Eight Great Dicks!

Like all great epics but one, Moby Dick is really a library of interconnected stories. It's not just that the doomed Pequod hears stories from every vessel she encounters in her captain's mad search for the white whale, and it's not just that we the readers hear extended stories about those and other vessels from Ishmael our narrator, and it's not just that Ishmael is telling us the Pequod's story and, by extension, the whole story of whales and whaling; what we tend to forget in the immediacy of Melville's tale is that the whole narrative is a story, told to us about events that happened a long time ago (“never mind how long precisely”) - and the teller himself is a made-up character, an invention of himself who won't even tell us his real name (“Ishmael” being a puckish Biblical choice designed to play off the name of the Pequod's captain). Stories and digressions open up off the main current of the book in almost endless variety, until they're finally paired away to one slender narrative of survival – Ishmael, clinging to a floating coffin. And even then, he doesn't tell us he survived in order to reach his dear home again, or to seek revenge on Moby Dick; he survives to tell the tale.

Given this kind of multiplicity – and the tiny, related fact that the book is the greatest American novel of the 19^th century – it's not surprising that Moby Dick has had as many editions as there are grains of sand on the shore. I dearly love the book and have read it more times than I could readily count (and in more places, including on the open water of all of the world's seas and once, in its entirety, in New Bedford), but even I couldn't even begin to guess at all the various paperbacks and hardcovers that exist out there in the wilds of the used-book world. I've seen perhaps two or three hundred such, but that's a drop in the proverbial bucket.

And naturally, I've developed favorites. Considering how often I've read the book – and more importantly, how often I've recommended it to others and urged them to read it – I could scarcely help it. There's an aura about Moby Dick, I sometimes think; like War & Peace, it's one of those overwhelming books that even faint-hearted readers somehow want to tackle (I've recently had it proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji does not have that aura, which is a pity, since it's really quite good too). Some of this might derive from its primary colors – a man's tale (no female characters at all, unless some of the more scurrilous postmodern theories about the whale itself are to be believed), full of adventure and yet delving into deeper meanings, and easily summarized: everybody knows the basic outline of what happens in Moby Dick, whereas not even Proust had the faintest idea how his own narcoleptic prose-epic ended.

When you're in the business of handing people books you want them to read, it behooves you to give some thought to your editions; a careless match could cost Moby Dick a reader, after all, and I want it to have as many readers as possible. And it's not just new readers: at different times of the day or seasons of the year, I myself will want a slightly different Moby Dick. So I've picked my eight favorites (in deference to John Parke's wonderful 1955 essay “Seven Moby Dicks”) to illustrate the gamut.

We start off with paperbacks, because Moby Dick is a big book, and squat, hand-friendly paperbacks are the best, most inviting way to grapple with it (well, the second most inviting way – the most inviting way would be to carry around an abridged edition, like the type that flourished in the 1930s and '40s, but our modern publishing world, getting so many of its sales from academia, has largely done away with abridgments, and rightly so; I myself have often urged people to read an abridged version of the book – but one of my own devising, consisting of check-marked chapters in the un-abridged version, so the reader is always free to go back and explore – an abridgment that actually has chunks cut out removes that option). And we start off with the most superficial reason to pick a book: its cover. In this case it's the somber, oddly threatening dark green seascape of the 1967 Bantam Classic edition (the paperback makes no cover-attribution, so to this day I still have no idea whose painting I've been admiring all these decades).

But the old Bantam Classics weren't manufactured to last even twenty years, much less half a century, and often when you encounter that 1967 volume, it's falling to pieces. Not so our next paperback choice, the old 1961 Signet Classic! These volumes were put together with rock-solid workmanship and on higher than average quality paper, and the results are visible even in this unthinkable year of 2010: this Moby Dick is a survivor – and if the movies are to be believed, it'll out-last us all, since it's this old Signet paperback that's on the bookshelf of the evil Khan's makeshift bookshelf in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And the volume boasts more than superior spine-glue! It's also got a feisty afterword by Denham Sutcliffe, then of Kenyon College, that includes this passage:

Everybody knows before he opens it that Moby Dick is a symbolical book, loaded with “hidden meanings.” Before he has read fifty pages he begins asking, “What does this bench stand for? Could it be Calvinism?” Or, “What does the chowder stand for?” Such an approach does violence both to the book and to the technique of symbolism. It translates a great story into a parlor-game cryptogram and it makes a trivial mystery out of one of the basic operations of the human imagination.

