Robert Armitage's blog

["You must allow me to present this young lady to you."]

Over the past few weeks, my blogging voice seems to have evaporated from this site. That’s not because I’ve slipped into some eerie library limbo. My time and energies have instead been devoted to preparing a public presentation, “Elusive Jane: In Search of Jane Austen at the New York Public Library.” For ages, it seems, my desk has been buried under a small mountain of books by and about Jane Austen, necessitating a major excavation every time I needed a pencil or a piece of tape. But the hard part is over, and I’m finally ready to meet anyone curious about the life of Jane Austen this Friday, November 6, at 2:15.

Of the many facets of my job here at the New York Public Library, my favorite is the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of people and share my enthusiasm for my favorite authors. Don’t tell anyone, but I also get to read Jane Austen and call it work.

Is it necessary to know anything about Jane Austen’s life in order to appreciate her novels? Certainly not. But after researching the biographies and background materials available here at the library, I found that the novels I had always loved took on a depth and an emotional resonance they hadn’t had before.

Although there are more available biographies of Jane Austen than you would probably care to count, and the facts they contain remain quite consistently the facts, the interpretation of those facts seems to differ from biographer to biographer. It began with James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt’s life, which first appeared fifty years after her death. This gracefully written, kind, and loving work helped to rekindle interest in Jane Austen’s life and writing and was used by all later biographies as their foundation. At the same time, the Memoir created an essentially false image of a placid spinster who wrote her novels as a sort of hobby and didn’t pay much heed to the world outside her own narrow scope. “Of events her life was singularly barren,” he wrote, “few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of her life.”

This of a woman whose life paralleled the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution; who lived through the fears of a French invasion of British soil; whose wide reading included not only novels but histories, accounts of current events, travel books, essays, and religious works; whose cousin brought the French Revolution directly into the family home when her husband lost his head to the guillotine; and whose brothers (both Admirals in the Royal Navy) kept her well informed of events beyond the boundaries of rural Hampshire. It is now clear, as Tony Tanner points out in his critical study Jane Austen that she “was much more aware of contemporary events, debates and issues, of the wars and domestic unrest, of the incipiently visible results of the Industrial Revolution, and of a radical change taking place in the constitution of English society, than the conventional view allows, or perhaps wants to allow.” In addition, Jane Austen was very much a professional author who spent her life developing and perfecting her own manuscripts (which she referred to as her “children”), wrangled with publishers, and was honored by the Prince Regent. She was eventually able to earn an independent living from her writing--a feat few women of the day could boast.

This is the Jane Austen I will be discussing on Friday, November 6th, at 2:15 in the first floor classroom of the New York Public Library. If you can’t make it that afternoon--I’ll be giving the same talk again on December 3rd and January 8th, also at 2:15.

These talks will be alternating with Out of the Blacking Factory, the Charles Dickens presentation I introduced last year, on November 20th, December 18th, and January 22nd.

The first time I visited Cape Cod, a city boy unaccustomed to the ways of the natural world, I encountered what seemed to me one of the primal mysteries, the secret from which so much else in life sprang. Although I have witnessed this phenomenon again and again over the past twenty or so years, it mystifies me still. During that first trip, my wife and I made an initial foray to the beach on Cape Cod Bay and looked out across the magnificent body of water held in the cup of land stretching from Bourne to Provincetown and marked by a length of watery horizon that could not be encompassed by peripheral vision alone. We waded out into that gentle ripple of surf and could see, at our feet, patches of waving sea grass, the scurrying shadows of hermit crabs hustling out of our paths, and an occasional darker-hued stripe indicating a gully in the sand and subtle deepening of the water. When we returned the next day at a different, later hour, expecting more of the same, we found the water gone, as if the whole bay had been sucked down a great central drain. What had happened? What could we do except stare, bewildered by the vast, striated plain of sand before us containing only a few attenuated channels and residual pools of water? The uncovered sand was striped with gray, green, orange, and pink, and at the horizon was a thread of blue, a shimmering dream nearly a mile away, an indication of the distance to which the water had retreated.

