April 2012, New Acquisitions (Arendt to Wyndham)

The Personal Libraries Library newest acquisitions comprise of:

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (Robert Smithson Collection)

On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism by Colin Cherry (Robert Smithson Collection)

The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts (Jorge Luis Borges Collection)

The Cantos (1-95) by Ezra Pound (Robert Smithson Collection)

Time & Western Man by Wyndham Lewis (Robert Smithson Collection)


The Cantos (1-95) of Ezra Pound include the first 95 Cantos of Pound's monumental poem. These were first published as six separate books: A Draft of XXX Cantos, Eleven New Cantos, The Fifth Decad of Cantos, Cantos LII-LXXI, the Pisan Cantos, and Section: Rock-Drill.

Please contact the PLL at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com for membership details or other information.

June Acquisitions / Somehow None for the Calvino Collection

Our new acquisitions include, from the Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Collection:

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Professional Secrets by Jean Cocteau

and Geometry and Faith by Thomas Hill from the Maria Mitchell Personal Library Collection.

From the Robert Smithson Personal Library Collection, we just accessioned:

Ritual Magic by E. M. Butler
Some Versions of the Pastoral by William Empson
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Symbols, Signals & Noise: The Nature and Process of Communication by J.R. Pierce
and
Rock Art of the American Indian by Campbell Grant



Grant's book includes many incredible photographs and illustrations. Above illustrates sandstone paintings by the Chumash of California. It details that "only the Chumash and the neighboring Yokuts painted on smoke-blackened surfaces."


Some Versions of the Pastoral joins Empson's other book The Structure of Complex Words on the shelf. They make a fine pair.


Please contact the Librarian at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com for information about the Personal Libraries Library or if you are a member and want to check out any of these new books.

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!

Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Collection

FICTION & POETRY
Bennett, Arnold, Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days - JLB 4.35 2012
Blake, William, The Complete Poetry - JLB 4.24 2011
Burton, Sir Richard, The Book of the Thousand and One Nights - JLB 4.28 2011
Cortazar, Julio, A Change of Light and Other Stories - JLB 4.6 2010
Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders - JLB 4.25 2011
Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pecuchet - JLB 4.1 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary - JLB 4.11 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, The Temptation of St. Anthony - JLB 4.22 2011
Garnett, David, A Man in the Zoo - JLB 4.27 2011
Gide, Andre, The Counterfeiters - JLB 4.7 2010
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol I - JLB 4.39 2014
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol II - JLB 4.40 2014*****
Ibsen, Henrik, Hedda Gabler - JLB 4.16 2010
Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt - JLB 4.37 2012
Kafka, Franz, Amerika - JLB 4.10 2010
Joyce, James, Ulysses - JLB 4.3 2010
Melville, Herman, Four Short Novels: Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Encantadas - JLB 4.29 2011
Meyrink, Gustav, The Golem - JLB 4.34 2012
O'Brien, Flann, At Swim-Two Birds - JLB 4.14 2010
O'Neill, Eugene, Strange Interlude - JLB 4.23 2011
Phillpotts, Eden, The Red Redmaynes - JLB 4.33 2012
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe - JLB 4.38 2012
Stevenson, Robert Louis, New Arabian Nights - JLB 4.36 2012
Sturlisson, Snorri, Egils Saga - JLB 4.2 2010
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels - JLB 4.9 2010
Walpole, Hugh, Above the Dark Circus - JLB 4.31 2011
Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man & The War of the Worlds - JLB 4.17 2010
Wells, H.G., The Time Machine - JLB 4.13 2010
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass - JLB 4.5 2010
Wilde, Oscar, The Works of Oscar Wilde - JLB 4.19 2010

HISTORY, ECONOMICS & POLITICS
Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History - JLB 4.4 2010
Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 2) - JLB 4.15 2010
Polo, Marco, The Travels of Marco Polo - JLB 4.8 2010
Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class - JLB 4.20 2010

SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS
Dunne, J.W., An Experiment with Time - JLB 4.18 2010
Kasner, Edward & James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination - JLB 4.32 2011

PHILOSOPHY
Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling - JLB 4.30 2011

RELIGION
Aldous Huxley, Intro, The Bhagavad-Gita - JLB 4.12 2010
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience - JLB 4.21 2011

LITERARY CRITICISM & THEORY
Cocteau, Jean, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau - JLB 4.26 2011

Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Wish List

The following list has been compiled from multiple sources, most importantly Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books: 1999). In this important tome can be found numerous essays and lectures by Borges- it is through culling these texts that the library has begun to compile a Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Collection. This collection endeavors to recreate the books that Borges read and wrote about, books that at one time were a part of his personal library. The initial source for his books in the PLL collection comes from his list "A Personal Library," the prologue of which states:

Over time, one's memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share. (Selected Non-Fictions, 513)

Following is his list of 100 texts for "A Personal Library;" also present are texts gleaned from other essays including "Joyce's Ulysses," "A Defense of Bouvard & Pecuchet," and "German Literature in the Age of Bach."