Neither the Bantam nor the Signet sports much in the way of critical apparatus (although the Bantam does include the aforementioned John Parke essay). For that, we have to turn to those twin titans of popular-run critical editions, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics. The latter is edited by Tony Tanner with fearful miscomprehension (sample gibberish: “Given the radically orphaned condition of modern man, a danger that Melville could see was the accelerating drift into disconnectedness of the non-affiliated contemporary individual”), but it includes fascinating correspondence between Melville and his book's dedicatee, Nathaniel Hawthorne, including this typically fascinating aside:

Lord [wrote Melville], when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; - I have heard of Krakens.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Penguin editor – waggishly called Harold Beaver – who appends to his own edition hundreds of pages of end-notes. It's the work of a madman, and it makes the Penguin hands down the most critically overloaded edition ever nominally intended for a mass-market audience. If you're a reader who likes this kind of herbaceous annotation (I sure as Hell am), this is the edition for you.

But all mass-market paperbacks of Moby Dick share at least one limitation, and in the case of this particular book, it's a crippling one: their size and price prohibit illustrations. All epics invite illustrated editions (poor aforementioned Genji has an absolutely gorgeous one, also from Penguin), but few do so more readily than Moby Dick, mainly because Melville is such a visual writer and renders this book is such childishly primary colors: Ahab has a peg-leg, and sperm whales are all head and tail – a child could draw either one and elicit recognition from the literati. So the other half of our eight choices today will be illustrated versions.

And we'll start with what was once the best-known (and still holds the records for the best-selling) such edition: the old Modern Library edition illustrated by Rockwell Kent. Kent originally did his work for R. R. Donnelley and Sons in 1930, and the edition quickly went through a boat-load of reprints – not only because then, as now, Modern Library made some of the best-designed and most reasonably-priced classics, but also because Kent's style of illustration was enjoying a vogue at the time (readers of Edith Hamilton's Mythology will recognize that style, with varying degrees of affection) – heavy black lines, straightforward, usually eye-level compositions designed to be self-consciously nostalgic for woodcuts of the previous century. Kent's work on Moby Dick went far beyond the standard commissioned seven-picture deal: his illustrations positively fill the book, and he balances full-page set-pieces with dozens of spot-illustrations. Melville's book frequently calls for such aids to the reader; who in this day and age will be able to picture a case-bucket, or a monkey-rope? Virtually every time such a term appears, a dutiful Kent rendering of it won't be far behind. It might not be our current notion of art, but it's oddly comforting.

Moby Dick has always been popular with various 'illustrated classics' done for children over the years, and you'd think one of the goals of any such series would be to produce just that sense of comfort. But in 1990 Berkley Publishing Group enlisted fan-favorite comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz to do a fully-illustrated graphic novel of the book, and the results are anything but comforting. With its garishly varying colors and its great heaping helpings of the book's text (unlike most other illustrated classics, this is an abridgment, not a bowdlerized retelling), this Sienkiewicz Moby Dick, despite its provenance, is one of the finest and most spellbinding editions of Melville ever produced.

The prize of actual finest edition, however, goes to the 1979 Arion Press edition that was later brought out by the University of California. The paperback edition is, fittingly, white and oversized, and the whole thing is profusely illustrated by Barry Moser, who clearly has Rockwell Kent peering over his shoulder throughout. Moser provides several full-page dramatic drawings, but like Kent, he also gives us dozens of spot-illustrations of everything from a mast-head to a quarterdeck to a great squid like the one that gets Ahab's murderous hopes up at one point in the book. This gorgeous edition is proudly, defiantly just the book – no Introduction or Afterword, no essays or end-notes: just Melville's strange, rolling prose and Moser's clear, evocative black-and-white engravings. It might not be the most handy version to pack in the bottom of a footlocker, but it belongs on a high shelf with some of the prettiest editions ever made.

