NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Canada’s  National Book-Collecting Contest was created by the Bibliographical Society of Canada to encourage young Canadians to collect books and study the discipline of researching and writing bibliographies. The prizes were awarded to the winning entrants at the Annual General Meeting held in Toronto on Wednesday June 24th. First prize went to Charlotte Ashley for: The Works (and Quirks) of Alexandre Dumas père.

Here’s the utterly charming story…

"It began when I was fourteen years old and read The Three Musketeers for the first time in my life. I thought it was the best book I had ever read. "I am going to read every word this man has ever written," I told myself, not sure at the time what it was that I was swearing to do. I imagined that Dumas must have written at least a few other books and I swore I would own them all. My copy of The Three Musketeers comprised of two small blue cloth volumes from J.H. Sears and company, ancient-looking books to my inexperienced eyes. I imagined a future in which I owned a whole shelf of similar romances, bound in leather or cloth with intricate gilt-tickled spines; my Dumas collection. Today I have over seventy-five books bearing Alexandre Dumas père’s name, covering thirty-seven of his over 250 works. That his oeuvre would be so big was an unexpected surprise, but a welcome one. From the point of view of a young person without much disposable income, but who nevertheless loves nothing more than to spend long hours scouring the shelves, boxes, basements and hiding-places of used book stores, collecting the works of a prolific but popular author like Alexandre Dumas is a perfect project. His works range from the staggeringly popular and ubiquitously available (Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo) to the completely obscure (Charles the Bold) and includes plays, short stories, travel diaries, histories, romances, a cookbook and more. Along his works one can find everything from the cheap and plentiful to the rare and expensive. Once the scope of Dumas’ oeuvre had become clear to me, I established some collecting rules. I did not simply want to buy books found and arranged by booksellers, sold to me at the fair price. To me, it is the bookseller who has done the "collecting" in such cases,
and I am doing nothing but buying it. I take much greater pleasure in locating the books myself; putting together a hodge-podge little collection of books found one at a time in book stores all over the world.

The first aim of my Dumas collection was simply to own one copy of everything Dumas ever wrote, regardless of edition or condition. Because of this seemingly simple aim…"

Read the rest here.

Also, here’s Charlotte Ashley in the National Post, plus second prize ($1000) winner Vanessa Brown, and the story of her collection The L.M. Montgomery Collection in the Forest City,  and third prize ($300) winner  Naseem Hrab and the story of her’s: The Complexities of Ordinary Life: Autobiographical Comics and Graphic Novels.

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Here’s D.G. Myers on the usefulness of lists:

My own view of statements about the “best” or “worst ever” is that they are interrogative challenges. The claims come with understood questions attached at the end:
Lolita is the greatest English-language novel written since 1880, [isn’t it? What else is, then?]”

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Came across this photo of Hazel Bell, after finding her FROM FLOCK BEDS TO PROFESSIONALISM: A HISTORY OF INDEX-MAKERS at Oak Knoll Press’s uber exciting website.

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Charles Knight in Shadows of the Old Booksellers (published in 1865) tells us of a bookshop in Finsbury Square, Moorgate, named ‘The Dome of the Muses’ belonging to bookseller James Lackington:

"A dome rises from the centre, on top of which a flag is flying…Over the principal entrance is inscribed "Cheapest Booksellers in the World’…We enter the vast area, whose dimensions are to be measured by the assertion that a coach and six might be driven round it. In the centre is an enormous circular counter…We ascend a broad staircase, which leads to ‘The Lounging Rooms’, and to the first of a series of circular galleries, lighted from the lantern of the dome, which also lights the ground floor. Hundreds, even thousands of volumes are displayed on shelves running round their walls. As we mount higher and higher, we find commoner books, in shabbier bindings; but there is still the same order preserved, each book being numbered according to a printed catalogue."

from The Book Browser’s Guide by Roy Harley Lewis.

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Espresso Book Machine.

From the 1984 Books in our Future report., by the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress of the United States:

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Block head?

Listen here as  famed author of Life of Pi and self proclaimed political gadfly Yann Martel 1) Absorbs a barrage of punishing jabs I throw at him over his latest book What is Stephen Harper Reading? and 2) Punches back at a Canadian Prime Minister whom he considers to be a visionless, ‘fact’-mired, fiction-eschewing ideologue.

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Guy de Maupassant

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I recently picked up a copy of In Art or Instruction, a limited duodecimo-sized edition published in 1969 as a greeting to friends of Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. on the occasion of its fiftieth year.

Here’s what then president William Jovanovich had to say in it about publishing:

"Publishing, too, is steady work, for there can be no end to the constant, perdurable need to instruct and to engage by art and entertainment the whole of society no less than every one. By its best humanistic definition, publishing is a major means by which we conceptualize ourselves, by which we find our what the world is and what it wants of us. Books and journals and films and other media that inform, that tell what is knwon and intimate what is not – these reveal the identity of the reader and viewer no less than that of the author or producer. Assuming that men will always be curous about themselves, publishing must be, like awaiting the millenium, the longest-lived of professions."

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Good exchange in the comments section over at Alone on a Boreal Stage, led by Zach ‘Hawkweed’ Wells, who first off quotes American poet Robert Pinsky

"I think that if an audience for any art is having a good time, they are willing to suspend the need for comprehension for a while—that’s part of the pleasure. So if the poem by Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore sounds great, is amusing or engaging or spooky in a way that we like… then like the devotee of opera or rap music or rock music, we are happy to understand only gradually, over many listenings. And if it doesn’t sound good, it is boring even if we understand it. That’s the trouble with a lot of boring art: you understand the stupid cop show, or the tedious sitcom gag, too soon and too completely. Same for the stupid middlebrow poem."

Then follows up with this:

When I’m assigned to review a book, I want nothing more than to have that rare magical experience one has when reading great literature. Major understatement: It doesn’t often happen. A reasonable second place is a book with enough interesting things and evidence of serious engagement on the part of the author to make it worth the time to read. This happens fairly often. Sometimes, not that often, one encounters very little evidence of honest effort on the part of the writer (and, by extension their editors and publishers) and, moreover, next to nothing redeeming in the book. In short, you get the kind [of] "stupid" art that Pinsky’s talking about.

I couldn’t agree more. Greatness is indeed a scarce commodity, mediocrity is not; reviewers, commentators readers need to nullify feelings of guilt about not liking most writing that comes to them published and polished  up in fancy looking packages, or about hurting feelings, or coming across as a negativity monger…consider the published output of some of our greatest writers and poets…consider how much of it was mediocre…perhap this message should affix itself to all negative reviews. Perhaps it would mitigate some of the hurt…and hostility.

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