Member: Django6924

Boswell doesn't have a "fan club" per se, but a few Boswell lovers have been cataloging the Boswell Library on Library Thing for the last fourteen months. We should be complete this month.

best,
Jerry Morris

posted by moibibliomaniac at 7:46 pm (EST) on Nov 17, 2009

Django, many thanks for your detailed reply - that was really helpful! I'll follow your advice - the leather version is definitely way out of my budget at the moment.

posted by BorisG at 9:31 am (EST) on Oct 15, 2009

No problem. I also won't be buying from the sale - at least until my son's college tuition payments are completed.

posted by pm11 at 11:27 am (EST) on Oct 13, 2009

Django:
Check out Oak Knoll Books online. They have a 60% off sale, including a $34 Zadig by Voltaire.

posted by pm11 at 9:24 pm (EST) on Oct 2, 2009

I realize only now that your pic features Sir Gawain and the Green Knight! When you read this book in Middle English, do you need a dictionary or are you sufficiently fluent? I must admit that, without a translation into Modern English, some lines are almost impossible to decipher fo me, while others are quite plain.

posted by Pepys at 4:28 am (EST) on Aug 14, 2009

I have several versions of Song of Songs, including a recorded version in French that the singer Alain Bashung and wife recited at their wedding! I became fascinated with it because in the ancient bible in the Romanesque church at Romainmôtier, those pages have been torn out! I'll take some photos tomorrow - and would be interested in seeing yours!

posted by overthemoon at 4:19 pm (EST) on Aug 3, 2009

Sorry about the rotten weather. The prairies are usually much hotter in July but the whole country seems to be trying to disprove global warming this year. We've had snow in May and once the snow finally went away it seemed like it would never stop raining (we just got dumped on again today). Churchill (our northern port on Hudson's Bay) had it's ice break-up in late June (the latest time for it in a long while). Even British Columbia (our "tropical" province) had an awful spring. And tonight on the local news they said we've had eight consecutive months of below normal temperatures--one more month and we break a record (not that we want to). So bundle up, stay warm, and hopefully this will all go away and you can enjoy some of Regina's real summer weather soon.

posted by haniwitch at 12:20 am (EST) on Jul 15, 2009

I do like Tim Horton's coffee but pretty much any coffee I've tried has given me a headache. Which is maybe a blessing in disguise because if I ever got addicted to something like that there wouldn't be as much money to spend on books.

I'm afraid I haven't been to Regina so I can't give you any recommendations other than to say that it's supposed to be a very nice little city. My only experience with Saskatchewan is a couple of towns along the Manitoba border (which is the province I live in). Hope you enjoy your stay there.

posted by haniwitch at 11:59 pm (EST) on Jun 24, 2009

I'm glad you were intrigued. I thought you might enjoy it.

By the way, I note the 5-star rating for Marquez. I agree wholeheartedly on Marquez and recently finished Love in the Time of Cholera (also wonderful).

posted by pm11 at 1:56 pm (EST) on Jun 8, 2009

Django: here is the rest of the note from my friend (see note below). Don't read this first. Read the one below first and then come up to this one,.

"(continued)

A later (and far superior) bio by Eleanor Ruggles set the record straight. She discounted Lindsay's paranoid account of Souther's "conspiracy" to prevent him from moving back into the family home.

My psychobiographical take is that Latham Souther, Lindsay's neighbor and near contemporary, served as a model of the "good son" that Lindsay's father could have pointed to. Vachel dropped out of medical school, disappointing Dr. Lindsay whereas Latham followed in his father's banking business. I've also (in my own fevered imagination) drawn a dotted line from my arch-conservative great-grandfather to Vachel to Vachel's friend Lewis Sinclair to Sinclair's archetypal character George Babbitt. Every description of Souther I've ever read, both positive and negative, match Babbitt to a T. Maybe Souther coincidentally fit the profile that Lewis outlined but it is uncanny and there are very few degrees of separation."

posted by pm11 at 8:30 pm (EST) on Jun 2, 2009

Django:
I thought you might find this series of posts from Facebook interesting. A friend of mine still lives in Springfield, Illinois and is a member of the Vachel Linsday Association.Great quiz.

The opening comment is a suggested question from me for a Springfield, Illinois quiz Larry was creating.

Robert Miner. Great quiz. Much better than the other one. I've got one to add:
Which well-known 20th Century writer who produced classic translations of such works as The Iliad and the Odyssey graduated from Springfield High School?
a. Robert Fitzgerald
b. Richmond Lattimore
c. Robert Fagles
d. Robert Graves
12:31pm · Comment · Like · See Wall-to-Wall

Larry Stevens at 6:26pm June 2
Well done. Adding Fitz crossed my mind but I couldn't come up with a good question off the top of my head. Same for Barrett Deems, another famouse SHS alum.

