Free Books, Round Eight

It’s the eighth of the Giornale’s free book giveaways. This time around I am disposing of mostly oddities & obscurities. Peruse the list of books below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed or not: and if it hasn’t, then leave a comment stating which of the books it is that you want. Once you have laid claim to the volume of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. I’ll sort through the requests, and will decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a book will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the books within a week or so (I will pay all postage costs). I’m limiting the offer to one book per recipient.

1. L’Idea del Theatro by Giulio Camillo (1480-1544), edited and with an introduction and notes by Lina Bolzoni. Having read about Camillo and his ‘Memory Theatre’ in Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, I picked this book up when I saw it in one of the Feltrinelli bookstores in Rome. It was one of several books I acquired in the optimistic hope that my Italian would continue to improve until I could read them. Camillo’s Theatre won him great fame in his lifetime, & was supposedly ‘a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.’ The book is a pocket-sized paperback that was published by Sellerio Editore of Palermo, in 1991: no ISBN is shown on its cover; 210pp.

2. The Sonetti of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), edited by Pietro Gibellini, with notes by Giorgio Vigolo. Another Italian purchase, this time a stout paperback containing more than five hundred sonnets in Roman dialect, whose doubled consonants seemed to want to jump out of the page in an effort to make themselves understood: Undiscimila vergine, sagrato! / Undiscimila, cazzo! e tutt’inzieme?! / Jèsummaria! me vvedi cuanto seme / Che ppoteva impiegasse, annà spregato! My copy is from a 1995 reprinting in the Oscar Grandi Classici series first published thus by Mondadori in 1990, ISBN: 8804326999; 700pp.

3. The Ash Wednesday Supper by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), translated from the Italian by Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner. Come to think of it (see also #1, above), reading Frances Yates’ speculative histories inspired me to make all manner of rash book-buying decisions. Another such is this translation of La Cena de le Ceneri, one of the Italian dialogues written in Elizabethan London by the ‘itinerant Italian friar,’ philosopher and heretic, a work noteworthy for its early support of Copernican theory. While Bruno’s flamboyant rhetoric occasionally fascinates, I find it very hard to read him at length without succumbing to a headache. The book is a paperback published by the University of Toronto Press, in 1995. ISBN: 0802074693; 238pp

4. This is, I discovered to my chagrin, a book about the 1608 work Theatrum Morum by Aegid (aka Aegidius, Egidius, or Gilles) Sadeler (ca.1570-1629), rather than a reissue of the book itself, a collection of emblematic illustrations drawn from Æsop’s fables. The German text, written by an Erhard Breissig, is set in fraktur. The frontispiece, and six of the emblems from Sadeler’s book are reproduced in facsimile at the end of this volume, which was published in Prague in 1938 by the (presumably short-lived) Gesellschaft deutscher Bücherfreunde in Böhmen (German Booklovers’ Society in Bohemia). The copy I have is numbered 68 from an edition of only 300. 126pp.

5. Hieroglyphics by Arthur Machen. My first rush of enthusiasm for Machen’s work began about twelve years ago, and I’ve since read most of his novels, tales & autobiographical works. One book of his I never read until quite recently, however, was this non-fiction ‘Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature,’ in which he discusses at length his enthusiasm for Dickens, Cervantes, Rabelais, etc. and pronounces in favour of the the liteature he sees as mysterious, or striving after transcendence. Seeing as such views are well represented in Machen’s other books, I found little but repetition in this one. The copy I have is of the ‘new and revised’ edition published by Martin Secker in 1912. Note that the book is not in the best condition: some pages are loose and others are spotted; 202pp.

6. Thomas Ligotti’s Death Poems is a curious little book, a collection of morbid poetry by the renowned writer of intense and literary tales of supernatural horror. The problem here is that Ligotti is no poet, or rather, that there is more poetry in a page of one of his better tales than in this whole volume of what seem to me to be flatly prosaic verses. The book is a diminutive hardcover, carefully designed, with gilt-edged paper bound between marbled endpapers, and was limited to 333 copies, published by the Durtro press. The ISBN is 0952349779; 88pp.

7. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Having snapped up Underground, Sputnik Sweetheart and the story-collection After the Quake, as soon as they were published, and having greatly enjoyed them all, I was very keen to get my hands on this latest of Murakami’s novels to appear in English. I was so keen, as it happened, that I paid a little above the regular asking-price when I saw this Uncorrected Proof printing of the UK (Harvill) edition advertised on abebooks a month or two before the book’s official launch. Sadly for me, I liked this the least of the ten Murakami titles I’ve read to date, and, as it is clearly marked Not for Resale(!), I’d be glad instead to pass it on to someone who might appreciate it more than I did. The proof edition’s ISBN is 1843432471, & it’s a 436pp trade paperback.

8. Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), in a translation from the Russian revised and edited by Alex Kozulin. I forget exactly how I arrived at this pioneering treatise on psycholinguistics, originally published in 1934, but not translated into English until much later. In any case, even though it doesn’t seem especially abstruse, I found it to be a book I bounced back from whenever I tried to read it, and I eventually abandoned the attempt no more than a couple of chapters in. My copy is from the ninth printing (1996) of the MIT Press edition first issued in 1986. ISBN: 0262720108; 288pp.

9. The Major Works of Sir Thomas Browne. As I mentioned a few entries back, I now have the 4-volume Works of Browne, making this volume a duplicate. It’s as good a single-volume collection of his works as one could wish for, comprising Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals, along with a few selections from the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a short essay On Dreams, plus an informative introduction and notes by the book’s editor, C. A. Patrides. Also included in the volume is Samuel Johnson’s Life of Browne. It’s a well-thumbed Penguin Classics paperback, from the fifth printing of their edition first published in 1977. ISBN: 0140431098; 558pp.

10. Big Numbers (Issues 1 &2) by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz. I was never in the habit of buying comic-books, but, come 1990, having greatly enjoyed Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen, I thought I would make an exception for Moore’s eagerly-awaited project Big Numbers, and dutifully bought the first two issues, only to find, a long while later, after much wondering about whatever happened to issue #3, that the writer’s & artist’s collaboration had thereafter acrimoniously collapsed. ISSN: 09578692; 2x40pp.

Varo

There follow some more details of scans of reproductions of paintings by Remedios Varo. As with my previous entry about Varo, the images are taken from my copy of the 3rd edition of the Catálogo Razonado of her œuvre published by Ediciones ERA of Mexico City in 2002. This time I just picked out an arbitrary selection of some of my favourite paintings from the book. Click on the details to see the pictures in full: note that the full images range between 680Kb and 1.7Mb in size.

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This is the hermit. [above] He is now beyond normal time and space; his body is made up of two triangles, one upright and one inverted, which form a six-pointed star, symbol of time and space in ancient esoteric teachings. Inside his open chest there is a yin-yang symbol representing inner harmony. This is the most beautiful symbol of all (at least I think so), for it is enclosed in a circle, and has come to signify equilibrium.

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This woman leaving the psychoanalyst’s office [below] drops her father’s head into a small circular well (which is the proper thing to do when leaving the psychoanalyst). The basket she carries holds yet more psychological waste: a pocket watch, symbolizing the fear of arriving late, et cetera. The psychanalyst’s name is Dr. FJA (Freud, Jung and Adler).

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This scientist is experimenting with different plants and vegetable. He is somewhat bewildered because there is an unruly plant [above]. All the plants are growing shoots in the form of mathematical figures and formulas, except for that one that insists on producing a flower. And the only mathematical branch it sprouted at the beginning, which drooped onto the table, is very withered and weak and, besides, is mistaken, for it says ‘two plus two is almost four.’ Each hair on the scientist's head is a mathematical equation.

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The quotes above are comments of the artist’s apparently recorded by her brother, Dr. Rodrigo Varo. These I also took from the Catálogo Razonado. The last of the images above is a detail from the final painting that Varo completed before her death in 1963: its title is Naturaleza muerta resucitando, ‘Still Live Reviving.’

Reading Browne on the Bus

Most days I take the bus between our apartment and my place of work: it’s not that far, the trip only takes about ten minutes, but twice ten minutes times five makes for a hundred minutes every week that I oftentimes would squander by just staring absently into space. Since last summer, however, I have made a point of carrying a book with me whenever I go by bus. In recent months, I have very slowly been making my way through the collected Works of Sir Thomas Browne, in Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s four-volume (1964, Faber & Faber) edition. I began with vol. 2, which is taken up with the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, before traversing the miscellaneous works and notes in vol. 3, towards the letters, in vol. 4, where I currently find myself in the middle of Browne’s correspondence with his son Edward, a physician like his Dad… When I’m done with the letters, I intend to revisit the Religio Medici, Hydrotaphia & The Garden of Cyrus, etc. in vol. 1, works I first read about ten years ago.

