SHARP-L posting format reminder

[Patrick Leary]

By way of getting the new term off to a good start, let's remember that
no posting to SHARP-L should contain extraneous copies of other people's
messages. A posting that consists of one or two lines -- e.g., "Try
checking [such-and-such a reference]" -- followed by 40+ lines of an
earlier message by someone else that we've all already received at least
once, is an abomination in the sight of right-thinking listowners and
listmembers everywhere. Please take a moment to delete any such
excrescence before pressing "send." This small courtesy keeps the list
tidier and more useful for everyone. Many thanks for your help.

-- Patrick

____________
Patrick Leary
listowner, SHARP-L
***@sharpweb.org

[Dan Franklin]

I'm looking for novels whose central theme concerns books, book
collectors, or libraries. I've recently read the following:

James Morrow, The last witchfinder
Ross King, Ex-libris
Ellis Peters, The heretic's apprentice
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The rule of four
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Umberto Eco, The name of the rose

Now I want a long list for the long winter evenings ahead. Would you oblige?

[Catriona Menzies-Pike]

On Book Collectors, Iain Sinclair's 'White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings'
(1987) is a must.


Catriona Menzies-Pike
Department of English
University of Sydney

[Sharon Shaloo]

You may wish to follow this link to a growing bibliomystery collection at
Simmons College Grad School of Library and Info Sciences.

http://web.simmons.edu/~schwartz/bibmyst.html

Meanwhile, I am delighted with a list considerably more highbrow than the
Dunning and Fforde's I have been reading in the off hours for the past year!

Sharon Shaloo
Massachusetts Center for the Book

***************************************
Sharon Shaloo
Personal email: ***@msn.com

"I cannot live without books." -- Thomas Jefferson

[Penny L. Richards]

_The Shadow of the Wind_ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon was a recent (and very
popular) Spanish addition to this genre. The first line tells the
theme:

"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of
Forgotten Books for the first time."


Penny L. Richards PhD
Research Scholar, UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Co-editor, H-Education and H-Disability
***@earthlink.net

[Patrick Buckridge]

Martha Cooley, _The Archivist_ (1998)

Patrick Buckridge
Brisbane.

[Deborah J. Leslie]

Jasper Fforde, _The Eyre Affair_, (somebody learns how to enter and
kidnap characters from books); and sequels: _Lost in a good book_, The
well of lost plots_, and _Something rotten_

And thanks for the tips for my own long winter evenings.
__________________________________________
Deborah J. Leslie, M.A., M.L.S.
Chair, RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee
http://www.folger.edu/bsc/index.html
Head of Cataloging, Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003
***@folger.edu || 202.675-0369 || http://www.folger.edu

[William M. Klimon]

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, THE RULE OF FOUR
Arturo Perez-Reverte, THE CLUB DUMAS

and with books and libraries a key theme of the second order:

Susanna Clarke, JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL

and there are lots and lots of bibliomysteries listed here:

http://www.bibliomysteries.com

William M. Klimon
***@alumni.upenn.edu

[Jonathan E. Rose]

Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
George Gissing, New Grub Street
And of course, just about anything by David Lodge

Jonathan Rose

[Clara Hudson]

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte -- a rare book dealer skirts
secret societies and the occult.
--
Clara Hudson

Public Services Librarian

Weinberg Memorial Library

University of Scranton

Scranton, PA 18510

570-941-4000

***@scranton.edu <mailto:***@scranton.edu>

[Iain D. Brown]

Post by Dan Franklin
I'm looking for novels whose central theme concerns books, book
Now I want a long list for the long winter evenings ahead. Would
you oblige?

For a lighter read, try James A. Michener's "The Novel" (1991,
Secker & Warburg) -- a yarn about authors, novels, publishing and
critics.

Best wishes,

Iain.

[Claudia C. Funke]

The best novel I've ever read about books:

Elias Canetti, Auto-da-fe (Die Blendung)





______________________________________________
______________________________________________

Claudia Funke
Curator of Rare Books
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
Columbia University
1172 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, New York 10027

telephone: [phone]
facsimile: 212 854 8904
email: ***@columbia.edu

[cachinmf]

Simon BRETT, The Booker Book (1989) about a writer trying to write a
Booker-prize winning novel. Rather amusing!
Marie-Françoise Cachin

[Matt Schneider]

I would also recommend _House of Leaves_ by Mark Z. Danielewski, _If
on a Winter's Night a Traveller_ by Italo Calvino, _My Name is Red_ by
Orhan Pamuk, and a good deal of Jorge Luis Borges.

