The 36 Miseries Of Reading And Writing In 1806

by Stephen J. Gertz

"TO THE MISERABLE CHILDREN of Misfortune, wheresoever found, and whatsoever enduring — ye who, arrogating to yourselves a kind of sovereignty of suffering, maintain that all the throbs of torture, all the pungency of sorrow, all the bitterness of desperation, are your own — who are so torn and spent with the storms and struggles of mortality, as to faint, or freeze, even at the personation of those ruined Wretches, whose Stories wash the stage of tragedy with tears and blood —approach a more disastrous scene! Take courage to behold a Pageant of calamities, which calls you to renounce your sad monopoly. Dispassionately ponder all your worst of woes, in turn with these; then hasten to distill from the comparison an opiate for your fiercest pangs; and learn to recognize the leniency of your Destinies, if they have spared you from the lightest of those mightier and more grinding agonies, which claim to be emphatically characterized as 'The Miseries of Human Life;' — miseries which excruciate the minds and bodies of none more insupportably, than of those Heroes in anguish, those writhing Martyrs to the plagues and frenzies of vexation, whose trembling hands must shortly cease to trace the names of" -

Mssrs. Timothy Testy and Samuel Sensitive, whom, acting on behalf of their creator, writer and clergyman James Beresford, satirically related, in The Miseries of Human Life (1806), the mortifying torments that plagued contemporary readers and writers and thwarted enjoyment of those justly exalted pastimes. Some of the following agonies are of their time, others are timeless, many are familiar to book collectors, and all appear in numerical order as in the book yet differently formatted. The order is not a ranking, though number one has always been and will always be #1.

1. Reading over a passage in an author, for the hundredth time, without coming an inch nearer to the meaning of it at the last reading than at the first; — then passing over it in despair, but without being able to enjoy the rest of the book from the painful consciousness of your own real or supposed stupidity.

2. As you are reading drowsily by the fire, letting your book fall into the ashes so as to lose your place, rumple and grime 'the leaves, and throw out your papers of reference; then, on rousing and recollecting yourself, finding that you do not know a syllable of what you have been winking over for the last hour.

3. In reading a new and interesting book, being reduced to make a paper knife of your finger. [Refers to a once absolutely necessary reading accessory to open the upper edges of text gatherings left folded by the printer or binder - SJG].

4. Unfolding a very complicated map in a borrowed book of value, and notwithstanding all your care, enlarging the small rent you originally made in it every time you open it.

5. Hunting on a cold scent, in a map for a place — in a book for a passage — in a variety of Dictionaries for a word:— clean thrown out at last.

6. Reading a comedy aloud when you are half asleep, and quite stupid.

7. In attempting, at a strange house, to take down a large book from a high, crowded shelf, bringing half the library up on your nose.

8. Mining through a subject, or science purely from the shame of ignorance.

9. Receiving "from the author," a book equally heavy in the literal, and the figurative sense; accompanied with entreaties that you would candidly set down in writing, your detailed opinions of it in all its parts.

10. Reading a borrowed book so terribly well bound, that you are obliged to peep your way through it, for fear of breaking the stitches, or the leather, if you fairly open it; and which, consequently, shuts with a spring, if left a moment to itself.

11. Or, after you have long been reading the said book close by the fire, (which is not quite so ceremonious, as you are about opening it), attempting in vain to shut it, the covers violently flapping back in a warped curve — in counteracting which, you crack the leather irreparably, in a dozen places.

12. On taking a general survey of your disordered library, for the purpose of re-arranging it — finding a variety of broken sets, and odd volumes, of valuable works, which you had supposed to be complete; — and then, after screwing up your brows upon it for an hour, finding yourself wholly unable to recollect to whom any one of the missing books has been lent, or even to guess what has become of them; and, at the same time, without having the smallest hope of ever being able to replace them. Likewise,

13. Your pamphlets, and loose printed sheets daily getting ahead, and running mountain high upon your shelves, before you have summoned courage to tame them, by sorting and sending them to the binder.

14. As an author — those moments during which you are relieved from the fatigues of composition by finding that your memory, your intellects, your imagination, your spirits, and even the love of your subject, have all, as if with one consent, left you in the lurch. 

15. In coming to that paragraph of a newspaper, for the sake of which you have bought it, finding, in that only spot, the paper blurred, or left white, by the press, or slapped over with the sprawling red stamp.

16. Reading newspaper poetry; — which, by a sort of fatality which you can neither explain nor resist, you occasionally slave through, in the midst of the utmost repugnance an disgust.

17. As you are eagerly taking up a newspaper, being yawningly told by one who has just laid it down, that "there is nothing in it." Or, the said paper sent for by the lender, at the moment when you are beginning to read it.

18. Having your ears invaded all the morning long, close at your study window, by the quack of ducks, and the cackle of hens, with an occasional bass accompaniment by an ass.

19. Writing a long letter, with a very hard pen, on very thin and very greasy paper, with very pale ink, to one who you wish — I needn't say where.

20. On arriving at that part of the last volume of an enchanting novel, in which the interest is wrought up to the highest pitch — suddenly finding the remaining leaves, catastrophe and all, torn out.

21. Burning your fingers with an inch of sealing wax; and then dropping awry the guinea to which you are reduced by the want of a seal.

22. In writing — neither sand, blotting paper, nor a fire, to dry your paper; so that, though in violent haste, you sit with your hands before you, at the end of every other page, till the ink thinks proper to dry of itself; — Or toiling your wrist, for ten minutes together, with a sand glass that throws out two or three damp grains at a time; and in consequence of such delay —

23. Losing the post — and this, when you would as willingly lose your life.

24. Emptying the ink glass (by mistake for the sand glass) on a paper which you have just written out fairly — and then widening the mischief, by applying restive blotting paper.

