blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Writers are often the best champions of other writers. In the early days of the last century, it was Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw who helped cement Henrik Ibsen’s reputation in the English-speaking world. Years later, Pulitzer Prize winner Walker Percy would play a crucial role in arranging the posthumous publication of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) after a manuscript thereof was sent to him by Toole’s mother. That Bernard Shaw and Walker Percy were, by then, quite prominent in their own rights was of course a huge help to their causes, as seems so often to be the case.That’s why it’s rather lucky for P.G. Wodehouse that his mantle was taken up by none other than Evelyn Waugh. 

"If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.” – Alan Paton

It’s frequently said that history is written by the winners. When it comes to some of the great humanitarian causes of the last century, it often seems that the winners write most of the great literature, as well. In the case of the American Civil Rights Movement, for instance, the American canon was able to embrace such monumental works as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). So too has the tradition of anti-apartheid writing in South Africa yielded not just powerful political statements, but some of the era’s most enduring pieces of writing. This powerful vein of protest literature gave the world Nobel Prize-winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. It gave us Zakes Mda and Lewis Nkosi. And, crucially, it gave us Alan Paton.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” —Oscar Wilde

At the outset, the proceedings that led to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment for sodomy read much like his plays. Four days after the successful London premier of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), arguably the absolute pinnacle of 19th century comedic farce, John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (creator of a set of eponymous, wildly circulated boxing rules), left a calling card at Wilde’s club. It read: “For Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite" [sic].

If the 30,000 volume book collection housed in Umberto Eco’s Milan apartment can be said to inspire one response, it might well be awe. Lila Azam Zanganeh, who interviewed Eco for The Paris Review described Eco’s abode as “a labyrinth of corridors lined with bookcases that reach all the way up to extraordinarily high ceilings," and makes mention of the library as “a legend in and of itself.” Most commonly, when a visitor is first shown the veritable universe of books that expands throughout the author’s home, they can think of only one question: “have you read all of these?”

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. - Jorge Luis Borges

Argentina is country so literary that its name is said to be derived from a Latin poem, and it has had a vibrant literary culture since the first co-mingling of Spanish culture with native oral traditions more than four hundred years ago. So, where is a person to start on the task of unraveling a complex literary culture?

Henry David Thoreau would no doubt bristle at anyone questioning his credentials as the ultimate writerly recluse. His magnum opus, Walden (1854), presents a grand, philosophical vision of doing without and living a simple, self-reliant existence, far from the comforts of civilization. As Kathryn Schulz’s recent New Yorker article points out, however, the impression of seclusion the heralded poet tries to convey is not entirely accurate. Not only did Thoreau spend less than two years in his cabin on Walden Pond, said cabin could hardly be described as remote. Walden Pond itself was a popular spot for vacationers and picnickers and was thus crawling with people in the summer months. The cabin was a short walk to Thoreau’s mother’s house, which he visited as often as once a week for tea and home cooked snacks. To put it briefly, Emily Dickinson puts this man to shame.

In the 1880s, the term "new journalism" was sometimes used to refer to the new yellow print newspapers that were being popularized at the time. In 1923, Robert E. Park referred to the penny-newspaper trend of the 1830s as the advent of "new journalism." In 1973, Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) author Tom Wolfe edited an anthology containing works by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, fashioned as both a collection of admirable pieces of writing and as a sort of manifesto for what Wolfe saw as the a groundbreaking trend in American letters. Its title? The New Journalism. Third time’s the charm.

During Joseph Conrad’s lifetime, little fuss was made over his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Of the three pieces of writing all bound into the single volume in which Heart of Darkness was sold, what would come to be the author’s most famous work received the least critical attention. It was initially passed over in favor of works like Youth: A Narrative (1902) and The End of the Tether (1902) that history has largely left to fester. Over the course of the past century, however, Conrad’s once-obscure work about a young man, Marlow, taking a trip down the Congo River, has become one of the most-assigned and most-discussed pieces in the canon. It remains, today, one of the most ubiquitous items on college course syllabi around the United Sates. And with it comes a varying range of views, critiques, and feelings.

"Lord, I loathe that woman so! She is an idiot—an absolute idiot—and does not know it ... and her husband, the sincerest man that walks...tied for life to this vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite!"
-Mark Twain, referring to Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s wife, Lillian

To be called "the sincerest man that walks" by Mark Twain, one of the fathers of American fiction and whose contributions still loom after more than a century and a half, is certainly a rare honor. You have to imagine, however, that New England-born poet, novelist, travel writer, and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich would have preferred the compliment couched in slightly less venomous language. Indeed, given only that quotation, you would have gleaned very little about a writer whose influence has outlived his name recognition.

“That’s not writing, that’s typing”
-Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)

Writers and readers alike are taught to be dubious of first drafts. “The first draft of anything,” Ernest Hemingway said, “is sh*t.” By that same reflex, many seem to find themselves wary of anything written too quickly. Detractors of National Novel Writing Month tend to express their disapproval by way of this wariness. They intimate, or sometimes say outright, that nothing of value could possibly be written that quickly.