Thank you for a great review, Kevin! I especially love the last sentence!

I echo Hal's query about when this will ship as I was going to drop a hint
to my family about Father's Day approaching, but am not sure I want to wait
that long if I don't have to. :)

Thank you,
Taylor

On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 7:57 AM Hal Bush <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> thanks for this, Barb & Kevin.  Long-awaited, indeed!! -- and kudos to
> Alan as well.
>
>
> point of inquiry:  I ordered the volume for our library earlier this
> spring and so far the book is not out -- anyone know when copies are
> expected to ship??
>
>
> One reason being;  I'd like to have a look at it as I finish up a revision
> of an essay due at the publisher by June 1!!
>
>
> nota bene: thanks Kevin for the citation: _Collecting, Curating, and
> Researching Writers'
> Libraries_  (2014), a collection of essays and interviews edited by Richard
> Oram and Joseph Nicholson; will check it out!
>
>
>
>
>
> Dr. Hal Bush
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Saint Louis University
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
> 314-977-3616
>
> http://halbush.com
>
> author website:  halbush.com
>
> ________________________________
> From: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Barbara Schmidt <
> [log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 1, 2019 6:15:49 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: BOOK REVIEW: _Mark Twain's Literary Resources, Vol. 1_, Gribben
>
> BOOK REVIEW
>
> The following review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
> Donnell.
>
> ~~~~~
>
> Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from
> the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions
> that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.twainweb.net&d=DwIBaQ&c=Pk_HpaIpE_jAoEC9PLIWoQ&r=f7i-Uq4rMQU8-TBe45qVLg&m=CScIF-fpdJhLdMwlNOqc5C-sugybdtUz1q9inr-ZSxE&s=Q63QS6vSEsx0z0oLJFK8TD_s1JUBvrBf6BmQmR_xDBg&e=
> >.
>
> Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
> Kevin Mac Donnell
>
> Copyright (c) 2019 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
> redistributed in any medium without permission.
>
>
> _Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and
> Reading. Volume 1._ By Alan Gribben. NewSouth, 2019. Pp. 350. $60.00. ISBN
> 978-1-58838-343-3 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-60306-453-8 (ebook).
>
>
> Anyone familiar with Twain studies of the last four decades knows that the
> most eagerly anticipated work in the field is the revised and enlarged
> edition of Alan Gribben's _Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction_ (1980).
> The first edition itself was eagerly anticipated: Six years before it
> appeared, Hamlin Hill's famous must-read essay "Who Killed Mark Twain?"
> appeared in _American Literary Realism_, where Hill predicted that "source
> and influence hunters will have a field-day tracking through its
> encyclopedic catalog of volumes the humorist owned and annotated."
> Published in an edition of 500 copies, nearly all were sold to libraries
> and the book quickly went out of print, driving the price for used copies
> as high as $450, putting it out of the reach of most Twainians. This was
> especially unfortunate because the immense utility of the work--the result
> of its ingenious conception and meticulous execution--had advanced the
> direction and scope of Twain studies more than any other work published
> since. It may be counted as one of the handful of essential reference works
> on Twain, along with Paine's (albeit flawed) biography of Twain, the Mark
> Twain Project editions of Twain's _Letters_ and _Autobiography_, and R.
> Kent Rasmussen's _Mark Twain A to Z_.
>
> The first of the three volumes of the new edition has now been published;
> the second and third volumes will appear later this year and in 2020, and
> will be reviewed separately as they are published. Those second and third
> volumes will contain the catalogue of the books Twain actually owned or
> read, describing their editions, annotations, and ownership markings, and
> their influence on Twain's writings. This first volume sets the stage for
> the two volumes to follow, and _must_ be read first in order to fully
> understand Twain's library, how he used it, and how best to apply that
> knowledge to any study of his creative process.
>
>  This first volume gathers together twenty-five of Alan Gribben's essays
> about the formation, influence, and dispersal of Mark Twain's library,
> along with a new introduction by Gribben, a foreword by R. Kent Rasmussen,
> and an expanded Critical Bibliography that nicely captures the crowded
> shelf of studies based upon Twain's readings. The critical bibliography
> begins with Paine's 1912 biography which foolishly projected Twain's
> "reading interests during his final four years onto other periods of his
> life . . ." (269). The critical bibliography even includes a 1924 master's
> thesis that was the earliest guide to Twain's reading.