25. Putting a wafer, of the size of a half crown piece, into a letter with so narrow a fold, that one half of the circle stands out in sight, and is presently smeared over the paper by your fingers, in stamping the concealed half.

26. Writing on the creases of paper that has been sharply folded.

27. In sealing a letter - the wax in so very melting a mood, as frequently to leave a burning kiss on your hand, instead of the paper: — next, when you have applied the seal, and all, at last, seems well over — said wax voluntarily "rendering up its trust," the moment after it has undertaken it.

28. Writing at the top of a very long sheet of paper; so that you either rumple and crease the lower end of it with your arm against the table, in bring it lower down, or bruise your chest, and drive out all your breath, in stretching forward to the upper end.

29. Straining your eyes over a book in the twilight, at the rate of about five minutes per line, before it occurs to you to order candles; and when they arrive, finding that you have totally lost the sense of what you have been reading, by the tardy operation of getting at it piecemeal.

30. Attempting to erase writing — but, in fact, only scratching boles in the paper.

31. Snatching up an inkstand (overweighted on one side) by its handle, which you suppose to be fixed, but which proves — to swing .

32. Writing at the same ricketty table with another, who employs his shoulder, elbow, and body, still more actively than his fingers.

33. Writing, on the coldest day in the year, in the coldest room in the house, by a fire which has sworn not to burn; and so, perpetually dropping your full pen upon your paper, out of the five icicles with which you vainly endeavour to hold it.

34. Looking for a good pen, (which it is your perverse destiny never to find, except when you are indifferent about it), and having a free choice among the following varieties. (N. B. No penknife).

35. Writing with ink of about the consistency of pitch, which leaves alternately a blot and a blank.

36. Writing a long letter with one or more of the cut fingers of your right hand bundled up — or else (for more comfort), with your left hand. You might as well stick a pen in a bear's paw, and bid him write.

__________

__________

Aubrey Beardsley's Reading Woman

by Stephen J. Gertz

AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898)
Chaix, Paris, 1897.
Cropped plate from Les Affiches Etrangères.
The original poster was published in 1894.

 

In 1894, Aubrey Beardsley created a poster to advertise T. Fisher Unwin's Children's Books.

"Printed in black and purple...in its most common form  it was used to advertise Topsys and Turvys by P.S. Newell, four works by Palmer Cox, the first 19 volumes in Unwin's Children's Library, The Land of Puck by Mary Mapes Dodge, and the magazine St. Nicholas. 

"According to Gallatin the poster was also produced in reduced size [as here, 1897].

"Copeland and Day also used Beardsley's drawing (printed in black and yellow) on a poster promoting The Yellow Book... They did so without Unwin's authorization, a step which led to an acrimonious correspondence between the two publishers and threats of legal action after the design was reproduced in an article about posters published in the March 1896 issue of The Overland Monthly, an American periodical" (Lasner).

Lasner 75. Gallitan 791.
__________

Image courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.

__________

__________

Private Moments, Public Reading

By Alastair Johnston

Pursuant to My Last...

After writing about André Kertesz's book, On Reading, and Steve McCurry's blog post about people reading, a couple of friends posted more pictures of readers on (where else?) Facebook that are worth sharing. Kate Godfrey reminded me of the wonderful site UndergroundNewYorkPublicLibrary, which shares images of readers on the New York's subway transit system.

Reading Katie Roiphe's In Praise of Messy Lives

The images, reminiscent of Walker Evans' project The Passengers (clandestine photos taken on the New York subway between 1939 and 1941 but not published in Evans' lifetime) include identification of the book's title so you can draw your own conclusions about the person in the photo and their choice of reading matter.

Reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions

Evans' passengers, by the way, were only caught reading the newspaper ("PAL TELLS HOW GUNGIRL KILLED"). Another photo, posted on Facebook, of a boy reading in a bombed-out building during the London Blitz led me to a google image search.

A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid
on October 8, 1940,  reading a book titled 'The History of London.'

This image led me to another biblio-site, called Needful Books, a google community where people are encouraged to post their own photos of books. This photo, posted by Michael Allen on 20 May 2013, is purportedly of a boy reading The History of London. There are other images of books and bookstores that will delight Booktryst readers, and more readers, shared by Mr Allen:

Posted by tanphoto on flickr

Obviously this could lead from here back into historic images of readers. I assumed that in the early days of photography when exposures took a minute or more, photographers would have used books as props quite often, but a cursory glance through the bookshelf shows this not to be the case. There is a lovely shot of a reader in the latest monograph on Clementina, Lady Hawarden, by Virginia Dodier (Aperture, n.d. [1999]) but that reader is soundly asleep. Recently another collection of Lady Hawarden's prints came to light and was auctioned in London. The album contains another reading portrait from the 1860s, one of her daughters, also named Clementina, "reading," but it looks as if the young lady is nodding off.

And to prove, once again, that the old guys stole all our best ideas, here is a favorite image by Alexander Rodchenko, a portrait of his mother from 1924:

__________

Of Related Interest:

Photographers on Reading.
__________
__________

Photographers On Reading

By Alastair Johnston

Who doesn't love a good book? And in our image-saturated society, who doesn't love a good photo of someone else reading? The Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) published a book of sixty-three candid black and white photos of people reading, called appropriately enough ON READING (New York, Grossman, 1971). 

