There is None Such as the Nonesuch Dickens

Christmas, as far as I am concerned, is officially here.  Why?  Because I've got exactly what I asked Santa to bring (by way of my dear, all-too-indulgent husband.)  Now, I did require the strength of two coworkers to get my gift to my car tonight (thank you, Ann & Jason,) but then my back is in a bad way.  And I am ever so grateful.  Truly, I am.

And what did I get?  Why the glorious, exquisite, all but perfect (and very heavy) boxed sets of The Nonesuch Dickens!  The esteemed publisher, Duckworth, and the resurrected Nonesuch Press, have reissued two sets to date, the second only recently, and today I took both home.  The Nonesuch Dickens was originally published in the 1930s and marked the high point of the 20th Century in the reproduction of Charles Dickens' work.  These reissues reproduce the beautiful binding, printing and detailed craftsmanship of the originals.  They are uniformly big, handsome volumes, with all the original illustrations happily in place, in all their pristine glory, finally to be seen by other than collectors of rare editions.

It's true, in my hoard at home I have already two complete sets of Dickens; my old, reliable, transportable, and frankly ugly Complete Oxford (no longer available, I understand, as a complete set,) and a lovely, if rather bumped and tatty American set from early in the last century.  The print -- presumably from old plates -- in the Oxford is troublesome, and the illustrations woefully reproduced in fading, reduced grays.  In the older American set, the illustrations are a hodgepodge of a later date than the originals, and while interesting of themselves, are not what Dickens himself commissioned and or approved.  I love both of my earlier sets.  I will never willingly part with either.  But The Nonesuch Dickens is everything they are not; a Rolls Royce to my earlier subcompact and barely repairable -- not to say unhorsed -- landau.  

Whatever my other plans might have been for reading over the Holidays (and I do need to reread Breakfast with Scot for the first selection of the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club, starting January!) I am, as I write, eyeing the happy heft of the Nonesuch Martin Chuzzlewit before me on my desk.  Such a awesome object, such creamy pages, such lovely endpapers, such legible type!  And the illustrations!  So clear!  So big!  

Maybe just a chapter tonight, to ease the pain in my back with a bit of heavy, happy lifting...

More Snowbound Reading

Having ventured out at last to fetch home a loaf of bread & other eatables, I'm now in for good.  So with my ham sandwich and hot coco, I'm going to settle down and reread a bit of Josephine Tey.  She is my favorite mystery writer, and she might be yours too if you give her a try.

Her real name was  Elizabeth Macintosh, though she adopted more than one nom de plume.  She was of perhaps the last generation of professional women writers who found it simpler at first to be published under a masculine name.  She had, for example, great success as a playwright under the name Gordon Daviot when she wrote Richard of Bordeaux, which was a smash hit for John Gielgud in 1932.  Macintosh took to mystery writing, a more established genre for women, as Josephine Tey, publishing her first novel under that name in 1929.  Not being a particular fan of the genre, she wrote her mysteries entirely to suit herself, famously not even doing anyone in in one of my favorites, Miss Pym Disposes, until the book was nearly two thirds through!

She did invent a superb hero in Detective Inspector Grant, featuring him in five novels, including The Daughter of Time, wherein, laid up "in hospital," he enlists various associates to help him solve the historical mystery of the murder of the Princes in the Tower.

                                                                                                                                           Today I think I'll go again to The Singing Sands, set in Scotland, and again featuring Grant, this time recovering from what we might now call a nervous breakdown.

Josephine Tey may not have been specially concerned with the puzzle-making that usually constitutes the chief virtue of the whodunit, so purists may not find in her a favorite, but for any reader willing to spend a cold afternoon or two in her company, the pleasures of this witty and inventive writer will be richly rewarded.

Coco and murder sounds just right for today in Seattle.

Snowbound Reading

Getting to the bookstore today may prove impossible.  Getting out of the house at all might not be such a good idea just now.  So this would seem to be the perfect occasion for some wintry reading before the fireplace, next to the space-heater, or just huddled in bed with extra blankets and a stocking-cap.

By way of suggestion, you might try reading some of the delightful stories of Saki.  If you don't know him, Hector Hugh Munro was an Englishman and one of the true masters of the short story.  His stories are invariably funny, and occasionally chilling.

Three stories come immediately to mind when looking out the picture window today at all the evil white nothingness:  The She Wolf -- about the dangers of being glib in matters supernatural, The Wolves of Cernogratz -- which concerns making the best of servant problems, and finally, and particularly, The Interlopers,  of which I am reminded every time I forced to take a walk in the woods.

All three are of course included in The Complete Stories of Saki, from Penguin, available at the bookstore and to be ordered online.

Saki is best read in such weather as we're having now.  With a nice cup of tea, with lemon, not milk, and certainly without sugar, though a drop of whiskey wouldn't do a bit of harm on a day like this.

The Snow Is Snowing, The Wind Is Blowing, But I Can (NOT) Weather the Storm

Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" will not be making one more venture off the bookshelf this year.  Your humble reader lives in West Seattle and can't get out.  Snow, it seems, does not like me, my tiny car, or Truman Capote.  So the scheduled reading, in Mill Creek, Thursday, December 18th, at 7 PM, won't be happening.

