“Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.” Lauren Young writes in Atlas Obscura about the phenomenon of bibliomania, “a dark pseudo-psychological illness” that afflicted upper-class victims in Europe and England during the 1800s. And for a first-hand account of more contemporary book theft, read John Brandon on his high school pastime: “The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in.”
Biblio-klepto-mania
Hey, Hub Fans
Perhaps the best piece of baseball writing ever put to paper (duly praised here), John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” about Ted Williams is being released in a slim, stylish volume from Library of America this week.
Fear and Loathing in NYC
Hunter S. Thompson was a man whose reputation preceded him. Let’s honor his legacy the way he probably would have wanted–by taking a look back at a list of the crimes he committed in the Big Apple. If you don’t know anything about Hunter S. Thompson, this job application that he sent to the Vancouver Sun in 1958 should get you started.
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Reality Slips
“I sensed myself hurtling into the reality of the film, and leaving my own behind.” Esme Weijun Wang writes on the slippage of reality in films and schizoaffective disorder.
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Up South
“Young black fiction writers in the U.S. often face a strange obstacle as they try to figure out who they are — it’s called American literature. A high number of pre-civil-rights-era novels by white American writers are likely to include tossed-off racial slurs and/or stock black characters, some of which make racially conscious readers want to hurl the book across the room, even if the wooly-headed pickaninnies are only peeking around a doorjamb on one page out of 400. There are exceptions, but shockingly few. You always have to brace yourself — always.” James Hannaham writes about growing up in Yonkers but finding himself in Southern literature.
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I shipped five cartons of books from San Diego (home, at the time, to some world-class secondhand book shops) to Berlin… I had some hand-trembling finds in the shops of that city. As each carton arrived I was summoned to customs. The fifth carton arrived in the form of an ominous grey sack provided by the US postal service: the carton had somehow burst en route. It wasn’t until I’d unpacked all the cartons and gotten the books on shelves, a few days later, that I noticed that nineteen or twenty books were missing… and almost all of the missing books were written by Anthony Burgess. My Burgess collection was wiped out, along with several airport-purchased paperbacks of so-so crap I’d used to get through various flights. International shipping book thief with widely variable taste!