It celebrated the universal joy of reading in a poetic elegy of private moments made public. Kertész gained recognition as a photographer and was able to travel the world and always when the opportunity arose made snapshots of readers for his project. 

Since it began in 1915 with a group of three boys reading in his native Hungary, it's clear Kertész came to think of it as a century-long project! Kertész died in 1985, but his work endures. A gift of 120 of his reading photos was the basis for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago in 2006. More recently, in 2009, his work was celebrated at the Photographers' Gallery in London, and in 2011 the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted an exhibit of his "Reading" pictures.

To me it's odd that as recently as 1971 -- which is in some people's living memory, though still B.C. (Before Computers) -- the world was black and white. But more specifically the world of fine art photography was black and white, and for some collectors and curators remains so.

Photojournalism has changed a lot in the last generation, just as reading has. Now artists like Alex Webb and Steve McCurry regularly dazzle us with news photos that are works of art in their own right. Webb works in the margins: he likes the places where borders exist and throw up societal conflict. He responds to chaos in spots where most of us are disconcerted and the last thing we want to do is pull out a camera and start getting in people's faces, like at a funeral in Haiti. He has a painter's eye, gets the tropical colors, scorched shadows & dramatic cropping effortlessly into the frame and manages to tell a story at the same time. And one of the most visually striking parts of Webb's work is its richly saturated color. He says,

As I understand it, one of the tenets of Goethe’s theory of color is that color emerges from the tension between light and dark, a notion that seems to resonate with my use of color, with its intense highlights and deep shadows. Also, my photographs are often a little enigmatic — there’s sometimes a sense of mystery, of ambiguity.

He makes it sound simple! But then he is capable, in his books, of taking Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander to another level, through his use of color.

National Gee has long fostered talented photographers. There's a whole new bunch to watch, including Michael Wolf (who started out at GEO in Germany, but now works in Hong Kong) and David Liittschwager, who takes Avedon-like portraits of endangered creatures. The most celebrated, and with good reason, is the spectacularly gifted Steve McCurry. He is an unassuming bloke, a face in the crowd, which is a good asset for a street photographer: Someone you might see loitering on a bridge and not think, "A perv, call the cops!" He's just hanging out, waiting for that moment when the flower seller rows his boat underneath. He's there every day -- as long as it takes -- and, after ten days, the light is right, a slight haze, even the water wants to look good, everything comes together and he gets the shot. One photograph. A very Zen exercise. But how many times have you missed the shot, because your mind wasn't there in the moment, or your reflexes weren't quick enough? But people reading are in their own time and space, and that is all the time in the world for them -- suspended over the abyss of an author's black words in a limitless white expanse, the white of the page blending into the sparkling scrim behind their eyes -- as well as for the observant to capture their portrait. 

McCurry has updated Kertész, and he does it with such aplomb: it's on his blog which he regularly fills with masterpieces as if he were just dealing cards but somehow hitting full house after flush after Aces and Kings. And as he travels the world, adding images to his own "People Reading" category, it's gratifying to see that books and newspapers are still crucial to people's lives.

__________
__________

Elegant Style And Fashion In 19th C. Spain

by Stephen J. Gertz

Published weekly from 1842 through the turn of the 20th century, La Moda Elegante Ilustrada, Periodico de las Familias (Illustrated Elegant Style, A Family Magazine) was nineteenth century Spain's leading fashion magazine.

The plates within La Moda Elegante Ilustrada depict the latest fashions from Paris including seaside attire, day dresses, fashions for a day in the country, ball gowns, as well as children's clothing.

It was Spain's Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, the go-to magazine for Spain's upper class women.

This, the annual for 1882, features thirty-two hand-colored steel-engraved plates printed by A. Godchaux, and Guilquin, of Paris with designs after Adele-Anais Toudouze; F. Bonnard; A. Chaillot; Jules David; and P. Lacouriere.

Notable is that in more than a few of the plates women are reading or holding a book, reflecting, as current fashion magazines do, current trends and customs in culture, in Spain and, by extension, those of Europe's upper class, all following the French example. Books were a fashion accessory and reading a fashionable activity for ladies who wished to be au courant. Reading, in short, was cool.

Annuals of La Moda Elegante Ilustrada are extremely scarce, with only one institutional copy of the 1882 volume worldwide, at University of Granada, according to OCLC/KVK. Princeton and three libraries in Spain appear to have multiple volumes from the series but it is unclear whether 1882 is amongst them.  Only two volumes in the series have come to auction since ABPC began indexing results in 1923, for 1893 and 1902. No copies of this, the 1882 volume, have been seen at auction within the last ninety years.

___________

[FASHION]. La Moda Elegante Ilustrada. Periodico de las Familias. Cromos Pertenecientes al Año de 1882. Madrid: [Officinas de La Moda Elegante Illustrada], 1882. First edition. Folio (13 7/8 x 10 1/8 in; 354 x 257 mm). [4] pp. Thirty-two hand-colored steel-engraved plates, printed by A. Godchaux, and Guilquin, of Paris. Designs after Adele-Anais Toudouze; F. Bonnard; A. Chaillot; Jules David; and P. Lacouriere. Plates untitled but numbered 1680-1700  (eleven in numerical series with letters, i.e. 1681D), and 2247E (final).

Colas 2069. Lipperheide 4642. Hiler, p. 619. Holland, p. 88.

__________

Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

__________
__________

The Year Of Reading Dangerously

by Stephen J. Gertz

2012 provided many opportunities for daredevil readers to dance on the precipice and laugh in the face of peril. Here's a review of some of my own action-packed adventures in reading during the last twelve months.

