A Time Of Gifts

This past summer Patrick Leigh Fermor died at the age of 96, an event that not too distantly followed the reprinting of two of his most well regarded books by New York Review Books (an imprint of the periodical whose goal is to reprint lesser known important titles). His passing has rekindled significant interest, especially in the States, of a writer who remained obscure outside the non-fiction genre of travel writing despite the fact he was considered by many as the greatest living travel writer before his death. A Time Of Gifts appears on almost every most respectable top 10 list of travel books and like most contemporary readers I had never heard of it but swept up in the copious coverage of Fermor’s passing, such as Christopher Hitchen’s eulogy, http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/06/16/christopher-hitchens-farewell-to-patrick-leigh-fermor-the-last-ideal-hero/ , I was intrigued by the fantastic proposition this book represented. Fermor, in 1933 at the age of 18, walked from Holland to, as he continued to call it, Constantinople resourcing only his wits, the kindness of strangers and a less than meager purse. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water are lauded as radiant narratives of a now disappeared Europe and inimitable pieces of English prose and from what I can tell thus far walk the walk. Attached are two excerpts. Pages 96 - 99 present a fantastic deconstruction of pre-Baroque ornament in Germany; pages 150 – 155 provide a fascinating glimpse into the (hitherto?) unrecognized peculiarities of the Danube School of painting. Fermor’s language is infectiously rapt.

Traditional Irish slip jig

This rare footage features two of the most well regarded Irish traditional dancers of the day. Their mastery of craft is displayed in perfect unison of footwork; hard to suppress a smile for their achievement. Not to be ignored is the quiet reverence of  the small audience. No one texting, not a cell phone in sight - Amen!

(click post title to launch YouTube)

The American Seasons continued

... as promised

Originally published Dodd Mead 1956

Originally published Dodd Mead 1960

Originally published Dodd Mead 1965 and winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction

Spines

Back covers were uniform

                                                                             

North With the Spring

Apollo edition North With the Spring

For those interested in North American nature studies Edwin Way Teale is an inevitable force to contend with. (Click on post title to link to Wikipedia entry.) He came to my attention via the reference to his Strange Lives of Familiar Insects in Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. Teale has a formidable bibliography to his credit that includes a four volume work, beginning with North With the Spring (1951), that represents the notable accomplishment of crossing the country's cardinal directions over four seasons. In this book and through Autumn Across America (1956), Journey Into Summer (1960) and Wandering Through Winter (1965) he documents an encyclopedia's worth of information about flora, fauna, weather, human impact, etc. with his nascent ecological sensibilities.

These works, which have come to be known as The American Seasons, appeal to me for their contributions to ecological science, their literary merits - down to earth reporting and just plain good stories if you like things like eagle's nests and the world's deepest spring, a couple hundred foot hole in the ground that turns into a river at your feet - but also because the undertaking involved a many, many thousands of miles road trip around the land. Sure beats hawking widgets or trying to assuage clients whose life savings is down the drain. Doesn't it?

In the mid-1960's Apollo Editions published trade paperbacks of the quartet with gorgeous illustrated covers that rework a collage motif in four different color schemes. These attractive covers are difficult to locate on the internet. I've only seen them listed individually on book sale sites, usually without images and I've yet to see the the whole group pictured anywhere hence sharing pics of my copies here and in the companion post. 

Cache Lake Country: Life in the North Woods

By John Rowlands, illustrated by Henry Kane; W.W. Norton, 1947. A detailed journal/ manual notable for its passionate advocacy of wilderness living and its many illustrations including technical drawings of equipment, methods, wildlife details, etc. This book is thought to be an imaginarium which, if true, is nonetheless informed of actual experience. 

Cache Lake Country at MIT library  

Author note on Wikipedia 

American Signs

American Signs: Form &; Meaning on Route 66 (Lisa Mahar); The Monacelli Press, 2002. Not a social history, this work is a fascinating analysis of motel signs on the famous route. Replete with analytic illustrations, this exploration of the signs reveals a seemingly incidental set of artifacts to be distinctly evolved and sophisticated.

Eye magazine, the international review of graphic design, calls the text and design of the book "a model of clarity" in their reserved but insightful review.

Rick Poynor refers to American Signs with enthusiastic respect in this article  Rick Poynor on American Signs

American Guides

The American Guide Series of books was produced by the Federal Writers Project between 1935 and 1943. The Federal Writers Project was one of the many programs under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era government program that assisted the millions of unemployed. The series is said to have originated from a casual cocktail party conversation between writer Katharine Kellock and WPA administrator Arthur Goldsmith. These wonderful travel guides cover the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states) and the District of Columbia and employed over 6,000 writers. Each volume covers a state’s history, geography, and culture, and includes photographs, maps, and drawings.

The American Guide Series is a highly collectible set of books; many people search the shelves of antiquarian book shops in an attempt to bring together the entire series. The Guide Series’ value continues to increase, with some titles now worth several hundred dollars. Two of the more desirable titles include the first edition Idaho volume, most of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the Dakota volumes, which had very limited printings. The recent popularity of the series has also prompted publishing houses to reissue selected titles in attractive and affordable paperback editions.

In addition to the popular state series, the Writers Project also produced over 1,200 books and pamphlets, including guides to major cities and interstate roadways, folklore collections, oral histories, and even song recordings. The project enlisted the talents of such well-known writers as John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

Text copied from www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/WPAStateGuides.pdf 

American River Series

- from James Findlay's introduction to the exhibition of Carol Fitgerald's reknowned collection at the Bienes Center for the Literary Arts in Ft. Lauderdale.
 

