Shelf Portrait No. 9

Completing my survey of the downstairs bookcase, here’s the second shelf from the bottom. It’s a work-in-progress with only eight volumes currently on display. I was aiming for a shelf of decorative un-jacketed reference-books, and this is how it’s worked out so far. All but one of these are relatively recent acquisitions, though I’ve owned other copies of The Art Book and The Oxford Companion to English Literature in the past. My prior copy of the former got left behind in a house-move; whereas I’d previously had a fourth edition volume of the latter, now replaced by one from the fifth edition in a garish red fake-leather binding.

To join the The Oxford Companion to English Literature I bought the Companions for Wine and for Cheese. thereby covering three major sources of nourishment. To go with the Phaidon Art Book (a cheap charity-shop find), I ordered a matching copy of The Photography Book via ebay. The other three volumes are Leonard Feather’s & Ira Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, The Grammar of Spice by Caz Hildebrand, and The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by W. Pincus Jaspert et al. in a late ’50s edition.

Shelf Portrait (Number Eight)

Once upon a time I had about twice as many cookbooks as I do now. The survivors are shown in the picture above. They occupy the bottom shelf in the downstairs bookcase. In recent years I’ve been on something closer to an ‘eat to live’ regime than a ‘live to eat’ one, owing to a variety of food sensitivities and a need to keep my weight under some semblance of control. These books get opened quite seldom now – they’re the remnants of a tastier past.

I came by these volumes by a variety of means. Anjum Anand’s Indian Every Day caught my eye in a Malmö bookshop. I learned of the existence of Eula Mae’s Cajun Kitchen (“Cooking Through the Seasons on Avery Island”) while searching Amazon for On Avery Island, i.e. the debut album by Neutral Milk Hotel. Catalan Cuisine and A Culínaria Paulista Tradicional (the latter featuring recipes from the São Paulo area of Brazil) were sent to me by on-line acquaintances. Welsh Heritage Food & Cooking was a gift from my mother. The Downhome Household Almanac & Cookbook (with its hundreds of recipes from my late wife’s native Newfoundland) was sent to us by our Canadian niece. We already had a copy, albeit a worn & tattered one, that this one replaced.

Some others have seen a great deal of use: The Conran Cookbook, Indian Every Day and The Gastronomy of Italy have all lost their damaged dust-jackets, while the spine of Jaimie Oliver’s first publication The Naked Chef is faded, cracked and stained. On the other hand, Rick Bayless' Authentic Mexican and the Sopranos Family Cookbook have seen much less in the way of active service. In the case of the former title, the difficulty of obtaining many of the necessary ingredients in Northern Europe proved too much of an impediment in re-creating its recipes. Even then, it allowed for some tantalizing ‘window-shopping’ onto another cuisine.

Ivan Generalić

An art-book caught my eye during a recent visit to Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny. On its cover, a striking specimen of poultry; while within were various scenes of country life painted in a somewhat naive style, with hints here & there of the surreal. I enjoyed the pictures but couldn’t read the text, which is in Serbo-Croatian, this being a volume devoted to the work of the artist Ivan Generalić published in Zagreb in 1973. I bought it anyway: it’s good to have something representing another language on my shelves.

A short bio at artnet says of Generalić that he “is remembered for his highly stylized, vibrant, and almost hallucinatory landscapes of rural farm life which he combined with incisive political commentary” and that he “made his works through a unique process of applying oil paint on the reverse of a pane of glass, creating a shimmering, screen-like quality”. Several of his paintings are reproduced at a website devoted to his work.

War Stories

Above are two novels in translation I’ve read recently set in World War II: HHhH by Laurent Binet and Fatelessness (aka Fateless) by Imre Kertész. These editions were published in 2012 and ‘05 respectively. Both were acquired second-hand at the excellent Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny.

HHhH relates the rise to prominence of the notorious high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, and follows the ultimately successful plot to assassinate him. The story is thinly fictionalised in a post-modern sort of a way with numerous asides about the author’s misgivings in mixing invention with historical fact, and about the practicalities of writing of the book and of the research behind it – sort of like seeing a movie intercut with scenes from its own ‘making-of’ featurette. How much one enjoys the result will depend, I think, on how well one gets along with Binet’s authorial presence. A few irritating instances aside, I got along with him very well. The story of the assassination is an inherently gripping one, and Binet conveys its high-stakes intensity in fine style.

The plans laid by Heydrich resulted in a flood-tide of death and suffering when they were set into motion. His death was untimely inasmuch as it came too late to help the millions of people affected, though who knows how much more damage he could have done had he lived longer. Fatelessness concerns one person’s experience of Heydrich’s murderous legacy. A 14-year-old Jewish boy from Budapest, initially more bemused than alarmed by the proliferating rules and restrictions imposed on him and his family, finds himself part of a large group of Jews rounded up and put on a train to Auschwitz. Kertész had himself endured a similar ordeal. His narrator has a detached outlook and a relatively dispassionate ‘voice’, which (so it seemed to me) provided some insulation for the reader from the appalling subject-matter. Even so, I found it a difficult story to read.

Ligotti

Here we see the books currently in my library from the pen of the idiosyncratic American horror writer Thomas Ligotti.

Second from top is my copy of the first UK edition of his debut short story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1989). This is a book I’d first read in ‘92, having borrowed it from Cardiff Central Library. At the time I was very unhappily acclimatising to the misery of my first proper full-time job, and I found a perverse comfort in Ligotti’s bleak worldview. I meanwhile greatly enjoyed his way with words. To paraphrase a line from the story ‘Vastarien’, I felt as though “the book had found its reader” and became an immediate fan. After much searching I found a copy of my own in early ‘94, at the Cardiff branch of ‘Forbidden Planet’.

Toward the end of that same year I spotted Ligotti’s second book, Grimscribe (1991), listed in a mail-order bookseller’s catalogue. How that copy (of the UK edition – published by Robinson, ended up in a US Carroll & Graf dust-jacket is a long story I won’t get into). Story collection #3, Noctuary (1994) came into my hands in ‘98. I suspect it would have been among my first on-line book orders, but I can’t specifically recall. The remaining five volumes were definitely all on-line orders, all placed as soon as I’d heard of the titles’ having been published.

My Work is Not Yet Done (2002) is a collectable volume, coming as it did with a bookplate signed by both Ligotti and illustrator Harry O. Morris. More sought-after still is the Durtro edition of Teatro Grottesco (2006). Hardback copies of Ligotti’s essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) likewise seem to be decidedly uncommon. Rounding out the set are the small volume of two stories that is The Spectral Link and the collection of interviews gathered in Born to Fear, both published by Subterranean Press in 2014. My copy of the former might have been worth more if my dog hadn’t got his teeth into it.