I love beach reading; I can get lost in a book for hours, days, weeks. Aside from the risk to steady employment the only real danger is sand in the perineum and gutter margin. 

During 2012's hurricane season, however, a new menace manifested itself, emerging from the waves to scare the sand out of my shorts on the East Coast. Fortunately, the rest of my clothes were on the West Coast with me in them.

The book I was reading before and later while fleeing my Fruit of the Looms, a copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, was snatched from my hands on the run. Yes, I ran on my hands, my legs herky-jerky. When last seen Godzilla was reading the book aloud to a sacrificial victim, taking particular relish in reciting Kurtz's last words, "The horror! The horror!" followed by a diabolical laugh.

My ol' buddy from Hebrew school, Kim Jong-un (we called him Kim Jong-Junior, The Bane of Jehovah) was finally promoted to the rank of Marshal of the DPRK in the Korean People's Army on July 18, 2012, consolidating his position as the supreme commander of the North Korean armed forces.  When he isn't waving or saluting at something he enjoys reading Playboy to the exclusion of all other skin mags; he has, in fact, banned the competition.

Remembering, however, his keen sense of humor (a fellow frat-member died of laughter while listening to North Korean knock-knock jokes; an insidious form of torture), I dared to peruse Naked Pyongyang: 1,000 Flowers Of Joy, a sous le manteau guide book to the North Korean capitol's fleshpots, featuring Miss Anti-Yankee Imperialist July in all her glory, during his promotion ceremony.

Bad idea. When you're First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, First Chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea, the Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, and a presidium member of the Central Politburo of the Workers' Party of Korea, friendship, evidently, takes a back seat to foreign policy.

He fired a test ICBM at me - but not before ripping Naked Pyongyang from my hot little hands and stuffing it into his back pocket for later inspection of counter-revolutionary propaganda mercilessly exposing the North Korean body politic.

When Toyota recalled 7.43 million automobiles in 2012 due to power window problems that might cause a conflagration, Mom and Pop accidentally (?) left me in the car at the service center, where, after the window issue was corrected, my manifold pressure was adjusted, rings lubed, oil transfused, umbilical cord severed, and idle set. But a dedicated reader is never idle; I read A Duck, A Dog, And A Dipstick, the new childrens' book by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, "Click and Clack" of Car Talk fame, and the follow-up to their As The Wrench Turns. What's the danger? You try reading while your seat is reupholstered with an oil rag instead of a diaper, hot jumper-cables fastened to your 'jammies.

I'd often wondered what would happen if, while enjoying a leisurely cruise through the Mediterranean aboard the Costa Concordia in January 2012, I read Athanasius Kircher's massive two-volume folio, Mundus Subterraneus (1664-65) by the rail on the starboard side of the ship. Unless someone is simultaneously reading the same book on the port side I don't recommend it.

I had nothing better to do in October so I hopped a capsule, zoomed 31 kilometers into the stratosphere, and jumped. It only took eleven minutes to land but it felt like an eternity. Luckily, I brought a book along to pass the time; simply twiddling my thumbs would surely not allay ennui on the way down.

Plummeting toward Earth at  614 mph broke Evelyn Woods' speed-reading record but made reading a copy of Great Expectations a bit dicey - the wind-shear ripped the leaves out every time I tried to turn a page. It was originally a serial novel so it was fortunate that I'd eaten my Wheaties - The Breakfast of Champions -  that morning: you try holding onto a book and pulling a ripcord while you tear through the atmosphere like a human meteor.

The tragedy at Newtown led the National Rifle Association to assert that more guns are needed to protect ourselves and our loved ones from crazies with Colts or Bushmasters; they're all over the place. Taking the warning to its logical conclusion, the American Book Association now recommends that readers pack heat. In a further move, it has suggested that in the future all books be sold with guns n' ammo for readers' safety. This cross-marketing scheme will surely shoot book sales into  the ionosphere, so I'm all for it. The idea has the additional benefit of discouraging people from interrupting you while you're deep into text. For this reason alone, Good Housekeeping has given the notion its Seal of Approval. Lock 'N Load To Rock 'N Read is the NRA's proposed slogan.

My last act of book daredevilry occurred at 12:00:01 AM, January 1, 2013 when I dove off the fiscal cliff while reading economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek's The Road To Serfdom. The suicidal aspect of cliff-diving (and reading Hayek. If  Salma Hayek wrote it, 'nother story) fell into high relief as I fell to an uncertain end. Reading cuts without increases in revenue to lower the reading deficit is a recipe for literacy disaster.

That was My Year In Reading. Yours?
__________

__________

Meet "The Reader," A Drama In Lithography

By Stephen J. Gertz

TOBIAS, Abraham Joel (1913-1996). The Reader.
New York: Works Progress Administration, 1935-43.
Lithograph. Image size (21 1/4 x 15 3/4 in; 54 x 40 cm). .

Painter, lithographer, illustrator, and muralist  Abraham Joel Tobias (1913 - 1996) was primarily known for his sculptural paintings of the 1930s, a pioneer in the form.

"[From] 1934-35, Abraham Joel Tobias created and exhibited an extraordinary group of works he called 'sculptural paintings' that integrated shaped canvases and complex framing devices, both conditioned by the imagery they contained. With their complex yet coherent interplay of imagery, construction, and composition, the sculptural paintings are uniquely innovative works within the history of American art" (Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University).

