Category Archives: Booklore

Entries and posts that relate to the creation or consumption of books

States of a poem called Black Tuesday

May Swenson’s elegy for Martin Luther King cast as a set of beatitudes and collected in Iconographs is marked by the traces of the peculiarities of composition by typewriter. The word “blessed” occurs often but it is marked with an … Continue reading

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Missing Spooks

I was engrossed in William Gibson’s Spook Country when I discovered a binding error in my copy. Ironic since the missing chunk occurs just after Chapter 55 “Phantom Gun Syndrome”. So I managed to locate a complete version of the … Continue reading

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Logo Imaginings

The logo of the American Academy of Bookbinding reminds me of the animal caricature of the wise old owl. Four squares brought into formation to form a larger square. The bottom two have a white circle on black ground (the … Continue reading

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Page Turning

As Appendix B to More Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis there is “A Reminiscence of 1898 by Wilfred Hugh Chesson” in which Wilde comments on the impact of page size on the experience of reading. “I do … Continue reading

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Juxtapositions

In our household books move and arrive arrested in some interesting configurations: Susan Stewart’s On Longing underneath Wendell Berry’s Home Economics and both bearing well under the weight of the two volume C.K. Scott Moncrieff translations of Proust’s Recherche. Sometimes … Continue reading

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Birthday (mine)

Thinking of Chris Bearchell who passed away last month at the age of 53. Having read the obituary pieces in the gay and alternative press, I turned to personal recollections of having been a frequent guest at the Walnut Street … Continue reading

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Gatherings

Joy Harjo has a line in “The Field of Miracles” in The woman who fell from the sky: poems that opens the imagination to the strength of attentions to particulars: the leaf a codex for the season of memory The … Continue reading

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