A letter from Vachel Lindsay to Susan Wilcox was unearthed a few years ago in which VL inquired after the young Robert Fitzgerald whose student work he had just read in a journal Ms Wilcox had sent him.

Robert Miner at 6:42pm June 2
That's cool. Susan Wilcox had a huge impact and must have been a wonderful teacher.

I'm on a book blog where a cinematographer was making a strong case for Vachel Lindsay's legacy and I thought about your comments on your Facebook page. I have mixed feelings about him as a writer, but take a special rooting interest in him as a hometown favorite.

Larry Stevens at 7:03pm June 2
We (the VL Assn) had his grandson, Nick Lindsay, an indy film maker, come give a lecture in Spfld a few years ago. I asked him if thought the VL bio would make a good film and he said no.

Lindsay did write the very first book of film criticism so his legacy is secure in that regard.

I have to tell you my own revelation which I hope is not too long for this comment field. I knew that VL was a friend of my great-grandmother, Lyna Souther, and that he had given her some book as a present. I ended up finding the book at the Sangamon Valley Collection. It was a utopian tract by a famouse Gothic Revival architect that proposed the creation of Walled Towns (the title) to save humanity from the ravages of modernism. Lindsay inscribed it to my g-grandma and filled it with critical annotations. He was trying to sell his notion of a University of Springfield to her and her elite friends.... Read More

Larry Stevens at 7:15pm June 2
. . . (continued from previous post)

In researching all this, I googled Lindsay+Souther and found a reference to a letter in a library collection addressed to my great-grandfather, Latham Souther. The letter addressed him as the Trust Officer of the estate of VL's father.

My blood ran cold. The trust officer of the Lindsay estate was cast as the main villain of Masters' bio of VL. The name of the person was omitted from all of the bios for legal reasons. Masters all but blamed him for Lindsay's suicide. I quizzed my father about this and he knew nothing about it. I verified from published letters by Lindsay that he hated my great-grandfather, that Souther was always telling him that he had to quit writing poetry and get a real job. Lindsay had built up this animus into a full blown conspiracy wherein he was being banished from Springfield like Dante from Florence. Masters bought Lindsay's story whole and retold the banishment story in the bio. (continued) . . .

Robert Miner at 7:22pm June 2
Larry, this is amazing. What a find. Sorry your great-grandfather is on the villain side of the story. I've got to figure out how to send this to my friend on the book blog site. I think he would find it interesting.

posted by pm11 at 8:27 pm (EST) on Jun 2, 2009

I fell over it in the remaindered bin at Barney Nobles. I didn't know there was a movie. I'll have to add it to my Netflix lineup.

posted by varielle at 5:27 pm (EST) on May 11, 2009

Hello, way back in June you asked me on the Folio thread at which school it was that I heard Mary Renault speak. It was South Wilts Grammar School for Girls, Salisbury, Wiltshire. It's still there, and still quite good, I think. When my older sisters were there, the teachers and the headmistress were of the generation of redoubtable Oxbridge bluestockings (in the mould of MR). Those glory days had all but gone in the 1970s, although a few maiden ladies remained - women of great character and erudition.
I remember the Latin teacher saying at exam time (to widespread incomprehension and titter) that "wise virgins will bring spare pens." Well, at least one of the girls knew why she put it like that!
best wishes, GG

posted by Goldengrove at 2:36 pm (EST) on Mar 26, 2009

HI:

i have recently joined LibraryThing and note that you have an extensive LEC collection. This is my main area of interest. I note that you have the 1951 edition of Anna Karenina. I just bought a copy of this on Ebay, but after I bought it I noticed a set on ABE that mentioned a dust jacket. I tried to contact the bookseller to determine if it really had a dust jacket or if he was describing the glassine covers, but i did not get any response. Do you know if it came with a printed paper dust jacket?

I am also interested in acquiring early (the first 100) monthly letters. Do you know of a source for these? The newsletters, I think, are fascinating ephemera and display Macy's great love of books and are also wonderful exapmles of mid 20th century salesmanship.

posted by atrco at 9:35 am (EST) on Feb 25, 2009

Hi Django - reading over an old posting on a Folio Society thread I noticed that you had pointed me in the direction of Prokudin-Gorskii.

