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.