February 2011 Reading Room & New Acquisitions

The February Reading Room Hours bring to an end the era of the small-bookcase for the Library. I am diligently sanding, staining & finishing the bookshelves for the Library to grow into. Look for the new shelves & Library room next month!

In addition to another successful Reading Room, the Library continues to grow in members and books.


The newest acquisitions include:

The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce & Jorge Luis Borges by L. A. Murillo (Smithson Collection)
The Varieties of Religious Experiences by William James (Borges Collection)
Monsieur Teste by Paul Valery (Calvino Collection)

Also, are two more books to add to the Flaubert contingent!:


The amazing covers of Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony and Victor Brombert's The Novels of Flaubert, from the Borges & Smithson Collections, respectively.


And lastly is Snapshots, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Smithson's Personal Library. The Library's edition has this amazing sheet taped in the back, showing Haslam's Bookstore's acquisition of the book on February 25, 1975. The Personal Libraries Library has now accessioned the same book almost exactly 36 years later! A beautiful parallel & paratext.

Please contact the Library at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com with queries about the books or membership. Also, please browse the Catalogues to see other books in the Library.

July Acquisitions! Piles of books from the Borges, Calvino & Smithson Collections!

A brief vacation for the Personal Libraries Library Librarian led to a brief vacation for the Library itself. Belgium was very inspiring & many books were purchased, unfortunately none for the PLL Collection. I did look for French versions of Flaubert, Perec and Queneau, but to no avail. Yet, books were piling up on the PLL doorstep awaiting my return and accession into the Collections. They include:

The Portable Blake with prose, poetry & drawings of William Blake (Robert Smithson Library),
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Italo Calvino Library),
At Swim-Two Birds by Flann O'Brien (Borges Library),
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Borges, Calvino & Smithson Libraries),
Amerika by Franz Kafka (Jorge Luis Borges Library),


and to accompany Madame Bovary, Philip Spencer's Flaubert: A Biography (with an amazing cover.) Another intriguing acquisition is Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.


A brief excerpt from a section called "Tangles Involving Science and the Occult:"

Speaking of psychics and ESP, another sphere of life where strange loops abound is fringe science. What fringe science does is to call into question many of the standard procedures or beliefs of orthodox science, and thereby challenge the objectivity of science. New ways of interpreting evidence that rival the established ones are presented. But how do you evaluate a way of interpreting evidence? Isn't this precisely the problem of objectivity all over again, just on a higher plane? Of course, Lewis Carroll's infinite-regress paradox appears in a new guise. (p. 693)


And the beautiful Berkeley Highland edition of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon (Smithson Library) is joined by his The Time Machine (Smithson & Borges Libraries.) A stunning duo.

The New Collections! Italo Calvino & Jorge Luis Borges

The PLL is happy to announce two new collections: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges! The first book of both libraries is Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet (also found in the Robert Smithson Personal Library.) Both Calvino and Borges wrote about the novel about two scriveners searching for universal knowledge; an unattainable quest. Below are two pages from the novel and are part of the PLL First Book Postcard Series.


There are already overlapping books in Italo Calvino's and Robert Smithson's Personal Libraries, including Musil's The Man Without Qualities, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake & Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. And, of course, the tangled knot continues with Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones.


Also newly accessioned to the Calvino library is Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec (a close friend of Calvino's), Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

Members are invited to check out books from the Calvino & Borges Personal Libraries!

Books, Books, Books! Science, Science, Science!

The Personal Libraries Library has recently acquired many books from the Robert Smithson Personal Library that are focused on science. One line of inquiry in Smithson's artwork was the transformation, entropy and detritus of geological elements. The images above and below are from Geology: Our Changing Earth through the Ages by Jerome Wyckoff.


"Cross section of a volcanic region shows how igneous activity in the crust produces various landscape forms- volcano, lava flows, dikes and sills, laccoliths, geysers and hot springs, and fumaroles." (Golden Press, 1967: 43)


The Library now has a set of books on rocks, minerals and crystals. They include: Crystals and Crystal Growing by Alan Holden & Phylis Singer, Field Book of Common Rocks and Minerals by Frederic Brewster Loomis, and Crystals, Diamonds, and Transistors by L.W. Marrison.


Two additional new books are Harry Asher's Experiments in Seeing and Flaubert's Bibliomania, a short tale about a man obsessed with books:

He saved all his money, all his goods, all his emotions for books. He had been a monk and for books he had abandoned God. Later he sacrificed for them that which men hold dearest after their God: money. Then he gave to books that which people treasure next to money: his soul. (The Rodale Press, 1954: 15)

Recent Library Acquisitions and Maria Mitchell's Observatory

The past month has been busy here at the Library. Multiple new members (welcome!) have lead to many new books! They include the beauties pictured above and below from the Robert Smithson Personal Library. They span from literary criticism such as Bernard Benstock's Joyce-Again's Wake to the metaphysical study in Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner, as well as Victor Von Hagen's The Aztec: Man and Tribe. Some of these books were also donated by a private donor from her own personal library. The Library thanks you!


Other acquisitions include Richard Burgin's Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. In Flaubert's amazing, satirical Dictionary, you can find the following (New Directions, 1954: 16):

ASTRONOMY. Delightful science. Of use only to sailors. In speaking of it, make fun of astrology.
ATHEISTS. 'A nation of atheists cannot survive.'
AUTHORS. One should 'know a few,' never mind their names.


Flaubert's seamless segue from Borges to Mitchell leads me to recount my pilgrimage, of sorts, to the Maria Mitchell Observatory at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The first building of Vassar, Mitchell lived and taught in the Observatory for many years. In fact, she slept in a cot in the classroom itself! The Observatory still stands, yet now contains multiple offices and a library resides in the observatory dome. The PLL finds this a particularly poetic library location due to Mitchell being a librarian herself.

New acquisitions to the Mitchell Library include Madame de Stael's Corinne and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Both are 19th century feminist texts that point to Mitchell's suffragist roots.