Archives for June 22, 2004

I returned from the barber seconds ago and am now about to go up the spout, but I just received this e-mail from a reader apropos of the Evelyn Waugh quotation-from-memory I posted at the end of yesterday’s Consumables, and wanted to pass it on to you before I retire to my Secure Undisclosed Location:

I may be late on this, but here’s the passage in Evelyn Waugh’s diaries that you asked about on your blog the other day. It’s the entry for Sunday 17 November 1946 (p. 663 in the English edition). A houseguest had departed, and Waugh wrote, “What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ “

Even better. Many thanks. Ta-ta for now.

“To ‘live’ is an expression which has had much harm done it by second-rate writers who seem to think that ‘life’ is limited to pretending you like absinthe and keeping a mistress in Montmartre.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Gustav Holst: An Essay and a Note”

Last fall I pulled Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs off the shelf for the first time in years and found two fifty-dollar bills tucked inside. Nice, but alarming enough that I can now confidently say–after an evening of on-the-ground investigation–that there is not another red cent hidden in any book in my apartment. This is not my usual notion of a savings account–my money didn’t earn a lot of interest there, needless to say–and I’m going to be very careful next time I take a box of books to the local bookstore.

A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) catalogs some of the amazing items discovered in used books at New York’s Strand and a few other bookstores. These items include an activist’s rap sheet; sketches by Bosch, Michelangelo, and the unidentified; birth certificates; dirty pictures; and, natch, love letters. Some of the gaudier finds:

The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, once opened a book titled “The Bill of Rights” to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, “Boo! Abbie Hoffman.” Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.

Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: “A plague upon / and to perdition / the Hun who mars / a first edition…”

Harvey Frank wasn’t pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer’s hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, “My Reservoir of Dreams,” before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. “I thought I would bring her into my life,” says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. “I was sort of touched,” she says. “I put it on my desk. Or somewhere.” She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.

Ouch, and d

“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”

Raise your hand if eww. The grammatical errors and infelicities found by Louis Menand in the punctuation guide Eats, Shoots & Leaves are enough to make this editor’s hair stand on end. Thanks anyway, Lynne Truss, but I’ll stick with the foundational texts in “the Edward Gorey school of grammar” (as one Amazon reviewer nicely puts it), Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Deluxe Transitive Vampire and New Well-Tempered Sentence. They’re trustworthy and titillating–what more could you want in a grammar guide?