And my personal favorite, out of all the candidates? Oddly enough, it would be the 1994 specially-commissioned remainder edition put out by Barnes & Noble as part of a short-lived stab at making a distinctive shelf of 'classics' (the Dracula and the Gulliver's Travels are also worth finding, but the Moby Dick is the best). B&N brought together the text, some letters, some reviews, a dictionary of terms, a whiny-pants introduction by Mark Helprin, and twelve gorgeous full-color page-sized illustrations by Mark Summers, and they topped the whole thing off with Hart Crane's haunting poem “At Melville's Tomb”:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,

The calyx of death's bounty giving back

A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashing charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive

No farther tides … High in the azure steeps

Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Summers' drawings are as stark as Kent's and as vibrant as Moser's, and their relative infrequency (no spot-illustrations here) gives them a distinct power all their own. This is the edition of Moby Dick that forms my own Ahab-like obsession whenever I'm book-hunting, since B&N only did a limited run and it's consequently somewhat hard to find. I've never, in fact, come across it randomly – when it first came to the downtown Boston Barnes & Noble, I, bowled over by its beauty, bought all the copies in the shipment, and those are the only ones I've ever seen. If I were at all comfortable finding used books online, this is one of the only ones I'd seek.

There are countless other editions, of course, spurred not only by creativity (there was recently a childrens pop-up version) but by cupidity (for good or ill – mostly ill – the book is always assigned in schools, so every publisher in the world has a financial motive for bringing out a slightly more expensive paperback every two or three years), but these eight form the nucleus of my own appreciation, and the first two have been tried and treasured traveling companions and, when opened, bear still the salt-sea tangs of places long ago. Countless editions, yes, but I feel certain one of these eight will serve just about any reader still willing to commit themselves to the deep.

Dracula!

Our book today is Dracula, Bram Stoker's immortal, undead, paradigm-shifting 1897 novel that has changed the shape of Western pop-culture more than anything published since. The book was a gigantic financial hit for Stoker virtually from the instant of its publication, and it's been imitated, parodied, adapted, and interpolated endlessly ever since.

I think there are three reasons why the concept Stoker hammered out and popularized caught on with such unprecedented drama (aside from the awkward, furniture-upsetting vigor of his prose, that is): first, he gives us a jim-dandy cast of characters - a good girl, a bad girl, a cowboy, an intellectual, a bland good guy, an aristocrat, a crazy old Yoda-figure, and of course the world's greatest villain, the perfect combination of plotting fiend and ravenous beast; second, he gives us that most emotionally satisfying of all plot under-structures - the invasion story ... Dracula has one goal in mind from the book's onset -- he wants to infect England with his undead virus, wants to begin turning the country (as I've done many times in the past, I whole-heartedly recommend Kim Stanley Newman's Anno Dracula, a book that has its own killer premise, that Stoker's novel is itself an alternate history, that in reality Dracula's plan worked), with only our band of heroes standing in his way; and third, he gives us a bad guy who's offering something just a little bit alluring. True, newly-turned undead must serve Dracula - but they get to live forever, outside of conventional strictures of morality. I've always considered it one of Dracula's rare important weaknesses that we never really see that allure championed properly - the Count's foremost servant, Renfield, is insane, and Lucy is a dimwit. But Lord knows, subsequent handlers of Stoker's material have spared no effort to show us that allure in all its dark glory (including most recently and most famously the Twilight saga, in which the winsome heroine pleads with her undead suitor to turn her, so she can be "free").


Sometimes, when I really love a book, I find my appreciation increases just a bit with every really good or interesting edition I find, and that's certainly true of Dracula - it's apparently endless commercial viability guarantees a fresh crop of repackagings every year, and some of them are worth having. Of course there's the Oxford World's Classics paperback with its great binding and its great notes (and the apparently requisite photo of Bela Lugosi on the cover), and there's the dorky old Magnum Easy Eye edition (also with Bela) for those who scorn any kind of scholarly apparatus.



At the hilariously, frantically overdone other end of the 'scholarly apparatus' spectrum, there's Leonard Wolf's epic 1975 Essential Dracula (it's got a still from Nosferatu on its cover, but don't worry - it's dedicated to Bela), which features the text of the novel onto which an encrusting, clambering moss of footnotes has clapped with joyful tenacity. Wolf footnotes absolutely everything in the book, and unlike so many equally annotated volumes of other classics (and the recent annotated volume of this one, which is as thorough as it is boring), Wolf's notes are always bristling with opinions. Sometime they very nearly end up being more interesting than the passages they explicate, like this little swipe at the token American:

Quincey Morris is a frequent window gazer. Presumably, this is part of his frontier American heritage. Stoker, no doubt, meant the trait to imply a huntsman's alertness. Ironically enough, this man of action rarely accomplishes anything.

