Just one more book

I’ve just tracked down one of those rooms I said I loved (here): it belongs to Prof. Richard A. Macksey, at Johns Hopkins. The library comprises over 70,000 volumes. That’s rather a lot. Here’s a video, with shots of his beautiful library. I particularly like all the lovely Windsor chairs.

For the Birds

I must be.

Keep an eye out for the next post, which will be a very exciting affair altogether.

More Medieval Madness

So my friend Kate and I went to Bennett & Kerr today and once we got in the door we began to resemble Mr Nicholson(above). There are just so many goodies in this place that I cannot begin to tell you about. When the printed catalogue arrived it had me foaming at the mouth. Very few of the books I wanted were actually there, which was disappointing but probably a jolly good thing. Neither of us knew exactly the road, but Kate's excellent friend, Mr Sat Nav, knew the way and gently guided us all the way. We were warmly welcomed by Marion, who made us tea and let us wander around like crazy feral children. Every now and then there'd be a gasp and the sound of another book being thrown greedily onto the 'maybe' pile. This was duly transformed into the 'must have' pile. I was delighted with my haul. Curry's Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences; Boitani's Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame; Coopland's edition of Philippe de Mézières' Epistre au Roi Richart; E.G. Stanley's Continuations and Beginnings. Overall, a very good morning's work. Kate picked up some marvellous things, valuable and interesting stuff. But I shan't say more about hers. It might be mistaken for envy.

The one wot didn't get away

At last. Mine. Mwha mwha. Gorni's edition of the Vita nova. The 'Wants' section of Abebooks really does work. The email telling me a copy was available came first thing in the morning and I couldn't get my credit card out fast enough. This is really very scarce and I am delighted to have it. The book is what the Italians delightfully call intonso, meaning the pages are uncut. The bookseller's description might have been interpreted as saying that this was a fault with the publishers, on a par with the small tear on the cover. But I didn't care. I was so afraid that it would get here I said nothing until it arrived and it now sits on my desk. I also ordered a copy of Luciano Rossi's edition of the by Guinizzelli, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati, 17 (Einaudi, 2002 [ISBN: 8806152696]). Very happy to have this too. My next big(ish) purchase will be Rosanna Bettarini's splendid two-volume edition of Petrarch's Canzoniere, Nuova raccolta di classici italian annotati, 21 (Einaudi, 2005).

Now running around making final arrangements for our Light conference tomorrow and Saturday. Looking forward to it, or I would if I could sit for a minute.

Another wot got away

I thought I nearly had it. A tad over-priced, but I was willing. Postage cost a disgrace, but that's the way of it. And then a message, the bookseller regrets that this book is not in place: it may have been sold to a customer who walked in off the street, or the seller's database has not been updated. So that's that. I know it will come up again; it'll be in the window of a charity shop, or I'll find it online again and I'll be that person who walked in of the street and gets it in time. Patience with books leads to good collections.

It was Guglielmo Gorni's edition of the Vita nova for the 'Nuova Raccolta di classici italiani annotati', published by Einaudi, in 1996 (ISBN: 8806132253). I must admit I find myself convinced by his renumbering of the chapters. Numerology is always a tricky one to argue, because it's so flexible and can be made to perform incredible acrobatics for you that just work somehow, but the patterns around the number 9 are very stimulating and compelling. See too his article ''Paragrafi' e titolo della «Vita Nova»', Studi di filologia italiana, 53 (1995), 203-222 for an account. There's something very economical about his argument and his critique of Barbi's assertion that the divisions are inconsistent in the extant manuscripts is powerful. (Cf. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta, 'From Manuscript to Print: The Case of Dante's Vita Nuova', in Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. by Theodore J. Cachey, William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies, 1 [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], pp. 83-114, for another view, of considerably more shaky philological foundation).

But I cannot complain. Lately I've been finding some lovely things here and there. Kenelm Foster's The Two Dantes (London, 1977), in lovely condition, and a very good pb of his Petrarch (Edinburgh, 1984). The former I found before a visit to Cambridge last week. I took it as a good omen for my journey, and it was indeed a good omen. While in Cambridge I found a lovely copy of Gordon's The Double Sorrow of Troilus (Oxford, 1970), and Barron's Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester, 1980).

