Shelfies #42: James Blaylock

As for the bookshelf in question, it’s one of three built into what was once a window that looked out at nowhere. The shelf sits above my nook desk, the three shelves containing my favorite books, which is to say the books I pull down and read when I should be writing. For clarification I’ll point out that the small, fattish book is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The slim blue volume farther to the right is Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, and the dried-blood-colored book four doors down is the revered and exquisitely collectible Waterfront Edition of Liverpool Jarge by Halliday Witherspoon, signed by the author and limited to one thousand copies. Word has it that the book of seagoing yarns is almost infinitely valuable to the “right collector.” A bookstore stamp on the first page reads “The Old Corner Bookstore, Inc. Boston Mass.” Another on the inside front cover reads “Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books, 140 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach 2, California.” I don’t know what the “2” means, but I can easily recall the location and appearance of Acres of Books, which vied with Powell’s Books as the King of used bookstores in western North America before it was bulldozed in the name of progress. The penciled-in price reads, $1.00, a real bargain. The Old Corner Bookstore, I’m happy to discover, is still a going concern along the Freedom Trail in Boston, where it occupies a venerable building built in 1718, which, unfortunately now also houses a Chipotle restaurant, which (to my curmudgeonly mind) should be ridden out of town on a rail. A little-known fact from the horse’s mouth: The yarns in Liverpool Jarge bear an interesting resemblance to the stories in James Norman Hall’s Dr. Dogbody’s Leg, which was published some twenty years after Witherspoon’s book. Dr. Dogbody’s Leg (sitting on the shelf below the shelf you see in the photo) has been referred to as the most brilliant of J. N. Hall’s books, but I’ll bet a shiny new dime that Hall was standing on the giant Witherspoon’s shoulders when he wrote it. 

I could say a heap about every book on the shelf, but for brevity’s sake, I cannot, so I’ll point out first that Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees is simply the best fantasy novel ever written. What you see is the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series publication, 1970, the novel itself first published in 1926 (and no doubt too valuable for me ever to own a copy). Off to my right there’s a shelf full of Ballantine Adult Fantasy novels, the series published between 1969 and 1974, 65 novels with astonishing covers, many of the books long out of print before Ian and Betty Ballantine came up with the idea of reproducing them with gorgeous covers and introductions by Lin Carter. According to all accounts “the series was “never a money maker,” but was done for the love of beautiful, strange books, of all the odd, outmoded notions. When Random house bought Ballantine Books, that sort of sentiment no longer applied, and the series was ended. Here’s a bit from Lud-in-the-Mist: “The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both “the Silent People,” and the Milky Way, they thought, was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.”

The Hollow Earth I prize for its almost-convincing nuttiness. I’m a fan of faux science: cryptozoology, ghosts, the paranormal, flying saucers, crop circles, Atlantis, the mysteries of the Sargasso Sea, the Loch Ness Monster, the Ogopogo. The Hollow Earth was written, or compiled, by esotericist and UFO theorist Dr. Raymond Bernard (his actual name being Walter Siegmeister), and leans heavily on the discoveries of Admiral Richard E. Byrd (the book asserts) who flew into the interior of the Earth through an opening “beyond the Poles.” The book is packed with evidence: graphs and charts and convincing illustrations, although (alas) no photographs. I read the book inside and out when I set out to write my hollow earth novel The Digging Leviathan, but I discover these many years later that the only thing I marked in the text was the following: “Whether you accept or reject the content of this book is your privilege. No one cares.” 

