LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Girls Gone Oscar Wilde

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

Spring! When a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of g-string bikinis, Pauly D branded bronzer, and doing lime Jello shots on booze cruises. From Cabo to Cancun, those who look good in swimsuits are celebrating that magical time of year when they can abandon their textbooks and fly south for sun and surf.

Which is why I decided to head in the opposite direction to spend Spring Break in Paris, where wearing sensible layers in March is recommended and “pasty” is a hue in high-demand. For those who look forward to vacations as “time to read something really fun” and who prefer downing snails at Brasserie Lipp to tequila shots at Señor Frog’s, it is tough to beat the City of Lights. True, the girls are a bit less likely to randomly remove their tops, but who needs that when you’ve got the Venus di Milo? Yes, the Moulin Rouge has become an overpriced tourist trap and the pink inn where Van Gogh once bedded prostitutes now serves bad soup. But things can still get a little raucous when you’re running the same wine-soaked streets that Hemingway and Fitzgerald stumbled down not so very long ago.
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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Kindle Fire

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

On Christmas morning, like five million other people worldwide, I tore the wrapping paper off an innocuous-looking gift only to find a brown box inside with “Kindle Fire” printed along one side.  I lifted the lid to find my own face reflected back in a glossy, black rectangle.

Make no mistake, I’d asked for it.  I’ve been curious about eReaders since before Amazon began making them – tempted by my desire for a cool gadget that might save me thousands in chiropracty thanks to my tendency to travel with three books at once.  Meanwhile, friends teased that I ought to hurry up and finish my novel before printed books went the way of vinyl records.  Yes, I’d been eWorrying about eReading even before Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” appeared in The Atlantic in 2008, in which Carr examined everything from neuroscience to Nietzsche to explain why electronic reading leads to more distracted, superficial thinking.  It was enough to put me off for the next several years. Read the rest of this entry »

LITERARY ARTIFACTS: the quixotic search for Cervantes’s bones

Cervantes: Lost in La Mancha, Found in Madrid. (Maybe. Probably. We Think.)

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

 

Somewhere deep inside the Convento de las Trinitarias Descalzas in Madrid, historian Fernando Prado is searching amidst the holy books and cloistered nuns for the man who wrote the first modern novel, published 407 years ago today: Miguel de Cervantes— or whatever’s left of him.

The plaque on the exterior of the convent memorializes the author of the great Don Quixote, who is buried inside.  Probably.  They’re pretty sure he’s in there somewhere.  Just no one’s quite sure where.  Cervantes’s bones may have been moved to another convent nearby during a 17th century renovation.  Although it’s thought they were moved back again, and that they weren’t disturbed at all when, in the 20th century, part of the convent was converted into a courthouse.  However, what’s certain is that he was buried there initially—at least it said in his will that he wanted to be.  Though Cervantes himself was not a member of the “Barefoot Trinitarian” sect that runs the convent to this day, they once helped ransom him out of slavery, and one of his daughters belonged to the convent (they think).  All we really know for sure is that the great author died nearby, in his home, of dropsy (only it may have been cirrhosis of the liver, or possibly diabetes) on April 23rd, 1616, just ten days before William Shakespeare.  Except that Spain was using the Gregorian calendar and England the Julian… so really they died on the same day.

OK, fine.  Really all we actually know is that he’s dead.

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Merry Christmas, Charles Dickens

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

Without Charles Dickens, Christmas today might well be a relatively minor holiday with no gift-giving, no large family-gatherings for turkey dinners, no Bing Crosby songs on the radio…perhaps even no Macy’s Santa, Swarovski-Crystal-topped tree, or kick-lining Rockettes.  All this and more we owe to a slim stack of messy manuscript pages that came to be known as A Christmas Carol, currently on display at the Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan.

In the early 19th century when Dickens was a boy, Christmas was barely celebrated at all.  In his introduction to A Christmas Carol, Professor Richard Michael Kelly explains that farther back, in medieval times, peasants and lords alike celebrated Christmas with a twelve-day rager, glomming the Nativity onto the pagan feasts of Saturnalia and the Winter Solstice to create a super-holiday full of carol singing, gift-giving, raucous game-playing, the burning of Yule logs, and a whole hell of a lot of drinking.  But by the 17th century, Puritans in England and America had all but outlawed these sinful celebrations and Christmas had dwindled into a relatively-minor holiday.  It was the publication of A Christmas Carol that prompted the widespread public celebration of the holiday we know today.  Yes, that’s right.  Without Dickens, buzzkill-Christmas might have persisted to this very day, with no Black Friday pepper-spraying, no insane mega-watt home decorations, no terrifying Target 2-Day Sale commercials, no Paula Deen “Mama’s Eggnog” (it starts with a pint of heavy cream…), no ironically ugly Christmas sweaters… well, you get the picture.