Pausing, then Effecting

A quick visit to my local secondhand bookshop ended up a bit of a crisis of hyperventilation and overspending. The usual story. One of the retiring dons has off-loaded some of his books, and he had a research interest in good stuff, like Chaucer. This means that there were many things I wanted. I had to make three piles in the end. The stuff I couldn't live without. The stuff I could live without for today (but no guarantees about tomorrow). And the stuff I know I'll regret not buying. (That's usually as good as it gets, I'm afraid). In the end I think that I was exemplary in my restraint and good judgment. First to call out to me was M.B. Parkes' Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992). A hard to find book, very competitively priced (£20). That was the little gem. Something I've used, and coveted, and wanted to own for a long time. The rest was all criticism I don't own but have read (with varying degrees of attentiveness). Owning them now and having them on my shelf obviously means I can return to them in my own time and ruminate. (That's the justification). Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (CUP, 1973); David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (RKP, 1980), and very serendipitously Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 1992). Super stuff. A very happy bunny.

Enciclopedia dantesca, gen. ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols (Treccani, 1970-1976)

In 1944 the idea for a new encyclopedia on Dante was suggested by Umberto Bosco (1900-1987). This was designed to replace the Scartazzini 3-volume Hoepli encyclopedia published between 1896-1905. The new encyclopedia actually only took shape during the 1965 celebrations for the 700th anniversary of the Poeta's birth. In 1970 the first volume appeared from Treccani in Rome, and by 1976 the fifth and final volume of lemmata had appeared. A sixth volume appeared the following year, and contained an appendix of texts and illustrations. Thus was completed a monument of Dante scholarship. Whatever is missing from this encyclopedia is simply not worth knowing. In 1984 a 2nd edition was printed, though the revision appears to be mainly an updated bibliography rather than any alterations to the individual entries. Italian publishers are very good at producing luxury books. Think of Vallecchi, for example. So too Treccani reissued the Enciclopedia dantesca in 1996 in a beautiful deluxe edition. This edition, now out of print, was issued in 2500 copies in full leather and just exquisitely produced. The boards are lined with silk and each volume is individually boxed in leather, silk and suede.

Lately I managed to acquire a copy of the ED. It sits now by my desk and is consulted about five times a day, and that's when I'm not working on Dante. Because Dante's poem is encyclopedic, the encyclopedia is...well...even more encyclopedic. Quid dicam?

For scholars who don't read Italian there is the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. by Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 2000). I've used it and found it very good, especially for taking account of more recent approaches and bibliography. It does not pretend to replace the ED, and a single volume of 1,000 pages could not possibly do so. But just as the ED was put together by the great Dante scholars of the time, so too does the Dante Encyclopedia comprise entries by the big Dante scholars around at the moment.

Closure

Joy unbounded. Back in May 2005 I posted on a volume of the Mondadori reprint of the Ricciardi Opere minori of Dante. I had been looking for vol. 1/1, the Vita nuova and Rime ed. by Domenico de Robertis and Gianfranco Contini. It had been and has been annoying me for a long time. Well, guess what? I found it. Quite by chance, just a casual browse on an Italian version of Abebooks which is called Maremagnum. I find it a very useful site for s/h Italian books, though I do wish that Italian postal charges were a little lower. They seem to also list some of the booksellers on Abebooks, and indeed on Abebooks you'll find some of the sellers who list with Maremagnum. The site charges a commission, which seems fair enough, and they do tell you what they charge. The bookseller is called Studio Bibliografico Orfeo and it is in via Torleone 20/a, 40125 Bologna (tel. +39 051 6360113). Needless to say after looking for this book for about five years it is very satisfying to find it in Bologna. They also sent me a very elegant catalogue of their stock and it looks very interesting. Not a huge amount of Dante, but a few nice things.

The value of these editions is their commentaries, which are excellent. The texts themselves are, bit by bit, being superseded by more recent editions, such as de Robertis' edition of the Rime (I want it I want it etc), Brambilla-Ageno's text of the Convivio and Gorni's edition of the VN, though in this last case we may be talking more about a question of a reinterpretation of the divisio textus rather than individual lectiones; undoubtedly Barbi's text is still extremely important.