At one time or another I’ve also owned copies of The Nightmare Factory; In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land; Crampton; Sideshow, and Other Stories and Death Poems. Of these I sold a couple and gave away the remainder. There are only a few of his works (most notably The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein) that I haven’t read at all.

Poems of Today

The latest addition to my collection of obscure anthologies of translated poetry is Poems for Today: from Twenty-five Icelandic Poets, a 1971 publication from the Iceland Review Library selected and translated by Alan Boucher. Specifically my copy is a ‘74 reprint that was purchased in Iceland in ‘76, for 720 ISK (judging from the inscription on the half-title page and the price-tag on the back cover). The inscription suggests the original owner lived out on the Western Isles of Scotland.

I enjoyed the poems. As one might perhaps expect there’s a good deal of boreal gloom in them. “Hard it is to bear on a mountain road / a full load of autumn forebodings” writes Jóhannes úr Kötlum, the oldest of the poets featured, in his ‘Traveller’s verse’. In the same author’s ‘Climacteric’ one finds a note of atomic-age anxiety, while elsewhere, in Stéfan Hördur Grímsson’s ‘Term of reckoning’, there is ecological unease. I don’t know if it was a sign of the times, or a characteristic of the selection, but only one of the poets whose work was included was a woman – Nína Björk Árnadóttir.

Iceland’s spectacular landscape features heavily - its mountains, fells, pristine pools and all-but-empty roads; and there are striking lines about the harsh splendour of winter at those latitudes – “Our passage through storm-whirled thundering polar darkness soon at an end / on the wind-polished ice-blue pane a whitening cloud” writes Hannes Sigfússon in an excerpt from ‘Winter pictures from the life of poets’. There are summer idylls too, though, and poems about non-Icelandic landscapes set in deserts and sprawling cities.

The country’s legendary and mythical pasts also cast long shadows: there are some echoes of the sagas; the occasional glimpse of an elf. We also read something of the poverty and hardship of times past, as in Jón úr Vör’s ‘Lean months’: “And do you remember the endless / milkless midwinter days, / the lean months’ left-overs, / salted scraps soaked in the pail…” Less weighty contemporary concerns crop up too: one of the poems is about the novelty of Mediterranean package holidays. There follows one of the poems in full.

Wait while it sings

When a bird first sings on your bough
do not go straight away — but wait while it sings
though its song be strange to you and new
wait while it sings although you thirst
with parched throat about the fire and hear
springs trickle at the foot of the hill; still wait
in the bright night while it trills.
Its lyrical tongue will cease in the night’s
quiet and peace among you in the flames’ light —
a strange tongue — wait nevertheless;
you will not enjoy that voice for long
for it will fly off when it has released
the heart-child from chains and freed
those clear eyes, quick small fingers
and little feet; brought to your ears
in the leafy thicket; wait while it sings.

—Thorsteinn frá Hamri.

Journey to the South

There are no few novels where an author who has successfully established an intriguing atmosphere, or has brought to life some well-rounded characters, or has described a tantalising series of events, then finds themselves unable to tie together the various threads they’ve been spinning to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. Conversely, there are books where the author has a devised a proper ending, but one they’ve only been able to attain by way of a wearisomely laborious set-up. I’ve met with significantly fewer books in the latter category than the former – to my mind, Michal Ajvaz’s novel Journey to the South, which I finished a few days ago, is one of them.

It could well be that aficionados of detective or mystery stories are more familiar than I with stories that build weakly only to end strongly. Journey to the South is, among other things, a murder mystery. Martin, a postgraduate student, witnesses a fatal shooting in a theatre, at a performance of a ballet composed by one Tomáš Kantor. In the crime’s aftermath, Martin becomes involved with Kristýna, a fellow-eyewitness, who had formerly been Kantor’s girlfriend. The victim of the shooting and Kantor were step-brothers. Before his ballet’s première, Kantor had also been found murdered.

The second part of the book is an account of Martin & Kristýna’s attempts to unravel the twin mysteries of the these deaths, a quest which leads them from their home city of Prague to the Greek Islands – the titular Journey to the South. Theirs is a highly-implausible but colourfully-imaginative quest for the truth. Before we even learn about that journey, however, the bulk of the novel’s first (and longer) part is devoted to a narration of an unconventional manuscript of Tomáš Kantor’s, one which comprises stories within stories within stories. The various ways in which its nested narratives inter-relate with the murder-mystery and its solution are striking and thought-provoking.

The trouble I had with it all was that the constituent narratives themselves were, as often as not, rather pedestrian and flatly-written. Working ones way into the nested tangle of unlikely stories felt at times like an arduous ascent, through the ways these were resolved felt correspondlingly akin to an enjoyably freewheeling descent. Amidst it all Ajvaz has a good deal to say about the nature of narrative, and how it alters and is altered by the world around it; about art imitating life imitating art, etc.; and about signs and symbols and how they are interpreted and misinterpreted. Ultimately though, I found Journey to the South almost as frustrating as it was rewarding, and wouldn’t recommend it as a point of entry into Ajvaz’s work.

Fitzcarraldo

Pictured above are the seven books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions that are currently at home on my shelves. An eighth (Mathias Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild) is on the ‘to be read’ pile). Another four or five have come & gone. The first one I acquired was Camilla Grudova’s wonderful short-story collection The Doll’s Alphabet.

Fitzcarraldo have brought a breath of fresh air to British publishing with their steadfast endorsement of quality literature in translation. By the expedient of publishing excellent authors previously un- or under-represented in English, their list now includes four Nobel prizewinners. As well as the high quality of the texts, I very much like the consistent simplicity of their jacket designs.

I don’t always find the interior design of their volumes as pleasing, but it usually works well enough. One mis-step (in my opinion) was their ungainly edition of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, too hefty a tome that would have been much better subdivided into two or three volumes. I’ve my eye on a few more of their titles and look forward to seeing what else they come up with!

Poor Things

With the recent release of the movie adaptation of it, there has been much discussion of late about Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things. It’s a book I only got around to reading a few years ago. In August 2020 I ordered a first edition copy with a lightly distressed dust-jacket for less than £5, postage & all. Now one might be hard-pressed to find a similar volume for under £50.

