I asked at reception for Mrs. Hamer. It always gave me pleasure to use her married name, not the name she was known by. She once told me some of the names she had used in her life to keep her life secret, and I forgot them. 

Gabriele d’Annunzio was born in 1863 in Pescara, a town in the Abruzzi. He died in a villa overlooking Lake Garda in 1938. Ariel. A name he called himself and often signed, sometimes as Gabriel Ariel. In every poet, to some degree, there is this lyric angel and the sheer beauty of words is his domain.

A book written so hectically one can’t help thinking that the author was trying to hide something Animated cartoon: a unicorn in a tree top, mourning his lost love. It brings tears to my eyes I evaded evil with my body, though it came from my body

In the summer of 1963, the kingdom of Morocco had not yet become infested with tourists, hippies and freaks. I didn’t land as a pioneer, of course, but neither did I follow in the wake of fashion. I could step adventurously upon the shore believing that I had arrived through personal and independent choice.

Sue was not overly fond of bullfights. I believe they wearied and distressed her, although she did enjoy the music, the colors, and the pageantry. She went to bullfights with me in Spain—long ago, twenty-three years ago—when we were first together. 

He wrote other letters that day to Wes Joyce, proprietor of the Lion’s Head where he drank, and to Joe Flaherty the writer who lived in the same house as himself. The letters were all postmarked at three in the afternoon. That evening he went to the Lion’s Head, drank quietly, said little, and studied the faces of Joyce and Flaherty who were also at the bar and would receive his letters in the morning. 

The work of the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization can be said to have started in the period 1949-1951, although its full organization in its present form—the voluminous files, the worldwide network of correspondents-only came later.

In one of those years John Train, then studying for a Master’s degree at Harvard in Comparative Literature, noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, of Hoquiam, Washington. 

They tell of certain years in the Italian literary-prize business as the French would speak of a good or bad vintage year: the giddy splendors of 1965 prize-feting and fighting, the multiple crises of ’68 culminating in the sad death of Nobel poet Salvatore Quasimodo while presiding at some minor poetry prize event at Amalfi, and the year Moravia, out of pique or paradox, went out to found his own prize, giving the first award to his ex-wife in lieu (it’s said) of support payments.

Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. 

  For almost a year, I have been helping the Waldenbooks Company in its efforts to get Americans to buy and read more books. One of the sad statistics of our society is that only 3% of the American public buys hard cover books. This points out that the home library, which was once such a staple for informed people, has lost much of its importance.