Those of you worldlier than I was will have recognized by now the ancient rhythm of the tides, a drama which plays out every six hours, day after day, and has done so for as close to “forever” as you’re likely to come. Now that I’ve returned from my annual jaunt to the beaches of Cape Cod and tried to return to the unnatural rhythms of the workaday life, my mind keeps going back to that great tidal clock, which continues without my having to do anything about it, without even the slightest necessity for willfulness or action on my part. I suppose it even happens when I’m not there to see it.

What, you might well ask, does any of this have to do with a blog whose main focus, so far, has been books and reading?  read more »

“Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead baby, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

— from a letter of Jane Austen to Cassandra, October 27, 1798

The most magical thing about visiting London for the first time was the sense of being so close to the source of the literature I’d spent so much of my life reading. One of my sharpest memories is of the day I turned a corner in the National Portrait Gallery and came unexpectedly upon this likeness of Jane Austen done by her sister, Cassandra. Although I had previously seen reproductions of the unfinished sketch--always of special interest because it is only one of two authenticated images (the other is of Jane seen from the back, face hidden by a bonnet)--coming across the real thing was another matter. Time collapsed, and I felt almost in the physical presence of an author already deeply rooted in my imagination.

Maybe the resemblance is not the most accurate or truthful. The family seemed to think it was not a success. According to R. W. Chapman, when James Edward Austen-Leigh decided to include an etching of the portrait in his memoir, his sister, half-sister, and cousins gave it only “very guarded and qualified approval.” Although it “was not positively inconsistent with their youthful recollections,” they seemed to think that “perhaps it gave some idea of the truth.” Despite their reservations, the actual penciled work with its washes of watercolor is a great deal more delicate and beautiful than any reproduction would lead you to believe, and I stood in the gallery staring at it, transfixed. If there was anything wrong with the image, I thought, it wasn’t Cassandra’s lack of skill in capturing the likeness but rather in her inability to animate it with any of the intelligence, irony, or playfulness which any reader of Jane Austen would expect to find there.  read more »

I recently wrote about an old favorite of mine, the fantasy novel Time and Again, by Jack Finney. It is the story of a man who travels back in time to New York in the 1800s. Once there, the story is compelling, precise in its details, and completely believable, the only far-fetched element being his actual methodology for returning to the past--he looks at old pictures and sort of thinks himself back through time. At least I thought this was far-fetched, until I got a look at the photographs I’ve reproduced here.

We can pretend that our work lives are a linear progression, day after day, neatly punctuated by weekends, with a summer vacation splitting each year down the middle. The truth, as usual, is far messier. If you work long enough at the same job, your experiences become layered like geological sediment. As of this past April I’ve worked in the General Research Division of the New York Public Library for thirty-two years. When it occurred to me that the library itself will be celebrating its centennial in 2011, I realized how much of its history I’ve actually participated in. Now, there are people--I’m sure you know a few--who seem to dwell principally in the past, always reminiscing about the old days and the peculiar characters who used to inhabit them…while their stories might hold your interest for awhile, it doesn’t take long before the tedium sets in. For the most part, I try to stay on the surface of the present moment, like a skater on a frozen lake; but with these photographs I’ve cracked through the skin of ice and gone plunging down and down. . .  read more »

"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.”

— Opening of The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford

Who can remember what childhood was really like? Who would really want to? What comes back to me of childhood are a few hazy outlines, like half-remembered snippets of dreams glimpsed just before awakening and quickly forgotten. As a child, I’m sure I knew that the world around me was a very real place and that I was indisputably its center, but I somehow can’t recapture the innocence of a boyish imagination still unclouded by age or experience. Perhaps it’s the natural order of things that such perceptions disappear, which is why most authors can never truly portray children or childhood. Even if you rattle off the names of a dozen wonderful stories or novels which seem to do just that (To Kill a Mockingbird springs to mind), these are still only the clever impersonations of children filtered through adult sensibilities.

