The Private Library

OenoLit and The Private Library

Given that the first book printed from moveable type in Western Europe contains numerous references to wine, and given that the technology for printing that first book may itself have been modeled upon the screw press used to extract wine from grapes, this writer has always found it puzzling that the cultivation, processing, distribution and consumption of wine is rarely a major thematic element in works of fiction.  

(I should note that this post is concerned only with wine made from grapes, and the fiction associated with same.  For a more  encompassing view of wine -- including rice wine -- visit Cerebral Boinkfest.  In the absence of a better signifier -- VinoLit having already been spoken for by Mike Madigan's YouTube show -- I have coined the term OenoLit to refer to all such fiction.)

The non-fiction titles that have been penned about such matters constitute an enormous body of literature.  In fact, many such works were among the earliest titles printed in Western Europe (image below left via Bea & Peter Siegel Books):

  

These non-fiction titles cover virtually every aspect of the world of wine, and range from the virtually non-collectable (unless you have very deep pockets) to the mostly virtual (and inexpensive).  [The 1495 German edition of Crescenzi's Opus ruralium commodorum, below left, is via Washington University:)

  

The above notwithstanding, fictional depictions of the world of vineyards and wineries and oenophiles represent but a teeny, tiny part of the literary largess.  

(Poetry has celebrated "all things oeno" for thousands of years.  The poem below, for example, was penned by China's renowned Song Dynasty poet Su Shi in the 11th century CE.  It [and many similar examples] can be seen at Ridge Vineyards' excellent blog, 4488:

              I raise my cup and invite
       The moon to come down from the
            Sky. I hope she will accept
            Me. I raise my cup and ask
       The branches, heavy with flowers,
          To drink with me. I wish them
           Long life and promise never
            To pick them. In company
        With the moon and the flowers,
          I get drunk, and none of us
            Ever worries about good
          Or bad. How many people
        Can comprehend our joy? I
      Have wine and moon and flowers.
Who else do I want for drinking companions?

Numerous poetic traditions celebrate the world of wine, and many of these traditions pre-date [by several centuries] the advent of the printed book:)

  

Admittedly, folks have been composing poetry a lot longer than they have been composing prose works like novels, novellas and short stories.  Even so, a recent search on OCLC using variations of keywords like "wine fiction" reveals a mere handful of titles (at most, a few hundred) wherein the world of wine is a major thematic element:

  

Fortunately for the average book collector, much of this fiction is genre fiction -- often by well-known writers -- which means that it is both readily available and (perhaps more important) affordable.

Because the cultivation, processing, distribution and consumption of wine often requires, and attracts, a substantial amount of money, it probably comes as no surprise that much OenoLit is focused on murder and mayhem:

  

Only occasionally does OenoLit attract the attention of the general public, most typically when an OenoLit title gets turned into a movie.  For the most part, OenoLit seems to be appreciated only by the rare book collector who specializes in this type of fiction (or who includes such fiction as part of a more encompassing selection of literature about the noble grape and its lesser siblings:)

  

Like other food- and drink-themed fiction -- e.g., ChocoLit and Coffeehouse Mysteries -- it appears that the publishing potential of OenoLit has yet to be fully realized....

Epithalamia and The Private Library

Epithalamium: From the Greek epi ("at") and thalamos ("nuptial chamber").  A celebratory song or poem, often in sonnet form, in honor of a bride or groom or both, usually praising their virtues, describing the events of the wedding day, and wishing them good fortune....

ODLIS (Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science)

Even among those few folks who still collect printed books of poetry, it's hard to find many who focus on the epithalamium (pl. epithalamia), one of the most ancient of all types of poetry in the Western world. Basically a type of ode, the epithalamium counts among its better known practitioners such ancient worthies as Sappho, Pindar and Catullus; Renaissance masters such as Ronsard, Donne and Edmund Spenser; and modern poets such as Gerald Manley Hopkins and A. E. Housman.  (The examples below are via the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek and the Open Library, respectively:)

  

It is in fact to Sappho that the earliest known literary epithalamia (ca. 600 BCE) usually are attributed:

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings

All desired and timely things.