I enjoyed the story, though I wasn’t enamoured with all the aspects of Gray’s evidently hands-on approach to book design. I have to admit I’m just not that fond of his illustrations. The whimsical blurbs on the front dust-jacket flap left me cold, as did the fake reviews on the rear one. While (as far as I know) the typography wasn’t Gray’s own handiwork, I thought it too left something to be desired. One thing I did very much like, on the other hand, was the cover design.

It features boldly stylized thistles in silver on blue cloth, and above them Gray’s oft-repeated motto “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” – words to live by, which for him would have been tied up with his devotion to the cause of Scottish Nationalism. On the acknowledgments page of the book, it states that “The epigraph on the covers is from a poem by Denis Leigh” when the poet’s name was actually Dennis Lee, and the lines he’d written that had inspired Gray were in his poem ‘Civil Elegies’, published in ‘72:

And best of all is finding a place to be
in the early years of a better civilization.

Pollen

When I first made an acquanitance with the work of Beresford Egan, some eighteen years or so ago, it was in his capacity as an artist and illustrator. His graphic work was clearly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley’s, but has an Art Déco flavour all its own. I learned at the time that he had also written some fiction, but only last year did I think to seek out his best-known novel Pollen (1933). I acquired a copy of the 2013 re-issue published by the Side Real Press.

It’s an account of bohemian types behaving badly in early ’30s London and Paris. Our protagonist – Lance Daurimer – is an unapologetically caddish & amoral painter, who finds a kindred spirit in the enigmatic Anna Beryl, who becomes his landlady. His cold-hearted seduction of two very different women provides the book with its plot, eventually serving him with a portion of comeuppance. I could have done with fewer of Daurimer’s tedious pronouncements on the hypocrisy of bourgeois social norms, but overall, while it’s no lost classic, I found it enjoyable, and better-written than I’d anticipated.

Atlas

There can surely be little demand for paper atlases in this age of zoomable and seamlessly uncreased on-line maps. One of the kinds of fool I am is the kind who would buy a used copy of The Times Concise Atlas of the World (9th ed., 2004) at a charity shop. With a sharp depreciation from its original R.R.P. of £75, I paid £3 for mine, which turned out to be no special bargain, merely the going rate for a type of book that people are finding it difficult to give away. Having said that, a 14th edition of the same work was published as recently as 2020, so presumably there was some expectation that they still might find buyers.

(The same year that this edition was published, Google acquired Keyhole Inc., the original developers of what would become Google Earth.)

Relatively concise it may be, but it’s still a fairly hefty tome. For now I’m keeping it on this shelf, but that may need a re-think. The book falls into three sections: 70 pages of preliminary material (satellite imagery, geological & geographical information, etc.); 200 pages of maps; and a 142-page index. The index is a marvel in itself and a fine exemplar of a declining art: 7 columns per page of small type including a total of over 130,000 place-names. Both the small town where I live and the smaller one where I grew up can be found among them.

Plus Fabric

“How much simple inexpensive pleasure there is to be had in writing, or receiving, a letter on paper so smooth to the pen, so crisp to handle…” so runs some of Spicers advertising copy from 1958. The box pictured above matches the packaging design they used at that time (but could easily be later). By then, Spicers must have been one of the main rivals in the writing paper business to market leaders John Dickinson & Co. ‘Plus Fabric’ survives to this day as a brand for envelopes; as does a wholesaling company who have inherited the Spicers name.

One of the former paper-making concern’s productions was the ca. 1950 sample-book whose cover is shown below, including within it “the majority of the usual writing, printing, wrapping and speciality papers”. Among them are some hand-made sheets with Hodgkinson & Co. watermarks, but, as far as I can tell, there is no ‘Plus Fabric’.

Shelf Portrait #6

Pictured above is one of four shelves in the bookcases upstairs reserved for larger-format volumes, most of them art-books. I’ve owned a couple of them for nearly thirty years: the Odilon Redon exhibition catalogue and, tenth from the left, The Three Golden Keys by Peter Sís, a children’s book I bought for my niece that I loved so much I went back to get a copy for myself. Next but one to its right is the most recently-acquired on the shelf – another exhibition catalogue, this one devoted to the work of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert.

Half of the remaining titles were accumulated during my years in Sweden. The first five from the left fall into that category (no. 5, with the blank orange spine is a book about the work of Hungarian artist István Orosz), as do the volumes about Paula Rego and Remedios Varo. Slightly later arrivals reflecting some current fixations include Silvie Turner’s The Book of Fine Paper and The Typewriter: a Graphic History of the Beloved Machine by Janine Vangool.

Diary

One Saturday morning this summer in a Chepstow charity shop I spotted a set of six small old books. On a closer look I saw they collectively made up a Victorian edition of Samuel Pepys' famous Diary. The asking price was £5 per volume, which didn’t strike me as excessive, so I brought them home.

Although this edition was published in 1889, it seems my newly-acquired set wasn’t purchased until six years later–if the inscription in each volume is anything to go by: Robert H. Hobart Cust / October 1895. Mr. Cust also glued his bookplate inside the cover of each book. His name was distinctive enough that I felt there was a chance the internet might be able to tell me more about him. Indeed so - born in 1860, he later made a name for himself as an art historian, publishing his first book in 1906.

Despite his historical vocation, his interest in 17th-Century English history can’t have been too acute, as it was obvious that no-one had ever read this copy of Pepys' Diary all the way through, with many of its pages still un-cut. Hoping to rectify that, I made a start on it a few months ago, and, after some time away from the book, have just begun Vol. III, which opens toward the end of 1664, not long before the turmoil of the ‘65 outbreak of plague in London.

El Zarco, the Bandit

Back at Broadleaf Books last Friday, a bright orange spine caught my eye, and when I pulled the book from the shelf, the cover design further intrigued me. I’d never heard of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano but felt I couldn’t go too far wrong with a slim volume called El Zarco, the Bandit, so I bought it. I read the book with pleasure: a stirring tale of the brave blacksmith Nicolas, who, besotted by the beautiful but haughty Manuela, despairs to see her elope instead with the titular dastard El Zarco. Drama ensues.

My enjoyment of the story was enhanced by the look and feel of a beautifully-designed book. It’s a relatively early (1957) Folio Society edition, in a translation by Mary Allt, featuring some perfectly well-judged woodcut illustrations by Zelma Blakely, who was also responsible for the eye-catching cover image. I’ve had mixed success with the Folio Society’s productions over the years, and don’t always feel their handiwork truly enhances the texts in question; or, at least, their efforts just as often hit wide of the mark (with respect to my own tastes) as they land on target.

