Niche of Time: January 2022

Monday, January 31, 2022

One-Offs and Dead-Ends: Some Fantasy of the Shadow Library Re-Organized

Too Many Magicians …Randall Garrett

The Dragonbone Chair … Tad Williams

The Riddle of the Wren … Charles de Lint

The Wizard of Zao … Lin Carter

The Outlaw of Torn … Edgar Rice Burroughs

Caught in Crystal … Patricia C. Wrede

A Book Dragon … Donn Kushner

The Dragon Hoard … Tanith Lee

Once On a Time … A. A. Milne

The Incredible Umbrella … Marvin Kaye

Westmark … Lloyd Alexander

A Barnstormer in Oz … Philip Jose Farmer

Magician: Apprentice … Raymond E. Feist

Beauty … Robin McKinley

Tea with the Black Dragon … R. A. MacAvoy

Red as Blood … Tanith Lee

Dragonslayer … Wayland Drew

Sorcerer’s Son … Phyllis Eisenstein

Merlin’s Booke … Jane Yolen

The Mists of Avalon … Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Iron Dream … Norman Spinrad

Tales of Neveryon … Samuel R. Delaney

The Magic Labyrinth … Philip Jose Farmer

The Book of Skulls … Robert Silverberg

Star of the Unborn … Franz Werfel

We … Eugene Zamiatin

Parsival; or A Knight’s Tale … Richard Monaco

Dragonworld … Byron Priess & Michael Reaves

Huon of the Horn … Andre Norton

Weave-World … Clive Barker

The Cold Moons … Aeron Clement

Deus Irae … Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny

Labyrinth … A. C. H. Smith

The Dark Crystal … A. C. H. Smith

The Space Prodigal … Carl Sherrell

Voyage of the Basset … James C. Christensen

The Neverending Story … Michael Ende

The Dragon and the George; The Dragon and the George … Gordon R. Dickson

Here, There Be Dragons ... James A. Owen

Books that I got as movie tie-ins, books that I heard were classics, books that I heard were pretty good, lesser books by better authors, books bought because I liked the covers or cover artists, books bought as a last desperate measure, books got by accident from the book club ... and so on and so on. Once I had them there seemed no reason to sell them until years later. A few I still wish I had on the shelves.

Saturday, January 29, 2022

The Shadow Library: Rolling Along in "The Gnomobile"

A 1936 book by Upton Sinclair (Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Jungle" fame, a 1906 book whose revelations about the meat-packing industry led, to some extent, to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act) that was adapted into the 1967 Disney movie "The Gnome-Mobile", of which this edition was a tie-in. I remember watching the movie on The Wonderful World of Disney. It starred Walter Brennan with Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber (the two Banks children in "Mary Poppins") and used many of the same effects of "Darby O'Gill and the Little People". The title song was by the Sherman brothers! There was even a good environmental message about saving trees, especially the redwoods in California. Although nowadays I would rank it as a third-tier Disney, I enjoyed it well enough as a child. I found a rather battered copy of the book years later and tried to read it but found Sinclair's venture into children's literature (written for his grand-daughter) too leaden to enjoy. After hanging on to it a while, I sold it. There is a vast difference between the book and its adaptation.

Two New Cabell Books

"As I Remember It is a volume of reminiscences, in the most elegant Cabell manner, looking back over his life, his career, and the literary scene of which he was a part. An important source for the study of fantastic literature, and also the literature of the American South." - Amazon. To be more precise, this 1955 work of autobiography is about his "collaborators" - in the first half of the book his first wife Priscilla Bradley Shepherd and in the second half his many literary friends (which included H. L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, and Sinclair Lewis).

When Let Me Lie was first published in 1947, most reviewers missed the double meaning of the book's title. Deaf to James Branch Cabell's many-layered ironic wit, they read the book as a paean to the old South. Readers of this edition are unlikely to repeat the mistake. Let Me Lie is indeed a carefully researched and brilliantly written historical narrative of Virginia from 1559 to 1946―focusing on Tidewater, Richmond, and the Northern Neck―but as a fictional scholar remarks in the book, Cabell's history is "both accurate and injudicious." Virginia's story of itself, Cabell claims, depends on illusion and myth, and his skill as a satirist allows him to construct and deflate these myths simultaneously. Ranging from Don Luis de Velasco and Captain John Smith to Edgar Allan Poe and Ellen Glasgow, from Confederate heroes to the oddities of the post-Civil War Old Dominion, Let Me Lie remains compulsively readable, as history, entertainment, or both. – Amazon. My copy lacks this cover.

I little thought when I picked up that Del Rey edition of The Silver Stallion back in 1979 what an interest I was sparking. But here it is, forty-two years later, and still being fed, having passed beyond the fantasy.