Featured book: The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, volume 1

The publication of Ernest Hemingway's letters is a major literary moment, and one which Papa himself may not have wished to occur.  Undertaken by Cambridge University Press, volume 1, covering the years 1907 through 1922, has been published to much fanfare and with great interest.  This story from the Chronicle of Higher Education (potential paywall) explains some of the background of the publication, and includes interesting commentary from Hemingway's son Patrick.

This book trailer gives a bit more information about the publication of his letters:



Among my favorite are those sent to family and friends from fishing trips in remote Upper Peninsula Michigan.  From August, 1919, Ernest writes to friend Howell Jenkins (p. 203):

Jock and Al Walker and I just got back from Seney.  The Fox is priceless... The little Fox is about the size of the Black and lousy with them.  Jock caught one that weighed 2 lbs. 15 and a half inches.

The Fox River went on to be immortalized in his short story "Big Two-Hearted River."

Dickens Bicentennial Celebrations Warm Up

The year 2012 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, and the literary world has already begun the celebrations.


This week in the Guardian newspaper, there are several features worth noting.

• First, a poll in which readers can select their favorite novel.  Simon Callow picks Nicholas Nickleby, what's your favorite?
• This is the first of three walking tour podcasts, in this case following the route of Oliver Twist as he enters the Great Metropolis and follows his adventure through to the courtroom of Mr. Fang.
• A second podcast features a visit to the Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street, and a conversation with Claire Tomalin about her newly published biography of Boz.
• A colorful interactive chart of characters from Dickens' work featuring the illustrations of Chris Riddell.

I'm sure the Guardian will be adding more interesting features to their site, as will others.

Lexicographical Essays from the OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is the grand-daddy of lexicographical achievements, describing how words in the English language have been used over time by means of quotations from publications.  In addition to owning print copies of the first and second editions, we are fortunate to have a campus-wide subscription to this wonderful resource.  In the past year, the OED Online has made a number of improvements to the online version of their indispensable publication, which now includes timelines for each word and links to the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, as well as more specialized dictionaries for non-modern meanings of words.

In addition to the content of the dictionary, the OED website includes many other features that may be of interest to the lexicographically curious reader.  In particular, note the short but fascinating essays by the editors of the Dictionary, for example John Ayto on 20th century English or David Crystal on the influence of the King James Bible on our language or Robert McCrum on entries using P. G. Wodehouse's works.

There is even a series of YouTube videos on a variety of topics related to the Dictionary.  Ever wonder how entries are researched?  Check it out on YouTube!

To keep up with what is new about this ever-changing publication, you can follow the OED Online on Twitter.

Library of America: Story of the Week

The venerable Library of America collection, a non-profit publisher dedicated to keeping authoritative works of American writing in print, has a web series of weekly extracts taken from its many titles.  Story of the Week provides full text of short stories, letters, diary entries and other portions from within the volumes published by LoA, from John Adams to Howard Zinn.  Each is prefaced by an explanatory annotation by the volume editor.

Ancient Lives project

Are you interested in papyrology?  Ancient Greek texts?  Want to learn about working with documents that are a thousand years old, and how to transcribe and measure them?  Then check out the Ancient Lives Project.

This project uses crowd source to help sort through thousands of documents that make up the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection at Oxford University, only a small portion of which are available online.  A companion blog and Twitter feed can keep you current on how the project is moving along.

Just Loafed, I Suppose.

From the Paris Review, #60, The Art of Fiction, an interview with P. G. Wodehouse:

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

Off the Shelf podcast- new episode

I've just published a new episode of my author interview series podcast, Off the Shelf.  Molly Berger joined me to talk about her new book entitled Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology and Urban Ambition in America, 1829-1929.  Check it out!

In Search of Shakespeare's London

The blog Spitalfields Life is a fascinating diary of the sights, sounds, people and life of that neighborhood in the East End of London.  Today's post finds the author, who is always identified by the soubriquet "the gentle author", visiting locations that would have been frequented by Shakespeare, including the recently-discovered site of his first theatre.  The photos and text are a wonderful example of the kind of discoveries one can make in that part of the great city.

To read more about Shakespeare's London, check out these books at the Kelvin Smith Library:

Anne Barton's chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare entitled "The London Scene: City and Court".

Stehpen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare

Featured New Book- The Novels of Daniel Defoe

The scholarly edition of an author's work is bread and butter for literary scholars.  KSL is proud to announce the acquisition of the ten-volume set The Novels of Daniel Defoe, published by Pickering & Chatto.  It is the first modern complete scholarly edition of Defoe's novels.

This edition, edited by W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, includes works like The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and of course The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  The set was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine in 2008.

The purchase of this set was made possible through the generous endowment of a book purchasing fund from the W. Jones Family.