I had heard a rumour that Treccani, who bought the Ricciardi catalogue, were going to publish the Opere minori again, and I have a feeling they're going to bring it out in those editions they sell with the Sunday newspapers. I've already seen one of the Promessi sposi and would guess it's going to be the same for Dante. I have another little find that I'll post about soon, but will wait until it arrives!

Lesley Grant-Adamson, Guilty Knowledge (Faber, 1986)

Trinity Rare Books is a wonderful second-hand and antique bookshop in Carrick-on-Shannon (that's in Co. Letirim, in the northwest of Ireland, for my international readers) and I paid a visit on Saturday to wish Nick and Joanna festive greetings. They have good stock in the shop, especially Irish literature and local material. There are some nice early McGaherns and you often see lovely Kavanaghs and Yeats there. There's even an early Ulysses, though I don't think that's for sale. I picked up a couple of nice things, including Arsenio Frugoni, Incontri nel Medioevo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1979), and a copy of Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, as well as the book I review below. The Frugoni is a collection of previously published articles, some of which are very famous, such as his very interesting work on circumstances surrounding Boniface VIII's jubilee year of 1300 (the year in which Dante sets the Commedia). His daughter Chiara is a famous medieval historian too. Mad Christmas dinners in that house, I should think. I once went in to Trinity Books after they'd bought a load of wonderful Italian stuff and picked up copies of Peter Armour, The Door of Purgatory: A Study of Multiple Symbolism in Dante's Purgatorio (Oxford: OUP, 1983), and his Dante's Griffin and the History of the World, as well as John Took, "L'etterno piacer": Aesthetic Ideas in Dante, John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion and Rachel Jacoff (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Except for the last all hardbacks, and all in great shape. I actually thought I was having a mirage to see all that stuff in one place in what is the least densely populated part of Western Europe. I may have started to hyperventilate or at least make some form of alarming moaning noises. You just never know where or when a book is going to turn up. Of course it's the stuff I didn't buy then that still sticks in my mind, like Patrick Boyde's Dante Phylomythes, to be republished imminently in paperback, or Anthony Cassell's Dante's Fearful Art of Justice, or the folly purchase which would have been three volumes of Edward Moore's Studies in Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896). But I'm getting over it, and was very grown-up about the whole thing. I've nearly forgotten about them. Three years later.

Lesley Grant-Adamson's third novel is called Guilty Knowledge and was published in 1986 by Faber. The novel's heroine, Rain Morgan, a gossip columnist with the Daily Post, hatches a plan to get a junkit to the Cote d'Azur for a few days in the depths of winter. She will interview Sabine Jourdain, the mistress of a famous artist, who rumour has it wants to talk. Off she goes with her on-off lover, a cartoonist named Oliver, and before you know it they are up to their necks in it. It seems that Rain and her questions have been the catalyst in a whole series of murderous events that leads even to her own safety being threatened. At the heart of the mystery seems to be the reclusive and brilliant artist Marius Durance and the group of glamourous people around him. There are the high-powered dealers, Benjamin and Merlyn Joseph, and Philippe Maurin, the charming gallery owner. And then the remains of Durance's coterie of beautiful women, Sabine herself, and Barbara Coleman. It seems the minute that Rain starts asking questions, both Sabine and Barbara are being urged not to speak, by the Josephs and by Maurin, but what could they have to say that threatens everyone?

Grant-Adamson's novels often have a female detective, or in this case just a nosey journalist who wants to get to the bottom of a murder (or two), and her strength is in the way she draws women who are both frightened of the situations they find themselves in, and determined to understand those situations. In this story Rain and Oliver are constantly about to catch a flight back to England but Rain wants to talk to one last person to put another piece of the puzzle in place. She is always about to say enough, this story isn't worth what's happening, but at the same time she is constantly making connections that draw her deeper and deeper, until eventually she gets in a little too deep. The book is well structured and interesting, though the title, Guilty Knowledge, does not quite work for the story and is, perhaps, a little banal. It's a pity because it is not written that way. It gets a little complicated at the end as the different threads are being brought together, but the killer and their motives (keeping it gender neutral there for you) have a powerful simplicity, like all the best murder stories. And the whole book has been preparing you for that simplicity.