The sixty-five books in the series were published from 1937-1974, by Farrar and Rinehart (1937-1946) and its successors: Rinehart & Company (1946-1960); Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1960-1974). Constance Lindsay Skinner [1877-1939] was the general editor from 1937-1939. The series editors who succeeded her were Stephen Vincent Benét [1898-1943], Carl Carmer [1893-1976], and Hervey Allen [1889-1949]. During the life of the series, there were also two associate editors: Elizabeth L. Gilman and Jean Crawford; and four art editors: Ruth E. Anderson, Faith Ball, Benjamin Feder, and Philip Fiorello.
Assembled over the past eleven years and gleaned from Carol Fitzgerald's large and encyclopedic collection, the exhibition highlights 103 books, drawings, and other printed materials. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Everglades: river of grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the display showcases it, along with three other Florida rivers: Suwannee River and The St. Johns, and a later title about the Hillsborough,River of the Golden Ibis.

Constance Lindsay Skinner originated the idea for the series, and in a bid to make it special, recommended that the authors be "novelists and poets" and the illustrators be "professional artists". She and her heirs achieved their goal with great success with such titles as: The Everglades: river of grass, by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, illustrated by Robert Fink; The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby, illustrated by Andrew Wyeth; and The Sangamon, by Edgar Lee Masters, illustrated by Lynd Ward. The sixty-five original titles were published by Farrar and Rinehart and its successors from 1937-1974, but the collection also contains almost all known variant, special, commemorative, foreign, and Armed Services editions.

In her quest to gather the materials of the series, Carol Fitzgerald has demonstrated an extraordinary degree of perseverance and determination. For her, it has been an exhausting yet richly satisfying venture. Her interest in collecting the titles began casually in 1986, but soon developed into a near-obsession. Quickly she discovered a small network of book dealers with a special interest in the series, cultivated contacts with publishers, and wrote numerous letters to authors, illustrators, and editors. In the end, her efforts to document for posterity the making of the 65-volume series have been herculean.
Shortly, the results of Carol Fitzgerald's carefully detailed and scholarly research will be presented in the publication of a bibliography and history of the series. We will all be enriched by her endeavor.

- Carol Fitzgerald's American Rivers, A Descriptive Bibliography was released in 2001.

Blog title links to publisher's blog post on the author. Comprehensive title roster can be found here

 

John Graves' Goodbye To A River

In the late 1950's John Graves revisited a 175 mile stretch of the Brazos River before proposed dam construction forever submerged his childhood stomping grounds. Undertaken in a canoe with his dachshund companion Goodbye To A River is an engrossing commentary on the river, nature, and Texas history and culture. Today it is cherished as a uniquely voiced history of the state and lauded as a conservation-minded work ahead of its time

It appeals to me for the rugged outfit he embarks with, i.e. no hi-tech synthetics, no ultralight gear, no GPS, etc, but only the waxed cotton canvas and woolens of the day, wood paddles, metal cookware - and daunted not a bit!

More recently Graves teamed up with photographer Wyman Meinzer to document Texas landscape features in Texas Hill Country and Texas Rivers. Texas Sky is Meinzer's solo effort. All published by the ever-interesting U. T. Austin Press, one of the best resources for American Southwest culture and home of the Perry-Casteneda Library Map Collection, a comprehensive and very useful archive.

2/5/14 Post Script: sadly, I recently learned that John Graves passed away last summer. NPR posted this tribute: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/07/31/207309842/texas-author-john-graves-dies-at-92-wrote-goodbye-to-a-river

Map of Blood Meridian

Speaking of Cormac McCarthy, for fans of his masterpiece here is a reproduction of the map from John Sepich's reknowned literary companion Notes On Blood Meridian. (Color treatments mine.)

Post title will link you to middle novels section of the forums on the new official McCarthy website. Sadly - extremely sadly! - the thousands of conversations from the forum on the old official site that deeply explored myriad nuances of McCarthy's work were not migrated over to the new site. I think only those familiar with the former archive can appreciate how much of a loss their current inaccessibility is. Fortunately I exported several conversations related to BM and am trying to figure out how to link them up here. I inquired of the webmaster what the plans were and received: "They are gone but have been saved. There's an ebook, a print book, or some other kind of archive in the works. Stay tuned."

Tuned.

Updated Feb 2013

The Road: the film.

After a delay of over one year the film adaptation of Cormac MacCarthy's novel The Road finally hit the streets of NYC last Wednesday. Most impressive to me was the rendering of the post-apocalyptic world: the unrelentingly barren and silent, burnt and burning, vast, empty and destroyed landscape was unnervingly realistic. High marks can also be given to the narrative's verisimilitude to the novel - an unexpected satisfaction. The acting: Viggo was thoroughly convincing as a desperate survivor in the dying world; the boy significantly less so.

If the film narrative mechanically paralleled the novel, in a cathartic sense it may not have, and thus is realized the prediction that the story was unfilmable. This take on the film adaptation is articulated well in this LA Times review:
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/la-et-road25-2009nov25,0,4633283.story

Another interpretation of the character's journey in The Road can be imaginatively experienced in the Google Earth construction posted on the Cormac MacCarthy forum. From the post: "If you are interested, a guy created the path from The Road on Google Earth so you can zoom in and see the path they take. The link is http://www.googlelittrips.org/ You may have to click on the High Ed button and then search "the road cormac" Then download the file which is pretty small and then open it. You have to have Google Earth as well." 

For interesting discussion of topics, themes, and other tangents relating to MacCarthy's work visit the forum at the CMacC Society's page: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/forums/