Openings (and New Aqcuisitions, April 2011)

One cannot travel anywhere in the back country of the United States, especially west of the Great Plains, without being impressed by the many evidences of old mines showing grayly on the flanks of ragged mountains and crumbling ghost towns wrapped in sage and silence at the ends of long abandoned dirt roads.

-first sentence from A Range Guide to Mines and Minerals by Jay Ellis Ransom


In addition to the incredible A Range Guide to Mines and Minerals from Smithson's Personal Library, new March/April acquisitions include:

Learning and Language: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Calvino Personal Library)

Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Mitchell Personal Library)

Culture & Anarchy by Matthew Arnold (Smithson Personal Library)

Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century by J.L.E. Dreyer (Smithson Personal Library)


The Complete Poetry of William Blake (Borges Personal Library)
and
Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka by Edgar Allan Poe (Calvino Personal Library)


It is with humility really unassumed--it is with a sentiment even of awe--that I pen the opening sentence of this work; for of all conceivable subjects I approach the reader with the most solemn--the most comprehensive--the most difficult--the most august.

-first sentence from Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe

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.

August & September Acquisitions

The newest acquisitions to the Personal Libraries Library span the collections. They include from the Robert Smithson Collection:

Candide by Voltaire
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

From the Jorge Luis Borges Collection:

Hedda Gabler by Henrick Ibsen
The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon


And from the Italo Calvino Collection:

Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec (pictured above)
Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp

Please contact the Librarian at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com to check out any of the books!

Lastly, a confluence of covers:

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!

Italo Calvino Personal Library Collection

FICTION & POETRY
Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso - IC 3.17 2010
Borges, Jorge Luis & Adolfo Bioy Casares, Extraordinary Tales - IC 3.30 2012
Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones - IC 3.2 2010
de Quincey, Thomas, Joan of Arc and The English Mail-Coach - IC 3.29 2011
Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pecuchet - IC 3.1 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary - IC 3.15 2010
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana - IC 3.11 2010
Irving, Washington, Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories - IC 3.21 2010
Joyce, James, Finnegan's Wake - IC 3.3 2010
Joyce, James, Ulysses - IC 3.12 2010
Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being - IC 3.7 2010
Leopardi, Giacomo, Pensieri - IC 3.33 2013
Lucretius, The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura) - IC 3.32 2012
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain - IC 3.16 2010
Musil, Robert, The Man Without Qualities - IC 3.4 2010
Perec, Georges, Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties - IC 3.19 2010
Perec, Georges, Life, A User's Manual - IC 3.5 2010
Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Prose, Poetry and Eureka - IC 3.24 2011
Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive & Cities of the Plain - IC 3.20 2010
Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night's Dream - IC 3.25 2011
Shakespeare, William, As You Like It - IC 3.27 2011
Sterne, Laurence, Tristam Shandy - IC 3.28 2011
Stevens, Wallace, Poems - IC 3.26 2011
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels - IC 3.8 2010
Valery, Paul, Monsieur Teste - IC 3.22 2011
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass - IC 3.13 2010
Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days - IC 3.10 2010

ART & CRITICISM
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida - IC 3.6 2010
Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky - IC 3.23 2011
Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale - IC 3.18 2010
Valery, Paul, Variety, Second Series, including "The Position of Baudelaire" - IC 3.31 2012
Zellini, Paolo, A Brief History of Infinity - IC 3.34 2014******

SCIENCE
Galilei, Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - IC 3.9 2010
Hofstadter, Douglas, Godel, Escher, Bach - IC 3.14 2010

* indicates last book accessioned to the library

Italo Calvino Personal Library Wish List

This ongoing list has been gleaned from Calvino's books Six Memos for the Next Millenium and The Uses of Literature. The vestiges of Six Memos can be seen in a sorting of books into Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility & Multiplicity (these make up five of the six "memos," the sixth (Consistency) was never completed.) Other forms of categorization are to follow.

