Zadie Smith
To read
Watership down by Richard Adams
Faces gif
To read:
Feet on the ground by Ray blount
A new exhibition at the New York Society Library, “Readers Make Their Mark,”collected annotated books from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, thus continuing the culture’s growing fascination with marginalia.
Books for the reading list:
Portraits my John berger
My promised land by Ari sh.?
for when I finally get through the name of the rose:
martha gelhorn, face of war
Dead blog update
Note to self; read
Nabokov
Kafka
The fantastic laboratory of Dr. Weigl
The Invisible ma, Ralph Ellison
“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file”
As I lay dying by William Faulkner
It’s possibly my first novel by Faulkner, although I can’t swear by it because certain specimen of Southern literature blend together in my mind into a sleepy, tense, muggy scene of all the stories blended together. (I must have read some of Faulkner’s short stories along the way - for the atmosphere if not for the content)
The copy I’m reading is quite heavily annotated by some previous owner, and I continue to want to argue with his interpretation of the text
While putting together a class on 19th-century British writers we came upon this beautifully bound first edition of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which had been hiding in its protective box.
The binding was executed by George Bayntun, a famous bookbinder and bookseller in the English town of Bath in the very last years of the 19th century and the first four decades of the 20th. Although the external part of the binding is impressive enough—rich red morocco leather, gold stamping, gilt edges—we were particularly delighted when we opened the front cover and discovered inlays of black and green leather and an inset miniature portrait of Thackeray himself. A note in pencil on the flyleaf states that the portrait is painted on ivory, which is something that will need further investigation!
Another important feature of this book is that, being the first edition, it contains all of the drawings that Thackeray made to accompany the text. More recent editions have tended to leave out some or all of these drawings, or to reproduce them very poorly. This is a shame, not only because many of them are delightful in their own right, but also because there are one or two points in the novel at which the drawings reveal—or at least suggest—something that is not mentioned in the text. The most famous example involves the death of Jos Sedley. The text leaves it unclear who brought it about, but the etching captioned “Becky’s second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra” strongly implies that she was the culprit.
- Tim
Thackeray, W. M. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848. MU Ellis Special Collections Rare PR5618 .A1 1848