For some reason I never picked this up at the time, but have just looked him up now. And his colour images are fantastic. We had a programme here in the UK last year about colour photography & cinematography of the Edwardian 10s, the 20s and the 30s, including Albert Khan. I thought Khan's photos were magic in the way they recpatured the early 20th century (and beautiful as artistic images too!) but if anything P-G outdoes these.

So thanks for the suggestion, sorry it has taken me so long to follow it up.

posted by zenomax at 4:00 am (EST) on Feb 11, 2009

Django - really I was only joking! You mean the NY Trilogy? well, if you twist my arm...

posted by overthemoon at 4:24 am (EST) on Jan 24, 2009

Thanks for the comments--hope you find something enjoyable in my library. As for my music, I write modern classical music, including electronic music. I like to play with time (suspend it, dilate/contract, more than one timestream going at once, etc); I like cyclical, cumulative structures; I like shifts in perspective; I like motivic play and development. Favorite composers include Gyorgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Tristan Murail, Salvatore Sciarrino, Debussy, Beethoven, and Bach (and a whole lot more :). My recent music is trending toward more complexity and some playing around with microtones.

I have some pieces posted at a couple of places--I'll give you a couple of links in a private message.

posted by Medellia at 7:07 pm (EST) on Nov 17, 2008

I've added you to my interesting libraries for the purpose of Folio-gazing (and note-taking!). You have quite the collection.

posted by Medellia at 11:08 pm (EST) on Nov 15, 2008

Indeed I did. 17K is actually not too bad, as I have seen it go for 25K before. The slipcase is not in the greatest of shape though, but in this case, the slipcase does not hold quite the value that the actual book does.

posted by chase.donaldson at 6:44 pm (EST) on Oct 1, 2008

no problem django, it isn't a heavy thing and you are the first so it's all yours!

posted by overthemoon at 2:53 pm (EST) on Sep 19, 2008

Robert,

I noticed today on the FS website that the elusive, Folio Society tote bags are being offered to those who purchase 4(!) books today. Knowing your perpetual angst in never having been offered this exclusive luxury, I thought that I'd bring this to your attention. I hope that you can contain your excitement.

Nancy and I are very thankful that Ike has left us relatively undamaged. Two elm trees in our front yard are about fifteen feet shorter than they were previously, but we received no damage to the house whatsoever. A tornado touched down only 150 from us, toppling two seventy-foot elms into neighboring property, so things could have been different. We still have no electricity and are unlikely to have it restored for several days yet. We are staying with friends who have two children that just left home for college (leaving guestrooms in the process) and who have electricity.

Cheers,

Steve

posted by teebweeb at 2:20 pm (EST) on Sep 18, 2008

Robert,

Just letting you know that the books will be sent off tomorrow. Sorry for my delay, but things have started to get crazy at school.

posted by chase.donaldson at 12:53 am (EST) on Sep 17, 2008

I actually just received your check today! I should be able to get the box in the mail in a day or so. I look forward to seeing pictures of your library!

posted by chase.donaldson at 5:28 pm (EST) on Sep 9, 2008

Robert,

The link for the Brothers K is below. They dropped the price to $65 too, and just so you know, there is a 15% discount on the Powells site if you use VISA08 as a coupon code.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDeta...

posted by chase.donaldson at 12:20 pm (EST) on Sep 6, 2008

ps - if you have any pictures of your library, i would very much like to see it!

posted by chase.donaldson at 2:46 am (EST) on Sep 4, 2008

I know that you have been looking for the 3 volume Brothers K from LEC. Powells has a set now for 75 that is in pretty good shape. I almost bought it, but it didnt have the slipcase...thoughtd you might like to know

posted by chase.donaldson at 12:55 am (EST) on Sep 3, 2008

I know that you have been looking for the 3 volume Brothers K from LEC. Powells has a set now for 75 that is in pretty good shape. I almost bought it, but it didnt have the slipcase...thoughtd you might like to know

posted by chase.donaldson at 12:55 am (EST) on Sep 3, 2008

Hesketh's book sounds very tempting--methinks I shall add it to my neverending list of amazon "saved" books (I try and empty as much of it as I can come Christmas).

I was perusing your library (just realized your image is from Gawain and the Green Knight--hoping to work that into nightstand rotation very soon!) and saw Memoirs of a Georgian Rake. It looks equally appetizing. I don't think, off the top of my head, I can counter your Smith of Smiths with a recommendation of my own...was going to use Aubrey's Brief Lives but I see you have that one. Man is it funny.