During the mid-1930s through early 1940s, Tobias was employed by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal program, 1935-1943, that put millions of unemployed laborers, as well as those in the arts, to work during the Great Depression on public works projects. It was during this period that he created The Reader, a stunning composition that highlights, perhaps as no other visual depiction, the intensity of an active reader, deeply engrossed in, and wholly united with, the volume. The reader and book are physically as one and indivisible, and lost to the outside world. At this moment there is nothing more important in the universe than the reader and the book; a holy communion, a prayer meeting. Tobias's use of chiaroscuro effects heightens the drama.

As matted and framed.

"The name Tobias may not ring a bell with most New Yorkers, but tens of thousands of them a day pass one or more of his works huge murals everywhere from Public School 134 on the lower East Side to the lobby of the Domestic Relations Court in downtown Brooklyn…

"Tobias, who was born in upstate Rochester but spent his early years in Scotland before returning to New York at age 8, once said he chose art on his first day of school. The story goes that he was so upset the teacher gave him pencil and paper and asked him to draw her a picture. He did and she praised him so lavishly that he continued to draw for the rest of his life.

"Tobias was one of the first artists to paint on shaped canvasses and to make the frame part of the painting. In the '30s, when he started, that went unremarked, but in the '80s, the techniques caused a stir among art critics.

"He had shown the paintings in 1935 then put them away for more than a half century, until a curator at the Smithsonian Institution heard about them. The Smithsonian bought one shaped like a huge seashell and called his works 'astoundingly different.'

"Forty-four other works, in all sizes and shapes, were exhibited at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"He refused to sell them, and they are now back in storage" (NY Daily News obit, February 05, 1996).

A print of The Reader is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

__________

Images courtesy of Between The Covers, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Fran Lebowitz On Book Collecting

by Stephen J. Gertz

Fran  Lebowitz,  whose  debut  collection of devastatingly witty essays,  Metropolitan Life (1978), and  its  companion,  Social Studies (1981), put her on the literary star map as a latter-day Dorothy Parker,  and whose  subsequent "writer's  blockade" has   become  the most celebrated case of scribe with blank slate in recent - and, perhaps, since ancient - history, does not need an excuse to talk about books and reading.

In an interview-essay from 2010,  Fran Lebowitz on Reading, that has not received the broad attention it deserves, she discusses, amongst other things, rare books and their collection.

"I'm not a collector," she says. "I don't care about things like that. I'm not a collector because I'm not that organized. I'm not grown-up enough to collect things."

"But," she adds. "I have acquired a stellar collection of odd books, weirdo books, books that don't fit easily into categories."

A category, however, that her odd books do easily fit into is heteromorphic literature, a broad, all encompassing genre that, under this name has a nice, academic gloss that lends credence to their collection and study. The common alternative is Weirdiana. In Lebowitz's case, perhaps Oddiana is the proper category.

"I have a very small but choice collection of books about the Masons, the Odd Fellows and the Elks. I particularly like Odd Fellows books. They're a little harder to find… You don't hear about the Odd Fellow much any more. I looked them up in the telephone book here but I guess in New York you don't need a separate listing for Odd Fellows."

Though she can be bitingly caustic she is invariably polite, so it should come as no surprise that she is a fan of a certain arbiter of the social graces.

"I collect Emily Post. I think I have everything of hers but I don't keep up with the revised editions. I have a book called Manners for the Millions [1932, in three different editions], which is a manual for immigrants to the United States. Emily Post may tell you how to properly address a Colonel, this tells you not to wipe your nose on your sleeve."

Many careers as a rare bookseller have begun when personal collecting got out of hand and insanity prevailed.

"I was once in Cleveland on a book tour and a bookshop there had just bought the library of a parochial grammar school and they were selling the books for ten cents a pound. There were these big meat scales. I went crazy…For about thirty dollars I bought eight thousand books.

Beware the parent whose personal habits and dire influence can lead children astray and onto a dark path for life.

"My mother was a big bookworm. Not a bibliophile. My mother got me into what has been for my entire life certainly what could be called my drug addiction: the reading of detective stories. I read five or six a week and must have eight billion of them…I suppose I read them for the atmosphere or the characters but I read them like a drug. I read them instead of taking heroin."

Don't imagine that Fran Lebowitz is a literary snob:

"I love trash. I like Jacqueline Susann and the early Harold Robbins. I love Jackie Collins."

She also has an interest in smut.

"I have a pornography collection. It's not a huge one. The really good stuff is too expensive for me. I wrote some for a company called Midway Press...

"The first one I wrote myself and it was called House of Leather...Then I wrote two or three others with about five people...My copies of these books are gone and I'm not looking for them. I have a finicky aversion to buying second hand pornography because I know where it's been."

Her reading and collecting interests are not confined to detective fiction, weird books, etiquette manuals, and porn.

"I would say that if I collect anything literary I collect O'Hara first editions, not that they're that hard to find. Each printing was about eight billion. O'Hara is a really important American writer and a really overlooked one."

On the life of a dedicated reader frittering away precious time, Fran has this to say:

"I would rather read than have any kind of real life, like working, or being responsible...All the things that I never did because I was reading, so what? If someone said to me, how did you spend your life? I'd have to say, lying on the sofa reading."

Fran Lebowitz's relationship to books is intimately overt.

"...When I was a very little child after I'd read a book I really liked I'd kiss it. Love is really the word... Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects...The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books."

It is always comforting to be surrounded by loved ones.

__________

Read the full interview here.