A work which does present an authentic child’s view of the world, however, is The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan written by Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (“Daisy”) and concerning not children and their habits but manners, class, courtship and marriage in Queen Victoria’s England. The manuscript was handwritten in a red-covered exercise book in 1890, when the precocious Daisy was nine years old. Here was a child who, from the earliest age, seems to have been permitted unlimited access to the family library and to have absorbed whatever she wanted of its contents, principally Victorian fiction, whose tone and trappings she made irresistibly her own.

Why read this short novel? Because it presents a picture of the Victorian world, refracted through the prism of its literature and transformed once again by the perceptions of a bright and uncannily observant child who is, underneath it all, still very much a child. The result is an unintentionally hilarious comic masterpiece which has not been out of print since its first appearance in 1919.  read more »

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me"

— Shakespeare, Richard II

This month marks my one-year anniversary as a blogger for the New York Public Library. A blogger is something I never thought I would refer to myself as, but I suppose there are worse things that can be said about a person. My first post on May 30, 2008 concerned the release of Sex and the City, a movie which featured the library among its New York locations. This was and remains my most-read post. I don’t kid myself into thinking that the world was so desperately waiting to hear from me; I happened to coincide exactly with the release of a much-anticipated movie, based on a television show which it seemed everyone (except me) had watched, which in turn was based on a popular novel.

Mulling over this early post set me to wondering if the movie Sex and the City had driven people back to the Candace Bushnell novel in a sort of self-generating circle. I like to think that almost anything can send us back to books and the experience of reading if we’re so inclined. Or is that simply a case of cock-eyed optimism? Once we become involved with movies and television, is there any time left over for reading; or have the other media splintered our concentration into so many different pieces that there’s no putting them back together again?

After a year’s worth of blogging, I can now confess my belief that one of the worst things about the 21st century is the number of electronic devices created exclusively to waste our time. There are television sets the size of doors with a hundred or so stations that we restlessly flip through, searching for something--anything-- to engage our imaginations. There are hand-held gadgets--the cell phones, iPods, and BlackBerries--that we fiddle with on bus and subway trips as our attention waxes and wanes. And there are the primary culprits, our computers, which leech away time like blood. Sitting before them, we’re like the Time Traveler who, during the trial run of his time machine, nudges the lever ever so slightly, sees nothing in his room has changed, and thinks his experiment a failure. . .until he notices the fresh candle worn down to a stub, indicating several hours gone by in an instant. (Was that a scene from the H. G. Wells novel, the 1960 movie, or the 2002 remake?) Do all these things damage our ability or even desire to focus on a book?

With a somewhat judicious approach, however, computers and gadgets can also lead to books. Despite my initial qualms about the Google book project, it has proved an important resource in my work as a librarian. Although I personally would not want to read a book downloaded onto a little gadget, that doesn’t make the existence of e-book readers any less real. A reader at the main reference desk once raved to me about his Kindle reader because he was visually impaired and could magnify the font size of his text as many times as required, giving me my first positive feeling about something I’d always looked on with a certain scorn. And, ironically, the internet is a great purveyor of real books, too. I admit that I have done my share of killing off the world’s bookstores by ordering lower-priced books online.

As I started to think about these matters, I began to ask myself questions about books being adapted into other media and whether that other media will ever lead us back to the real thing. Now, I know you’re reading this on a computer, and you probably have better things to do with your time, but assuming you’re still with me, I’d like to share these questions with you, give my answers after the break, and invite you to submit your own answers to any or all of them.

1. What was the last movie you saw, adapted from a novel, which disappointed you?

2. What book would you like to see adapted into a movie, even if you know it will ultimately be a disappointment?

3. Are there any theatrical works which have led you to seek out their literary source?

4. Does it work the same way for television? Name a show or shows which drove you to the fictional original. Or the other way around: fiction which drove you to television.

