It’s been a long while since I gloated, and I’ve accumulated a lot to gloat about. In fact, it’s been so long that I’ve read a fair few of ’em, so some of the following will be capsule reviews as well as the usual stories of how I wandered on a whim into a bookstore and couldn’t resist…

Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered is a beginner’s drawing course, illustrated by Quentin Blake. If you know his work, you’ll already suspect that this isn’t the usual course in perspective and shading. Instead, you’re encouraged to just let go and enjoy yourself, with the secret aim of “giv[ing] you the ability to sneak into the heart of your subject by going direct.” It looks fantastically fun — who wouldn’t get enthusiastic about scribbling in the blanks left where Quentin Blake left off scribbling? (Yes, you’re allowed to draw in the book. That’s the point, in fact.) And in looking up his website (which I can’t view because my Flash player is out of date) I discovered something marvellous: one of my very-favouritest children’s books, How Tom Beat Captain Najork And His Hired Sportsmen (which was illustrated by Quentin Blake), was written by Russell Hoban. The Russell Hoban who wrote Riddley Walker, which for some incomprehensible reason I haven’t reviewed yet, but when I have you’ll be able to summarise the review by: read it. I’m completely blown away by this — the man has just become my personal hero. A masterpiece of a novel that drove one of my friends to tears (me also, but that happens more often than I like to admit), written by the same bloke who produced one of the few books I can remember having read to me, before I could read it myself. I am in awe. (Drawing was a gift from family, who now get double thanks for the books and for putting me on the trail of this awesome discovery.)

Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder was an impulse buy in the Book Exchange, and I read it (through — it’s a slim 168 pages) on the train to Paris. It’s won a Pulitzer Prize and been talked about a lot. I’ll review it properly on LibraryThing, but until then it’s recommended if you like scientific oddities; there’s quite a bit (and copious references) on the collections craze that went with colonialism and the great age of exploration.

Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah was another family present. I’d had The Songlines recommended to me, and now I’ll be looking out for it: Chatwin’s descriptions completely envelope you, thick and warm and sweaty like the tropical heat, and I stayed up half the night finishing the book so I could draw a cool breath again.

I bought Books and Printing: A Treasury for Typophiles after seeing it mentioned on the typophile forums, for almost no money at all — especially considering its 430 pages, hard covers, and 22 different typefaces. It’s a collection of essays, and a preliminary glance suggests that some of them are rather dry fare, but the book itself is lovely.

Tom and Frans gave me the Penguin Classic edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which I’m enjoying very much. I picked out a quote (“In England any person fond of natural history enjoys in his walks a great advantage […] but in these fertile climates, teeming with life, the attractions are so numerous, that he is scarcely able to walk at all.”) and then was both pleased and annoyed that the Penguin folks chose the same one to head the back-cover blurb.

I couldn’t pass up Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, especially after singing its praises to so many people in the wake of his death. I found it on the Boekenmarkt Spui, in a tray of otherwise remarkably bad modern fantasy (not even sf), and the stallkeeper seemed just as surprised as I was.

Also from the Boekenmarkt, De Aaibaarheidsfactor by Rudy Kousbroek (something like “The strokability-factor”). Apparently he invented the term, which describes the cuteness of various sorts of animals with reference to the effort people will go to in their interests. I first met this magnificent word in a performance by Kim Soepnel, in which she recited a poem entitled “De Aaibaarheidsfactor van een kameel” (it was this memory that prompted me to buy the book, which I still haven’t read). At the rist of violating her copyright, I’m going to reproduce this poem in its entirety: “Een kameel heeft, namelijk, geen aaibaarheidsfactor.”1 The book itself has a high aaibaarheidsfactor: it’s illustrated with drawings by Kousbroek’s daughter, aged 5, and the dust jacket is slightly furry.

Proofreading turned up Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins — it’s marketed with “By the author of The God Delusion” but this one dates from his simple science-popularising days. Whatever you may think of his current activities, the man wrote some good pop science. Thanks, Kuba and Juha.

In Brussels I picked up The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon. LT review is pending; it’s good, but not as good as my memory of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The premise alone is pretty fantastic: it’s alternative history where the state of Israel didn’t get started and the Jews were given a temporary settlement in Alaska after the second world war instead. It works, very well. Now I have to re-read K&C for comparison.

The bookstore also gave me a choice: “A Detective or a Classic?”. I chose the classic, and got Plato’s Symposium (missing Lucretius on Sensation and Sex, Castiglione on How to Achieve True Greatness and von Clausewitz On the Nature of War, but also Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Burial, Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the Holocaust and David Hume On Suicide — on balance I think I got off lightly).

