Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

The printer, Maurice Darantiere: "At the same time, I laid bare my financial situation, and warned him that there could be no question of paying for the printing till the money from the subscriptions came in - if it did come in. The work would have to be done with that understanding. M. Darantiere agreed to take on the printing of Ulysses on these terms. Very friendly and sporting of him, I must say!"

"All hope of publication in the English-speaking countries, at least for a long time to come, was gone. And here in my little bookshop sat James Joyce, sighing deeply. It occurred to me that something might be done, and I asked: "Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?" He accepted my offer immediately and joyfully."

"Miss Weaver was having printing troubles and, besides, she was getting letters from subscribers complaining that Ulysses wasn't suitable for a periodical that had its place on the table in the living room with the family reading matter. Some of them even went so far as to cancel their subscriptions."

The Guardian commentary/editorial on the New York Times book review: The New York Times Book Review's retirement plan: "The Book Review was once American literary culture's holy of holies, but neither books nor criticism count for much any more."

"I had been longing to hear about Ulysses. Now I inquired whether he was progressing in it. "I am." (An Irishman never says "yes.") He had been working on the book for seven years and was trying to finish it."

More on that episode of Sherwood Anderson's here and here. Since this breaking away meant leaving his wife and three children - well, it was messy and took longer than his simple telling of the story to Beach makes it seem.

"Sherwood Andersoon was full of something that had happened to him, a step he had taken, a decision he had made that was of the greatest importance in his life. I listened with suspense to the story of how he had suddenly abandoned his home and a prosperous paint business, had simply walked away one morning, shaking off forever the fetters of respectability and the burden of security."

"But above all, I valued the copy of Melanctha in the first edition, which Gertrude [Stein] inscribed for me. I should have locked it up; someone stole it from the bookshop."

"A member could take one or two volumes, could change them whenever he liked or keep them a fortnight. (Joyce took out dozens and sometimes kept them for years.)"

Her lending library: "There was no catalogue - I preferred to let people find out for themselves how much was lacking; no card index - so unless you could remember, as Adrienne, with her wonderful memory, was able to do, to whom all your books were lent, you had to look through all the members' cards to find out what had become of a volume."

"Another pleasant memory of my time in London was my visit to the Oxford University Press, where Mr. Humphrey Milford himself showed me the largest Bible in the world, made for Queen Victoria. It wasn't a book you could read in bed."

"The books in my lending library, except for the latest, came from the well-stocked English secondhand bookstores in Paris. They, too, were antiques, some of them far too valuable to be circulated; and if the members of my library hadn't been so honest, many, instead of a few, of the volumes would soon have been missing from the shelves."

On the name Shakespeare and Company: "That name came to me one night as I lay in bed. My "Partner Bill," as my friend Penny O'Leary called him, was always, I felt, well disposed toward my undertaking; and, besides, he was a best seller."

"Shortly, my mother in Princeton got a cable from me, saying simply: "Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money," and she sent me all her savings."

"During the nightly air raids, Cyprian and I had the choice of catching the flu in the cellar or enjoying the view from the balcony. We usually chose the latter. More frightening was "Big Bertha," the German's pet gun, which raked the streets during the day."

Sylvia's sister, Cyprian: "And the poor girl couldn't stroll around in Paris, as she liked to do, without being pestered by some follower or other. She was immediately recognized by little boys as "Belles Mirettes," a character in a serial film called "Judex" shown in weekly episodes at movie theatres all over Paris, and a crowd of her fans sprang up wherever she went."

"Finally, the Palais Royal attracted such an undesirable crowd that it had to be "moralized," whereupon it lost, of course, "much of its interest and popularity." But we found it interesting."

"In spite of the theater and one or two bookshops dealing mostly in erotica, the Palais Royal was at this time fairly respectable. It had been otherwise in the old days, when, according to a guidebook I picked up, the Duc d'Orleans, or rather, his son, the Regent, lived there and gave those famous parties."

Vida Dutton Scudder: "I was not a very good little girl. I did love to argue, and they called me impertinent, and I was shut in the closet to sob, and I regret to say sometimes to kick; for I never meant to be impertinent, I only wanted - wanted forever, exhaustingly to my poor relatives - to know WHY?"

Larcom: "It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood. Let her ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or little sister spoken of as a shop-girl, or a factory-girl, or a servant-girl, if necessity had compelled her for a time to be employed in either of the ways indicated."

Larcom: "My "must-have" was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand."

Lucy Larcom: "The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky, than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart."

Mead: "...whatever I write is, in a sense, an intrusion into [the] lives [of my family] and their own memories. Yet to ask each one of them to pass judgment on what I am writing would involve all of us in the curious unrealities of a committee approach to work without any of its rewards. The alternative has been to resolve the difficulties in my own mind as best I could."

Mead: "My closest models, my mother and my grandmother, had both had children and also had used their minds and had careers in the public world. So I had no doubt that, whatever career I might choose, I would have children too. ...And then in 1926, when I was told that I could never have children, I took this as a kind of omen about my future life."

Mead: "Among many American Indian groups the last old women who spoke a language that had developed over thousands of years were already senile and babbling in their cups; the last man who had ever been on a buffalo hunt would soon die. The time to do the work [of studying such cultures] was now."

Mead: "At the same time we firmly established a style of relationships to other women. "Never break a date with a girl for a man" was one of our mottoes in a period when women's loyalty to women usually was - as it usually still is - subordinate to their possible relationships to men."

Mead: "The first time she came, I made up her bed for her. Accustomed to being the eldest, that was the kind of thing I always did. Ag looked at me and said, "Well, the man you marry will certainly have an Oedipus fixation on you, which will be all right if it isn't joined to an incest complex.""

Mead: "But in the setting of this coeducational college it became perfectly clear both that bright girls could do better than bright boys and that they would suffer for it. This made me feel that coeducation was thoroughly unattractive. I neither wanted to do bad work in order to make myself attractive to boys nor did I want them to dislike me for doing good work."

Margaret Mead: "But my mother was filled with passionate resentment about the condition of women, as perhaps my grandmother might have been had my grandfather lived and she had borne five children and had little opportunity to use her special gifts and training. As it was, the two women I knew best were mothers and had professional training."

I listen to the podcasts of Radio New Zealand Nine to Noon for the book reviews - usually they have several each week. The only down side - they often pick books that aren't out in the US yet. Dammit. (NOT that I need more books, I own lots that are yet unread.)