Or this, about the recurrent wimpiness of Jonathan Harker, the book's main protagonist:

Mina here takes note of a pervasive weakness in Harker. The reader, more than Mina (one supposes), has seen a good deal of Harker lying passive and supine: most notably, of course, in his nearly flirtatious lassitude in the presence of Dracula's women; his swoon; his doze; and for a full six weeks he lay bedridden in Budapest. Mina, on August 24, reports that he was "so thin and pale and weak-looking ... He is only a wreck of himself ..." It is with this wreck that Mina spends her wedding night.

(fans of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer will read that "nearly flirtatious lassitude" and immediately think of Giles' own encounter with Dracula's women ... and, recalling it, most likely laugh out loud)



Dracula has naturally had countless adaptations to more visual formats over the years. The character had a long and very entertaining run in a Marvel Comics adaptation drawn by the great Gene Colan, and Mike Mignola's four-part comics adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is so visually stunning it almost compensates for the idiocy of the movie itself. And there've been many, many illustrated versions of the novel. Penguin brought one out in 2006 featuring both color and black and white drawings by an unusually restrained Jae Lee, and just last year Sterling kicked off its All-Action Classic series with graphic novel adaptation scripted by Michael Mucci and drawn with distinctive, idiosyncratic energy by Ben Caldwell.




And there'll be more, that goes without saying. Stoker hit upon the same creative gold that was found by Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Rice Burroughs did with Tarzan, so interpretations and re-interpretations will always be with us. This can usually be extremely frustrating - it's frustrating that Tarzan is currently creatively quiescent, it's more frustrating that Holmes is about to be debased beyond recognition into a gay kickboxer, and probably it'll be equally frustrating when details of the 2011 Hollywood version of Dracula come to light (I'm guessing the Count will be played by somebody under 25 - Michael Pitt's my frontrunner at the moment).

With any luck, in the meantime there'll be a nice meaty BBC TV production to sink our teeth into.

Oxford World's Classics!

Can we take a moment from the hurly-burly of our normal blogging to pause and praise the the heyday of Oxford World's Classics?

That heyday took place long after the establishment of the press at the start of the 20th century - and a large part of it is aesthetic, having nothing to do with the critical and scholarly issues that should be the only scratch-marks of any press. Nevertheless! In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Oxford World's Classics greatly expanded their line of titles and hugely improved their look - the spines and cover-backgrounds went from white to vibrant yellow, and the choice of cover-paintings greatly improved. It was a sight to see.

For a brief, wonderful interlude, your bookstores shelves were filled with these titles, often crowding out the frumpier-looking Penguin Classics. All the standard classics were here, from Homer to the Bronte girls, but there were lots and lots of stranger, less expected titles, from the Kalevala to Elizabethan prose works to seminal 'horror' titles like Dracula or The Invisible Man sporting movie-still covers. There was Austen and Dickens and Scott and Thackeray, and there was, for the first time, the whole of Musketeer novels of Dumas, and there was a splendidly-annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes, plus a generous helping of American classics.


And then there were the glories of the press: the extra-large Golden Bough, for instance, or the Annotated Bible (still far and away the best Bible to own), and what is surely the crowning achievement of the Oxford World's Classics of this period, the complete, gorgeously produced, exhaustively annotated run of Anthony Trollope.

The bindings weren't as resilient as Penguins, it's true, but the scholarly apparatus was often more current and sometimes more lively, and even when they weren't, the Oxford volume of virtually anybody made a worthy counter-balance to the Penguin.



And Penguin had the last laugh: in the mid-90s, they sued Oxford University Press for copyright infringement: that 'O'-shaped colophon on the bar with the word 'Classics' came too close, apparently, to the long-established Penguin Classics look. So the entirety of the Oxford line was pulled, at ruinous expense to the press. Trade-sized white-spined paperbacks of a fraction of their titles were put back on the market, but nothing like the old variety remained, and suddenly those vibrant yellow spines became collector's items when they were found in used bookstores. Certainly I keep an eye out for them, on the rare occasions when I enter a used bookstore!