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: “THIS IS A FREE BOOK”

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

What exactly is a book worth?

The Oprah-stamped and Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides will cost you around $15 these days at most brick and mortar booksellers.  On Amazon you can order it for $10.20 and pay for shipping, or you can download instantly it to your Kindle for $9.99.  There are 37 different used copies listed on Amazon for only $4, shipped.  At The Strand in Manhattan, the same will run you $7.50.  You can borrow it, of course, from the New York Public Library – but you’ll have to wait.  Currently, all 34 copies owned by the New York Public Library are out, as are the 5 eBook copies recently made available for rental.

Only every reader knows that a book’s worth is not the same as its cost.  We’ve all paid too much for an unreadable dud, just as we’ve all grabbed lifelong favorites for just a buck or two.

But what if you could your own pristine copy of Middlesex for absolutely nothing?

To find out, I journeyed to Baltimore, to a little place called The Book Thing where Eugenides’s novel and thousands of others are always absolutely, 100% free.

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Damn the Man, Save St. Mark’s!

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

This week, St. Mark’s Bookshop announced that despite the massive outcry from the reading public, the store’s Cooper Union landlords have not agreed to lower their monthly rent in order to help save the independent bookstore. The news came after weeks of furious blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking on the part of readers throughout New York City. A petition to save the bookshop has gathered 43,825 signatures as of the time of this posting. High-profile activist Michael Moore dedicated much of his October 3rd book-signing to speaking out about how St. Mark’s is actually the price we are being asked to pay for Wall Street’s greed, and in recent weeks, members of Occupy Wall Street have made stops at the store to help rally against the landlords. Bookshop owners, Bob Contant and Terry McCoy, say that it remains to be seen if the recent surge in customer support will be enough to keep the bookshop’s doors open.

Like many other New York City readers, I have followed the saga of St. Mark’s closely, and when the news first broke, I signed the petition, forwarded it to all my friends, watched Michael Moore’s speech on YouTube, and immediately set out to 3rd Avenue and 9th Street to buy a book. Good for me!

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Finding the Future

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

 

I arrived at the Centennial Exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen  A. Schwarzman building, fully expecting to get lost in the past.  But there, above the iconic stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, I was surprised to see a large sign inviting me inside to “Find the Future”.

Surely the slogan was meant to be inspiring, but its stark font filled me with dread.  The future was what kept rushing at me through my Twitter feed:  the threat of more hurricanes, another election season, the development of an HBO adaptation of The Corrections.  I wanted to walk around in a beautiful Beaux-Arts building and examine the belongings of writers long-dead.  I wanted to forget what century it even was.

The exhibit did not disappoint.  Inside I found a massive room filled with artifacts, literary, historical, and otherwise:  Columbus’s letters, Audubon’s “Birds of America”, and Kepler’s first model of the solar system.  But then I noticed a gleaming white MacBook sitting under glass in the center of the room, quietly displaying the New York Times homepage.  Was this what they’d meant by “Find the Future”?  Beside the laptop sat two small lumps of clay, etched in cuneiforms that were over 5,000 years old.  The earliest known human writing looked sad and insignificant when placed next to the sleek, glowing machine.

A nearby sign explained that “as the Internet makes information increasingly easy to obtain, and more experiences become virtual, direct encounters with the Library’s books, manuscripts, prints, photographs and objects reveal the collections as an indispensible public resource.”  A teenaged boy came up and pressed his face against the glass, staring longingly at the laptop.  He did not seem to want virtual, direct encounters.  It looked like he wanted to check his email.

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LITERARY ARTIFACTS: The GutenPad Bible

The Outlet is pleased to announce the arrival of a new column. Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma will write about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

 

It is the summer of the eReader.  At a beach recently I saw one blanket after another weighed down by Nooks.  My companions had each brought a Kindle, and all three marveled at how easy they were to read in the sun.  Stubbornly, I squinted at my paper copy of Moby Dick, pointedly underlining and dog-earing its pages.  And yet I was fascinated as the Kindles’ screensavers faded from Woolf to Poe.  Then I smirked when our host lost his Kindle for several hours, only to find its slim profile hidden beneath my mammoth Melville.

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