FICTION & POETRY
Fantastic Stories by Juan Jose Arreola
Vathek by William Beckford
The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
The Blue Cross and Other Stories by G.K. Chesterton
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Hour of All by Fransisco de Quevedo
Marcus Brutus by Fransisco de Quevedo
The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas De Quincey
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Mandarin by J.M. Eca de Queiroz
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
Lady into Fox by David Garnett
The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
The Bead Game by Herman Hesse
The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James
The Lesson of the Master by Henry James 
The Private Life by Henry James
Short Stories by Franz Kafka 
Tales by Rudyard Kipling 
The Idols by Manuel Mujica Lainez
The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen 
The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlink
A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
The Great God Brown by Eugene O'Neill 
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill 
The Blind Pilot by Giovanni Papini
The Tragic Everyday by Giovanni Papini
Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo 
Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwab
Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw
Candide by George Bernard Shaw
Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Aeneid by Virgil
Stories by Voltaire
Essays and Dialogues by Oscar Wilde

MATH & SCIENCE
On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

RELIGION
The Apocryphal Gospels
The Book of the Dead, E.A. Wallis Budge (Routledge, 1960)
An Explanation of the Book of Job by Fray Luis de Leon
The Song of Songs by Fray Luis de Leon
The Study of Human Nature by William James
The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones

CRITICISM & HISTORY
The Blood of the Poor by Leon Bloy
In the Darkness by Leon Bloy
Salvation for the Jews by Leon Bloy
Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by R. Gomez de la Serna
Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
The Nine Books of History by Herodotus
An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano

"Endgame", "The I Ching" & Other New Acquisitions for Smithson Collection

New members and a trip to a Ventura, California used bookstore has led to the acquisition of new books from the Robert Smithson Personal Library. They include Jorge Luis Borges' Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, Samuel Beckett's Endgame (including Act Without Words: A Mime For One Player, which reads like a Yoko Ono Instruction Piece) and The I Ching, translated by Wilhelm & Baynes with a foreword by C. G. Jung.


Also acquired is the interesting Man's Discovery of His Past: Literary Landmarks in Archaeology, edited by Robert F. Heizer (seen above) and Alice Ford's Audubon's Butterflies, Moths, and Other Studies.


Ford's book on Audubon is a beautifully letterpressed book that gives a history of Audubon and his field sketches. It also contains many plates of Audubon's images, including many insects and beetles that are an important part of his work; yet are generally overlooked.


Lastly, a small volume of The Megalith Builders of Europe by Glyn Daniel rounds out the newest bunch of books accessioned by the PLL. Daniel's book discusses the Pre-Historic megalithic tombs and temples of Europe, detailing their builders, structure, use and prevalence. One can see how these graves and hunebeds of piled stone would interest Smithson, as well as their entropic changes throughout time.


Please contact the Library at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com to join & check out books!

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

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.

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!

The First Books to be Checked Out!

The PLL is ecstatic to announce that the first books have been checked out of the library by members (besides the Librarian herself.) Both books are from the Robert Smithson Personal Library Collection: Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings.

The Second PLL Collection: Robert Smithson!

The Personal Libraries Library is happy to announce the beginning of its second collection: the Robert Smithson Personal Library.

The Library was recently reminded (thanks Lacey!) that the personal library of Robert Smithson was catalogued shortly after his death. The catalogue, compiled by Valentin Tatransky, can be found in Robert Smithson, organized by Eugenie Tsai with Cornelia Butler (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.) This catalogue is not comprehensive in itself, but is quite extensive. Some books from Smithson's personal library are also currently in the Library's librarian's personal library and have seamlessly become the beginning of the Robert Smithson Personal Library. These include Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones and Labyrinths, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea and Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. Due to this fortuitous overlap, the catalogue set forth by Tatransky, and the Library's interest in Smithson, he seemed like the perfect second collection.



Interestingly enough, there was not only cross-over in Smithson's and the librarian's libraries, but also that of Maria Mitchell! Emerson's Essays and The Marble Faun can be found in the Maria Mitchell- and Robert Smithson Personal Library. Please note the multiple book cards.


Please peruse the Robert Smithson Personal Library Catalogue to see the Library's holdings. Also, check the Robert Smithson Wish List if you want to donate a book, or find a book and care to alert the Library. Contact the Library at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com