>
> Gribben's essays, published over the last forty-seven years tell one
> fascinating tale after another. He describes Twain's "Library of Literary
> Hogwash" which consisted of books so bad that they were relished by Twain
> as "_exquisitely_ bad." He describes Twain's uncanny ability to read sense
> into Robert Browning's dense poetry, the evocative story behind Susy
> Clemens's set of Shakespeare, Tom Sawyer's (and America's) falling under
> the spell of romantic adventure stories, the literary knowledge on display
> in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, Twain's favorite books, Twain's
> earliest literary exposures, the popular myth of Twain as an unlettered
> author and how Twain himself promoted that public illusion, Twain's
> familiarity with the Arthurian legends, Twain's debt to "boy's books" when
> composing his own greatest works, the ways certain books influenced
> particular writings by Twain, and how Twain's reading habits and tastes
> evolved over time. Written during five decades, these accounts
> interconnect, and they are all page-turners, especially when Gribben
> describes his adventures in tracking down Twain's widely dispersed library.
> He tracks down nearly 100 books from Twain's library that had been given to
> Katy Leary. Another book from Twain's library shows up through interlibrary
> loan. Forgeries are discovered in public and private collections. The
> maddening story of how Twain's library was scattered in all directions is
> balanced by the gratifying story of how much of it has been recovered and
> preserved.
>
> In addition to enlarging the inventory of surviving books and identifying
> the specific editions of the books listed in the various sales of books
> from Twain's library, Gribben has also identified much new evidence of
> Twain's readings in Twain's own writings. In his writings Twain often
> mentions authors or books by name, but he more often alludes to people or
> events, both fictional and nonfictional, that reflect his own reading. Of
> course, Gribben is not the only person who has identified such sources, and
> he includes the findings of many others' work, all reflected in his
> extensive Critical Bibliography or in the individual catalogue entries.
>
> Twain's reading habits had already expanded beyond the horizons of Hannibal
> when, as a teenager in 1852, he read an issue of the _Philadelphia Courier_
> that gave him the idea of writing an essay about Hannibal that he published
> in that paper a short time later. He would remain a daily reader of
> newspapers for the rest of his life. Thanks to the newspaper exchange
> system, he read papers from all over the country every day, seeking fodder
> to fill the pages of the newspapers where he was employed early in his
> career, and later as a newspaper owner and editor. As a young man he read
> obscure short-lived comic journals, and all his life he read the major
> magazines of his day. He was photographed with piles of magazines and
> newspapers, sometimes reading a magazine or paper whose name and date can
> be identified.
>
> Twain was a life-long patron of libraries, taking advantage of two
> printers' association libraries (one held 4,000 volumes) while employed as
> a type-setter in New York City in 1853. He was awarded a sterling silver
> key in return for officiating at a library opening in England, and he
> befriended Andrew Carnegie, who established more public libraries in the
> United States than any other library benefactor in US history. Twain
> himself gave books from his own library to libraries several times in his
> life, most notably establishing a public library in Redding, Connecticut,
> with a large donation of books from his own shelves.
>
> Mark Twain was as much a reader as a writer, a bibliophile and connoisseur
> who appreciated fine printing and elegant bindings, and also an avid reader
> who literally consumed books, sometimes tearing or cutting them to pieces.
> Twain's copy of Francis Galton's _Finger Prints_ (1892) does not survive,
> but he clipped out the illustration of fingerprints from the title-page of
> his copy and sent it to his publisher when brainstorming an idea for the
> title-page design for _Pudd'nhead Wilson_. On the other hand, the books he
> gave his wife and daughters were often sumptuously bound with heavily gilt
> full leather bindings with silk end papers, like the edition of Browning he
> gave his daughter Susy, or a set of Sir Walter Scott he gave his wife. A
> copy of Bayard Taylor's _Home Ballads_ (1882) that Olivia Clemens gave her
> mother on behalf of Jean and Clara (Susy was then old enough to select her
> own gift for her grandmother) was elaborately bound in leather with
> striking bird's-eye maple panels inset on the front and back covers.
> Although Twain sometimes destroyed books in the service of his art,
> beautiful examples of the book arts adorned the shelves of the Clemens
> family library and were prized.
>
> Despite his vast and varied life-long reading habits, he cultivated a
> public persona of not being particularly well-read, once writing an editor
> of _The Critic_ that soliciting his opinion of what people should read
> would be worthless to readers of _The Critic_ because he read mostly
> history and biography, and that the sum total of the fiction and poetry
> that he'd read would barely fill three octavo volumes. Paine and Howells
> both played roles in perpetuating the myth that Twain did not appreciate
> _belles-lettres_. In truth, Twain's personal library consisted of at least
> 3,000 volumes, of which slightly more than one-third survive. His access to
> the Langdon family library in Elmira, where he spent several months every
> year during the twenty most productive years of his writing career,
> broadened the scope of his available reading materials.