All whom morning sends to roam,

Hesper loves to lead them home.

Home return who him behold,

Child to mother, sheep to fold,

Bird to nest from wandering wide:

Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

  

Theocritus (inventor of the pastoral) is, however, the more famous author of epithalamia among the ancient Greeks (the example following is from his The Epithalamy of Helen):

...What Bridegroom! dear Bridegroom! thus early abed and asleep?
Wast born a man of sluggardy, or is thy pillow sweet to thee,
Or ere thou cam’st to bed maybe didst drink a little deep?
If thou wert so fain to sleep betimes, ‘twere better sleep alone,
And leave a maid with maids to play by a fond mother’s side till dawn of day,
Sith for the morrow and its morn, for this and all the years unborn,
This sweet bride is thine to own....

The great Latin poet Catullus (whose poems are known from medieval copies of a single manuscript) accounts for the earliest extant examples of epithalamia in that ancient tongue (ca. 84-54 BCE):

...And, roused by day of joyful cheer,


Carolling nuptial lays and chaunts


With voice as silver ringing clear,


Beat ground with feet, while brandisht flaunts


Thy hand the piney torch.

For Vinia comes by Manlius woo'd,


As Venus on th' Idalian crest,


Before the Phrygian judge she stood


And now with blessed omens blest,


The maid is here to wed....

  

Edmund Spenser, best known to most book collectors for his great unfinished work The Fairie Queen, produced what generally is conceded to be the best example of the epithalamium in English (he penned it for his own, second, marriage):

...let them make great store of bridale poses,

And let them eeke bring store of other flowers

To deck the bridale bowers:

And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread,

For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong

Be strewed with fragrant flowers all along....

Even folks who don't collect the printed book at all often are familiar (usually unknowingly) with this type of poetry, since the Christian Bible includes an example (until at least the Renaissance, the Song of Solomon was traditionally interpreted as an epithalamium celebrating the marriage between God and the soul and/or the church):

The song of songs, which [is] Solomon's.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love [is] better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name [is as] ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee....

(This Biblical masterpiece has attracted the attention of many fine presses over the centuries.  The specimen below was produced by the Circle Press:)

Understandably, many modern critics do not necessarily agree with including the Song of Solomon as an example, inasmuch as epithalamia originally were recited to recently married couples by friends standing directly outside (until the Middle Ages, often inside!) the connubial bed-chamber.

Because definitions have become a bit looser over the centuries, it is not uncommon nowadays to find that such poems often are not addressed to a specific couple at all (cf. this recent example by Matthew Rohrer).  And lest one think that all epithalamia are genteel affairs, the example below (penned by 17th century English poet Sir John Suckling) should disabuse one of such notions...

...The maid—and thereby hangs a tale;

For such a maid no Whitson-ale

             Could ever yet produce:

No grape, that's kindly ripe, could be

So round, so plump, so soft as she,

             Nor half so full of juice.

Her finger was so small, the ring

Would not stay on, which they did bring;

             It was too wide a peck:

And to say truth (for out it must)

It lookt like a great collar (just)

             About our young colt's neck....

