blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Given the long history of African American literature--one fraught with difficulty and violence--how can we even begin to give a brief account? The first published works of African American literature came about in the 18th century, at a time when the United States was just coming into being and when newly recognized citizens, with clearly defined rights and freedoms, owned slaves. Conditions of slavery produced a certain genre of writing, which we’ve come to describe as slave narratives. By the time the late 19th and early 20th centuries came around, Jim Crow policies led to  enormous discrimination and violence in the South, yet novelists still produced some of the most notable works of fiction in our collective history.

The sport of fishing in America has long endured, despite what some people intuitively assume by early adulthood: that the term “fishing activity” is an oxymoron. For those folks, it’s a wet, messy, endeavor starting early in the morning and resulting in either nothing to show for one’s efforts or, from time to time, cold, clammy creatures that must be gutted and cleaned. But, for those who can see the art and science in the act of fishing, and who can learn to appreciate the workings of chance present on any given fishing escapade, the sport is actually quite riveting.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be a source of strife when you can lose yourself in the classic romances from literature--after all, what could be better than love and passion as written by some of the world's most talented authors? Happy ending or not, you can bet they’re all heartbreakingly beautiful. Take a moment to delve into the best romances of classic and modern literature as we count down our top ten list.

Posterity has remembered Henry Adams mostly as an American historian. His most famous published works are History of the United States of America, a nine volume set, and his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. However, he is also credited with having written two works of fiction, Esther, which he published under the pen name Frances Snow Compton, and Democracy, An American Novel, which was the first novel of its kind to become an international bestseller. In addition to being a historian, Adams was also a part of a highly political family, a member of an elite circle known as The Five of Hearts, and one half of a marriage that ended in tragedy.

If you're just getting into antiquarian or rare book collecting, you may be overwhelmed by the terms and phrases bandied about in item descriptions. What's a frontispiece? What is foxing in books? What's the difference between a galley and an advance reader copy? We hope to shed some light on the jargon of the book trade in a series of glossary posts, starting with the anatomy of a book.

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.

The United States Library of Congress claims a long list of “world’s largest” accolades amongst libraries: world’s largest law library, world’s largest collection of comic books, world’s largest collection of cartographic materials, as well as the world’s largest library, period. With more than 158 million items on about 838 miles of shelving, it’s hard to argue with that one. In addition to its utterly massive collection, the Library of Congress is a bastion in the fight to archive American culture.

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.