Jay Russell’s Shelfie
How, oh how, could I not pick a fiction shelf for this exercise?
God knows, I have more than enough of them. Indeed, most of the overstuffed bookcases in my ‘library’ (= bedroom) hold nothing but fiction. So why not a picture of the mad jumble of Stephen King titles? (Including a 2nd printing – goddammit! – of the Donald M. Grant edition of The Gunslinger.) Or the doubled-up stacks of Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion paperbacks, mostly purchased in the ‘70s as precious UK imports when I was but a lad in NYC’s long gone Science Fiction Shop? Or the piles of Harlan Ellison or Kurt Vonnegut or John D. McDonald paperbacks?
(Let’s play Travis McGee title Mad Libs: [Number] [menacing adjective] [colour] [noun].)
No, the shelf pictured might actually be more important. A shelf of somewhat mismatched non-fiction items, shoved together with minimal plan or purpose, ranging across many ages of reading, on an old MFI shelf. (The cheap veneer has peeled away, of course.) Books I have mostly not even looked at in I-don’t-know-how-long.
This particular collection explains a lot about my sensibility. Oh, how I pored over these books as I fell under the demon spell of cinema.
Example (as Jules Winnfield demanded of Vincent Vega):
Ephraim Katz’s exquisite The Film Encyclopedia. This is an early edition, I think. I am not taking any of these books off the shelf as I write this, so I can’t recall which version it is exactly. I believe – like several of the books here – I might have obtained it from the Quality Paperback Book Club in the mid-70s. (Does anyone else remember QPBC? I don’t know how many times I joined to get the initial bargain deal and then quit as soon as possible to avoid spending money.) Katz provided a great and clear (and painlessly scholarly) introduction to the panoply of movies/directors/writers/actors/etc which I heard or read about elsewhere (Film Comment magazine anyone?) but never got to see. That was a world before VHS, when the only way to catch a longed-to-watch film was if it showed up butchered on local TV (good old channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie). Or – if lucky enough to live in NY – wait and wait for it to be screened at the Bleecker or Thalia or other rep house. It took me years to finally see Sam Fuller’s Naked Kiss. Oh, what a time to be alive!
Fantastic Television also comes from this era, when there was so little SF/Fantasy/Horror on American TV that an overview of all of it from across the decades could be stuffed into one fairly thin, heavily illustrated volume. So hungry was a teen genre geek to nourish his appetite, that even a slight volume like this brought longing and delight.
Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic. A serious book! About cartoons!! I was not just wasting my time with Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and Robert McKimson. This was art. Maltin proved it!
(Missing from this shelf – and my library – is a copy of any of Maltin’s magnificent Movie Guides from the time. No book was so central to building my knowledge of and desire for movies. But alas, they are all gone now – most having fallen apart from over-perusal. The. Best. Book. Ever.)
I am aware already of going on too long here – but, but…Film Noir, The Western, the beloved Movie Quote Book, HOLLYWOOD BABYLON!!! – so while I can’t possibly discuss every book in the photo (sorry, Kim), I must devote words to Why A Duck?
Perhaps it is the most important book on this shelf (sorry again, Kim).
A Hanukkah gift (as I recall) from so long ago that time itself was a mere fabulation in the back of a mad god’s mind, I doubt I have ever spent as much time turning the pages of any other book. Richard Anobile compiled several such volumes, I recall, in which he simply pulled sequences of key frames from memorable scenes of classic comedy films and – comic book style – appended the associated dialogue. A crazy idea in the age of infinite YouTube clips, but…
Genius.
As a devoted Marx Brothers fan – and what intelligent human isn’t? – how I dove into those pages, reliving and memorizing the Stateroom and Sanity Clause scenes from A Night at the Opera. And the Peanut Vendor and Spy scenes from Duck Soup. And the Swordfish scene from Horse Feathers. And…and, and, and…all of it. All those brilliant, witty, razor sharp moments penned by the likes of Perelman and Kaufman and Ryskind, et al. And the cynical, musical, explosive, corny, cutting, hokey, enduring chaos of the four brothers themselves.
A life’s aesthetic shaped by the actual movies, of course, but gilded and stamped in the brain forever by stills and word balloons in Anobile’s fabulous compendium.
I mean, c’mon: that’s a hell of shelf. No?
Jay Russell needs no introduction.
Check that.
Jay Russell needs many things – a Namiki Emperor fountain pen (in vermilion if you’re buying), a decent work ethic, a copy of Eric Maschwitz’s No Chip on My Shoulder – but most especially an introduction. Once upon a time he wrote some books – the ‘Marty Burns’ novels, a series so fiendishly clever as to all be out of print. (Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright, Apocalypse Now, Voyager and the very delicious Greed & Stuff.) Brown Harvest is a pretty cool book, too. You should read it.
In his alter ego, he is humble and lovable Shoeshine Boy.
Check that.
Shoeshine Boy was Underdog. Jay Russell is a creative writing lecturer at St Mary’s University Twickenham. Why must it all be so confusing.
He also writes stupid ‘about the authors’ for himself.
Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
Join us on Instagram @shelfiesplease.