László Krasznahorkai and The Private Library

His mere arrival itself had been excessively mysterious, or at least had proceeded very differently from that of the others, for he had not come by train and then by bus; for however unbelievable it seemed, the afternoon of the day of his arrival, perhaps around six o'clock or half-past six, he simply turned into the campground gates, like a person who had just arrived on foot, with nothing more than a curt nod; and when the organizers politely and with a particular deference inquired as to his name, and then began to question him more pressingly as to how he had arrived, he replied only that someone had brought him to a bend in the road in a car; but as in the all-enfolding silence no one had heard the sound of any car at all that could have let him out at any "bend in the road", the entire thought that he had come in a car but not all the way, only up to a certain bend in the road and only to be put out there, sounded fairly incredible, so that no one really quite believed him, or more accurately, no one knew how to interpret his words, so that there remained, already on that very first day, the only possible, the only rational – if all the same, the most absurd - variation: that he had travelled entirely on foot; that he had picked himself up in Bucharest and set himself to the journey: instead of boarding a train and subsequently the bus that came here, he had simply made on foot – and who knew for how many weeks now! – the long long trip to Saint Anna Lake, turning in through the campground gates at six or six-thirty in the evening, and when the question was put to him as to whether the organizing committee had the honor of greeting Ion Grigorescu, he dispensed his reply with one curt nod....

Something Is Burning Outside, László Krasznahorkai (trans. Ottilie Mulzet)

Despite the fact that his novels have been translated into numerous languages, and despite the fact that his work has received the attention of publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai remains virtually unknown in the United States.

In part, this may be attributed to the fact that so few of his works have thus far been translated into English:

  

Of course, translating Krasznahorkai into any language is not exactly a straightforward process.  As James Wood points out in The New Yorker, 

[Krasznahorkai's] tireless, tiring sentences feel potentially endless....  It’s often hard to know exactly what Krasznahorkai’s characters are thinking, because his fictional world teeters on the edge of a revelation that never quite comes....  Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. His demanding novel The Melancholy of Resistance is a comedy of apocalypse.... The pleasure of the book flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness....

Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai achieved fame (at least in Europe) with the publication of his very first novel, Sátántangó, in 1985.  His novel War and War (1999) was brought to publication, in part, with the assistance of the American poet Allen Ginsberg.  The translations this writer has read suggest, often simultaneously, elements of Proust, Kafka and Beckett.  How much of this is due to the author himself, and how much to his able translators (most frequently, the Hungarian poet George Szirtes), might make for an interesting investigation:

  

In any event, folks who do not normally collect "dense" works of literature might be well advised to wean themselves on something less daunting.  Krasznahorkai's novella, Animalinside (trans. Ottilie Mulzet) matches the art of painter Max Neumann with very short texts by Krasznahorkai.  (New Directions, Krasznahorkai's English-language publisher, had only 2000 copies of this title printed, as Neumann's images were printed in a seven-stage process.  The image below is via Vertigo:)

Because, as noted above, much of Krasznahorkai's oeuvre has yet to be translated into English, the author represents something of a ground-floor opportunity for English-language book collectors.  

This is the case with much "foreign" literature that has yet to be translated into English: Arabic literature, Islamic literature (which is not necessarily the same thing), Latin American literature, novels of officialdom, Popescu Prize winners, Primeo Planeta winners.  A private library often can be built "under the radar" of one's fellow book collectors simply by realizing that the world of literature does not stop at the borders of the United States....

Johann Froben and The Private Library

He was the soul of honesty himself, and slow to think evil of others; so that he was often taken in. Of envy and jealousy he knew as little as the blind do of colour. He was swift to forgive and to forget even serious injuries....  He was enthusiastic for good learning, and felt his work to be his own reward. It was delightful to see him with the first pages of some new book in his hands, some author of whom he approved. His face was radiant with pleasure, and you might have supposed that he had already received a large return of profit. The excellence of his work would bear comparison with that of the best printers of Venice and Rome....  

Erasmus, on the death of Johann Froben, 1527 (quoted in The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen, Clarendon Press, 1914)

Portrait of the printer Johann Froben; late 16th-early 17th century copy of ca. 1520 original by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)

Although his popularization of italic fonts and more portable texts gave rise to a famous epithetic comparison (the German Aldus), Johann Froben probably is better remembered today for his efforts to make texts as accurate and pleasing to the eye as possible, undertakings which brought him considerable contemporary fame, though not much money.