Back when the Society still followed the old ‘Book Club’ business model, I signed up as a member (ca. 1994), but only for a single year. There were just too few titles in their catalogue at the time that appealed to me to secure a repeat subscription. I’ll admit to having been irked more than is reasonable to see them lavish care & attention on books that I deem underserving of such treatment. I was about to lament how they’d never brought out an edition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a great favourite of mine that I think has been ill-served in its lacklustre UK paperback editions, but it seems they have very recently published one. I was sure to place an order before coming back to finish this paragraph!

Croxley Writing And Ledger Papers

Another book of paper samples, this slim volume of Croxley Writing and Ledger Papers comprises, after some introductory matter, five leaves apiece of six different papers: Lion Loan, Three Candlesticks Parchment, Colne Valley Parchment, Croxley Lion Ledger, Croxley Extra Strong and Croxley Law Paper. These were all products of the Croxley mills operated by John Dickinson & Co. Ltd. There’s no publication date, but there are sample texts within the book bearing dates in 1937 & ‘38, so the latter year seems a likely candidate.

The sample texts are a well thought-out selection of pseudo-typewritten letters and ersatz handwritten ones; along with mocked-up legal and commercial documents. I particularly like the fake Art Deco letterheading in the sample above for the “Union Airways Corporation”, and the none-too-legible writing beneath it: “My dear Henry, In my opinion your scheme is good - Go ahead and good luck to you! I have only one suggestion–why not use a better quality writing paper? I always use this Colne Valley Parchment!”

Broadleaf Books

Really good second-hand bookshops are a rare & endangered species nowadays. My favourite such establishment in this part of the world is Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny. Their stock is arranged in thematic sections, with the volumes in each section not necessarily following any obvious order. This frustrates systematic search, as it meanwhile rewards serendipitous discovery. With systematic search very easily done on-line, this seems to me an ideal state of affairs. I’m not in Abergavenny too often, but when I go, I seldom leave Broadleaf without making a purchase.

One of their bookmarks is shown above, resting in an open copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses (specifically a mid-’50s reprint of the Bodley Head edition), that I picked up on my last visit there. I’ve read Ulysses about 1¾ times: once while in university, and then again a decade later, if only up to some point in the middle of the so-called ‘Circe’ chapter. I’d then put my paperback copy into the seat pocket in front of me, whence I forgot to retrieve it on leaving the plane. I very much doubt I’ll make a third attempt at reading it from cover to cover, but there are some chapters I’ll be delighted to revisit.

Storybooks

Here are four of the six books published in New Directions' Storybook ND series last year. These are short texts in un-jacketed glossy hardcover volumes whose design is vaguely reminiscent of certain children’s books. Each one, however, administers a small dose of more-or-less serious literature. “Storybook ND: the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon” as they put it. I’d learned about the series while it was still in preparation and was ready when the first batch were issued to place some orders. Having a slight preference for short & sharp books over big & baggy ones; and already being a fan of a few of the featured authors, it was an initiative unusually well-tailored to my tastes.

Given my proclivities for the somewhat obscure and unpopular, I have to wonder how well it will thrive, and how much more the series might grow. A further two volumes, at least, have appeared this year, which, I suppose, means at least some other readers must be ready to cough up the $17.95 (or equivalent) per volume, which is by no means the very cheapest means of obtaining an afternoon’s entertainment.

Yoko Tawada was the only one of the four authors above whose work I hadn’t previously encountered. 3 Streets comprises a trio of diverting and occasionally thought-provoking ghost stories set in her current home city of Berlin. I must have read a dozen or so of César Aira’s numerous books: while The Famous Magician isn’t among my very favourites, I nevertheless enjoyed it a good deal. László Krasznahorkai’s Spadework for a Palace is a characteristically intense and enthrallingly splenetic piece, whose obsessive narrator fixates on his famous namesake (Herman Melville) and the unbuilt works of an architect called Lebbeus Woods. My favourite of the set was Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool, which, like her novel The Last Samurai has to do (in part at least) with the benefits of an unconventional education - for me it was an untrammelled joy to read.

Red as Blood

In my late teens I borrowed Tanith Lee’s short-story collection Red As Blood from the library. “Nine devilishly twisted fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm never dared to tell them” runs the blurb, hence the slightly laboured subtitle or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer. While I didn’t enjoy all the stories equally, the book left a positive & lasting overall impression and lingered indistinctly in my memory for decades afterwards.

Last year I bought two other volumes of her short fiction: Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows. It’s commonplace for short story collections to be mixed bags, but in these books I found an unusually (dramatically) wide variance between how much I loved the best stories and how actively I disliked the worst of them. Lee could write very fine prose - with something of a purplish hue - but seems to have been equally content to turn out pulpy pot-boilers. Literary finesse hadn’t been her only yardstick, whereas it was, in retrospect, the only one I had brought along.

Last month I obtained a copy of Red As Blood to re-read, some thirty-seven years on from my first encounter with it. Lee’s revisions, inversions & outright perversions of the traditional tales struck me as more successful (or at least, more enjoyable) than Angela Carter’s traversal of similar terrain in The Bloody Chamber. Again I preferred the slightly more literary pieces (especially the memorably eerie ‘Black as Ink’) to the pulpier ones (e.g. ‘Wolfland’), but on this occasion, helped by the distant echoes coming back from my first encounter with the book, I was more content to go with the flow and enjoy all of the stories on something more like their own terms.

I still have yet to read any of Lee’s novels. If I were to make a start on them I’d have to be selective, as neither free time nor shelf-space are in indefinite supply - and she wrote dozens of the things.

Big Dictionary Energy

Dictionaries. I was twenty-five when I acquired my first big one: a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in two hefty volumes. I can still remember the discomfort of carrying the cumbrous tomes the twenty minutes' walk home from Blackwell’s bookshop in Cardiff. Relative to my disposable income at the time they had been expensive - but I considered them to be an investment in words, and expected they’d last me half a lifetime.

Twenty years later I gave them to my Dad. He was looking for something to help him tackle the newspaper’s daily crossword, and, while the SOED was more dictionary than he needed, it seemed surplus to my own requirements. After all, times had changed such that my library card gave me access to the entire on-line edition of the ever-growing, ever-changing Oxford English Dictionary, which, if a frozen snapshot of it were to be printed, might easily fill two dozen even heftier volumes.

Even so, when I happened upon a micrographically-printed ‘compact’ edition of the original OED in a Chepstow junkshop a few months later I did not resist the absurd compulsion to take it home. It was a ridiculous and gratuitous purchase, but it was also a very cheap one at only £5 for the two volumes, their tatty slipcase and the plastic hand-held magnifier to facilitiate reading the tiny, tiny print.

The absurdity was assuaged when, within a year of that purchase, local government budget cuts obliged local libraries here to withdraw access to the online OED. I no longer felt quite so foolish in holding on to my really big dictionary. In the meantime it had been joined on the shelf by a similarly ‘compact’ edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, also in two volumes, cased & with a magnifier, which an ebay seller had parted with for about £25.

It’s relatively seldom that I have recourse to either reference, yet it comforts me somehow to have all of that information available off-line, should it be needed. Having acquired the DNB I then sought out a further five (regular-sized) supplementary volumes that had post-dated it, but pre-dated the work’s once-controversial second edition. More recently still, a copy of the original Compact OED’s supplementary third volume turned up at my local charity shop, for which the asking price was all of £2.

Shelf-Portrait No. 5

The third shelf in my downstairs ‘display’ bookcase (previously) has the most headroom and is home to some of my tallest volumes. These are more or less expensive art-books of one kind or another. Costliest among them would have been the FMR Arcimboldo book with the black spine none-too-clearly visible on the left. At one time I had another couple of titles from the same I segni dell’uomo series, but those I had acquired second-hand, whereas I bought the one above new from their official outlet in Venice (during the same trip as I acquired the carnival masks mentioned below).

The Opus Magnum volume cost me in the region of £150 - which seemed like a lot at the time but is I think a better price than one could find a copy for nowadays. And I could easily have paid £100 or so for the blue-spined book about Athanasius Kircher. I’ve had all those for between 15-25 years. Slightly more recently-acquired were the 2014 edition of The New Sylva (the red-spined volume on the right), and the Rizzoli printing of the Codex Seraphinianus; with the latest arrival of all being the Taschen Piranesi book which came into my hands last year. I had owned an Italian volume about Piranesi for some time which was pretty good, but where the reproductions of his etchings left something to be desired: the illustrations are larger and clearer in the Taschen edition.

Mavis Gallant

I’d become a great admirer of the short stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner (of Lolly Willowes fame) and read something on-line mentioning that the only other female author whose short fiction had been featured as often in the pages of The New Yorker over the same time-frame had been Mavis Gallant. Not at all familiar with the latter’s work, I ordered a copy of the 2004 reprint of her Selected Stories and found that although I loved her writing too, I took an irrational dislike to the physical book: a cumbersome 900+ page paperback. I felt it was the wrong format for her densely concentrated writing - like an off-puttingly super-sized portion of some very rich and calorific confection.

I’ve since accumulated half a dozen separate hardback copies of her short fiction (as pictured above), from The Pegnitz Junction (1973) to Across the Bridge (1993). For me these have been much more digestible servings of her prose. How to describe her writing? Here’s a thumbnail sketch of it by critic Hilary Bailey, as quoted on the rear dust jacket flap of Overhead in a Balloon (1987): “Brilliant, dryly accurate, impeccable detail, knowing and terrifyingly neutral. Mavis Gallant’s stories seem to tell us that all are victims of history and each other, all are out of synch with their own times and each other, all are strangers where they live and strangers to each other”.

Gallant was a Canadian who spent most of her writing life in Paris. Exile, displacement & alienation are prominent and recurring ingredients in her work, but nearly always well-blended with other flavours. Her characters are fully-rounded: good people one can’t love because of their exasperating flaws; awful people one can’t hate on account of their saving graces. How she can stealthily fold so much detail, plot & characterization into so few pages is a marvel. She strung some of her stories into inter-related sequences which collectively come across as novels in all but name - albeit with all the surplus padding removed. For example, the quartet of tales “A Recollection”, “Rue de Lille”, “The Colonel’s Child” and “Lena” jointly pack a tremendous novelistic punch into no more than thirty-seven pages.

As good as she was, there are some duds among her tales. She could be very funny but wasn’t really a humourist - a few efforts at lighter comedy fall a little short (I’m thinking of the ‘Grippes and Poche’ pieces). She was accomplished at extracting strangeness from the everyday, but also tried her hand at some deliberately surreal vignettes (such as the title piece of From the Fifteenth District) which didn’t work terribly well. And even now and again in her customary mode, the point of this or that subtly-realised slice of life might elude the frustrated reader. Those relative failures, however, are well-outnumbered by her many successes.

Writings

My odd enthusiasm for old stationery has bled its way into my library, with the acquisition of a number of paper sample-books. One of the best is this collection of Writings (i.e. writing paper samples) issued in March 1936 by Lepard & Smiths Ltd., apparently one of the longest established paper-merchants in London. The book’s cover is in rather shabby condition, but the contents have aged much more gracefully. On the first page is the boast that “we believe this to be the best and most complete Sample Book of Writings issued by any house” and the claim that “fully 95% of the papers shewn are of British make.”

To the contemporary letter-writer, who might do well nowadays to find even a few different types of writings in all but the most specialised retail outlets, the bewildering choice available to their forebears is much to be envied. Among the options offered by Lepard & Smiths, one curiosity is their Kalatex paper, made, as its name implies, with the addition of latex rubber to the esparto-based pulp. Of this paper, they claim that “the surface grips the ink, as there is not the slightest trace of greasiness”, and indeed its surface does have a ‘grippy’ feel about it - though I’ve not tried writing on the stuff.

Though the bulk of the papers in the book are of a plain ‘cream’ off-white colour, there are also some given in a range of shades, with, for example, their “Eleven” series of papers: available in Lilac, Yellow, Blue, Daffodil, Pink, Green, Buff, Salmon, Deep Blue, Moss, Cerise, Silver Grey and Old Gold. This paper is one of only a very few in the book which has suffered any significant deterioration over the last eighty-seven years, a testament to the fine quality of Lepard & Smiths' products.

Selected 'Selected Poems'

In my recent reading have been half a dozen books with the same title: Selected Poems. I especially enjoyed the two shown above. Putting aside my usual predilection for poetry in translation, these books have predominantly been by poets writing in American English.

Barring a couple of brief encounters in anthologies, I’d made the mistake of overlooking Marianne Moore’s poems until now, which is too bad as I find them very much to my taste. For me there’s something reminiscent of a fine jeweller’s sharp-eyed precision in the way she fits her words together into elaborate settings as if they were so many semi-precious stones - all to suitably sparkling effect.

John Berryman’s Selected Poems (1938-1968), on the other hand, I’d met with before, having owned an ’80s copy of the same collection in my youth. This latterly-acquired early-’70s one has the benefit of being printed on better-quality paper. Although he worked within the constraints of meter & rhyme often enough, Berryman’s art comes across as altogether untidier than Moore’s; a side-effect perhaps of his flailing through a chaotic life. There are nevertheless jewels aplenty in his poetry too.

Rhys Davies

The books in the photograph above contain most of the collected short stories of the Welsh writer Rhys Davies (1901–1978). Some others were, early in his career, published singly in limited editions: I have a few of those too. Possibly there were more besides which only ever appeared in periodicals, and which remain uncollected. Not shown are the Selected Stories of 1945, the Collected Stories of 1955, nor any of the posthumously-published editions of his tales. He is reckoned to have turned out about a hundred short stories and twenty or so novels over the forty-odd years of his writing life.

That life began, the story goes, after he’d left Wales for London and had found work in a suburban clothing store. One weekend he happened to pick up a copy of a literary quarterly called The New Coterie at a bookshop, and, reading the stories within, felt he could write just as well. Putting pen to paper on a wet Sunday afternoon, his first three tales “seemed to pour out like the rain”. These first attempts were accepted for inclusion in the next New Coterie, and, together with a few others, were published in 1927 in a slim paperback volume The Song of Songs. The same year saw the appearance of Davies' debut novel, The Withered Root.

Eight further full-scale story collections followed. My own favourites among them are Love Provoked (1933), the volume where I feel he first exhibited full mastery of the form; and A Finger in Every Pie (1942), the first of his collections I read, and a book I enjoyed so much it got me started on seeking out all the others. Not that I dislike the rest by any means: A Pig in a Poke (1931) may have some rough edges, but also a great deal of charm; and if The Darling of Her Heart (1958) plays it safe at times with some soft-focus nostalgia, there are more forceful moments too. A contemporary praised Davies as ‘The Welsh Chekhov’, which I feel is overstating his case: he couldn’t match the Russian’s depth; but I nevertheless prefer my compatriot’s writing over that of Anton Pavlovich. I’ve had less success with Davies' novels but have only read a few of those to date.

Described by one profiler as “a small, neat, darkish man with a bird-like face and quick eyes”, he hailed from the South Wales Valleys, then a major coal-mining centre. Despite leaving for London as a young man, Welsh settings predominated in his fiction for decades thereafter: whether in realistically-drawn tales of miners and their families from his industrialised home turf; or in stories set in a more or less idealised vision of rural West Wales. Some of the best entertainment in his fiction comes from his vividly-drawn (and frequently headstrong) female characters, from the downtrodden Mrs. Rees in ‘Nightgown’ and her dogged determination to bring one feminine comfort into her harsh life; to the witchy Sian Shurlock in ‘Over at Rainbow Bottom’, suspiciously-often a widow.

Davies was gay - albeit determinedly closeted - with (reputedly) a particular fondness for military men. There are hints as to his orientation here & there throughout his books, but only very seldom did he approach the subject of homosexuality more directly, such as in the stories ‘Doris in Gomorrah’, ‘Queen of the Côte D’Azur’ and ‘Wigs, Costumes, Masks’. Interestingly, none of these three appear in the 1955 Collected Stories, which gathered together about half of his stories written up to that point. In his brief Preface for the book, he wrote that the pieces included “yield me various degrees of satisfaction” while those omitted “cause me various degrees of unease” - an unease that may in some instances have had an extraliterary dimension.

In Other Languages

I’m a monoglot Anglophone yet own several books printed in other languages. Most of these are art-books of one kind or another where the pictures are part of the point, and where proper names, places and dates in the text can furnish some idea of what is being discussed. A certain something, then, is still being communicated across the language barrier. Beyond that, I like seeing how other languages fall on the page: the shapes of their paragraphs; the lengths of their words; the spatter-patterns of their diacritics & punctuation.

For example there’s an edition of Wentzel Jamnitzer’s Perspective corporum regularium (Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1993), a 16th-century work presented in facsimile with its original Latin and black-letter German text translated into modern Spanish. Other examples include an exhibition catalogue Mélancolie: génie et folie en Occident (Gallimard, Paris, 2005) and a monograph Bernini Architetto (Electa Editrice, Milan, 3rd ed.: 1996) which are respectively, as one would expect, in French and Italian.

Other volumes allow more or less English to intrude. Margareta Gynning’s study Det Ambivalenta Perspektivet (Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, 1999) of the painters Eva Bonnier and Hanna Hirsch-Pauli includes a seven-page English summary - more or less an abstract - after the main body of Swedish text. Opus Magnum: Kniha o sakrální geometrii, alchymii, magii, astrologii,…, on the other hand, by Vladislav Zadrobílek et al (Trigon, Prague, 1997) has a virtually complete small-print English translation of its constituent Czech chapters shoehorned into the back of the book.

In a different category are those books whose publishers have striven to be multilingual throughout. Examples on my shelves are Vrubel by S. Kaplanova (Auora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1975) which is in English, French, German & Russian; and Giovanni Lista’s Balla (Edizioni Galleria Fonte D’Abisso, Modena, 1982) in Italian, French, English and German. In the latter case the English translation leaves a good deal to be desired, so I wonder about the quality of the others.

These last are akin to parallel texts (which, in my library, are almost all collections of poetry), where text in the source language is printed on the left of a double-page spread, with a facing English translation. In that vein I have poems given variously in Basque, Catalan, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh (and perhaps a couple of others I’ve overlooked).

Shelf Portrait (Number Four)

Most of my books are kept in my upstairs study/office which, of my few visitors, fewer still will see. There is one small bookcase in my lounge/dining room downstairs: for years I used it for cookbooks and a changing assortment of non-bibliomorphic items. Last year, however, I thought I’d make a semi-decorative feature of it by filling it with a selection of interesting-looking volumes (interesting to me, at least). The current contents of its top two levels can be seen above.

Its shelves have ended up in an odd configuration where two of them are rather close together, permitting space between them only for books no more than about 175mm / 6⅞" tall. As of last summer I had enough sufficiently diminutive volumes to fill only half of it, and there followed an exercise of gathering a variety of compact, presentable-looking books to fill the other half. The top shelf supports a selection of (mostly) non-fiction titles. The most recent addition to it is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield, which I picked up from Stephen’s Bookshop in Monmouth on Saturday and then read that same day.

Orlam

Although more a standoffish admirer of P.J. Harvey’s music than an outright fan, I was nevertheless intrigued on reading a description of her book Orlam (when it was published last year) as “a novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular”: not the sort of work one might typically expect from a rockstar-turned-author. When I picked up a copy from a bookshop shelf last month I liked what I saw of the verse therein. At the next opportunity I bought the book, going on to read it cover to cover by the end of that same day.

It didn’t strike me as much like a novel, nor would I categorize it as a single long narrative poem: rather it seemed to me “a series of lyrical vignettes” in which the outline of a larger narrative could be discerned. Like a song-cycle where the reader is called upon to supply much of the music, it’s something akin to a concept album in book form. To say it presents an unsentimental look at rural life is putting it very mildly: in no way is it a pastoral idyll. There are moments of quiet beauty, but the prevailing mood is one of grim grotesquerie (“suffused with violence, sexual confusion and perversity” as the blurb on the back cover puts it). There is most assuredly “something nasty in the woodshed”.

I think the decision to use Dorset dialect words and phrases more or less liberally throughout works very well indeed. Their buzz and burr conjures up an intense sense of place that is meanwhile anachronistic and apart from current reality, given that many of those words are (apparently) no longer in current use, being salvaged by Harvey from the pages of William Barnes' 1863 Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect. Readers not from that part of the world are aided by numerous footnotes and a glossary, and for the fainter-hearted, all of the poems are given in plainer English too. All this apparatus can at times seem like overkill, but an excess of hand-holding is probably better than too little.

It’s a highly idiosyncratic book with no few weaknesses, but overall I found it a bold and a compelling work. An odd surprise for me was that I recognized a couple of the ostensibly obscure dialect words therein having previously heard them via another source. My late wife hailed from Newfoundland, which has a rich dialect of its own. On occasion she’d use the dialect word bivver as an emphatic variant of shiver (i.e. with cold); Harvey uses biver, which is explained in her glossary as “to shake or quiver with cold or fear”. And sometimes when brushing her hair, if it were badly tangled, my wife might complain of it being clitty. Harvey uses clitty a few times, glossing it as “stringy and sticky, tangled in clods or lumps”. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that a relative of my wife’s, on tracing their shared ancestry, found a number of forebears who’d moved to St. John’s from the Poole area of southeastern Dorset.

Solenoid

The work of Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu came to my attention in late 2019, by way of a review of his novel Solenoid at The Untranslated weblog. While Solenoid remained inaccessible to English-language readers at that point, I saw that two of his other books had been translated: Nostalgia, and the first volume of his trilogy Blinding (with an excerpt from the former, moreover, available on-line).

Around the time I placed an order for Nostalgia, I realised I’d already made an accidental acquaintance with some its author’s poetry, thanks to the inclusion of ten of his poems in an anthology called When the Tunnels Meet (1996). This was the culmination of a project in which ten Romanian poets were ‘twinned’ with Irish ones to produce translations of each others' work, Cărtărescu being paired with Medbh McGuckian. Those poems had a conversational tone (suggestive, perhaps, of American influences), and low-key, urban settings. Some struck me as a tad prosaic: I didn’t see any sign in them of the extravagant (and often poetic) surrealism that so often lights up his prose.

I loved Nostalgia, whereas Blinding: the Left Wing, though scarcely less impressive, left me with somewhat mixed feelings. Now, at last, I’ve also read Solenoid, published last year by Deep Vellum in Sean Cotter’s excellent translation. While I think one’s first encounter with Cărtărescu’s prose is always liable to be the most memorable, Solenoid is a more ambitious and coherent book than Nostalgia and intermixes its grandiose flights of fancy with down-to-earth realism in a more purposeful way than in Blinding. It’s not without some significant flaws, but I loved the whole well enough to have no qualms about overlooking those of its parts I liked less.

Love and Rockets

I didn’t hold on to any of the books of my childhood & teenage years, not the odd assortment of volumes about cars, aircraft and imaginary spaceships; not the hardback copy of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar… I never returned to the school library; not the first book I bought with my own money (Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss) nor the other SF&F paperbacks that followed it: Dune and its sequels, the first three Hitchhiker’s Guide books, Jack Vance’s Lyonesse - and a few others. The greater part of my youthful reading had been courtesy of the local library. My parents kept only a couple of dozen books in the family home, but frequently borrowed from the library, and I habitually followed suit.

Things began to change when I went to university, where I took my first steps toward accumulating a personal library. By the time I graduated I had something like a hundred volumes of my own. After some thirty-three more years of acquisition and deaccession, however, a mere four of those remain on my shelves today. Of those four, the one I’ve held on to for the longest is Love and Rockets: Book One by Los Bros Hernandez, bought from Forbidden Planet in London in the autumn of 1987, when graphic novels were newly in vogue. It was later joined by the likes of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Elektra Assassin and The Incal.

In the summer of ‘88, I obtained a paperback copy of Primo Levi’s wonderful memoir-novel-essay The Periodic Table, which appealed perfectly to my taste at that time for combinations of the literary with the scientific. I had already had my mind blown by the university library’s copy of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow when, in ‘89 or ‘90, I bought a copy of my own - an 8th printing of the Picador paperback edition. In late ‘88, a friend with poetical aspirations recommended Heaney & Hughes’ The Rattle Bag anthology to me, and I soon afterward found a well-used second-hand copy of the ‘83 reprint in the Oxfam shop on Kensington Hight Street for £1. It proved to be a potent ‘gateway drug’ for me into the world of poetry, and I’ve treasured that dog-eared volume ever since.

Also on my shelves back then (such as I can remember) were Pynchon’s V, Slow Learner, The Crying of Lot 49 & Vineland; William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Cities of the Red Night; Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs; Kerouac’s On The Road; Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky; Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood; The Great Gatsby; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, & Finnegans Wake (also Pomes Penyeach); A Hundred Years of Solitude; E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime; Black Tickets by Jayne Ann Phillips; Lucius Shephard’s The Jaguar Hunter; an omnibus edition of The Books of Blood; Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson; Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer by Carol Hill; William T. Vollman’s You Bright and Risen Angels and The Rainbow Stories. What others, I wonder, have since fallen permanently beyond the reach of my memory?

Shelf Portrait #2

It took a few false starts before I developed an enthusiasm for photography, but once I did, things escalated quickly. A few months after getting my first DSLR (a Nikon D80), I’d supplemented it with a second-hand film SLR (a Nikon F80). Having rediscoverd the joys of shooting on 35mm film it wasn’t much longer before I got my hands on an old TLR (a Yashica-Mat) to dabble with medium format. I took up home development of black-&-white film, and daydreamed about having my own darkroom, and of experimenting with a large-format camera.

At length I coaxed both those daydreams into reality, but in each case I bit off more than I could chew. My circumstances never permitted any kind of permanent darkroom, and the makeshift one I was able to set up was in no way satisfactory: the enlarger I’d acquired only got used on a handful of occasions. There was marginally better success with an entry-level 5x4 camera - a Crown Graphic - but after seeing for myself just how much bigger a step up it was in terms of inconvenience and expense from medium to large format, I felt discouraged after taking and developing only a few dozen shots. At around the same time, money and free time came to be in all too short supply, with photography in general having to take a back seat to other priorities.

One of the 5x4 shots I did manage to take was of the disorganised and neglected state of my bookshelves at that time (Autumn 2011). A detail from it is shown above. I find it interesting to look at in retrospect, given just how many of those volumes I’ve since let go. I no longer own the half-dozen copies of FMR magazine, for eaxmple, or the art-books about Adam Elsheimer, A.G. Rizzoli or Jacques Callot. And I sold my first-edition two-volume copy of the Codex Seraphinianus no more than a year after this picture was taken. I hated to part with it, but the four-figure sum from the sale proved very useful at the time. A decade later I bought a copy of the 2013 Rizzoli edition of the Codex by way of a belated replacement.

Like a Sculpture in the Glass

Midweek - either Tuesday or Wednesday - I will often have a glass of wine. Only one glass, but quite a large one. It’s a wasteful activity as the rest of the bottle doesn’t get used (I’m determined not to reprise the excesses of my youth). For a time I bought half-bottles, or, closer to my ideal portion size, 25cl ones: but grew frustrated at the limited choice available in those sizes. One has a few more widely-available options in the quarter-bottle format (18.7cl ) but for me that’s too unsatisfyingly small a serving. Perhaps I ought to try the offerings of half-bottle specialists The Little Fine Wine Company, who I’ve only just learned about.

Or perhaps I should just make an effort to find someone else to share the bottles with. Hypotheticals aside, most of my recent wine-buying has been from the shelves of Aldi and Lidl. Last week, for example, I greatly enjoyed the latter’s 2019 Torre de Ferro Reserva from the Dão region of Portugal; while later this evening I’ll be sampling the former’s Chassaux Et Fils Specially Selected Pézenas, from the Languedoc region of France, also a ‘19 vintage. Apparently (though neither the bottle, nor Aldi’s website says as much), it’s a blend of 40% Syrah, 30% Grenache and 20% Mourvèdre - a combination which bodes well - with the balance presumably made up of the likes of Carignan and/or Cinsaut.

There follow a couple of poems mentioning wine:

Your time of wine and roses

Your time of wine and roses
   has gone away
when your beautiful beloved
   leaves you.
When he leaves you
   the rose is so lonely,
the wine, like a sculpture in the glass.

—Sirkka Turkka (translated by Kirsi Simonsuuri).

I imagine the wine (and the roses) to be red in the above, white wine to my mind seeming less sculptural.

Red Ice

The year 1812 in Russia
while the soldiers retreated
among cadavers
of men and horses
the wine froze hard
so the sapper’s axe
had to share out
for everyone likewise the dying
the stout block of wine
in the shape of a cask
no museum
could ever have preserved.

—Jean Follain (translated by Christpopher Middleton).

The Forgery

“Charco Press” says the blurb on their website, “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.” They’ve been at it since 2017, but I only became aware of them a few months ago. On perusing their catalogue, I was intrigued to find I’d barely heard of any of their authors. Not really knowing where to start I took a chance on a couple of their volumes that seemed, in synopsis, like they might interest me: Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez and The Forgery by Ave Barrera. Both were enjoyable, with the latter in particular very much to my taste.

The Forgery (original title Puertas Demasiado Pequeñas: literally “Doors Too Small”) is Barrera’s first novel. Set in Guadalajara, it follows the fortunes and misfortunes of José Federico Burgos, a struggling artist turned copyist, who is persuaded by a wealthy businessman to engage in the outright forgery of a 16th-century Flemish altarpiece. Barrera skilfully combines naturalistic episodes with hallucinatory ones, and her story takes several surprising turns which yet do not feel like gratuitous twists. The imagery and situations are memorably striking; the characters are well-sketched and the prose is good. All that and something of a fairy-tale ending in a compact 173 pages - I loved it.

In the picture of my copy of The Forgery (above), the geometric background is provided by the cover of a Folio Society edition of Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. I like the bold designs on the Charco Press covers, which seem somewhat reminiscent to me (in a good way) of ’70s textbooks. I’ve since ordered two more of their titles.

Only the Road

With the long-standing ubiquity of hip-hop culture and its many offshoots, poetry must surely be as popular as it’s ever been in the English-speaking world; but literary poetry, as one might term it, has become (in those same territories) something of a special interest: a dusty niche visited by a relative few. Of those few, a smaller minority seek out poetry in translation. And how many of that minor minority are merely readers: that is, not academics, not other poets nor would-be academics or poets? I don’t know, but I get the feeling it’s a sparsely-populated sub-subset of the reading public in which I find myself.

A distinction for me between poems and stories is their re-readability. A poem is like a song in that I can revisit it dozens or even hundreds of times with little or no diminution of pleasure. Whereas it’s not often that I can read a story even a second time without a measure of restless impatience; without a sense that it’s lessened by the remembering of it. With that in mind, looking at all the novels on my shelves that I’m unlikely to read again in any forseeable future, I embarked on a project to reallocate some of that limited space for poetry.

The Goodreads list “Your Obscure Poetry in Translation Anthologies” has been one helpful guide in my recent efforts in filling what has become the dedicated poetry bookcase. I already knew and loved a number of the titles on the list (for instance The Poetry of Survival, Ice Around Our Lips and Modern Arabic Poetry) and have been acquiring some more: Reversible Monuments, Language for a New Century; and, the latest addition, Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry.

Editor/translator Margaret Randall has done a more than admirable job of casting a hundred or more heterogenous poems into English, and in presenting them and their authors to an Anglophone audience. Large anthologies are often necessarily the work of many hands, but here we have labour of love with a solo pilot at the controls. I’d be thrilled to find more volumes of this quality to further flesh out my poetry collection.