I wonder how many readers arrived, as I did, at Browne’s works, by way of the enigmatic final sentence of Borges’s celebrated Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which the tale’s narrator announces his intention to continue revising ‘an uncertain translation in the style of Quevedo […] of Browne’s Urne Buriall.’ This reference implanted in me a seed of curiosity that did not bear fruit until about five years later, when I picked up a copy of the Penguin edition of Browne’s Major Works. Together with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which I had acquired at around the same time, Browne’s compositions gave me my first exposure to the marvellous richness of seventeenth-century English prose. Both authors remain great favourites of mine to this day. Intrigued by the extracts from the Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the Penguin Major Works, I had for some time wanted to peruse it more fully.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as an affordabe modern edition of the Pseudodoxia, Browne’s extensive exploration & debunking of the ‘Vulgar Errors’ of his day, a kind of 17th-Century Mythbusters. Perversely, one sees French and Spanish readers are better served in this respect. While I was pleased to discover that, through the fine efforts of Mr. Eason, the entire text of the Pseudodoxia has been made available on-line, I still yearned to browse through it on the pages of an actual book. Much as I would have liked to obtain the 1981 Oxford edition, I found it cheaper (though still hardly inexpensive) to fork out for a set of the 4-volume Works. In contrast to the sonorous yet somehow disembodied authorial voice of the Religio Medici and the Urne Buriall, etc., the Pseudodoxia highlights the good doctor’s messily hands-on industriousness, and his boundless curiosity. The Miscellany Tracts, etc., and, to an even greater extent, the letters, help to further flesh out a portrait of a man at once worldly and pious, innocent and wise.

THE First and Father-cause of common Error, is, The common infirmity of Human Nature; of whose deceptible condition, although perhaps there should not need any other eviction, than the frequent Errors we shall our selves commit, even in the expresse declarement hereof: yet shall we illustrate the same from more infallible constitutions, and persons presumed as far from us in condition, as time, that is, our first and ingenerated forefathers.

Thus may we perceive, how weakly our Fathers did Erre before the Floud, how continually and upon common discourse they fell upon Errors after; it is therefore no wonder we have been erroneous ever since. And being now at greatest distance from the beginning of Error, are almost lost in its dissemination, whose waies are boundless, and confess no circumscription.

In the introductory epistle to the Hydrotaphia, Browne’s meditation on mortality, he ponders ‘But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered?’ These words came to take on an unexpectedly literal significance, when Browne’s coffin, which had been interred within the walls of St. Peter Mancroft church in Norwich, was opened up ca. 1840, and his skull (pictured above) was removed. It was separated from the remainder of his remains until being re-interred in 1922.

‘Repræsentatio,’ etc.

Christmas was good here in provincial Sweden: my mother-in-law and Ms. A______ were with us from the 19th; we put up our tallest tree yet (it’s at least 12’ high); we dined on glazed ham & scalloped potatoes on Christmas Eve, and a full-scale roast turkey extravaganza on the big day. I was the lucky recipient of such gifts as a robot, and a few dozen cigars. From the 26th we had three days of snow: one of the heaviest falls we’ve yet seen in these parts.

On the 30th my mother and Mr. L_______ joined us. On New Year’s Eve I cooked jambalaya & bourbon-glazed pork; we dipped fruit in a chocolate fondue, and watched the sky light up with fireworks as more snow fell, and we saluted the turning year with the aid of a magnum of Bollinger. On New Year’s Day we played Clue Mysteries, and enjoyed slow-cooked roast-beef, after which we donned party-hats & lit some festbloss (sparklers).

Yesterday morning our guests all left, and I went back to work… None of which has anything to do with the images displayed here. These are details from some of the many eye-catching engravings by Georg Donauer, (based on designs by Balthasar Küchler), to be found in an on-line presentation of a book entitled Repræsentatio Der Fürstlichen Auffzug und Ritterspil… first published in Stuttgart in 1611.

The book seems to be a visual record of the lavish festivities staged in celebration of the marriage of Johann Friedrich Herzog von Württemberg and Barbara Sophie von Brandenburg, in November 1609. The majority of its illustrations depict figures on horseback or on foot variously attired in strange uniforms, or dressed up to portray mythological personages. Other pictures show elaborate ‘floats,’ with costumed figures masquerading therein or thereupon.

The book is one of many baroque ‘festival-books’ collected under the heading of Festkultur-Online at the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, an endeavour no less impressive than the Renaissance Festival Books exhibition presented last year by the British Library. I found the Repræsentatio after seeing a couple of curious images from it reproduced at peacay’s web-log Bibliodyssey a few weeks ago.

Click on the details above to see the relevant images in full. A happy new year to you all!