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.

October & November Acquisitions!

The Library is growing! Above shows the entire library, which will soon need new shelving. There have been many new acquisitions in the past two months, which means new members. Also, I must mention that we just passed our one-year anniversary!


There are new books for each collection, spanning many eras and subjects.

Italo Calvino Collection:
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive and Cities of the Plain

Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Smithson Collections both contain:
J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time
H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man & The War of the Worlds

Robert Smithson Collection also acquired:
Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero
Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge
Denis Diderot's The Nun
Geza Roheim's Magic and Schizophrenia


(another convergence of covers)

Even the Maria Mitchell Collection was added to with a beautiful version of Lord George Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Read to see why this Romantic poet was considered a "rock star" of his day! One can catch a glimpse of the dashing Byron on the title page engraving:


Please contact the Personal Libraries Library at personallibraries{at}gmail{dot}com to check out books, membership requests or any other questions!

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.

New Acquisitions to the Borges, Calvino & Smithson Libraries!

It seems that every day finds a book, or more, on the Library's doorstep. Pictured above are just a few of the newest acquisitions to the Borges, Calvino and Smithson Collections. Included in the new acquisitions are:

Robert Smithson Personal Library:
Thoreau as World Traveler by John Aldrich Christie, Crystals: Their Role in Nature by Charles Bunn, Roland Barthes' Elements of Semiology and The Origin of the Zodiac by Rupert Gleadow.

Italo Calvino Personal Library:
Specimen Days and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda and James Joyce's Ulysses.

Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library:
Snorri Sturlisson's Egils Saga, Heroes & Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle, A Change of Light and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters and Marco Polo's Travels.


This beautiful edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass is found in both the Calvino & Borges Libraries. It is a "Book of the Month" Book illustrated with expressive lithographs. Also found in the book was the following printed matter- all letterpress printed- which has found its way to the Personal Libraries Library Archive.


James Joyce's Ulysses is also in both the Calvino and Borges Collections. Both wrote extensively about this novel, at one point Borges wrote, "Perhaps, for the future, the only achievement of "modern" literature will be the unfathomable Ulysses, which in some way justifies, includes, and goes beyond the other texts." (Selected Non-Fictions, 312.) Possibly Borges found this book disconcerting.


Lastly, is this sweet edition of Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Carlyle is particularly interesting to the PLL, as he opened the amazing London Library in London in the 1840s. The London Library remains the "largest independent membership library in the world." (Patience & Fortitude, Nicholas Basbanes, 207.) Finding Carlyle as a kindred spirit whose labors made the PLL possible, his mini-tome is quite special.