The tenant moved out of my old apartment in the west of Amsterdam recently, and my landlords found a parcel addressed to me dating from last year. In it was Zeg, ken jij de mosselman? (“Say, do you know the musselman?”), a coffee-table collection of photos and short texts about vanished or vanishing professions. Which probably means I have an open account and a bill to pay to the book-club that sent it, if they ever track down my new address.

One of my Dutch semi-uncles gave me Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily, which he had accidentally bought twice. I had to promise to finish it before he comes back from his holiday, so I can discuss it with him.

Showing a Kiwi friend around the city, I found myself in Nijhof & Lee. This is doubly inexplicable, because (a) I’m not allowed to go in there (they have a section on typography which gets me every time), and (b) the fellow I was showing around isn’t particularly interested in bookshops. Nevertheless, I bought (wordless diagrams) by Nigel Holmes, which consists entirely of numbered how-to diagrams (about 80 of them) on such subjects as tasting wine, naming a ship, cremating a body, building a snowman or a sandcastle, proposing marriage, performing a face-lift… Another good coffee-table entry, if we only had a coffee table.

Not long after, I accidentally steered him into the American Book Centre. They had Susannah Clarke’s new collection of short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, but after seeing the price tag (€33) I manfully resisted the urge. So manfully did I resist, that all my resistance was spent when I noticed Logorrhea, and I bought it immediately. It’s a collection of commissioned short stories, each of which is inspired by a word that made the winning point in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I know that doesn’t sound like a recommendation. But the fact is that the first story is “The Chiaroscurist” by Hal Duncan (the link is to the zine Electric Velocipede, where you can read the story online), Neil Williamson’s “The Euonymist” also features, as does Michael Moorcock, and the dodgy conceit seems to have given rise to some seriously good writing. There’s some (I hope) unintentional comedy in the section about the authors: each is presented in a fixed format, which works perfectly for “Michael Moorock (insouciant) is the author of …”, is odd but strangely apt for “Tim Pratt (autochthonous) lives in Oakland, California…”, but wildly out of whack in “Jay Lake (transept) lives and works in Portland, Oregon” and positively libellous in “Alan DeNiro (sycophant) is the author of…”. My one quibble is that there’s no colophon, and I quibble that quibble because the book is rather nicely designed, and I’d like to know the fonts they’ve used.

Changing tack completely: Two rather special alphabetic entries came to me from a friend — more precisely, from the collection of his grandmother, who died some months ago. Speels ABC der Nederlanden is an alphabet, with entries such as Amsterdam and Antwerpen but also Dorst (“thirst” — illustrated with Frans Hals’ painting of the happy drunkard), Onderwijs en Opvoeding (“education and upbringing”, illustrated with a picture of Ot and Sien who give their name to the local pub, although I’m still none the wiser as to the story), and Uitwisseling van minder vriendelijke uitlatingen tussen Noord en Zuid (roughly “an exchange of less friendly opinions2 between North and South”, which looks like being good material for practising polite insults in Dutch). The book was printed for Book Week 1962, by the Association for the promotion of the Importance of Bookshops (Commission for the Collective Propaganda of the Dutch book).3

The second of this lovely pair is In 26 letters: het boek in uw leven, uw leven in het boek (“In 26 letters: the book in your life, your life in the book”). This was printed by the same folk, but for the 25th Book Week, in 1960 — without even the excuse of an Alphabet, this is simply a celebration of books and writing in photos, articles and historical documents. They’re both beautiful, and I look forward to studying them more closely.

And last but most definitely not least, to match my Greek grammar (which turned out to be too detailed to be really useful as a learning aid, at least for a while yet) I also received a complete beginners course in Colloquial Greek (by Niki Watts), which comes with CDs and exercises and homework and everything. I may even post something about my progress at some point (starting with: when I make some), I’ve noticed some interesting things about the typography.4

Phew! I’m not going to admit to how many (or how few) of these I’ve read so far, but anyone who has an outstanding proofreading account or was considering randomly donating me a book for whatever reason, don’t let the size of this pile put you off. Wintertime in Amsterdam is long and dark and has dealt, in the past, with much larger stacks than these.

Notes:

  1. For Kiwis: That’s “The strokability-factor of a camel”: “A camel has, namely, no strokability-factor.” (In a translation that totally destroys all appeal of the original, let alone the fact that it’s supposed to be spoken not written.) [↪]
  2. “Uitlaten” is more like “to let off steam” I believe –etymologically “to let out”– but this is the best I could come up with. [↪]
  3. My –perhaps fast and loose– translation of “Vereeniging ter bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels; Commissie voor de Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse boek”, with the help of vertalen.nu. [↪]
  4. The short version is: just because the letter ‘κ’ (kappa) usually looks like a ‘k’, that doesn’t mean that a Greek font designer will necessarily treat it like a ‘k’ if he wants to play around a bit — causing me no end of confusion. [↪]