So here's to a wonderful run, brief though it was! To Oxford World's Classics: for a while, they made yellow the most fun color in the bookstore!

The Physics of Aristotle

Our book today is the so-called Physics of Aristotle, written in the 4th century b.c. and perhaps intended by its author as a kind of overview introduction not only to his gazillion (Greek for 200) other books but also to his way of writing ('perhaps' is repeated silently throughout that synopsis and everything that follows, since we don't know what Aristotle's intentions were - the Physics and all his other works were published by others, and it's as likely as not that Aristotle himself never lifted a finger to revise them).

The Physics (that's not it's real title - Aristotle would probably have called it 'On Natural Things,' which wouldn't have been helpful, since that's basically what he called all his gazillion books) is a systematic inquiry into the basic concepts, the underpinning shapes and natures of reality itself. That sounds absurdly over-reaching, but it's only after Aristotle that philosophers cropped up like toadstools to muddy the waters of such thought and make them undrinkable. Aristotle wouldn't have considered himself a philosopher at all in the sense of the breed with which we're now inflicted. He spent too much time watching bugs crawl over parchment to measure their strides, or carefully nursing marmoset babies with tissues soaked in goat's milk.

He's traditionally called the greatest philosopher of all time (Dante was particularly avid in his admiration), but his gazillion works are entirely free from any hint of caring about such distinctions - instead, they're full of the most muscular, free-wheeling, and utterly engaging intellectual investigations readers will find anywhere (the closest equivalent in many ways is Saint Augustine's City of God, but it falls short in the blinding rigor of its faith).

The accretions of centuries of admiration, even veneration, have conspired to make Aristotle one of the most intimidating figures in the Western canon, and that's a real shame, for the simple reason that he's one of the most enjoyable authors of any era. His style is simple and often conversational (understandable, when you consider that most of his gazillion works are probably elaborate lecture-transcripts) - the Robin Waterfield translation, currently put out by Oxford University Press, is the recommended version to demonstrate this - and the debates he carries on with himself and his subjects are endlessly fascinating.

The Physics takes as its subject matter the most elemental basics of the physical world, and before you start rolling your eyes, stop to consider how much more you knew by age 15 than Aristotle knew in his entire life. The natural world was his obsession, and he enlisted the steady stream of intellectually curious young men who constantly filled his life (the most famous of which, of course, was Alexander the Great) in acquiring specimens and oddities for his examination. But the natural world is only as yielding of its secrets as your tools are sharp to unearth them, and the tools of scientific investigation are incalculably sharper now than they were when Aristotle sought to know everything that was knowable.

You know that the Earth is a planet in a solar system, that it revolves around its mid-range sun along with a host of other planets, moons, and asteroids. You know that all living species on Earth are more or less related, that life forms descend into families and species, that cosmology currently indicates a very, very old universe of matter and energy streaming outward from a single explosive instant. Even if you paid no attention whatsoever in any biology class you ever sat through, you know more about that bug crawling across the parchment than Aristotle in all his efforts could know.

And it bears remembering that nobody had ever tried it before. Heraclitus, Empedocles, and the like had blazed the various trails of Aristotle's inquiries, but the depth and scope of those inquiries are like nothing anybody had ever done before. He searched everywhere, asked questions about everything, and wrote it all down in a prose that's direct, unpretentious, and sometimes playfully cat-tailing:

'Place' may refer either to the shared place that contains all bodies or to the particular place which immediately contains a body. For instance, you are now in the world, because you are in the air and the air is in the world; and you are in the air because you are on the earth; and by the same token you are on the earth because you are in this particular place, which contains nothing more than you. So if place is what immediately contains a body, it must be a kind of limit, and the upshot is that a thing's place would seem to be its form and shape, by which the thing's magnitude is defined and the matter of its magnitude is determined. For the form of anything is its limit.