5. Can adaptations be overdone? Should there be a moratorium on adapting any particular author?  read more »

"To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small Mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the Month of April. Necessary Servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times."

For those of you who are of a literary bent (you know who you are), April is “the cruelest month.” For those, however, to whom April is the month of tender shoots bursting through the soil, trees hazy with the first green traces of foliage, and perfumed air trembling with the promise of spring, the more appropriate adjective would be “enchanted.” This distinction brings me to a novel which always seems to infiltrate my senses at this time of year: The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim.

The excellent 1992 BBC film version (which, incidentally, will be released on DVD next month) introduced me to this small miracle of a story, but the novel on which it was based contains an even more effortless combination of charm, wit, and sensual feeling for the natural world. The plot is hung on the slenderest of threads. February in London in the 1920s is about as cold, damp, and dreary as this past winter in New York has been. Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot--childless women burdened with stifling duties and distant husbands--catch each other reading the above personal notice one miserable afternoon and are seized with the idea of leaving everything behind, including their boorish husbands, for one magical month in Italy. The husbands are not the worst of their species (men fare less well in some of Elizabeth von Arnim’s other fiction), but they are cold and rather remote. Mellersh Wilkins is a man who “produced the impression of keeping copies of everything he said.” Frederick Arbuthnot writes risqué historical novels which are a great embarrassment to his wife, who firmly believes that “No one should write a book God wouldn’t like to read.”  read more »

Intellectually, I have nothing against modern opera, and I can usually steel myself to try it again, even if the result inevitably turns out to be another tepid stew of tedious language and monotonous music. Emotionally, however, it is the standard repertoire which draws me again and again. These so-called “warhorses” of the operatic repertoire have endured for so long because they speak directly to our adult passions. (Melodrama is, after all, only real life ratcheted up a notch.) How many of us, like Rigoletto the court jester, have felt humiliated by our employers and plotted elaborate revenge? How many women, like Tosca, have fended off the advances of some lecherous, latter-day Scarpia? How many men, like Canio in Pagliacci, paint on their clown faces to hide the anguish beneath? Does the death of Mimi at the end of La Boheme affect us so deeply because it reflects, somehow, the death of our own youthful ardor and innocence?

Now that the Metropolitan Opera season is drawing to a close, I’ve started to look again (as I did in my post of November 25th) at some of the literary sources of opera--titles which can be found nestled in the stacks of the General Research Division--and have arrived at what some consider the most popular opera of all time: Carmen.  read more »

Last week in the South Court training rooms, I gave my presentation “Changing Styles in Children’s Literature.” Although I’ve given this talk on various occasions over the last few years, doing it again always focuses my attention on the strange power of children’s books and sets my mind spinning back to my own dim past, when I would stare up at the family shelf of books in a kind of awed yet uncomprehending fascination. I might not have been aware of much else, but I already knew that those books were the key to some unknown yet highly desirable place. They were full of pictures which created interesting puzzles for me to resolve and indecipherable words which nonetheless buzzed with elusive possibilities.

Scientifically speaking, learning to read is a step-by-step process, each incremental bit building up a solid foundation. In memory, however, it seems much more of a magical transformation. My mother would read the words, I would look at the pictures, and they were always two separate levels of enjoyment. Until a certain memorable day when I began to recognize the actual words myself (something like, “Brontosaurus was a plant-eater”) and suddenly the whole enterprise gelled into one big, amazing package. I would no longer have to make up my own stories to go along with the pictures. And those blocks of text took on a resonance I had never even suspected.