Tristram Shandy I discovered at the university in an 18^th Century Novels class. It’s widely considered the first modern novel and also the funniest novel ever written, neither of which I’ll disagree with. As is true of most of the books on the Shelfie shelf, it’s best read in a leisurely manner. I took it along to Europe on a 10-weeks-vacation back in the 1970s and read a good part of it during a week in Ireland. My wife Viki and I were staying along with our friends Beth and Bill in an “Irish cottage,” a thatched roofed, two-bedroom place that smelled of burnt peat and sat on a meadow kept trim by a dozen or so goats. We had driven into Limerick to buy groceries, coming home with suspiciously green-tinged ground beef, tomato paste in a tube, and a pound of spaghetti. The sizzling beef had an interesting odor to it. Viki would tell you that it stank, but it seemed to me sensible that the local grocery wouldn’t sell bad meat, and that it was simply “aged,” and so I ate up a double helping and regretted it four hours later. I bought “Holiday Tummy” pills at a nearby pharmacy and stayed home the following day while everyone else drove off in a rented car to see ruins, which car (I’ll add for the sake of color) drove itself into a ditch and blew out a tire. I sat by the peat fire all the day long, improved by the pills and reading Tristram Shandy, pausing now and then to laugh and to look out at the goats. I remember this as one of the Notable Days of my life, and, happily, I was well enough in the evening to go down to the pub. Now and then I wonder if the book was as good as my memory insists it was, and so I pull it down from the shelf and look into it, discovering that it’s even better. Tristram Shandy was one of two books that condemned me to living the life of the writer. (Viki made it possible.) And speaking of the horse’s mouth, which I did two or three paragraphs ago, the other book that lured me into the writerly life was Joyce Cary’s The Horses Mouth, which is sitting one of the other three shelves.

A couple of things are true about these books. The first, (evidently) is that aside from The Hollow Earth and a few poems in the Oxford Book of Light Verse, everything on the shelf (and most of the books on the shelves above and below it) was written before I was born, which is to say, before 1950. I seem to prefer “old” books, both the content and the physical object. I like the smell of dusty old paper, the way old books look, the atmosphere of books of bygone eras, and so forth, as long as they’re good books, although a particularly good cover is sometimes good enough for the object to pay its rent. 

It occurs to me that I’ve always have liked old books. The Brownies and the Goblins, by N.M. Banta was my favorite book when I was a child. It was written and illustrated back in 1915, and my copy of it was old and battered in the 1950s when I was growing up. Brownies and Goblins were all the rage back around the turn of the 19^th century, an illustrator named Palmer Cox being the great genius behind the craze. In the book on my shelf, the Brownies and Goblins go to the moon on a dwarf-built flying machine and find the gigantic Man in the Moon, whose feet are on backwards -- “When he wants to go east, he goes west.” He lives alone like the Nowhere Man, nearly blind and without company, sitting on a mountain of treasure. The Brownies and Goblins fit him with a pair of gigantic faary spectacles and teach him how to play baseball. He sends them back to earth, their flying machine stuffed with jewels, after admonishing them to give it away to “the poorest people they could find.” 

There’s a point in time when those evocative, sense-of-wonder, largely innocent books fell out of fashion, when “old” anything fell out of fashion. Perhaps I’ve fallen out of fashion, and in fact I’ve never cared much about it, so it wouldn’t have been much of a fall. The second thing about the books on the shelf cannot be separated from the first: I can turn to a random page in any of the books and read happily wherever I land, not because I recall the details of the story, but because of the quality of the line-by-line writing: its beauty, its wit, its eccentricity, its sheer nuttiness, the way no one on earth but that particular writer could have written the prose, etc. 

One parting note: If the point of all this were to recommend desert island books to avid readers, I’d include The Code of the Woosters, Lud in the Mist, The Best of Myles, Whiskey Galore, and Tristram Shandy. If there’s room in your sleeve for a sixth book, take along Dr. Dogbody’s Leg.

James Blaylock, twice winner of the World Fantasy Award, is a southernC alifornia writer whose short stories, novels, and collections have been published around the world. He was one of the literary pioneers of the Steampunk movement along with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter. His short story “Unidentified Objects” was nominated for an O. Henry Award in 1990. Despite his close association with Steampunk, most of his work is contemporary, realistic fantasy set in southern California. In April, 2016, his novel The Rainy Season was chosen by Orange Coast Magazine as one of the ten quintessential Orange County novels.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. For more Shelfies, please join us on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.