blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

One could say Evelyn Waugh was something of an early 20th Century Anthony Bourdain. A novelist, essayist, biographer and travel writer, Waugh (1903-1966) was a renowned world traveler and played witness to some of the more seismic events of his era: the fall of the British Empire throughout South America, World War II, the struggles of a post-war Europe, and the emergence of the United States as a world superpower. All of these things Waugh maintained strong views upon and chronicled in his writings, both fictive and non. Perhaps his most well-known endeavor, Brideshead Revisited, is our subject today.

For hundreds of years, Rome has been a city of wonder and inspiration for writers from various parts of the world. From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to John Keats, the Italian capital became a part-time home. If you’re in Rome and you’re facing the Spanish Steps, look just to the right: you’ll see the Keats-Shelley House. It was in this very apartment that John Keats spent his final days. The property is now a museum that holds significant works and materials related to the Romantic poets. But instead of focusing entirely on the materials of the Romantics, we’d like to turn to a recent acquisition of the Keats-Shelley House: a Jorge Luis Borges manuscript on John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

“No one in this world,” wrote H.L. Mencken in 1926, “has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses.”  This dictum may reek of an under-appreciated artist’s elitist disappointment, but there is perhaps some truth to it. Surely today, if you would like to make money, you are better off making a superhero movie than writing the next Mrs. Dalloway. It is risky, in the end, to be a genius. It is much safer to cater to the general tastes of a people than to be original, which can be alienating and inaccessible to the audience of one’s own time. In the world of creativity, the maverick risks being a true starving artist: although praised in death, she is spurned in life.

Below, we’ve compiled a list of poor authors who were able to write great work in times of financial scarcity. 

For many English-language readers, a mention of Italy conjures vivid images of culinary landscapes and Renaissance art. While Italian literature hasn’t been translated as widely as works from certain other regions of Western and Central Europe, many books from the country capture it in vastly different periods of time, bringing readers murder mysteries, film histories, and wartime memories. Today, we'd like to explore a sample of the best books on Italy.

Every literary composition is the result of a grand evolution — from hesitant, early beginnings to a ready and publishable book. Even great masterpieces have started out as underwhelming first drafts. Many scholars speculate that Shakespeare wrote Ur-Hamlet a decade before the world was graced with the masterwork we know today. Indeed, variations between Hamlet’s quartos and the Folio suggest Shakespeare was constantly revisiting his famous tragedy. Yet the example of Shakespeare and Hamlet is but one instance in a long tradition of re-invention and meticulous revision that will exist as long as literature does. Below, we look at this tradition, and explore early versions of books that led to the classic novels we read and love today.

Ivo Andrić was a novelist from the former Yugoslavia who gained international acclaim for his novel The Bridge on the Drina (1945), which takes place over four centuries in the northern Bosnian town of Višegrad. For his literary contributions, Andrić won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. Recently, Emir Kusturica, a Serbian filmmaker, became involved in a project to commemorate the novelist. Along the Drina in Višegrad, Kusturica has been central in the creation of Andrićgrad — a town named in honor of Ivo Andrić.

Günter Grass, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, died earlier this year, at the age of 87. He maintained a complicated attitude toward the country of Germany for all his life. Grass was a true agitator; he was almost always political, polemical, and provocative. Consequently, upon his death many obituaries concerned themselves with his political controversies, of which there were certainly a good deal. But of course, Grass was a multifaceted person and artist. On the 88th anniversary of his birth, we peel back the divisive persona, and take a look at the legacy of Günter Grass.

If you find yourself in Oslo and are thinking about looking for antiquarian books, we can point you in the right directions. Norway isn’t home to the largest remaining selection of antiquarian bookstores in Scandinavia (shops in Denmark and Sweden seem to have fared better than others), but there are still quite a few in which visitors can spend many hours scanning shelves and boxes.

There’s an ongoing campaign in Spain to locate mass graves of victims who were executed during the early days of the Spanish Civil War and through the decades of the fascist Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the country. With 15,000 euro, archaeologists have identified regions in which bodies may have been buried. One of those bodies is likely the remains of the playwright and poet Federico García Lorca.

Thomas Clayton Wolfe’s writing is slightly obscure, and bad luck is at least somewhat to blame. While many writers drift in and out of the canon, only a few find themselves supplanted by more popular authors with the same name. Indeed, the Tom Wolfe who penned Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) may have, by dint of sheer SEO, made the resurgence of North Carolina native and early 20th century modernist maestro Thomas Wolfe a little slow in coming. But is it finally the original Thomas Wolfe's time?