Born ca. 1460 in Hammelburg, Franconia (present-day Germany), Froben attended university in Basel. Early in his printing career he was an assistant in the Nuremberg workshop of famed printer Anton Koberger.  Froben later moved back to Basel, where he became a corrector for (and later partner with, then owner of) the press of his friend Johann Amerbach.  

Froben's first publication, the so-called Poor Man's Bible of 1491, was the world's first printed pocket-sized Latin Bible .  The 2nd edition of this Bible, which Froben printed in 1495 (image below via SMU's Bridwell Library), became the world's first printed Latin Bible to include a woodcut illustration (by Albrecht Dürer):

It might plausibly be argued that Froben helped lay the groundwork for the various Reformation movements that convulsed 16th century Europe.  These religious upheavals, which depended heavily on the wide distribution of religious texts and commentary in vernacular languages, can trace much of their driving force to innovations that Froben either introduced or improved upon.  

Many of Froben's religious titles, for example, were (as noted above) printed in sizes that were far more portable (and thus more easily distributed, especially covertly) than the folios which traditionally had been printed for ecclesiastical use.  Froben's Bibles were the first printed editions to include references to parallel passages throughout each volume. And Froben's 1516 printing of Erasmus' Greek New Testament Bible -- which, with its parallel Greek and Latin texts, "focused attention on just how corrupt and inaccurate the Latin Vulgate had become" -- served as the primary source-text for Martin Luther's enormously influential 1522 translation of the New Testament into vernacular German. (The copy of Forben's 1516 printing, below, is via SMU's Bridwell Library:)

Froben's partnerships with other printers -- e.g., Johann Petri (1496) and the aforementioned Amerbach (1500) -- gave this distinguished printer access to an unusually large number of presses (for his time). And his long association with scholars like Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus, and artists such as Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, insured both accurate texts and excellent illustrations.  Little wonder that, by the second decade of the 16th century, Froben was widely celebrated as the most scholarly printer in all of northern Europe.  

Of the 250+ titles known to have been published by Froben, perhaps the best-known and most revered today are those he published in concert with his client, collaborator and long-time friend, Desiderius Erasmus. Interestingly enough, Froben had first come to Erasmus' attention because Froben had pirated (in 1513) Aldus' 1508 printing of Erasmus' Adagiorum Chiliades.  This was, however, no mere piracy, since Froben undertook several textual emendations, and praised Erasmus (on the title page) as "the ornament of Germany."

Perhaps this praise flattered Erasmus' intellect.  As a book collector himself, though, it is more likely that Erasmus was drawn to the elegance and accuracy of Froben's printing, especially since Amerbach (whose presses Froben would shortly inherit) died before he could arrange to complete the printing of St. Jerome's Omnivm opervm, a publication that had been in preparation since 1507.  Erasmus himself had invested much time and labor in trying to bring forth an accurate and scholarly edition of Jerome's complete works, and it was Froben and Erasmus together who finally bought this mutually compelling project to completion (in nine volumes) in 1516. (The copy below is held by the University of Rochester's Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation):

After 1514, with very few exceptions, Froben and Erasmus were about as inseparable as any author and publisher have ever been.  The distinguished humanist and the distinguished printer could not, it seems, heap enough accolades upon each other.

That said, Froben frustrates many modern book collectors.

We have yet to encounter a reliable, comprehensive, modern biography or bibliography of this extraordinary and influential printer. (Brandler's work is now a half-century behind us. Sebastiani's 2010 thesis, which this author has not seen, might fit the bill if it could be expanded to encompass Froben's non-Erasmus publications as well).

Many of the most important articles about Froben require a reading knowledge of several European languages.

And Froben's own titles usually are beyond the reach of all but the few who have very deep pockets.

All this notwithstanding, the global economy is on life support, a situation which may yet benefit those book collectors who believe that fortune favors the patient....

Froben's printer's device, ca. 1523, by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)