May Reading Room Update

The May Reading Room Hours were a success! New members joined, books were checked out and many members stopped by to see the collections. As a by-product of being located next to the King Neighborhood Farmers Market- the Library even had some non-members wander in.


The Reading Room will not be open during June & July so that the PLL Librarian can travel to Belgium and the Netherlands; where many trips to libraries there will occur! Please look forward to attending the Reading Room Hours in August.

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

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

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