The Paris Review

It was Thomas à Kempis who wrote, "I have sought rest everywhere, and have found it nowhere, save in a little corner, with a little book.” Would Flavorwire’s slideshow of book edifices have provided the ultimate in serenity, or the reverse? What if the corner were itself a book? Whatever else your reaction, we imagine awe will figure in somewhere. Below, a few of our favorites.

Argument #2, by Tom Bendtsen

Marta Minujin's collaborative Tower of Babel

Matej Kren’s Scanner

Book Igloo, by Miler Lagos

Literary tourism is as old as time (or at least as old as the Lake District), but, due to a combination of new technology and easy travel, we seem to be living in its Golden Age. Last year, Wendy McClure reported from the Little House pilgrim trail, and Oxford, Mississippi, has drawn fans of Southern Gothic since Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel. On this site, you’ll recall Margaret Eby's paeon to Eudora Welty’s Jackson garden. If you want to reenact The Canterbury Tales, well, you can.  In recent years, readers have flocked to the Pacific Northwest to get a taste of Twilight; lovers of The Help have tried to get a taste of the 1960s in Greenwood, MS; and now, you can even experience the survivalist thrill of The Hunger Games in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, the FT reported live from Germany’s “Fairy Tale Road,” on which one can walk in the steps of Pied Pipers (Hamlin), the Musicians of Bremen, and the sites where Grimm scholars believe Sleeping Beauty might have actually pricked her finger and Rapunzel let down her hair. (More easily verifiable are locales that figured in the brothers’ lives.) Of course, in real life, all is not fairy-tale perfect. Explains Günther Koseck, the German noble who inhabits Dornröschenschloss (“Sleeping Beauty’s castle”) during the castle’s weekly Sleeping Beauty reenactments, his enchanted princesses “have to always be young and beautiful, and that means they have to be replaced occasionally.”

When modernist novelist David Markson died in 2010, the West Villager’s personal library ended up, by his request, at his old haunt, the Strand bookstore. Word quickly spread, and bibliophiles and readers tried to snatch up as many of the annotated books—many of which figured in Markson’s own work—as possible. (Alex Abramovich describes buying up three shopping bags’ worth of classics, complete with notes and marginalia.) The books were, typically, signed: either Markson, David M. Markson, Markson NYC, or Markson London. It’s an archive worthy of a university but preserved, instead, in bits and pieces on bookshelves all over New York and beyond.

Now, a tumblr, Reading Markson Reading, has dedicated itself to, as the author puts it, “Exploring the mind, method and masterpieces of David Markson through the marginalia found on the pages of the books in his personal library.” An intimate glimpse into the writer’s thoughts, for all readers to share.

Watch Markson reminisce at the Strand in 2007.

I’ve had a soft spot for bookmobiles ever since I read 1964’s career romance for young moderns, The Girl on the Bookmobile and learned how much pleasure and knowledge these roving libraries could provide!

It was a trimly built van-like conveyance. At the rear, the doors swung open to show a miniature room equipped with shelves already stocked with books, a tiny desk, and racks clipped wherever a stray space presented itself.

(Romance and the dissemination of books ensue.)

You can imagine how thrilled we were by the 1928 Bookmobile Boing Boing showed us a few days ago and, now, by Flavorwire’s roundup of mobile books around the world! Check out the whole thing, but here are a few of our favorites. We don't see why bookmobiles shouldn’t join food trucks as a twenty-first-century craze!

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I knew a kid in college who wanted so desperately to produce a book that he couldn’t stand the sight of their spines. He stacked them—ten or so brown and black books, library hardcovers—in his dorm room, titles to the wall, lips facing forward. He didn’t really buy books, either—at least I don’t recall that he did—but he never passed a bookstore without entering to read. These same stores have since displayed his books in their windows.

“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’” Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez, long ago when Nunez was dating Sontag’s son. “She meant not only what books they had on their shelves, but how the books were arranged,” Nunez explains. “Because of her, I arranged my own books by subject and in chronological rather than alphabetical order. I wanted to be serious.”

There are many varieties of nerd, but only two real species—the serious and the nonserious—and shelves are a pretty good indication of who is which. “To expose a bookshelf,” Harvard professor Leah Price writes in Unpacking My Library, a recent collection of interviews with writers about the books they own, “is to compose a self.” In Sontag’s case, a very rigorous self. And, of course, that’s just the sort of self someone anxious about his aspirations might shy away from. “A self without a shelf remains cryptic,” Price notes. It’s like the straight-A student who says he hasn’t studied for finals: if you haven’t confessed to caring, no one can consider you to have failed.

There’s not a lot of anxiety about keeping libraries in this collection, however, because the adults featured—Junot Diaz, Steven Pinker, Gary Shteyngart, James Wood, Claire Messud, to name a few—are all solidly successful. Price’s interviews are less about each writer’s affairs and encounters with individual books than his or her shepherding of the whole herd—what’s treasured, tossed, bought twice, allowed to be lent. The interesting questions focus on each writer’s feelings about intellectual signaling and methods of overall arrangement. In other words, the stars of the pictures aren’t the books but the shelves. Read More »

A cultural news roundup.

Cult author Russell Hoban has died at eighty-six.

Just what every child hopes to find under the tree: a Joyce Carol Oates doll.

Not so much? How about some grammatical correction?

A children’s science book?

Or a Vonnegut-inspired tee?

(#booknerd)

These same people might enjoy an at-home table-reading party.

The Utne Reader pulls up stakes for Kansas.

Tuck Everlasting: The Musical.

Literary novels, the HBO shows.

On Joan Didion’s “Oh, wow.” : “Much of the fun in these rather bitchy back-and-forths is seeing literary heavyweights get just this peevish.”

Capote in the buff!

Pooh’s predecessor!