A how-to guide disguised in a disposable novelistic dressing.
A novice book collector gets a quick and expensive education in the rare-book world in this epistolary tale.
In his 2011 novel, Correspondence, Hall introduced Larry, a rough-around-the-edges New Yorker who lucked into a cache of letters written by Victorian luminaries. In this sequel, Larry is flush with $400,000 from the sale of those letters and now wants to collect fine books. Perhaps a complete run of Trollope first editions would be a good way to start? One of his email interlocutors gently steers him from this folly—that’s an extremely expensive enterprise, and he’s on a $25,000 budget. So after a brief flirtation with more modest Victoriana, he begins to seek out affordable works from New Yorker writers such as James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and Dorothy Parker. Larry’s indulgent correspondents deliver pocket biographies of the authors he’s chasing down, along with brief clinics on book-collecting arcana, from foxing to association copies to explanations of wild price differences in different editions and the fine points of marrying dust jackets. Between that and Larry’s jeezum-crow exclamations at just about every step (“I have a question for you on dust jackets: What the hell is this all about?”), the novel is often ploddingly pedagogical, and Hall’s feints toward deepening Larry’s character with mentions of an impatient girlfriend and a shady-seeming book dealer feel half-hearted. But while the book is weak as a story, it’s a reasonably engaging and informed introduction to serious book collecting, and Hall's detours on Trollope and Max Beerbohm are informed by his scholarship on those authors. (He’s written books on both.) “I can’t help but admire a person so unashamedly frank and humbly inquisitive,” a scholar says of Larry, which is true enough. Alas the tension here largely involves Larry’s pocketbook.
A how-to guide disguised in a disposable novelistic dressing.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56792-56-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
1885
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82118-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
It took four weeks for illustrations of scenes from the US’s Civil War battles to make it from the front lines to readers’ hands; Morrison (Cheetah, 1998, etc.) explains that process in his uniquely handsome book. Morrison introduces the fictional artist, William Forbes, commissioned by the fictional Burton’s Illustrated News to follow the Union Army into battle at Bull Run. Throughout the day’s fighting Forbes makes quick sketches; it is risky business, and he is often in mortal peril. That night he makes a more complete drawing, which is handed to a courier and taken back to the Burton offices. There, engravers set to work translating Forbes’s drawing to a grid of wood blocks (Morrison includes interesting incidentals along the way, giving the process its due). The images are converted to electrotype, whereafter it is finally ready for the operators and pressman. Shortly after that, the newsboys are seen hawking the illustrated weekly, containing Forbes’s image a mere month after the actual event. Morrison successfully renders the complexities of illustrating newspapers 150 years ago, and just as successfully conveys that in abandoning the wood block for the photograph, some of the art was sacrificed for speed. (glossary) (Picture book. 6-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-91426-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