The Physics takes just this kind of thorough, analytical approach to its attempts to bring clear, repeatable definitions to all the vague terms that had been floating around the world of discourse since long before Hesiod started writing verse about them all. Assuming we all know what we mean by form, or time, or even the workings of chance was simply not acceptable to Aristotle; he probes everything, always, in the manner of Plato's Academy, inspired by the legendary Socrates. Aristotle never rests in his probing, and although some of his gazillion books plow so deeply into their territories that they make for heavy going, the Physics is at once simple and thrillingly complex, tackling everything from the elements to the infinite to the mechanics of change:

Change is not only opposed by change: rest seems to be the opposite of change too. So here is another issue we had better settle. A change is opposed in an unqualified sense by a change, but rest is also opposed to it in that it is the privation of change, and there is a sense in which we describe the privation of anything as its opposite. Now the opposite of change of a particular kind is rest of the same kind; for instance, the opposite of change of place is staying in one place. But that statement needs some qualifying. What's the opposite of staying in a given place? Is it movement to that place or movement from that place?

Aristotle wrote 2000 years ago, and there's nothing that promises a deathly dullness these days than anything that smacks of the Greek and Roman classics. We here at Stevereads have seen what happens when nominally intelligent young men (young women, in our experience, are more adventurous) are presented with such classics: their eyes glaze over, their mouths dip open just a bit, and they instantly, adamantly stop caring. They shouldn't: in life, Aristotle gloried in connecting with the curiosities of such young men (along with the horror any civilized person would feel, there was a definite thread of pride running through his reactions to Alexander's conquest of the known world - and what naturalist wouldn't love receiving live ostriches in the mail?), and even now, ages later, his writings - starting with the Physics - have abundant power to thrill and provoke.

So find yourself a copy of the Physics and dig in - we're sure you'll enjoy yourselves.

The Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger

Our book today is the Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger, this time in a new translation by P.G. Walsh. Walsh's translation is quite startlingly good - a marked improvement over even the best previous renditions - but there's only so much he can do with his author, because Pliny Secundus, Pliny the Younger, was a boob, a ponce, and a monumental suck-up.

He was born well and fostered well - when his father died, he became the ward of awe-inspiring consular Verginius Rufus and, more importantly, his uncle the Elder Pliny, about as vicious and remarkable an individual as is ever born into any generation. If the Elder Pliny's collected works - there were upwards of 40 books, not counting ten volumes of collected correspondence - were still extant in their entirety, they would overshadow the nephew to the point where we could safely ignore him. But they are not, and the nephew's correspondence, preening and blockheaded (and cringing, when it comes to his letters to the emperor) though it is, nevertheless sheds valuable light on the life and inner workings of imperial government in the first century. They are sometimes compared in this regard to the voluminous correspondence of Cicero, which is unfair: Cicero was an as big or bigger horse's ass than Pliny the Younger, but he could at least write - his letters flow like rivulets, they're beguiling. Pliny's letters are more of the Radar O'Reilly variety, plodding, point-driven, and relentlessly self-absorbed.

They aren't total disasters - there are ghost stories and lots of plummy bits about household slaves and real estate prices. And books - refreshingly, the letters are full of the love of books, which wouldn't have been evident in the writings of his celebrated uncle, who didn't enjoy books so much as use them like an old, alcoholic British attache might have used the young Thai girls on his ministry staff.

And there's some joshing, all done in a Plimptonesque mandarin style but companionable nonetheless:

To his friend Paulinus
I am angry. Whether I should be I am not sure, but I am angry. You know how love-feelings are sometimes unjust, often intemperate, and always susceptible. But what provokes them is weighty and perhaps just. Anyway, it is as if my anger is as justified as it is fierce. I am considerably angry because I have not heard from you for so long. There is only one way you can prevail on me, which is to send me, now at long last, streams of the lengthiest letters, for in my eyes this is the only genuine means of excusing yourself. All other excuses will not ring true. I won't hear of 'I was not in Rome,' or 'I was too busy.' As for 'I was somewhat out of sorts,' even the gods would not buy that!
I am on my estate, enjoying the two fruits born of leisure, books and idleness. Farewell."

There's at least a human quality here, albeit a middling one (even on this, Cicero beats him - when the latter's marble facade comes down, it comes all the way down).

He tries to hit this collegiate note as often as he can, wanting badly to appear the fuzzy-prioritied man of letters:

"To his friend Julius Naso

Etruria has been battered by hail, and the report from across the Po is of a bumper-harvest but with prices correspondingly dirt-cheap. My Laurentine estate alone offers a return. In fact, I have nothing there but the house and the garden, and the beach immediately beyond. None the less, it is my only profitable property, for there I write a lot, and cultivate not my non-existent land but myself with my studies. Already I can show you a full cupboard of papers, the equivalent of a full granary elsewhere. So if you are keen on a reliable and rewarding property, purchase something here! Farewell."