In some ways, this process of integrating words and pictures mirrors the two faces of children’s book illustration, particularly during the twentieth century. One the one hand, there are the artists who stress the individual illustration, without too much concern over the accompanying text. On the other hand, there are those who attempt to blend text and image into a richer whole. Throughout my own readings prior to giving my talk, two names kept emerging: Arthur Rackham and Maurice Sendak. They are the two inescapable masters of children’s picture-making, although each seems to represent an opposite end of the spectrum.  read more »

“As Abelard said to Heloise, ‘Don’t forget to drop a line to me, please.’
As Juliet cried in her Romeo’s ear, ‘Romeo, why not face the fact, my dear?’”

— Cole Porter, Just One of Those Things

Is love “just one of those things?” Now that the Godiva chocolates have been eaten, the frilly greeting cards opened, and the Vermont Teddy Bear-gram forgotten on a dusty shelf, is the spirit of Valentine’s Day dead? Maybe for everyone else, but for the true librarian, whose very profession is embedded in the soul of romanticism, it lives on. Some time ago, for an article in an online magazine, librarians were asked to name what we considered the world’s most romantic love stories. With yearning hearts, raging hormones, and brains overloaded with dopamine, we arrived at ten titles (Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Casablanca, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Doctor Zhivago, Sense and Sensibility, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pride and Prejudice, Hunchback of Notre Dame). Some of these responses were predictable: Romeo and Juliet, Cathy and Heathcliff, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Others were less so: Did Les Liaisons Dangereuses ever really give someone a warm inner glow? Did no one realize that Casablanca is not strictly-speaking one of the most romantic reads ever?  read more »

From the dust jacket of Pigeon Feathers →

A number of summers ago I saw John Updike at the library. He was sitting in the back of the main reading room, leaning over the table, and writing with a small gold pen. I felt as oddly excited and privileged as someone else might feel who, in the course of day-to-day activity, had encountered Johnny Depp or Angeline Jolie. I ached to know what he was writing on that pad, if it was a story for the New Yorker, another episode in the chronicles of Harry Rabbit Angstrom or Henry Bech, or just a tally of his day’s expenses in New York. I didn’t ask. Library professionalism, New York sang-froid, or maybe just temperamental shyness kept me from saying anything at all. When I looked again a short while later, he was gone.  read more »

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22”

Books can accumulate a lot of personal baggage. Keep them in your life for long enough, and they’re likely to become encrusted with memories. This dust jacket is from my personal copy of Catch-22 and goes back a long way, as you can tell from the $2.45 price drastically marked down to $2.19. This was the second and more durable copy I owned after I read ragged the more familiar blue paperback with the dancing airman on the cover. The library’s copy in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is the first edition, published in 1961. The branch libraries have a recent Everyman's Library edition with a picture of Joseph Heller on the cover. But it is the Modern Library edition and its cover art that resonate with me. I didn’t encounter the novel until the early 1970s, during my first years of college and the last nightmarish years of the Vietnam War; but I read it again and again, not only for its wit and style, but for the message, articulated for me clearly and for the first time, that governments and other institutions were not always to be trusted, that they might even be out to cause harm. Heller’s assertion that “The only freedom we really have is the freedom to say no” vibrated through the halls of Hunter College--as well as most other college campuses--and black humor was the very atmosphere we breathed.  read more »

A strange relationship is established with favorite novelists, particularly those who are our living contemporaries. In reading their work, we are reconstituting word by word their mental landscapes and experiencing the energy which has gone into the act of creation, thereby establishing an extraordinary sort of intimacy. Although it should work the same way with deceased authors, the relationship lacks the reassurance that they are safely off somewhere, working on their next book. Since these authors no longer inhabit our present reality, their fiction inexorably turns into historical fiction. When we have turned their last page, there is nothing beyond.