To anyone planning to attend Thursday, I can only offer my sincere apologies and my hope that you might find time, this busy Holiday Season, to read Capote's little masterpiece amongst yourselves.  You don't need me to make the story magical.

Maybe next year, we can try again.  Meanwhile, a Merry Christmas and sincere regrets to all our friends in Mill Creek who might have planned to come out and hear "A Christmas Memory" Thursday night.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

By Thomas Campion

Now winters nights enlarge

The Number of their hours,

And clouds their storm discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze,

And cups o'erflow with wine;

Let well-tuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense

With lovers' long discourse;

Much speech hath some defense,

Though beauty no remorse.

All do not all things well;

Some measures comely tread,

Some knotted riddles tell,

Some poems smoothly read.

The summer hath his joys

And winter his delights;

Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,

They shorten tedious nights.

Santa, Where's my Jetpack?!!!

If one is of a certain age, certain promises were made in childhood -- by The Wide World of Disney, filmstrips, and exhibitions at the State Fair -- and by now, we should all be eating meals cooked by voice-command, vacationing on the moon, and most importantly commuting to work by jetpack.

Never happened. Lies, all lies.

Some consolation came into the store recently though, in the form of a new book by Mac Montandon, Jetpack Dreams: One Man's Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was.

Here in one handsome, hardcover book is the whole ugly, heartbreaking and frequently hilarious story of what really happens when one tries to fly by putting rockets in one's backpack. A sad and sorry business it has been, but a very good book has resulted.

Getting Ready for a Christmas Party

The house has been cleaned.  My beloved is washing, ironing and starching the kitchen curtains as I write this.  There is beer in the garage and wine in the cupboard.  The Christmas tree is lit, and so will the guests be, with any luck and baring bad weather, tomorrow night at eight.  So what's left to do?

Well, I'll tell you.  There's a big old ugly stack of unshelved, unsorted books slap in the middle of my office.  That's as far as the strays have gone; not on the shelves, not boxed, not even kicked under the daybed.  It's after eleven at night, I have to work tomorrow, and I can't face sorting books at this hour.

Now my dear friend Judith is coming home with me from the store at five, and the party's not scheduled to kick off until eight.  I could ask her to help.  She'd be only too willing to do whatever is asked of her.  She's the dearest creature on Earth.  But can I really ask her to box books after spending the day in a bookstore?  At the Holidays?

And I know what would happen if I did.  We'd end up sitting on the floor, books scattered about the room, chatting our way through the lot, and accomplishing not a damned thing.  There might be a glass or two of wine involved, I dare say.

I think the only solution is a tarp.  I can say that we're renovating.  Or use a tablecloth and make it a serving area.

These are the hosting issues when one owns too many books and too few shelves.  Luckily, I think my guests, being bookish themselves, will understand and forgive.  

And we do need flat surfaces for folks to set their drinks down.  

Maybe I'll just shelve the Walter Savage Landor before I go to bed.  Hate to see anything spill on Walter Savage Landor.

I will NOT buy another book about Samuel Johnson... okay, maybe I will

There are two new, well reviewed, biographies of Doctor Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson. This is marvelous news -- if I didn't already own half a dozen biographies of same. What to do?

Now the curious thing about Sam Johnson is that he is, of course, the subject of the greatest biography in the English language: James Boswell's Life. I own two editions of this (that I remember;) an Everyman's Library edition and a six volume edition, edited by Augustine Birrell, from 1901 that I've painfully had to "restore" at least twice, having read it almost to bits. In addition, though it's out-of-print, there is the almost equally wonderful memoir of Johnson's great friend and last love Hester Thrale Piozzi.

Not enough though. I own two delightful out-of-print books by James Lowry Clifford; Young Sam Johnson and Dictionary Johnson, both worth finding and reading still, Liz Picard's book on Johnson's London, and on and on...

So why contemplate reading and buying two more? Well, Jeffrey Meyer's Samuel Johnson: The Struggle may prove too juicy not to want to swallow whole. I took it to lunch yesterday and took a bite or two. I looked up Oliver Goldsmith in the index -- my first rule when considering a book about Johnson and his circle is always to check the biographer's attitude to sweet, silly, brilliant Goldsmith -- anyone who doesn't love Goldy is no friend of mine. Good rule. Meyers passed. I then moved on to read the bits about Johnson's sexual peculiarities that are getting Meyers so much press.

Shocking, my dears, wonderfully, delightfully shocking. And touching. And, damn, now I think I have to own the Meyers.

Today for lunch I'm having a slice or two of Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography. Recommended by Harold Bloom (oh dear,) but also by Henry Hitchings, who wrote a very good book I also own, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World. I read Martin's introduction, and now, I fear, I may have to have this one too.

What's wrong with that?! I will have to try and sneak them home if I do, as I'm already being frowned at in that quarter for the haul I brought home on Employee Shopping Days.

But this is Dr. Johnson! How can I not? Right?! right?