Charming? Maybe. But there you see the reality peeking through despite itself: the skeleton of this lovely little picture is a late-night TV real estate pitch, one specifically aimed toward wealthy acquaintances. It's letters like these that give you the impression you might not have liked Pliny the Younger all that much. You certainly wouldn't have liked his ambition.

And he had loads and loads of ambition. He was deficient in courage (his uncle the Elder died while trying to save people from the firestorm of erupted Vesuvius; the Younger, also present, was content to sightsee from a safe distance), but he knew how to go after what he wanted. Under the reign of Domitian he started up the ladder of public offices, and under Trajan he was awarded the governorship of Bithynia-Pontus. Ponce or no ponce, governors need watching, and as a result we have among Pliny's letters a collection of exchanges between him and Trajan on various matters pertaining to the management of his province. Here Pliny is abject and fawning to the one Roman emperor who found such behavior distasteful, and he's extra-punctilious about everything because he no more trusts himself than others trust him. Trajan (or rather, Trajan's clerks, the emperor not really being a paperwork kind of guy) is constantly besieged with letters from his new governor on every subject conceivable:

"Gaius Pliny to the emperor Trajan

I am asking you, my lord, to state in reply what rights you wish the cities of Bithynia and Pontus to have in demanding the moneys owed to them from rents or sales or other sources. I have found that several proconsuls have allowed them the right of first claim, and that this had the force of law. My view, however, is that through your foresight some procedure should be established and ratified, by means of which their interests can be protected for ever. For the decisions made by the proconsuls, though wisely conceded, are temporary and precarious unless your authority is brought to bear on them."

What Pliny is talking about here, when all his mincing equivocations are removed, is graft - he's asking whether or not the governor's office, and not the city municipalities, might not have first crack at all owed revenues (most certainly including taxes), and he's asking Trajan to endorse the graft officially. The emperor's reply squelches the idea, as anyone but Pliny would have known it would:

"The rights which the cities of Bithynia and Pontus should wield in the matter of the moneys which for one reason and another are owed to the public weal must be decided in accordance with the law of each. If they have the privilege by which they are ranked before all other creditors, it must be safeguarded; or if they have no such privilege, it will not be incumbent on me to grant it and do injustice to private individuals."

In other words, things were working fine before you got there, leave them alone. Two years later, when Pliny died in office, he was not an overly wealthy man.

Walsh's translation, as noted, does all that can be done with this material, and his end-notes are ample and widely read. The volume is part of the Oxford World's Classics series, which can always be trusted to be excellent. Pliny is above all things a gossip, and those of you who find gossip fascinating (and you know who you are) will find much to please you here. Those with meatier interests can only hope that more of the Elder's works come to light someday.

books! an addition to the ranks!

I whole-heartedly approve of Blacks, Latinos, gays, and even Freemasons mixing willy-nilly in our schools, businesses, and playgrounds. I'm a fervent believer that all humans are equal (of course, those of you who know me well know that in my mind, I phrase it 'all humans are equally evil' - but the point's effectively the same).

But when it comes to my books, I segregate ruthlessly.

There are four rings. In the outermost, the rectum of my collection, are the books steadily being culled from the shelves for a more-or-less permanent cycle of selling and trading. This cycle is of course vital to the life of my collection, but it's ironic, since my GOAL is to buy only those books I intend to keep forever. My outer ring is a wry, permanent testament to the fact that even when it comes to book-buying, my judgement isn't perfect (control your shock, my young Jedi!).

The next ring is by far the biggest: my collection at large. These are the dozens and hundreds of books lining the shelves of all my various dog-chewed bookcases. These are the books that take an afternoon to move on moving-day. These are the books I prowl every day, the books I re-arrange, the books that sometimes surprise me by simply being there ('when did I get THAT?')(or, as I confess I often find myself saying, 'when did I get YOU?'). Of course it's FROM these books that the to-sell books come, but that's not a worry: 95 percent of these titles are safe from any purge.

They're a miracle, really. In virtually all ages prior to this one, such a library - relatively minuscule (I'm fairly certain at least a couple of you in the Silent Majority have larger ones) - would have been the world's own envy of every reading individual.