LIGHTNESS
Decameron by Boccaccio
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Voyage Dans la Lune by Cyrano de Bergerac
Baron von Munchausen, illustrations by Gustave Dore
Epicurius by Galileo Galilei
Thousand and One Nights, translated by Antoine Galland
Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
The Knight of the Bucket by Franz Kafka
Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl
History of Astronomy by Giacomo Leopardi
Ars Magna by Raymond Lully
Little Testament by Montale, translated by Jonathan Galassi
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare

QUICKNESS
Un Vieille Maitresse by Barbey d'Aurevilly (Pleiade Edition)
The Vision of Sudden Death by Thomas De Quincey
The Tester by Galileo Galilei
Essays and Dialogues by Giacomo Leopardi
Plume by Henri Michaux
German Medieval Traditions by Gaston Paris
Lettere Famigliari by Petrarch
Prose Poems by Francis Ponge
Histoire de Notre Image by Andre Virel (published 1965)

EXACTITUDE
Codex Atlanticus by Leonardo
Song of the Great Wild Rooster by Giacomo Leopardi
L’anguilla by Eugenio Montale
The Purpose of Things by Francis Ponge

VISIBILITY
The Unknown Masterpiece & The Human Comedy by Balzac
Purgatory by Dante Alighieri
Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola
The Empire of the Imaginary by Jean Starobinski (in La Relation Critique, 1970)

MULTIPLICITY
The Legibility of the World by Hans Blumenberg (published 1981)
Acquainted with Grief by Carlo Emilio Gadda
Kosmos by Humboldt
Absolute Love by Alfred Jarry (1899)
Deliberate Disharmony by Gian Carlo Roscioni
ADDENDUM: following are authors that Calvino mentions in Six Memos, without specifying a text. The PLL is researching the exact texts that Calvino read and had in his Personal Library.

Raymond Queneau, Giodarno Bruno, Wittgenstein, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Fernando Pessoa, Mallarme, Hoffmansthal, Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, Massimo Bontempelli,
Ramon Gomez de la Serna, William Carlos Williams, Michel Leiris, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, Plato, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Spinoza, Leibniz, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Leskov, Stevenson, Kipling, Wells, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Turgenev, Potocki, Gogol, Nerval, Gautier, Hoffman, Chamisso, Arnim, Eichendorff

Personal Libraries Library Reference Library

The PLL is pleased to announce the formation of a reference section. Following are books that are great sources about those whose libraries are being collected. These books are available during Reading Room Hours only, and not for check out.

MARIA MITCHELL
Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renee Bergland - Ref MM 1.1

ROBERT SMITHSON
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings edited by Jack Flam - Ref RS 2.1
Robert Smithson organized by Eugenie Tsai with Cornelia Butler - Ref RS 2.2

ITALO CALVINO (more to be added)
Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino - Ref IC 3.1
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino - Ref IC 3.2

JORGE LUIS BORGES (more to be added)
Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions edited by Eliot Weinberger - Ref JLB 4.1

New Acquistitions to the Robert Smithson Personal Library!

The Personal Libraries Library has been busy acquiring books for the Robert Smithson Personal Library. These new acquisitions include: t zero by Italo Calvino, Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges, Four Essays on Philosophy by Mao Tse-Tung, H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, and Language as Symbolic Action by Kenneth Burke.

t zero, a collection of short stories that contemplate the creation and evolution of the universe (a sequel to Cosmicomics), has an amazing short story that was most likely of interest to Smithson named Crystals. It follows Qfwfq (the main character of these stories) as it commutes from New Jersey to New York through prisms, crystals, lava & magma. The journey is not only a lesson in entropy but also stretches the boundaries of time:

"It could have been different, I know,- Qfwfq remarked,- you're telling me: I believed so firmly in that world of crystal that was supposed to come forth that I can't resign myself to living still in this world, amorphous and crumbling and gummy, which has been our lot, instead. I run all the time like everybody else, I take the train each morning (I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerging beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there, going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that crisscross that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its sides and its edges." (t zero, Italo Calvino, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich:1967, pp. 28-29)

Crystals is reflected (whether directly or coincidentally) in Robert Smithson's own writing, most specifically in his 1967 work, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, when discussing the landscape that he was viewing, recording and monumentalizing:

'That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is - all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other "out of date" things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the "big events" of history.' (Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam ed., University of California Press: 1996, p. 72)

Members can check-out these new acquisitions by contacting the PLL at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com. Also look out for even more new books that are forthcoming!