This February, Iris Murdoch will have been dead for ten years. For those of us who remember waiting anxiously for her new novels to appear—at the typical rate of one every year or two--that seems especially hard to believe. That sturdy, striking face from the book jacket photographs—with eyes that, if you stared long enough, seemed to puncture holes in you—suggested that mortality would never be an issue. Although hers was one of the most reliable literary voices throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, it was remarkable to discover, shortly after her death, that most of her monumental output (26 novels) was no longer in print. In our ever-accelerating information age, new books are kept on bookstore shelves for ever-decreasing amounts of time and allowed to go out of print with no apparent qualm on the part of publishers. It was gratifying to find, however, that over the last few years Murdoch seems to have emerged once again in paperback; but I wonder if she isn’t nowadays more remembered than read, due to the memoir of her final days by her husband, John Bayley; the Peter J. Conradi biography Iris: A Life; and Iris, the movie of her life with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.  read more »

If the New Year is to mean anything more than the difference between Wednesday and Thursday, it should contain a bit of reflection on the past, a glance over the shoulder to see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Since this is a blog about books, reading, and libraries, I thought an examination of my personal reading list during this past year might be interesting. I’m always intrigued by the lists of others--even if, as with the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2008, I’ve only read one of the selections. My average with other people’s favorite movie lists is usually even lower.

Since the number of real bookstores in New York has dwindled to a paltry few, one of the few places left to exercise the fine art of book-browsing is the Mid-Manhattan Library. In fact, most of the books I’ve read this year have been courtesy of my library card. I don’t generally gravitate to the new books section, with their glossy covers, pristine pages, and spines that crack a bit when you open them. I often prefer the excitement of unearthing a hidden gem, a book nobody’s ever heard of or long since forgotten, even if it’s been sitting idly on the shelf for a generation so. That’s how I discovered Something in Disguise, a 1969 novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and The Dressmaker, from 1973, by Beryl Bainbridge. Both are dark tales of British social mores, the first about a widow with grown children who marries a pompous bore who just might have a shady side to his nature, the second about a repressed young woman living with her aunts in wartime England. Of course, I could probably have found used paperback copies of both these books on the Internet, if I’d been aware of their existence. But since there is no such thing as browsing books on the Internet, where would I have looked? [Since I read Something in Disguise earlier this year, it seems to have been withdrawn from the Mid-Manhattan library but is still available in the General Research Division's collection.]  read more »

I generally enjoy the Christmas season if I don’t allow myself to get sucked up in the frenzy. Of course, the frenzy is almost irresistible: the catalogs start coming right after Labor Day, store owners regard Halloween as the beginning of the holiday season, and the stability of the global economy depends on how free and easy you are with your credit card. As for me, I’ve always thought of Christmas as "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." Yes, of course, that’s Scrooge’s nephew; but he and I seem to share the ideal of a benevolent, unhurried, and meditative Christmas in the midst of the contemporary tempest. What constitutes this traditional secular celebration? For me it is a cozy construct of movie images full of gently falling snow, music ranging from Bach’s Christmas cantatas to Jingle Bell Rock, some carefully sifted childhood memories, and of course, A Christmas Carol, the book that is probably Charles Dickens’s best-known and best-loved work, and the one which almost singlehandedly gave us the Christmas we know today.

Christmas Facts and Fancies, by Alfred Carl Hottes, places the roots of Christmas observance among a jumble of European influences, principally the Saturnalia of ancient Rome, a celebration of the harvest god which included feasting, songs, holly boughs and evergreen wreaths, candle-lighting, present-giving, and processions. This was the precursor of the Christmas season in early Britain, whose mostly rural population, under the auspices of local lords, combined the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival and spun out their celebrations over twelve days. By 1645, however, Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan forces detected a hot whiff of paganism in these rituals of the winter season and (Grinch-like) called an end to them. By the time Charles II was restored to the throne and the restrictions were rescinded, the traditions were largely forgotten and remained so for almost two hundred years. Even during the early part of the industrial Revolution, most people were too busy toiling and laboring to be bothered with a holiday which had fallen out of favor. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a blaze of creative enthusiasm, and it became an immediate sensation. The warmth and charity of Dickens’s vision struck such a powerful chord in both England and the United States that everyone suddenly wanted to celebrate Christmas again in the old fashion.