[l***@JJAY.CUNY.EDU]

Let's not forget Flaubert's chapbook Bibliomania: A Tale.

Larry E. Sullivan


----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Franklin <***@VILLAGETYPE.COM>
Date: Wednesday, September 6, 2006 7:09 pm
Subject: Novels about books

Post by Dan Franklin
I'm looking for novels whose central theme concerns books, book
James Morrow, The last witchfinder
Ross King, Ex-libris
Ellis Peters, The heretic's apprentice
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The rule of four
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Umberto Eco, The name of the rose
Now I want a long list for the long winter evenings ahead. Would
you oblige?

[Martyn Thomas]

"Reading Lolita in Teheran" by Azar Nafisi

Regards

Martyn Thomas

[Gordon Neavill]

Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures -- about a young book conservator from the Newberry Library who goes to Florence after the 1966 flood. In the convent library where she's working she discovers a pornographic work by Aretino assumed to have been lost centuries before. Full of details about bookbinding and book conservation along with touches of eroticism.

Barry


-----------------------------------------
Gordon B. Neavill
Associate Professor
Library and Information Science Program
106 Kresge Library
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
313-577-0507 (tel); 313-577-7563 (fax)
***@wayne.edu

[Martin Antonetti]

There is also Hugh Kennedy's amusing roman à clef about the antiquarian map business, Original Color (1996).

Martin Antonetti, Curator of Rare Books
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063
413.585.2907
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/

[jonathan Arnold]

I don't believe anyone has mentioned Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_...

Jonathan Arnold
PhD student, Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, University of London
***@googlemail.com

[Jesse Rossa]

Georges Perec's "Le Voyage d'Hiver" (available in the collection Species
of Spaces) is recommended for fans of Borgesian bibliophilic tangles, as
is Italo Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler." And of course
Borges' "The Library of Babel," available in a beautiful illustrated
edition from Godine. Elias Canetti's "Auto-da-fe" is a look at the
darker side of bibliomania. Danilo Kis' story "The Encyclopedia of the
Dead." One of the main characters in Richard Powers' "The Gold Bug
Variations" is a reference librarian and much of the book takes place in
a library....

