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ILAB Library - All You Need To Know About Rare Books and the Antiquarian Book Trade
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski Meet in the Desert in 1962
Published since 28 May 2013This issue of the fugitive and important western little mag is notable for featuring the first poem published by the young Raymond Carver, 'Brass Ring'. Carver was notified of the acceptance of the poem on the same day that he received notice of the publication of his regularly first published story, 'Pastoral' in the Western Humanities Review. [Sklenicka p. 84]. Maryann Carver, Raymond's first wife, would later say of that day "We were on top of the world. It seemed that if you did the right things, the right things would happen ... We were ecstatic and partied for three days."
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[+] More The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald through the Eyes of Fellow Authors
Published since 16 May 2013In 2010, online literary magazine The Fiction Circus hosted a seance for Fitzgerald at New York City's KGB Bar. A writer and artist known as Xerxes Vedammt offered his body to be inhabited by Fitzgerald. Once the departed writer made his, um, appearance, participants called out questions. One person asked what books Fitzgerald had read. The response: "I don't have a lot of time to read. But I enjoyed Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. I wish I had written The Talented Mr. Ripley."
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - Charles Dickens’ Debt to Henry Fielding
Published since 29 Apr 2013When Charles Dickens’ sixth son was born on January 16, 1849, the boy was named for one of Dickens’ favorite authors. Supposedly Dickens had first thought to name the boy after Oliver Goldsmith, but he feared the child would be ridiculed as “Oliver always asking for more.” Instead he named his son Henry Fielding Dickens, after legendary 18th-century author Henry Fielding. Though Dickens was born too late to meet Fielding, his predecessor had a profound impact on Dickens’ work.
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[+] More Charles Dickens: The Beginning of Modern Fandom?
Published since 28 Feb 2013As far as successful British 19th Century writers were concerned Charles Dickens was the commercial equivalent of J. K. Rowling. He was huge, without doubt the most popular novelist of his time and place. There are numerous possible reasons for his overwhelming popularity, but one deciding factor would be the broad nature of his readership. He wrote for everyone, and he did it at a shilling a go.
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - Red Jack
Published since 12 Feb 2013‘Until the 1950’s, Jack London was by far the most popular American author in Soviet Russia. Over thirteen million copies of his works have been printed since the Revolution. Even today [i.e. 1962] he continues as a popular classic, and it is probable that over the Soviet period as a whole he has been read more widely than any other non-Russian author.
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - The Novel That Never Was
Published since 23 Jan 2013The novel that never was: Meyern’s book is a Bundesroman, a popular genre of novel in late eighteenth-century German literature which featured secret societies. As for The Ruins on the Mountain-Lake, it never existed at all, except in Meyern’s mind.
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[+] More The King and Lie
Published since 13 Nov 2012Yul Brynner made a career out of playing a Thai king who danced the polka. For many people this was, and sadly is, their knowledge and impression of Thailand. The King and I was one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's outstanding theatrical successes during the "golden age" of musical theater. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were initially reluctant to pursue the project proposed by a theatrical attorney seeking a vehicle for client Gertrude Lawrence, a veteran leading lady. But they agreed to write the musical based on a 1944 novel, Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon. Yul Brynner dancing polka: The King an I - How famous books, based on legends, are turned into movies and music.
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - Wilde in Russia
Published since 07 Nov 2012Simon Beattie recommends a copy of the first separate edition in any language of Oscar Wilde’s unfinished play, A Florentine Tragedy, translated into Russian from a copy of Wilde’s manuscript and published in Moscow by Skorpion in 1907.
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[+] More Auto Shred: Ray Bradbury
Published since 05 Nov 2012When I was 8 years old, my mother took me to the public library in Van Buren, Arkansas to get me my first library card. I will never forget how the card had a little silver plate embedded in the paper. It was probably the first thing I had ever been given, other than birthday cakes, that had my name printed on it. Mom had checked books out for me in the past, but this time I got to pick out my own. She instructed me on the basics: pick out just one I really thought I would like, then I could read it, return it, and get another one. I had read some juvenile science fiction, but felt I was now ready for some grown-up stuff. The book I checked out was Ray Bradbury’s S is for Space. Definitely my first memory of a dust jacket that utterly reeled me in, and what an author photo! He looked every bit as eerie and unfathomable as the stuff of his stories.
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[+] More When Wallace Stevens hit Ernest Hemingway in Key West
Published since 03 Oct 2012October 2 is the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens (1879), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 for his Collected Poems. For many years, he was frequent visitor to Key West, beginning in 1922. In 1936, he encountered Ernest Hemingway there, and thereby hangs a tale.