This interview, and others with Diana Vreeland, John Waters, Susanna Moore, and Albert Murray, appears on the website I recently discovered for an impressive book shop in Harlem, NYC, The Private Library. They appear in the website's section, The Well-Dressed Bibliophile. I have devoured everything on those pages; a very tasty meal.

 __________

If you haven't seen Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's 2010 HBO documentary about Fran Lebowitz, why not? It's now available on DVD.

Here's the trailer:

She is the consummate New Yorker-Smart-Funny-Yakker. I watched it three times in a row.

__________
__________

Mom Turns Tot Into Bookworm

by Stephen J. Gertz

“I felt like I was brain-dead when I was pregnant, but then
after giving birth my creativity just exploded for a while,”
said mom Adele Enersen.

When Adele Enerson, a 33-year old new mother from Helsinki Finland, noticed that her newborn daughter, Mila, slept like a bear in hibernation, she had a brainstorm. Using ad hoc props from around the house, she created stage-set tableaus, carefully placed Mila within them, and let her camera fly.

Mila in a forest. Mila as an astronaut in outer space. Mila as a butterfly. Hanging on a clothesline. Surfing. It goes on.

She created a blog for the pics, Mila's Daydreams. Two weeks later, she had one million visitors. Soon afterward, she had a book deal. Yesterday, January 3, 2012, her book, When My Baby Dreams, was released.

View a slide show of her work from MSNBC here (scroll down upon arrival).

Though she cannot yet talk, feed herself, or walk, Mila is currently reading Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Her book report is due in fifteen years. No excuses accepted.

__________ 

Thank you to MSNBC for the lead.

__________

__________

Modern Books Are Not Edible: A Farewell To Bookworms

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Bodleian Library.

"Great is bookishness and the love of books."

So declares Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), whose In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays was published in London by Elliot Stock and in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1905.

The sentence opens his essay on Bookworms in the Bodleian Library and wherever books are shelved, chewed, and digested. He refers not to those of us who live inside of books but Anobium pertinax, that other lover of books. We read 'em, they eat 'em.

They're one of the many enemies of books cited by Birrell in his overview of printer and Caxonist William Blade's The Enemies of Books, published in London by Elliot Stock in 1902.

After upbraiding  the Charity Commissioners of the Bodleian  for selling off books that were water-logged and rotten, and declaring these public servants to be of a lower order of primate and  sworn enemies of books, he begins As the Worm Squirms, a squiggly science travelogue including  the care  and feeding of a bookworm on the edge of darkness, hitchhiking in Hebrew, an ill-fated bookworm's meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, and a doomsday eulogy for the cruel fate of the bookworm in the modern world:

From: The Enemies of Books by William Blades.

"By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine bookworm, the paper-eating insect, ravenous as he once was, has done comparatively little mischief.  Very little seems known of the creature, though the purchaser of Mr. Blades’s book becomes the owner of a life-size portrait of the miscreant in one, at all events, of his many shapes.  Mr. Birdsall, of Northampton [Birdsall's of Northampton, bookbinders*], sent Mr. Blades, in 1879, by post, a fat little worm he had found in an old volume.  Mr. Blades did all, and more than all, that could be expected of a humane man to keep the creature alive, actually feeding him with fragments of Caxtons and seventeenth-century literature; but it availed not, for in three weeks the thing died, and as the result of a post-mortem was declared to be Aecophera pseudopretella. 

"Some years later Dr. [Richard] Garnett, who has spent a long life obliging men of letters, sent Mr. Blades two Athenian worms, which had travelled to this country in a Hebrew Commentary; but, lovely and pleasant in their lives, in their deaths they were not far divided.  Mr. Blades, at least, mourned their loss.  The energy of bookworms, like that of men, greatly varies.  Some go much farther than others.  However fair they may start on the same folio, they end very differently.

 "Once upon a time 212 worms began to eat their way through a stout folio printed in the year 1477, by Peter Schoeffer of Mentz [Novellae constitutiones, etc.?]. It was an ungodly race they ran, but let me trace their progress.  By the time the sixty-first page was reached all but four had given in, either slinking back the way they came, or perishing en route.  By the time the eighty-sixth page had been reached but one was left, and he evidently on his last legs, for he failed to pierce his way through page 87.  At the other end of the same book another lot of worms began to bore, hoping, I presume, to meet in the middle, like the makers of submarine tunnels, but the last survivor of this gang only reached the sixty ninth page from the end.  Mr. Blades was of opinion that all these worms belonged to the Anobium pertinax. 

"Worms have fallen upon evil days, for, whether modern books are readable or not, they have long since ceased to be edible.  The worm’s instinct forbids him to ’eat the china clay, the bleaches, the plaster of Paris, the sulphate of barytes, the scores of adulterants now used to mix with the fibre.’  Alas, poor worm!  Alas, poor author!  Neglected by the Anobium pertinax, what chance is there of anyone, man or beast, a hundred years hence reaching his eighty-seventh page!"

Cue Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, his mournful, heartrending elegy now, unfortunately,  so stale from over-exposure in movies, particularly Platoon, that it could fairly be re-titled, Sad Schmaltz for Bad Violins.

Anobium pertinax aka Bookworm, RIP in open casket.

Having thrown a rose on the coffin of Anobium pertinax, Birrell ends his anti-encomium to the pest of all pulp with a parting shot at other book vermin:

"Time fails me to refer to bookbinders, frontispiece collectors, servants and children, and other enemies of books; but the volume I refer to is to be had of the booksellers, and is a pleasant volume, worthy of all commendation.  Its last words set me thinking; they are:

"’Even a millionaire will ease his toils, lengthen his life, and add 100 percent to his daily pleasures, if he becomes a bibliophile; while to the man of business with a taste for books, who through the day has struggled in the battle of life, with all its irritating rebuffs and anxieties, what a blessed season of pleasurable repose opens upon him as he enters his sanctum, where every article wafts him a welcome and every book is a personal friend!’"