And I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned A.S. Byatt's
"Possession," which is a perfect book for a winter's night.
Jesse

~~~~~~~~
Jesse Rossa
Assistant Librarian
Special Collections Department
University of Delaware Library
Newark, DE 19717-5267
phone [phone]

fax [phone]

[Patrick Buckridge]

Since this thread is continuing, can I offer three very different
Australian examples?

Frank Hardy, _But the Dead Are Many_ (1975)
Amanda Lohrey, _The Reading Group_ (1988)
John Harwood, _The Ghost Writer_ (2004)

(Also, I don't think Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ has been mentioned yet, has
it?)

Patrick Buckridge
Griffith University
Brisbane

[Robert Beasecker]

For those who like mysteries, John Dunning's series about an ex-cop turned antiquarian (and secondhand) bookseller is a pleasant diversion. The mysteries are book related, and there is substantial background given of the profession. The first book in the series is _Booked to Die_ (1992), followed by _Bookman's Wake_ (1995), _The Bookman's Promise_ (2004), and _The Sign of the Book_ (2005).




Robert Beasecker
Director of Special Collections
Grand Valley State University Libraries
1 Campus Drive
Allendale, Michigan 49401

[Peter Hoare]

And more book-related crime stories include Marianne Macdonald's "Dido
Hoare" series (no relation!! - but you see why I got interested), based on
an antiquarian bookshop in Islington (North London) - "Blood lies", "Death's
autograph", "Die once", "Ghost walk", "Road kill" and "Smoke screen". Quite
nicely written for this genre, I think.

Best of all, I think (and I may have recommended this before), is Edmund
Crispin's short story "Merry go round" in his collection "Fen country".
_______________________________________________________
Peter Hoare, 21 Oundle Drive, Wollaton Park, Nottingham NG8 1BN
Tel/fax [phone] E-mail ***@virgin.net
________________________________________________________

[J***@ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK]

I've just enjoyed Valerie Martin's short story 'The Unfinished Novel',
in her new collection of stories - 'The Unfinished Novel' is also the
title of the collection.
Jenny Hartley
School of Arts
Roehampton University

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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[Soledad Caballero]

Shall I mention a short novel of an uruguaian writer in which the
protagonist goes in a trip to find the unknown author of a book?

Dejen todo en mis manos, by Mario Levrero
Ed. Arca. Montevideo, 1998

I have really enjoyed it! (as well as other books of this writer)

Regards,

Soledad

Soledad Caballero
Montevideo-Uruguay
http://serendipity.wikispaces.com/



-----Mensaje original-----
De: SHARP-L Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing
[mailto:SHARP-***@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU]En nombre de
***@ROEHAMPTON.AC.UK
Enviado el: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:48 AM
Para: SHARP-***@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
Asunto: Re: Novels about books


I've just enjoyed Valerie Martin's short story 'The Unfinished Novel',
in her new collection of stories - 'The Unfinished Novel' is also the
title of the collection.
Jenny Hartley
School of Arts
Roehampton University

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous
content by The Roehampton University MailScanner
and is believed to be clean

[Ross Pudaloff]

Did anyone mention Henry James's The Aspern Papers?

Ross


Ross J. Pudaloff
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan 48202
Email: ***@wayne.edu
Telephone: [phone] (Graduate Office)
313 577-3062 (Faculty Office)
313 577-8618 (FAX)

[Gordon Neavill]

In addition to James Michener's The Novel, already mentioned, there's the cheesy novel The Bestseller by Olivia Goldsmith, best known as the author of The First Wives Club and for having died as a result of facelift surgery. The novel includes bitchy portraits of well-known editors who appear in the book under their real names.

Barry
-----------------------------------------
Gordon B. Neavill
Associate Professor
Library and Information Science Program
106 Kresge Library
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
313-577-0507 (tel); 313-577-7563 (fax)
***@wayne.edu

[Rodrick, Anne B.]

A book--a specific edition of Livy--is the key to one aspect of the mystery at the heart of Iain Pears' *An Instance of the Fingerpost.*

Anne

Anne Rodrick
Associate Professor of History
Wofford College

[lindam]

Try: *Salamander* by Thomas Wharton, the quest for the "infinite" book.



--
Linda Morra, Ph.D.
Dept. of English, UBC
***@interchange.ubc.ca
[phone]

[Winston Pei]

Salamander, a novel. Thomas Wharton. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
2001.
Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books. Thomas Wharton.
Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2004.

---

Winston Pei, BA, MA, MGDC
Black Riders Design

16103 Patricia Drive NW
Edmonton AB T5R 5N3

Phone: [phone]
http://www.blackriders.com/

[Helen Ryan]

Ende's Neverending Story is a must.

Helen Ryan
University of Iowa

[Jack Schofield]

There's a great resource, Books about Librarians or Libraries, at

http://www.librarysupportstaff.com/libbooks.html

This includes several mentions of "Librarians in Fiction: A Critical
Bibliography" by Grant Burns (ISBN: 078640499X).

It seems there's also a string of mystery novels written by a librarian,
Jo Dereske. Examples include "Miss Zukas and the Library Murders" and
"Miss Zukas and the Stroke of Death".

In addition, not mentioned, there's the famous librarian at the Unseen
University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels -- one of the few simian
librarians. See, for example, The Last Continent.