Actually, a really good source for somewhat under-known books is Michael Dirda...he's a reviewer for the Washington Post and has several volumes of reviews out. His latest book, Classics for Pleasure, is sort of an alternative canon. He mentions Petronius, Aubrey, Georgette Heyer, Jacob Burckhardt (his Renaissance essay), Gawain, and quite a few others. Actually, in his penultimate book, "Bound to Please", he wrote a review of a book you might like called "The Lunar Men". It's about a group of men--Darwin's grandfather, Wedgwood, James Watt, and some others--and their interactions, experiments, and lives in general in 18th c. England. Lots of anecdotes and such. The author, Jenny Uglow, also wrote a biography of Hogarth that was wonderful. It too has lots of stories, anecdotes, and scenes from London in the reign of George II (one of those kings no one notices, which is perhaps fortunate, as he died on the toilet). She goes into detail about the play, "The Beggar's Opera", and Sam Johnson makes a few appearances, as do Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and some other Literary Club alums.

posted by uncultured at 2:42 am (EST) on Jul 5, 2008

Re Smith of Smiths:

Never heard of this, what exactly is it? It's not on Gutenberg (or my other internet resource, www.archive.org, which has online editions of Thraliana, Walpole's letters, and the journals of Charles Greville). I found a few pages of preview on amazon but no description.

Speaking of Greville, he's not too bad a diarist, though the only editions I can find are reprints of a 1908 volume that, though it advertises "Hitherto Unpublished Extracts", is fairly clean and decent, though it does an excellent job of describing country house weekends and some minor scandals such as duels, eccentricities, and things of that nature. But maybe he just didn't put that sort of thing in his diary.

I suspect that between Boswell, Pepys, and Casanova, I've become quite spoiled in terms of what I expect from a diarist, and when combined with the spate of unbowdlerized translations that have come out in the past 10-20 years (the Pevear-Volkohnsky team tackling Russia and Dumas, the new Proust editions, etc.), I've really gotten finicky about reading the "correct" edition of something. War and Peace alone found me in the bookstore with the Briggs and P-V editions open to the same page, comparing and contrasting...Modern biography is the same way, each new version advertising newly found documents, secret letters, private information previous biographers were bribed to keep out, etc etc. It makes me quite neurotic, literarily.

Just to throw one more question out before I finish--Have you checked out Casanova's Memoirs? He's a great memoirist--I'm reading Volumes 1-2 right now, and he's in Turkey contemplating an offer to marry a Muslim aristocrat's daughter. It's surely exaggerated, but great fun. It's the Willard Trask translation; prior to him translations were based on an edition that was not only censored, but altered as well.

posted by uncultured at 1:57 am (EST) on Jul 3, 2008

How interesting re: Thrale's marginalia! Does she write entire anecdotes and such, or is it more restricted to brief phrases, like "How very true indeed!"? I have the '93 FS edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which, at least, provides names whenever Boswell says something like "a mutual acquaintance who loved to drink..." or "A man who constantly lusted after women..." (and oftentimes it turns out Boswell is speaking of himself...haha, not very surprising, I guess).

I just found this incredible website, www.archive.org, while doing a search for Walpole's letters--I'm finding all sorts of long lusted-after diaries and books from the 18th century. They have a VERSION of Thraliana--not the two volume edition from 1951 (put out by Oxford I think) but a separate, earlier version from 1913 that always has the phrase "With Hitherto Unpublished Extracts" in the title. Also have the Letters from Princess Lieven to Metternich--Lieven was pretty nasty customer, but she apparently was very smart and spot on re: gossip and England at the time. Just thought you'd be interested!

posted by uncultured at 2:44 am (EST) on Jun 13, 2008

Django, I have been interested in the FS edition of the Arabian Nights since I did not take it as a renewal offering several years ago. As you have both the FS and EP editions which one would you recommend? You mention you prefer the FS translation, but what about the bindings, illustrations, fonts, etc? I would appreciate any comments you have on both editions. Thank you.

P.S. I also posted this on the Arabian Nights thread in the Easton Press group.

posted by LucasTrask at 8:45 pm (EST) on Jun 5, 2008

yes, I did add them all manually because I already had most of the details on the computer in a list before LT existed, so I just needed to copy and paste.
I wonder why you can't transfer the details, isn't it automatic? As for the cover art - well I don't have a scanner and don't really like those flat pics so always try to do something a bit artsy. At the moment I'm struggling with the Age of Illumination, have made several attempts at it but am never satisfied.
You should normally be able to choose them from the "member uploaded covers" thing.

posted by overthemoon at 2:16 pm (EST) on May 29, 2008

thanks Django - I have just returned from a press trip but will have a look as soon as I get my photos uploaded etc.
I was very interested to see that he was the Gill of the Gill Sans, didn't realise that!

posted by overthemoon at 2:12 pm (EST) on May 29, 2008