Google Books adding British Library titles

Here is an interesting news article from CNET about Google Books agreeing to scan and add to their collection 250,000 books from the British Library.  The items, including books, pamphlets and journals, are from the years 1700-1870, and will undoubtedly be of much interest to those studying the 18th and 19th centuries.  The press release from the British Library has more details on the agreement, along with some examples of the titles that will be included.

Featured New Book- Archie: A Celebration of America's Favorite Teenagers

Graphic novels and comics have become of persistent interest here on campus, and Craig Yoe's book Archie: A Celebration of America's Faovrite Teenagers is just one example of the many titles we are adding to the collection to support that interest.

This particular title is a combination of sampler, history and background of the long-running Archie series, with short essays, biographies of some of the artists who have drawn Archie, and outtakes and rarities for fans.

If you are interested in Archie, check this book out!

Deciphering James Joyce

Here's a special post for Bloomsday 2011.

Do you have a hard time navigating Joyce's Ulysses?  The writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney did, until he began reading it aloud.  This article from the Economist's More Intelligent Life tells about Delaney's connection to the work, and about his podcast where you can hear Delaney's spoken version of Ulysses, one bite at a time.  His soft Irish accent isn't a bad way to experience it!

And lastly, a photo that simply must be shared.  "I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?" Joyce's fictional words, via Tom Stoppard.

Lexicography and the Law

My language as a youth was often governed by the Good Book- that is The Dictionary.  If I was curious about the meaning of a particular word, or certainly about the spelling of that word, the voice, which in my memory becomes disembodied like one from a Charlie Brown cartoon, implores me to "look it up!"  And certainly, if the word in question was NOT in the dictionary, it was, by its very lack of a definition, not a word.  Next case, please.

This article by Adam Liptak from the New York Times describes the growing use of dictionaries by justices in federal courts.

An example given is Chief Justice Roberts looking up the meaning of the word "of" in five different dictionaries (and finding out that it means pretty much what you would think it means.)

“I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom,” said Jesse Sheidlower , the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Secret Life of Punctuation

Keith Huston's blog Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation has been interesting to follow.  This week, his post is part 1 of 2 on the ampersand.  In it, we get some background on Cicero, whose scribe Tiro came up with a Roman form of shorthand in which he introduced the Tironean "et", which would certainly be the standard abbreviation for and. 

Or would it?

Looking forward to part 2!

Featured New Book: J.R.R. Tolkien's Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life

Arne Zettersten's J.R.R. Tolkien's Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life is the author's description of the overlap of the academic and creative work of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Tolkien was, most famously, the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as other justly famous works of fantasy.  However, he was also a brilliant linguist and philologist and professor of English language and literature at Oxford, specializing in Anglo-Saxon, Old English and other aspects of the history of our language.  He also worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, (as also discussed in a brief essay by Peter Gilliver, an associate editor of the OED.)

In this book, Zettersten, who worked with Tolkien in the latter part of the great man's academic career, looks at how his academic work informed his creative work.

If you are interested in Tolkien, the creative mind and process, or the history of our language, check out this book.

Featured New Book: The Homer Encyclopedia

I'm a big fan of scholarly encyclopedias- great destinations for those hungry for more information about a topic- and The Homer Encyclopedia published by Wiley is an excellent example.  The three volume set includes more than 1,300 entries written by 132 contributors from around the world, and represents the first comprehensive reference work encompassing the world and artistry of the Greek poet.

An interesting feature of this work is the hierarchical synopsis at the front of the first volume, giving access to the entries categorized topically. So if you are interested in the narrative in Homer, find under section 2.4 a list of the entries that discuss narrative: catalogues, digressions, parables, paradigms, reminiscences, similes, time.

This set is shelved on the first floor of the Kelvin Smith Library in the Core Reference section, just beyond the elevators.

Data in the Humanties: Franco Moretti

Hamlet and the region of death - The Boston Globe

This article from the Boston Globe highlights the work of Franco Moretti of Stanford University, who uses a quantitative, data driven approach to studying literature.

Here is the article from the New Left Review mentioned in the Boston Globe piece, Network Theory, Plot Analysis.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated Uncensored Edition

Welcome to a new blog through which I highlight findings from across the web, events of interest, and books in the humanities new to CWRU's Kelvin Smith Library collection.


This post is the first in what I hope is a recurring feature: a highlight of a recent library acquisition.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only novel published by Oscar Wilde.  In April, 2011, the Harvard University Press published this annotated and uncensored edition of the book.  Edited by Nicholas Frankel, the edition is also wonderfully illustrated throughout.


Whether you want to read this novel for the first time, or learn more about the book, its author and the age, check this title out at the library.