A Visit to the Book Fair; The Ladder of Vision; The Seduction of Mimi
Reading, Watching 05.03.26
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
Reminder: I will be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online.
This morning, I have for you:
A True Account of a Visit to the Antiquarian Book Fair in New-York
Irma Brandeis’s The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s Comedy
Lina Wertmüller’s film The Seduction of Mimi (1972)
I spent Saturday at the Antiquarian Book Fair at the Armory on Park Avenue. I highly recommend going if you’re in the vicinity. Today is the last day. Most of the items on display are beyond the means of all but the extremely wealthy or the most obsessive collector, but so many of the objects are works of art worth just looking at. There are illuminated manuscripts and codices from the Middle Ages, strange Early Modern guides to alchemy and witchcraft, and all sorts of historical documents and letters. And, of course, all the modern first editions that seem to attract the most collectors: the sheer number of 1984s and Catcher in the Ryes on display seemed to belie their eye-popping prices.
I went in search of my particular antiquarian interest: essays by Romantic critics, mainly William Hazlitt, and memoirs from the writers of that era. At the booth of London’s Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, where I bought my Second Edition of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk in London earlier this spring, a nice older gentleman arrived just before me to swoop up a copy of Lamb and Hazlitt: further letters and records hitherto unpublished, a volume edited by Hazlitt’s son William Carew, that documents the critic’s friendship with his fellow essayist Charles Lamb. I love this kind of stuff ever since buying Leigh Hunt’s very dishy memoir Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, where Hunt records his vacation from hell with Byron in Italy. But my elder friend came first and got it for around 30 dollars, which made it one of the cheapest things in the whole fair, I’d reckon. He was happy to commune with a fellow Hazlitt fan, who are few and far between, and I congratulated him on his find, while being a little envious. It seems that, for many, this fair is first and foremost an occasion to fraternize with people who share their interests and trade, which, since the vocation of antique books seems to attract shy, solitary, and peculiar characters, might be one of the few times in a year they experience camaraderie. So absorbed were the dealers engaged in chit-chat with each other that I imagined that an enterprising thief might easily make off with the precious goods.