Particularly on rye, with mustard. After ingestion, the personal friend is chased by a snifter of brandy, then, after digestion, an exegesis is excreted and read for prophecies. I anthropomorphically refer to Lord Wriggle of Wessex and his taste for books, his favorites tales, naturally, being The Conquering Worm by Edgar Allan Poe;  The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker; The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess; The Early Worm by Robert Benchley; Eye Worm Flower by Allen Ginsberg; and Dr. J.H. Snoddy's horrific tale of The Worminator - Snoddy's Treatise on Hog Cholera and Swine Plague: Symptoms and Cure Fully Explained: A Complete Worm Exterminator.

True,  swine worms don't eat books but all bookworms are swine. Unless they're human, of course, and thus divine. But if suffering from pica they're definitely pigs, and a tasty book hasn't a prayer.

__________

BIRRELL, Augustine. In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905. First American Edition. Octavo. 312 pp.

__________

*The roots of Birdsall of Northampton "stretch back to the early eighteenth century but it was in 1792 that John Lacy's Northampton bindery was acquired by William Birdsall, continuing in his family until 1961...In Birdsall's heyday, Gerring (Notes on Bookbinding, 1899) reported a staff of 250 engaged in making ladies handbags, fancy boxes, and stationary; as well as all types of bookbinding. The firm seemed always ready to experiment and careful records and samples were kept by Richard Birdsall, great-great-nephew of the founder, until he died in 1909...The firm's collection of over 3,000 finishing tools passed to the University of Toronto" (Maggs, Bookbinding in the British Isles II, #262, and #321).

__________

__________

The Cure For the Reading Hangover

by Stephen J. Gertz

I had too much to read last night and, boy, do I feel it.

I woke up this morning with a splitting headache. Bleary-eyed, I felt the march of time stomp on my bones in slo-mo, then in a lively polka. I soon felt nauseous and  brought up that which should have stayed down. Because I am compulsive, I had to inspect the remains of the reads, if for no other reason than to find comfort in the remembrance of text past.  I am the Proust of reading drunkards.

If Jackson Pollack had dipped his brushes in cans of liquid type and splattered them on the floor the artistic effect could not have exceeded the psycho-intestinal action-painting before me.

Behold a chunky, deliquescent impasto of ink drips dressing a green font salad of coagulated content on my pile-crushed, 100% genuine polypropylene, tufted living room carpet: 

Two auction house and four rare bookseller catalogs. • Last Sunday's NY Times Travel section because  even though I'm going nowhere reading about Morocco in Winter and the Castles of Moravia beats  a schlep into downtown L. A. • A New Yorker piece from a few weeks ago about a recently murdered Pakistani journalist who knew too much •  A suicide-inspiring insurance claim form for the benefit of Job • A typically prolix note from my dear Aunt Marilyn • Items from Courthouse News Service, i.e. the California Culinary Institute, aka Le Cordon Bleu, is being sued by twenty-one of its recruiters for, essentially, running the school like a used car lot with high-pressure tactics (What's it going to take to get you into this toque?), admitting anyone "as long as they have a pulse"  and, presumably, a carving knife, and offering financial aid that gets the student out of the frying pan and into the fire; "Naked Juice Not as Naked as It Claims," a story that attracted me because I, as many others, prefer my juice in the altogether - full-monty mango nectar, please; and Marlborough Airport Properties claims in Federal Court that President Barack Obama, the U.S. Secret Service and a 44,000 pound truck caused $676,000 in damages to an airport while moving from a Marine helicopter to a limousine to visit the Massachusetts Emergency Management bunker in Framingham last year - just wait until Mitt Romney hears about it, and forget about the others vying for the Republican nomination: it's TruckOne-gate, the Next Big Scandal • The subtitles to the original Swedish-language film adaptation of Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire). I love saying "flickan som lekte med elden" aloud; it reminds me of the adolescent invective I used to invent as I skulked away after angry arguments with my resident elders  • A special-ed teacher in Telford, Stropshire, U.K.. has been fired for threatening to place a lethal voodoo curse on one of her pupils as  punishment for misbehavior.  Amazingly, I had the same  Santería priestess-pedagogue  in the second grade in 1958  in Queens, New York City, U.S. and I'm still alive, so far. "What'ya goin' to do, kill me? Everybody dies." • A vegetarian dating website has been reprimanded by advertising watchdogs for having  meat-eating members; their beef is, evidently, legit • My contribution to an anthology entitled Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong because, apparently, in my case, it's true • various and sundry browser flashcards, last but not least: Frank and Louie, the two-faced cat with two first names, has won the Guinness Record for longest-lived two-faced cat • And Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum, has died, according to her zookeepers in Germany.

I know, I know - never mix your texts. It's on page three of The Booktender's Guide to Readology.

I was a wreck reliving overindulgence. Most people have blackouts. I have black-ins; I remember everything and then some, things I've never read and have no desire to do so. I had the D.T.'s, decomposed texts. I had to straighten out, fast. What to do?

I needed a bracer, a good, stiff one. Hair of the dog.

I read the morning paper.

I snapped out of it and into a major depression. Finally, home sweet homeostasis.

__________
__________

What Kind of Reader Are You? Take the Booktryst Reading Personality Quiz!

by Stephen J. Gertz

1st question: Blurry or crystal clear?