[Cigarette card: Sir Seymour Hicks, British actor whose most famous role was Ebenezer Scrooge]

The first printing of A Christmas Carol was 6000 copies, and it sold out in a matter of days. Dickens had personally designed and edited the book; but in his desire to produce as handsome an artifact as possible he spared no expense, and his profit was consequently much smaller than expected. For me, one of the most exciting parts of my public presentation Out of the Blacking Factory: Charles Dickens at the New York Public Library was the opportunity, courtesy of the Rare Books Division, to display that 1843 edition, the one which Dickens himself saw into print. It is an exquisite little gem of a book, in a reddish binding stamped in gilt, and it fits comfortably in your hand. Several of the familiar John Leech illustrations, such as “Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball” and “The Second of the Three Spirits” are hand-colored and seem to glow with a luminescence that is never captured in any of the reprints or on the Internet. You can see the Rare Books Division's copy again during my final presentation on January 16th. In the meantime, another copy of the same work is on display as part of the Berg Collection’s Literary Christmas Miscellany exhibition through January 4th, located in Room 315.

Like many others, my first exposure to A Christmas Carol was watching the old British movie with Alastair Sim on television every year, an event I looked forward to almost as much as the annual The Wizard of Oz. Those stark black and white images stuck in my head, and led to the feeling (which lingers in some form to this day) that the dark hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning contained some sort of potent magic and that interesting events on a ghostly plane were a distinct possibility. Still, no matter how many of the endless dramatizations and adaptations you’ve seen--and what winter season would be complete without one or two--there is no experience comparable to actually reading A Christmas Carol. I was in college when I discovered the book for the first time and recognized that what sets this work apart is Dickens’s unique voice. He is the narrator who, with the observation “Marley was as dead as a door-nail,” reflects that he himself might have regarded “a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of iron-mongery in the trade.” When Scrooge discovers the knocker with Marley’s face, it is “not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” And, after the night’s supernatural doings are over, he informs us that Scrooge “had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total-Abstinence Principle ever afterwards.” These are just a few of the verbal niceties that could never be captured on film. I’ve read A Christmas Carol almost every year for half a lifetime now, and the liveliness and energy of Dickens’s words never fail to cast their Victorian magic spell. These days, just before Christmas, I read it out loud to my wife, one stave per night, a routine which has become an indispensible part of our personal holiday tradition.

Words or music? Which is more important to opera? This is a question which intrigues opera lovers, such as me, as it is endlessly arguable without being finally answerable. Richard Strauss devoted an entire opera, Capriccio, to the debate. The opera culminates in a lengthy scene of ecstatic, mesmerizing musical intensity* which might seem to give the nod to music, if not for what the soprano is actually singing: that words and music are both indispensible, take one away and whatever is left will not be opera.

This season, the Metropolitan Opera has plastered every nook and cranny of the city with posters of Renée Fleming as Thaïs (just as, last year, you couldn’t turn around without spotting Natalie Dessay as the mad Lucia). If I’m any interpreter of expressions, this Thaïs, peeking knowingly through a loose lock of hair, is probably not thinking about her next trip to the library. But, music and words aside, the library is a good source for tracing the seed from which most operas are grown-- their original literary sources. Shakespeare had Holinshed, but the operas we now love typically sprang from works of popular fiction or drama, most of which have fallen out of fashion and are now known only through their later, musical incarnations. Of the few works I’ve selected to discuss, the library has multiple editions, but I’ve chosen the English translations (where applicable), and only those volumes which contain compelling illustrations. (Click on the picture for the catalog record.)  read more »

If you noticed me at any time during the last few weeks, skulking through the halls of the New York Public Library, I was probably clutching a plump little volume in one hand, wondering when I’d get another chance to read a few more pages. That copy of Dombey and Son was my loyal companion for a long time. Henry James might have derisively called nineteenth-century novels “loose, baggy monsters,” but I certainly appreciated the scope of this book, the sense of time passing, lives changing, characters intersecting on a vast, 900-page canvas. It made me wonder how much more intense the reading experience would have been, as it was originally conceived, in monthly numbers stretching over a year or so. The closest analogy I could come up with were the glory days of Masterpiece Theatre, before the VCR was even invented, when I just had to be home on Sunday night to catch the next episode of “I, Claudius” or “Jewel in the Crown.”