And those individuals YEARNED for it, make no mistake. Books were rare and costly and unwieldy, and even the most avid readers usually didn't possess more than a couple dozen. And I'm always grateful for that, I am. History provides few more intelligent, hungry-minded individuals than Henry VIII, and I currently have ten times the number of books he owned in his lifetime. I have ten times the number of books Henry VIII had. This circle gets what the kids call mad props.

The next circle is far more exalted - they're the four or five dozen books that are invited into my room, whatever room I'm sleeping in, in whatever apartment I happen to live.

Some of you will know the tiny little nerd-haven I make of whatever room I happen to occupy. The outer apartment is one thing, but my room ... well, that's where the books I most treasure are. The ones I like to SEE every day. The ones I USE, which is the ultimate dream of every book ever written (and who knows if maybe a whole LOT of them don't get that distinction? After all, my room is duplicated by prisoners' under-beds and teenagers' window-sills, and they're filled with Stephen King and law books and Nora Roberts).

This is where you'll find my Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (a free book to the first of you who can tell me how many tons Thundra can lift - and no fair peeking! Do it from memory! Honor system, people!). Here you'll find my Readers Digest guide to North American wildlife. Here you'll find Clifton Fadiman's Little Brown book of anecdotes. Here you'll find all the good volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History. Here you'll find my beautiful Penguin collected Jane Austen (one big fat beautiful volume). Here you'll find my Chapman's Homer.

The books in this circle are exalted. They get boxed first and most lovingly in all moves. They get consulted, frequently. They never get sold and almost never get given away. They're heavily bookmarked, heavily annotated. They're my working books.

Today I had the rare and incredibly sweet pleasure of adding a book to that ring. Today I found Tom McArthur's edition of the Oxford Companion to the English Language, and I knew instantly that I'd found an addition.

This book is wonderful, plain and simple. It's the quintessential browser's paradise, since its brief rather predictably sprawls all over creation. After all, there's nothing in the world that doesn't fall under the rubric of 'The English Language.'

There's no way to fully convey the wonders of this volume. It roams, it digresses, it fulminates, it sneers. The entry on Shakespeare is worthy of independent publication, the entry on Old English could double as an introductory course on the subject. And the quips are just as good. Take this one on the subject of Humor:

As there are stereotypes of national humour with some support in cultural fact, so there are widely accepted if not wholly reliable notions about humour in former ages. England before the Norman Conquest, for example, is nobody's idea of a country full of wags and wisecrackers....

Hee.

So without further ado, I log in and add a book to the second circle. Of course, this entails removing a second circle book already on duty. In this case it's a volume called High Seas given to me by my young friend Sebastian (his comment at the time? 'You've been a-sea and all, right? I thought you might enjoy this more than I - sounds frightfully WET to me...'). Sebastian is a) too fragile and b) too distractable to roger, so his time in this room is extremely limited - he'll never notice the switch).

I know, I know - this entry leaves unnamed one further circle. The Oxford Companion to the English Laguage succeeds seamlessly into my second circle, but some of you might be asking, what about the first circle?

Well, the first circle, as some of you may know, are my Essential Books. These are the books I not only use but NEED. Several of them are the books I've travelled the world with, during my 'lost years' ... Here, in one bookcase, are my ... well, my indispensables: my King James Bible, my Ovid (in the original and five translations), my Juvenal, my Dryden and Byron and Sheridan and Shaw and Spenser and Tacitus and Ariosto and Jeremy Leven and Graves and Browning and Livy and Huizinga and Syme and Morison and the Venerable Bede .... my Homer and my Tasso, my Horace ... my Horace.

It's very, very rare that I make an addition to this circle, and it's always a cause of intense joy. The last addition was the Oxford World Classic paperback of Boswell's Life of Johnson, the original volume of which I VERY mistakenly leant out to a young well-wisher who a) will never admit that it's out of their depth and b) never sheepishly give it back.

So additions to this particular ring are exceedingly rare. You can be sure you'll hear all about it, if this blog lasts long enough to record it (and judging from the anemic level of reader-comments, that's damn unlikely)

And in the meantime, let's all welcome this addition to the second-most exalted rank of my book-world! Of course I invite all of you loyal readers to comment at length about your own book-circles! I know you have them - I've been in enough of your apartments - and I urge you to make a clean breast of it!