blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Nostos, the Greek word for ‘homecoming,’ or a hero’s return, has been of particular interest to authors since time immemorial. The motif appears as the driving force of Homer’s Odyssey and stretches forth through the millennia toward James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), making pivotal pit stops in the likes of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter even has a 1964 play about it, fittingly entitled The Homecoming. For all of its prominence in the canon, however, the concept of a hero’s return rarely rises above the level of mythology. James Joyce, for instance, for all of the pathos with which he conveys Leopold Bloom’s homecoming, never saw an end to his self-imposed exile from Ireland. In fact (as part 1 of this series can attest) authors of no less gravity than Dante Alighieri, DH Lawrence, and Ezra Pound worked and died in exile.

In early 2007, Nobel Prize winning South African author J.M. Coetzee wrote a speech. It was delivered on February 7^th of that year in Sydney, Australia, vocalizing strong support for Voiceless, an Australian animal-rights non-profit, and eviscerating the practices of the modern animal husbandry industry. It was, no doubt, a speech worthy of Coetzee’s weighty reputation. At the podium, however, the words came not from Coetzee but from award winning actor, Hugo Weaving.

In recent years, the longstanding divide between comic books, graphic novels, and "serious" literature has begun to erode. The efforts of Art Spiegelman (Maus (1980)), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis (2000)), and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient, Alison Bechdel (Fun Home (2006), Are You My Mother? (2012)), have drawn interest from previously standoffish literary types. The stigma that has historically been tied to graphica is fading fast and more readers are immersing themselves in the genre. Even works like Frank Miller’s Sin City (1993), with its recent film adaptation, are expanding the traditional scope of the comic book audience. What this will ultimately mean for book collecting, however, remains to be seen. As it stands, the worlds of book and comic book collecting remain miles apart.

Mötley Crüe may be among the least Dickensian entities on the planet. Certainly, if we deploy the word the way it’s often used, to refer to over-the-top poverty and industrial hardship, we are left scratching our heads at whether ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ could, under any circumstances, be taken as an allegory for the British working class. Even if the word is just meant to evoke the esteemed author of such beloved works as Oliver Twist (1838) and A Christmas Carol (1843), the gap between Charles Dickens and Nikki Sixx still seems hard to bridge. With the band’s ongoing farewell tour, however, it may be unwittingly walking in the legendary novelist’s footsteps. 

Where most modern writers are hesitant to expect fortune and acclaim, sometimes going so far, as in the cases of Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger, to flee from them once they’ve arrived, Dickens wrote in explicit pursuit of fame.

For sixteen years, the illustrators of children’s books were neglected during awards season. Since 1922, the Newbery Medal had been awarded yearly to a work of distinguished children’s writing, but no such equivalent existed for illustrations in picture books. Not, that is, until 1938, whereupon a veritable dark age in the recognition of great illustrators was extinguished with the inception of the Caldecott Medal.

It has been suggested that Alfred Nobel created the peace prize in his will to assuage his guilt at the destruction and harm caused by his own inventions (dynamite among them). It is perhaps fitting, then, that in 1952 the prize was awarded to a man whose medical work in an African mission transcended guilt about colonialism to yield a legacy of saved lives, as well as a globally-praised philosophy.

In Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult classic The Princess Bride (based on William Goldman's 1973 book of the same name), the story begins with a grandfather’s proclamation to his ailing grandson that “back in (his) day, television was called books.” While the old man’s dictum may be an overly bold one, it’s certainly true that books used to be a lot more like television. Indeed, the serialized format that modern television viewers have come to love-hate began nearly a century before the TV’s inception with the rise of serialized novels.

Somewhere between freedom and slavery lies the seed of literary greatness. America’s literary history has borne out this notion time and time again, from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). For those authors and more, the tumultuous journey out of slavery defines careers laden with aesthetic triumphs and radical politics. This tradition of slaves turned literary superstars ought, by rights, to feature legendary Greek fabulist Aesop as its cornerstone.

“Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with
mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger,
and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land” 
- King Ashurbanipal, Assyria, circa 7^th Century BC

The above is one of the first known instances of a book curse, a practice used widely throughout the centuries to instill the fear of god(s) into would-be book thieves. Some Medieval Spanish manuscripts contained threats of excommunication and damnation the likes of which make the wrath of Assyrian gods Ahur and Belit seem positively tame, and bookstore owners across the world have poured grim wit and poetry into similar practices aimed at warding off shoplifters. For those of us who are protective of our books, there can be a certain charm to the notion of laying curses at the feet of those who would spoil our collection, but book curses are hardly the only thing for which bibliophiles owe thanks to Ashurbanipal. 

In retrospect, 1866 was a watershed year for Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He gained a cult following for his Hawaii travelogue (then referred to as the "Sandwich Islands"), published his first piece in a national magazine, and--finding "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" to be an unsuitable moniker--chose a new pen name: Mark Twain. "Forty-three Days in An Open Boat," published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December of 1866, was the first of his works published on a national scale.