Under the title “Epitomes,” Elwin Volk and Dennis McCalib produced a series of curious pamphlets.  The ones I have were all published in Los Angeles or Pasadena in 1949 and 1950; I found them in a library sale a few years ago, and have been puzzling over them ever since.  (Please click on the thumbnails […]

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William Dean Howells was admitted into the canon for the Parker Brothers 1897 edition of “Authors.”  He wasn’t in some of the later versions; tastes change.  His fellow authors this time around were James Russell Lowell, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Victor Hugo, Sir […]

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This isolated card is from an early “Authors” deck.  Most later versions were less generous with the engraving; and Cooper didn’t always survive revisions to the canon. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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We’ll have a few examples of “Authors,” that curious game about collecting writers.  This one has no indication of date or publisher.  The canon is conventional: Scott, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, Tennyson, Dickens, Stevenson, Irving, and Emerson.  Shakespeare is rather plump and peevish in this version, and his hair is curlier than I remember.  […]

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Théophile Gautier’s 1865 novel, La Belle-Jenny, is a boisterous, Romantic tale of conspiracy and intrigue, all of which fails.  Couples are parted; lives are ruined.  Near the end, Arthur Sidney, the character most to blame for all of this, sums up what he’s learned: Aimez quelqu’un ou quelque chose, un homme, un enfant, un chien, […]

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People like strange things; and publishers in the ’50s and ’60s were happy to provide an apparently endless string of strange paperbacks.  Some of the following are reprints from Fate magazine; some are from Ace Books’ “Strange Facts” series.  Many seem to have had the same cover design (please click for enlargements).  For less than […]

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Step inside. Some friends who, like me, frequent that bane of productivity, Facebook, alerted me to a piece recently published in the New York Times, about the short-lived Greenwich Village Bookshop and its very special door. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has created a wonderful website for this relic, so that […]

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Raymond Roussel does seem like the kind of writer who would write acrostics.  His works are steeped in wordplay.  The procédé is based on homonyms; “Parmi les noirs” throws in a rebus and a cryptogram; there’s a sonnet with a hidden message in La Poussière de Soleils; and so on.  Acrostics seem inevitable.

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Unfortunately, Jules Verne’s nephew, Gaston, was mentally ill. In 1866, Gaston tried to murder Verne, leaving his uncle lame for life. While recuperating, Verne wrote a sonnet in praise of morphine. I don’t blame him. A LA MORPHINE  Prends, s’il le faut, docteur, les ailes de Mercure Pour m’apporter plus tôt ton baume précieux! Le […]

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“To be popular, one must show interest in persons and things that do not interest one and simultaneously conceal the interest that one has in persons and things that do interest one.  One must always side with the prejudices and emotions of the person one happens to be with, however idiotic… “One must be humorous […]

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