The good folks at ReadCentral have prepared a brief quiz to help define your reading style and predict your reading personality based upon your responses. Here's a sample question:

Question 3  :  You wake up one morning and find yourself in the midst of heaps of books. How will you react?

A. So many books! Life is beautiful!

B. So many books! There should be some worth reading.

C. So many books! That one, over there, looks interesting. Let me start with that first.

D. So many books! Hope there are some that fit my taste.

That's one of five, and typical. It's not bad yet there's something a bit too Sunshine Stepford Reader about it for my taste. But perhaps I'm just a cockeyed pessimist, always looking for the gray lining within the silver cloud to brighten my day and make me feel that life is worth something, if not living.

And so Booktryst has prepared a Reading Personality Quiz of our own. Its sage perspicacity will awe and astound. Ready? Set? Peruse!

Question 1 : October 1964. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium,  the T.A.M.I. Show. You're a member of the callow Rolling Stones during an  early American tour and you've just witnessed James Brown blow the roof off the joint with a now-legendary performance that knocked the audience over like bowling pins. You have to follow his act. What book are you reading?

A. On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

B. The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene.

C. The Book of Common Prayer.

D. Seduction of Suicide by Kenneth Tullis.

E. It's All Over Now by Mandy Smith.

Question 2 : Good news! You've just been diagnosed as a clinical depressive thus confirming all your worst negative ruminations; you're not crazy. Bad news: You have zero tolerance for  prescription anti-depression drugs. But you've always loved to read. What do you self-medicate with?

A. A History of Coca, the Divine Plant of the Incas by W. Golden Mortimer, M.D.

B. Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium by Dean Latimer and Jeff Goldberg.

C. Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide). Edited by Michael Shedlin & David Wallechinsky.

D. Reefer Madness by Larry Sloman.

E. All of the above.

F. All of the above, all at the same time.

Question 3 : Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you walk into:

A. A Christian Science Reading Room.

B. A library with  a librarian who scolds, No Reading Allowed. Or maybe it was No Reading Aloud. Whatever, you can't be sure so you close your book and go to the rest room to read in peace without a proctor giving you the evil eye. The acoustics are perfect.

C. The waiting room at Jiffy Lube. Time to catch up on those three-year old issues of Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Super Chevy, and Peterson's 4Wheel & Off Road.

D. Rick's Café Américain in Mojave, California. You came for the firewaters. You were not misinformed. You belt a few back. Soon, you remember a lost love, an unforgettable book, the one that got away. Then tears flow into your Scotch like club soda; since the accident your lacrimal glands effervesce and produce seltzer. You drunkenly bark at the piano player, "Read it again, Sam!" He has no idea what you're talking about. And his name is Larry.

Question 4 : You're compulsive reader Henry Bemis sitting amongst the ruins of a library in a nuked-out, post-Apocalyptic Twilight Zone realm with all the books in the world strewn about and all the time in the world to read them. Suddenly, you have a bitter premonition that your eyeglasses will break leaving you unable to read at all. Oh, cruel irony! But before you wallow in self-pity, renounce God, and accept Satan as your savior you must choose what the last book you'll ever read will be. Oh, and you're kind of gimpy now, getting around is tough and there's no time to limp around so you have to be satisfied with the small pile of books at hand. Unfortunately, the pile offers a  random sample of the library's holdings of  law books. So, what'll it be?

A. The Code of Civil Procedure of the State of California. Approved March 11, 1872. With Amendments Up to and Including Those of the Forty-First Session of the Legislature, 1915. With Annotations Embracing the Decisions of the Courts of Last Resort of the State of California, and with Frequent Reference to the Decisions of the Courts of Last Resort of Other States, and of the Federal Courts by Charles H. Fairall.

B. Gesetzbuch über das gerichtliche Verfahren in Civil-Rechtssachen für die Stadt u. Republik Bern, mit erklärenden Anmerkungen Bern, Walthard, 1822 by Samuel Ludwig Schnell.

C. The Politics of European Sales Law: A Legal-Political Inquiry into the Drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code, Vienna Sales Convention, the Dutch Civil Code and the European Consumer Sales (Private Law) by Bastiaan Van Zelst.

D. Kita? B Al-Anwa? R Wa-Al-Mara? QIB: Code of Karaite Law. Vol III: Circumcision, Sabbath; Civil and Criminal Law, Liturgy by Ya'qub Al-Qirqisa.

E. Criminal Law Revision Committee, Second Report (Suicide) by Home Department, British Parliament.

Question 5 : You thought you were buying an E-Book. Turns out, you've subscribed to an Internet dating service for socially maladroit readers, which pretty much covers all of us. You fill out a profile and

A. Declare that anyone who reads Tolkein is tetched in the head.

B. Assert that the soft touch of your finger upon paper as you point to each slowly and lovingly read word  is nothing compared to what that finger'll do behind closed doors, hubba-hubba, heh-heh, with a hey, nonny, nonny, and a hotcha-cha.

C. Announce to all potential partners that you're an honest person, trustworthy, an open book - and the book is Mein Kampf.

D. Realize that you'll never get a date for as long as you live. And afterward, forget it; even worse luck.

Determining Your Reading Personality: It you've made it this far we urge you to consider seeking the help of a professional.  A professional what, we leave to your discretion.

Always remember: Your bookshelves are a mirror of the soul  (hopefully yours), and you are what you read so avoid reading cereal boxes, particularly General Mills' Frankenberry, and especially Ralston's Breakfast With Barbie.
__________
__________