I have had some trouble with Dickens in the past. My initial enthusiasm in starting one of his books usually peters out after the first few hundred pages. Maybe I just start to long for a female character who does not so totally embody the concept of goodness. But, since I’ve been preparing my public presentation on Charles Dickens, I thought I’d try again and chose one of the few novels I’d never read before, Dombey and Son. To my surprise, it’s one of the most thoroughly enjoyable Dickens novels I can remember. Of course, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of talking myself into feeling the way I think I should be feeling, but in this case there are many substantive reasons for my enjoyment—one of which might just be that I came to it at the right moment in my life.  read more »

As a professional librarian at the main reference desk, I do whatever it takes to respond to a particular question, and I never become judgmental about the quality of that question. That’s Library School 101. I will admit, however, to wondering sometimes where certain questions come from, or what it might mean for the culture at large when a number of people start asking the same question at the same time. For instance, what should I make of the fact that there have been several requests lately--by New Yorkers, no less!-- for books about vampires? Is it because Halloween is coming? Are they folklorists, horror literature fans, or just people who are trying to distract themselves from the terrifying facts of real life, such as the possible results of the upcoming election?  read more »

My apartment does not contain exquisite little Meissen porcelain figures, or walls full of J. M. W. Turner watercolors, or a locked case full of exotic anthropological artifacts from Papua New Guinea, or even a valuable stamp or coin collection. Instead, I’ve managed to surround myself with many well-loved objects of no intrinsic value: books, CDs, movies. This reflection was inspired by my decision, over the Labor Day weekend, finally to get rid of my personal VHS video library. I suppose I should confess at the outset that my VCR has been non-functional for over a year now, and I was holding onto my collection only as a sort of historical relic while I bored my friends insensible with the question of whether to buy a new VCR or to replace the tapes with DVDs. It’s no secret how much superior a format the DVD is; when I last watched one of those tapes, a year ago, I was well aware that it was like gazing through the surface of a stagnant pond. And how often can you watch the same movie, anyway? Some, if not most, of you will wonder what the fuss is all about. A few, I hope, will recognize the time, energy, money, and love that go into a collecting compulsion. You might even be holding onto similar accumulations yourself.  read more »

In previous posts chronicling my reading habits and tastes, I’ve invoked the names of authors like Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Austen, and Shakespeare, perhaps giving the impression that I invariably spend my time with only the best that literature has to offer. Before you brand me an elitist (and ruin my chances at a future presidential bid), let me state for the record that I also have my guilty reading pleasures, and they often run right alongside my more literary pursuits. A difficult question is what makes certain fiction “popular” and other fiction “literary.” Although the best popular or genre fiction can have psychological depth, moral purpose, social insight, stylistic competence or sometimes even finesse. . .somehow you know you’re not reading Proust. One handy measure is narrative speed. With any of the authors named above, I slow down, savor passages, sometimes even do a bit of subvocalizing while I’m reading. Hearing the words play out in my head takes more time than absorbing great chunks of prose all at once, but when it comes to reading what does time matter except as a big, warm sea to splash around in? Books on a popular level are more compulsively gobbled, making them dicey choices for reading at night. On more than one occasion I’ve set down my breakneck-paced mystery just before going to bed with a sense of having stepped off a train after a long trip and still feeling the speeding motion. Inner speeding does not make for a good night’s sleep.  read more »