"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing." -- “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” Photo by Napoleon Sarony Ballad of Reading Gaol by C.3.3. Published by London Leonard Smithers 1898, First edition, one of 800 copies printed on handmade paper. Buy. Oscar Wilde was our first literary rock star whose work continues to be widely read and his plays regularly produced. His epic 1882 tour of America has been referred to as the birth of celebrity culture in America. His witticism is legendary and his homosexuality was the cause of unfathomable persecution. We salute Oscar Wilde for blazing the way...
A Salute to Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh's arrival as it appeared in the December 24, 1925 issue of the London Evening News. It was on this day in 1926 that the world was first introduced in book form to everybody's favorite teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh. To celebrate here is a sampling of A.A. Milne's most famous creation. Here's an interesting fact about the book. We all know the character of Pooh has been a big player in the Disney Universe since the early 1960's but did you know that in 1930 a gentleman named Stephen Slesinger purchased the U.S. and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to the "Winnie-the-Pooh" works...
Five Book Salute to Halloween
Are you ready to get your spook on? October is here and that can only mean that Halloween is right around the corner. Here are a few bookish goodies to help you get in the mood. The Penguin Book of Witches. Edited by Katherine Howe, 2014. Who better to give us a bit of witch history than Katherine Howe, a direct descendant of three accused Salem witches. Starting with the few scant mentions of witches in the Bible and taking us through the Salem Witch trails Howe provides nothing but source material to illuminate just how slippery and unconvincing the...
Five Book (and one record) Birthday Salute to Wallace Stevens
Harmonium (First Edition, first issue, signed). The poet's first collection, published when he was 44 years old, after almost a decade of appearances only in magazines. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room to his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends. -from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction Today is the birthday of Wallace Stevens. Literary critic Harold Bloom called Stevens "the best...
A five book (one letter and one record) birthday salute to william carlos williams
Paterson. Published by New Directions, 1946-58. Williams's magnum opus. Today is the birthday of the influential American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). From the Poetry Foundation: William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create...