>
> It is sometimes forgotten that in Twain's day there was no television,
> radio, movie theaters, internet, or other distractions competing as sources
> of news or entertainment. Live entertainment--lectures, music, stage
> performances, circuses, panoramas, carnivals, fairs, church socials, sewing
> circles, reading clubs, and the like--filled many hours, but reading in the
> home accounted for many more hours of the day, and there was a centuries
> old tradition of reading aloud in church, school, and at home. That
> tradition was honored in the Clemens household. Twain read much more than
> most Americans and owned a library several times larger than those found in
> the majority of nineteenth century households.
>
> Fortunately for Twainians, he also annotated his books more heavily than
> most readers of his time, as demonstrated by the surviving third of his
> library, as well as the many books in the Langdon family library that he
> did not hesitate to mark up as he pleased. He was well-versed in the Greek
> and Roman classics, the Bible, and classic works of literature from several
> cultures, and his library also reflected a broad range of readings in
> religion, politics, history, contemporary novels and poetry, travel,
> biography, natural history, and medicine, as well as more narrow interests
> like surnames, phrenology, astronomy, English sign-posts, and collections
> of criminal trials. Twain's annotations often reflect a deep interest in
> these subjects with cross-references to his other reading. Twain's stories
> and characters may have come from his personal experiences, but the themes
> and structures of his writings can be directly traced to his reading.
> Twain's annotations are revelatory and make for entertaining reading. If
> Twain's public writings are free of starch and full of truth, his book
> annotations are free of restraint and bursting with naked candor,
> especially when he made notations he knew his wife and children--and future
> owners of these books--might read.
>
> It would be pretty to think that every book Twain ever read survived in his
> library up to the time of his death, but the dispersal of his library began
> with Twain himself during his lifetime. When he traveled for extended
> periods his library was routinely put into storage (in 1878-1879,
> 1891-1900, and 1903-1904) and not all of his books found their way back to
> his shelves. He sent two "bushels" of books to help a library near his
> Riverdale home in 1903, and he donated "four or five hundred old books" to
> the Redding town library in June 1908. His daughter Clara donated at least
> 1,750 more volumes to that library in Redding, Connecticut, a short drive
> down the road from his last home, Stormfield--there is some evidence the
> number might have been as many as 3,500 volumes. Some of those books were
> retained by the vice-president of that library, Twain's friend and
> illustrator, Dan Beard. It appears some of those books were sold almost
> immediately at a town "fair" to benefit the library. Other books were left
> with Albert Bigelow Paine.
>
> When Twain died, his bereaved long-time housekeeper, Katy Leary, was
> allowed to keep ninety books from his library; those volumes would later be
> rescued from a porch where they had been left in grocery bags to be hauled
> away. Clara and Ossip Gabrilowitsch lived for a time at Stormfield after
> Twain's death, and before they moved, Clara gave away household items to
> her neighbors, like pots and pans and bric-a-brac, and she may have given
> away some books as well. In 1911 an auction was held in New York with 556
> lots of books and household items from Mark Twain's estate, scattering 483
> of his books far and wide, some never to be seen again. In the 1930s and
> 1940s Clara sometimes gave away books from her father's library, first in
> Detroit and later in Los Angeles, and through a local bookseller she sold
> sixty books to Estelle Doheny, a wealthy collector whose collection was
> widely scattered when sold at auction in 1988 and 1989.
>
>  In 1951 Clara emptied most of her remaining shelves, and more than 300
> lots of books from Twain's library were sold at a public auction held in a
> carnival-like atmosphere on the grounds of her Hollywood home--complete
> with a hot dog stand. One buyer stored his purchases in barrels which were
> discovered in 1997, sent to auction, and are now at the Mark Twain House &
> Museum in Hartford. In 1952, the librarian at the Mark Twain Library in
> Redding held a sale that rid the small town library of books that were not
> being checked out and taking up much-needed shelf space. Unfortunately,
> that sale included an undetermined number of books from Twain's original
> donation from his library, many of which have yet to resurface.
>
> Despite more than a century of dispersal and destruction, many of Twain's
> books have been preserved. The bulk of his surviving books are to be found
> at The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford (300 vols.), The Mark Twain
> Papers at University of California at Berkeley (170  vols.), The Center for
> Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College (ninety  vols., plus 1,500 vols. from
> the Langdon family library of which nearly 700 date from Twain's time in
> Elmira--some with Twain's annotations), the Mark Twain Library in Redding,
> Connecticut (240 vols.), and the personal collection of Kevin Mac Donnell
> (300 vols., plus forty-four Langdon family library books from Twain's time
> in Elmira--some with Twain's annotations). These counts are approximate and
> all are "volume counts" that include multi-volume sets which often include
> multiple annotated volumes. Compared to other author's libraries, Twainians
> have less to complain about than they might first imagine.
>
> Literature on authors' libraries is relatively sparse, but those seeking
> context, might consult _Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers'
> