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Yours truly has penned 700+ posts over the past 2+ years.
I'm burned out.
Effective immediately, I'm taking a sabbatical.
I'll be back in September ... maybe.
In the meantime, the blog will remain up for those folks who need access to TPL's hundreds of links ... and for those folks who may want to re-visit one or more of the previous 700+ posts.
I will check in occasionally to validate links and make sure the place is still in one piece, but that's about it....
Anyone attempting to collect the literature of video gaming faces an enormous challenge. The history of the industry is a private library unto itself:
One needs to collect such histories as broadly as possible, since their focus varies considerably.
Some histories cover video gaming in considerable detail, examining everything from video game precursors -- e.g., Thomas Goldsmith's and Estle Mann's 1947 cathode-ray tube amusement device -- to the first home video game (proposed in the mid-1950s by Ralph Baer, though not realized until 1966).
Other histories frequently elect not to pick up the story until video games first come into commercial use in November 1971 (with Nutting Associates' release of Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney):
Of course, book collectors often choose instead to focus only on books that are specific to video games created for particular platforms...
...or focus on collecting only books that are specific to video games developed by particular hardware manufacturers and/or software developers:
Other book collectors choose to focus their collecting efforts on the vast literature that has been devoted to programming various types of video games...
...or they collect the equally vast literature that is devoted to how specific video games might best be played...
...or they search out volumes that explore how the narrative structure and other elements of video games differ from that of printed books and other forms of entertainment:
Some book collectors find the social impact of video gaming to be a topic more worthy of their time and money:
Other book collectors, because they collect video games themselves (as well as the equipment upon which such games are played), may devote at least a part of their private libraries to price and rarity guides....
The English language -- littered as it is with homophones, homographs and metonyms-- was made for puns:
The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
These much-beloved figures of speech, which deliberately confuse similar words or phrases for rhetorical (and usually humorous) effect, are recorded as early as the days of the pharaohs (where they were used to interpret dreams), and they have for centuries been a mainstay of some of the world's greatest literature:
Shakespeare alone is estimated to have used over 3000 puns in his various plays:
There's another: why may not that be the skull of a
lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets,
his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he
suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the
sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of
his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be
in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes,
his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers,
his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and
the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine
pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him
no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than
the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The
very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in
this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
Hamlet: Scene V, Act I: 103-112
Milton also was a great punster, as were many lesser authors:
Anyone building a private library around this topic, though, should keep in mind that not all puns are verbal....
As might be expected, the Internet is awash with sites that record puns of all types, a great many of which have been penned by that most famous of all authors, Anonymous....
There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
Any independent bookstore that has been in business for any length of time is likely to have squirreled away on its shelves a tome or two (or more) that is extra-illustrated. Such books are
illustrated by means of engravings, variant title pages, and the like, which were not included in the book by the publisher, but added later. This additional matter may consist of original drawings, manuscripts, etc., but it may also consist of leaves taken from other books. The added material may be mounted, inlaid, or trimmed to conform to the size of the other leaves of the book. Also called "Grangerized" (a term derived from the vogue begun by the publication of James Granger's Biographical history of England, in 1769, in which Granger had blank leaves included so that the owner could insert desired illustrations).
Just about any kind of book could be, and often was, subject to this sort of post-publication "enhancement" during the period when Grangerization was a not uncommon way to "personalize" one's books (late 18th-early 20th century). The Providence (Rhode Island) Public Library, for example, has in its Special Collections department a letter from John Russell Bartlett (John Carter Brown's librarian) to his son which dictates how a copy of Bartlett's Bibliotheca Americana: A catalogue of books relating to North and South America in the Library of John Carter Brown of Providence, R.I. (1865-1871) was to be extra-illustrated:
One of the most popular books subject to this practice (and one which a diligent collector may sometimes encounter at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library books sales and the like) is the Christian Bible. Owners often took the process of Grangerizing Bibles to great lengths: a copy in the Huntington Library, which originally was published in three octavo volumes, grew--through the post-publication addition of some 30,000 extra illustrations--to sixty folio volumes! This behemoth, which began as Kitto's Pictorial Bible (1836-1838) contained
specimens of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bibles, ...near 3,000 original drawings by Raphael, Caracci and others, ...missal paintings from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, ... Rembrandt etchings, ...Dürer woodcuts, [and] many choice impressions of line engravings and mezzotints. In 1875 this Bible was acquired by Theodore Irwin of Oswego, New York [whose son later sold it to Henry Huntington], who spent some years improving the collection still further by exchanging average impressions for better ones and substituting items he considered for some reason not sufficiently worthy.
One would have thought the illustrations in the original volumes (a scene from which is depicted below) would have been sufficient:
Among other types of books that frequently were Grangerized are numerous books on natural history, collections of poetry, travels and exploration, biographies, and encyclopedias of all types:
Because the additional materials used to enhance such volumes are themselves sometimes quite rare, one should scrutinize any Grangerized book that one encounters with some care....
Not all the books that collectors crave for their private libraries are rectangular in shape. Some, such as the two ca. 1920 titles below (via Lasting Words Ltd.), are shaped (at least in part) like bears:
Other books may be shaped like houses or shoes (images via Resource Books LLC)...
...strawberries or crescent moons (images via Orphan Treasures and Bristow & Garland)...
...fans or locomotives (images via Collector Bookstore and The Children's Bookshop)...
...and that's just titles that are meant to be read.
Many such books, most of which have been created for the juvenile market, also are three-dimensional. This is not that surprising, since many of the publishers of shaped books are the same folks who publish movable books.
In fact, if one really wanted to specialize, one might collect only shaped books that are also movable books, such as Carol Barton's Tunnel Map, below....
A decade ago this summer, in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic, B. R. Myers fired a shot at so-called literary fiction that left a lot of carnage on the literary landscape:
...what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity is easy—the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks.
Myers' long diatribe against the pretentiousness of most modern literary fiction (which he later expanded into a book), went so far as to name names:
It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O'Brien is one of the writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known....
The masculine counterpart to the ladies' prose poetry is a bold, Melvillean stiltedness, better known to readers of book reviews as "muscular" prose. Charles Frazier, Frederick Busch, and many other novelists write in this idiom, but the acknowledged granddaddy of them all is Cormac McCarthy....
Not all contemporary writing is marked by the Proulx-McCarthy brand of obscurity. Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not what the writer is saying but why he is saying it.... This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s. Still, this is foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts. If you find the above shopping list fascinating, then [Don] DeLillo's your man....
The problem with all these writers (and Myers does not hesitate to name several more) is that
[t]oday's "literary" novel ... need only evince a few quotable passages to be guaranteed at least a lukewarm review. This reflects both the growing influence of the sentence cult and a desire to reward novelists for aiming high. It is perhaps natural, therefore, that the "literary" camp now attracts a type of risk-averse writer who, under different circumstances, might never have strayed from the safest thriller or romance formulae. Many critically acclaimed novels today are no more than mediocre "genre" stories told in a conformist amalgam of approved "literary" styles. Every amalgam is a little different, of course; what unites these writers and separates them from the rest of the "literary" camp is the determinedly slow tempo of their prose. They seem to know that in leaner and livelier form their courtroom dramas, geisha memoirs, and horse-whisperer romances would not be taken seriously, and that it is precisely the lack of genre-ish suspense that elevates them to the status of prize-worthy "tales of loss and redemption...."
Strong stuff. But given the continuing declining sales of literary fiction, did Myers perhaps hit the mark with his criticisms? An interview Myers did with The Atlantic, in promotion of the book into which the above criticisms were expanded, provides further food for thought ... and more red meat for Myers' own numerous critics....
All societies have relied on music to transform the experience of work. Song accompanied the farmer’s labors, calmed the herder’s flock, and set in motion the spinner’s wheel. Today this tradition continues. Music blares on the shop floor; song accompanies transactions in the retail store; the radio keeps the trucker going on the long-distance haul.
Now Ted Gioia ... tells the story of work songs from prehistoric times to the present. Vocation by vocation, Gioia focuses attention on the rhythms and melodies that have attended tasks such as the cultivation of crops, the raising and lowering of sails, the swinging of hammers, the felling of trees.... [H]e synthesizes a breathtaking amount of material, not only from songbooks and recordings but also from travel literature, historical accounts, slave narratives, folklore, labor union writings, and more. He draws on all of these to describe how workers in societies around the world have used music to increase efficiency, measure time, relay commands, maintain focus, and alleviate drudgery.
At the same time, Gioia emphasizes how work songs often soar beyond utilitarian functions. The heart-wringing laments of the prison chain gang, the sailor’s shanties, the lumberjack’s ballads, the field hollers and corn-shucking songs of the American South, the pearl-diving songs of the Persian Gulf, the rich mbube a cappella singing of South African miners....
Promo for Ted Gioia's Work Songs
***
As noted above, work songs do a lot of things: they help reduce boredom when working on repetitive tasks; they help coordinate timing for specific types of work; they protest working conditions and the plight of workers; in hunting and herding societies, a work song's distinctive cries and/or whistles often are used to locate other herders or hunters, or to reveal the location of herds or prey:
Virtually every society on earth has produced work songs, though many of these songs have yet to be collected and published. The ones that have been published usually have been grouped together according to the type of vocation represented (sea shanties and lumberjack ballads, for example), or according to the specific historical context within which they arose (cowboy and bush ballads, for example):
By far the best-known such work songs here in the USA are the songs sung by African-American slaves, songs which are one of the foundations of the blues:
A number of these songs, as might be expected, are now widely available via the Internet. See, for example, here, here and here....
People are not the only ones about whom biographies are written. Places, too, have their biographies.
All lives are constrained by place. And not just the lives of people who lived in a particular place....
Habitation alone, however, is usually insufficient to warrant a biography of geography. Place must have influenced lives....
Biographies of geography are thus not always about cities, or even inhabited places, nor are they necessarily entirely non-fiction....
Granddaughter of Charles Darwin, daughter of astronomer/mathematician George Howard Darwin, first cousin to poet Frances Cornford and married to French painter Jacques Raverat, Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat no doubt came by her talent, and her eccentricities, naturally.
Though the average reader probably better remembers Raverat today, if she is remembered at all, for her surprising literary bestseller Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (which has never been out of print), it is as the "square-headed woman who cuts wood" (in the words of her friend Rupert Brooke) -- i.e., as one of Great Britain's greatest 20th century wood engravers -- that Raverat is today honored by most book collectors:
Her grandson, in a long and affectionate homage, observed that Raverat's
...early life was a confluence of several important torrents of change: the emancipation of women, particularly in the intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Cambridge, the transformation of the arts, notably through the efforts of the Neo-Pagans – “exuberant, untrammelled, [delighting] in physical existence and in nature” – and the perseverance of that Darwinian pursuit of understanding into the arts....
In an age when women could not vote, had just been admitted to the university and were generally expected to prepare themselves for a life of familial and domestic routine, hers was the kind of independent-minded behaviour for which the Darwins were celebrated. So serious was her rebellion in insisting on doing serious, full-time art at the Slade that Gwen did not talk to her parents for two years while there.
But it was not until after her husband died of multiple sclerosis (in 1925) that Raverat turned seriously to wood engraving,
As her grandson notes,
[n]ow a widow, she was truly alone in the world, with the added responsibility of two young children. Once again, her awkward, disconcerting courage came to her rescue and, though Virginia Woolf could brilliantly characterise her as “frozen, like an old log dried out of all sensation”, she poured her instinctive and formidable powers of observation into her work as an engraver, becoming one of the foremost miniaturists of her generation, a far greater artist than many in the overhyped Bloomsbury set she had grown up with....
Only 5 years earlier (1920) Raverat had co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers with fellow artists Philip Hagreen, Robert Gibbings, Lucien Pissaro and Eric Gill. Over the four decades that were left to her (she died in 1957), Raverat produced an extraordinary body of work. (Her illustrations for the very rare surviving copies of the Ashendene Press' Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloe, below, are via Bromer Booksellers:)
Most of the 500+ wood engravings that Raverat produced during her career are now held by the Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House, from whence reproductions of most of Raverat's engravings may be ordered. A nice complement, as it were, to a private library built around the books she illustrated....
If you ever have had the good fortune to amble amongst the quaint and curious bookshops that make even the rudest European hamlet a wonderful place to indulge one's bookish enthusiasms. you likely will have come across the occasional title illustrated by pochoir. A highly refined version of stenciling, pochoir is easily recognized by its crisp lines and brilliant colors, [which] produces images that have a freshly printed or wet appearance.
Pochoir was all the rage in French fashion magazines from roughly 1900-1930, and thus is closely associated with the art movements known as art nouveau and art deco:
Rentrons, La Fraicheur Tombe… 1914
Stenciling, which has been used to decorate objects since at least 500 CE, was used in 16th century Europe to produce--among other things--playing cards and postcards. However, it was the popularity of Japanese prints in 19th century Europe that led most directly to the development of pochoir. As a recent exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum observes,
[p]ochoir begins with the analysis of the composition, including color tones and densities, of a color image. Numerous stencils were designed as a means of reproducing an image. A craftsman known as a découpeur would cut stencils with a straight-edged knife. The stencils were originally made of aluminum, copper, or zinc but eventually the material of choice was either celluloid or plastic. Along with this transition of stencil materials, there was a shift away from the use of watercolor towards the broad, soft, opaque layers of gouache. The technique was further refined in an effort to create the most vivid, accurately colored reproductions. Stencils created by the découpeur would be passed on to the coloristes. The coloristes applied the pigments using a variety of different brushes and methods of paint application to create the finished pochoir print.
The center of the pochoir rage was Paris, and at the height of this illustration technique's popularity there were as many as thirty graphic design studios in France, each employing up to 600 workers. Such massive employment is a reflection of the intensive hand labor that was required to create pochoir illustrations, every one of which is unique (in that word's purest sense). It was this very expensive labor that eventually doomed pochoir as an illustration technique, although it still is occasionally used for fine press productions, as we shall see shortly.
Folks building a private library around the subject of pochoir generally collect both books about the technique itself, as well as books illustrated by the technique. Of the former, one of the most important titles to add to one's shelves is Jean Saude's 1925 exposition of the technique, Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir. Printed in an edition of only 500 copies, this title will likely set you back at least the mid four figures if you can find a decent copy in the marketplace (images below via the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery). Published in the same year as the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, it features a number of stunning art deco designs by Edouard Halouze and Lucien Chapuis:
More modern titles that address the technique (which remains popular for decorating a wide range of objects) are depicted below:
Among the many notable artists who produced books illustrated by this technique are E. A. Seguy and Umberto Brunelleschi, both of whom were active during the period noted above:
The technique has been kept alive for book illustration by a number of fine presses. A couple of recent examples are depicted below:
As noted in our post of 17 November 2009, the lush colors of pochoir can be somewhat duplicated by modern technology, as was demonstrated in the recent Whittington Press publication of Portmeirion:
Portmeirion was drawn and colored on a digital drawing tablet by the artist Leslie Gerry. While the lush colors approximate those produced by the pochoir process, purists will lament the lack of texture provided by the original, hand-colored, hand-printed process (as described below, from the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition):
the thick paint medium, gouache, causes a build up against the stencil's edge resulting in a surface elevation that can be both seen and felt. The visible bristle traces result when a brush is moved straight across a stencil-a visual and tactile element resulting from the manual execution of the print. With varying pressure on the brush, a shading, or gradation, affects the printed results. Textural variety is achieved by varying the technique for applying the paint: daubing, spraying, spattering, or sponging are the most common choices.
The British wood engraver John Nash is one of the best known and most collected artists to have produced English-language books using the traditional pochoir process. Among his best known works using this process are the Cresset Press edition of Edmund Spenser's The shepheardes calender: conteyning twleve aeaeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes: entitled To the noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie Maister Philip Sidney (1930):
It is the world's richest prize for Hispanic literature, and the world's second-richest prize for literature of any kind (after the Nobel Prize). That said, and despite the fact that it has been awarded since 1952, the Premio Planeta de Novela remains virtually unknown to readers here in the USA. (Image below left via Librería Solar del Bruto; image below right via Culturamas:)
Like the older and richer Nobel Prize for Literature, the Premio Planeta de Novela has endured its share of controversy over the years. The most damaging criticism has been that the publisher which awards the prize, Grupo Planeta, too frequently awards the prize to its own stable of authors, with more unknown authors often able to do no better than runner-up. (Financially, though, even the runner-up prize is pretty darn impressive. Although a runner-up has been recognized since the prize was established in 1952, a monetary award to the runner-up was not made until 1974. The runner-up currently receives €150,250; the main prize award is €601,000.)
The controversies associated with the award have been such that two authors, Miguel Delibes and Ernesto Sábato, actually declined the award altogether in 1994.
That said, the award has nonetheless managed to recognize a number of important recent works of Hispanic literature:
Regrettably, although most of the winners and runners-up are readily and inexpensively available in the marketplace, many have yet to be translated from the original Spanish. A complete list of the winners and runners-up will be found here....
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