Otherwise, I'd take Ficciones as the best source, with stories such as The
Library of Babel and Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.

Rgds, Jack

--------------------------------------
Jack Schofield * The Guardian
Computer editor * 119 Farringdon Road
020-7239 9541 * London EC1R 3ER, UK
--------------------------------------
E-mail: ***@jackschofield.com
***@guardian.co.uk
Send text only--no attachments!
--------------------------------------

[JS]

Nabokov's _Pale Fire_, Danielzewski's _House of Leaves_, Carey's _My
Life as a Fake_, Johnson's _Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry_ (it's an
*accountant's* book, see), a substantial part of Mitchell's _Cloud
Atlas_ deals with books, diaries, testimonies, some of Hawthorne's short
stories have scientists with these crazy libraries full of "black-letter
tomes" & whatnot. Hope I got the titles right

Jason

Post by Dan Franklin
I'm looking for novels whose central theme concerns books, book
James Morrow, The last witchfinder
Ross King, Ex-libris
Ellis Peters, The heretic's apprentice
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The rule of four
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Umberto Eco, The name of the rose
Now I want a long list for the long winter evenings ahead. Would you
oblige?

[shults_t]

While Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter's book collecting has been sneered at by
some as bogus scholarship, her "Gaudy Night" has *a* book in progress
central to a novel about women scholars and the pros and cons of their
existence at that time and place.

Terry Shults
***@utpb.edu

[Martin Green]

Add, Lev Grossman's Codex (Harcourt 2004).

There was also a novel some years ago called Book, but I can't recall who
wrote it, and a Google search on the title was, of course, useless!

Martin Green
Fairleigh Dickinson University

[o***@VSNL.COM]

Most of John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell mysteries have a bibliographic angle to them, most notably The Mad Hatter Mystery about a lost Poe MS. One also thinks of a Sherlock Holmes pastische by Vincent Starrett called The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet, collected in Richard Lancelyn Green's The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Terry Pratchett's The Truth is a delicious retelling of the invention of printing in Ankh-Morpork, the premier city in Discworld, with dwarves with names like Calson, Bodony and Goodmountain. And while we are with Terry P,. the librarian of Unseen University, the school for wizardry on Discworld, got turned into an orang-utan after a magical accident and refuses to turn human again.

Abhijit Gupta

[Julie Grob]

Not a novel, but highly recommended for the Halloween season: M.R. James'
_Ghost Stories of an Antiquary_. James was a Provost at Cambridge and Eton,
and some of his best stories concern scholars looking at medieval books,
prints, and archives. Great for reading out loud with the lights low.

Julie Grob


Julie Grob
Digital Projects and Instruction Librarian
Special Collections
114 University Libraries
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-2000
[phone]
***@uh.edu

[Kathleen Much]

John Dunning has published a new book in his mystery series about a book
dealer cum private eye: "The Bookwoman's Last Fling". (Somebody already
posted the others.)

The prolific Roy Lewis has written a series of mysteries about Matthew Coll,
an antiquarian bookseller in Dorset, and one of the main characters in his
Arnold Landon series is a bookseller (whose historical-novelist niece is the
protagonist's sidekick).

Val McDermid's "Booked for Murder" uses publishing as its milieu.

Henry Gamadge, author, bibliophile, and forgery expert in New York, is
featured in Elizabeth Daly's mystery series written in the 1940s.

Terrie Curran's "All Booked Up" revolves around mysteriously missing books
in a research library. The New York Times said, "A husband-and-wife
professor team finally breaks the case. We get a good deal of information
about incunabula, library filing systems, early English literature and the
like (the author is a professor of medieval literature at Providence College
in Rhode Island)."

Kathleen Much

[j***@GMU.EDU]

Has anyone mentioned A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M. Miller, Jr.,
where the books at the center of the three-stage plot were buried in the
US southwest during the frenzy of book burning that followed the nuclear
world war?

John Radner
Department of English
George Mason University

[Simon Cauchi]

A. N. Wilson's novel, Wise Virgin, is about a medieval manuscript and a
scholar's determination to produce a modern edition of it. See the
review at

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9F0CE0D9133BF934A15753C1A965948260&sec=&pagewanted=1

Simon Cauchi
<***@xtra.co.nz>

[David Stam]

Has anyone mentioned Scotts "The Antiquary"? David Stam

[Patrick Leary]

A number of people have written in to suggest that "someone" (meaning, I
take it, someone other than themselves) should volunteer the time to
compile a list of all the titles mentioned in this thread, and then
re-post it to everyone on SHARP-L. Anyone who likes is welcome to do
that, but please note in the meantime that all of the suggestions can
instantly be accessed via the SHARP-L archives at
https://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/sharp-l.html

Best wishes,

Patrick

______________
Patrick Leary
listowner, SHARP-L

[John Hench]

How about "The Bay Psalm Book Murder," by Will Harriss? It deals with a murder connected with a possibly authentic/possibly forged copy of "The Whole Booke of Psalmes" (1640). This book was published in 1983, a couple of years before Mark Hoffman killed two people in a coverup of his forgery of "The Oath of a Freeman."
John Hench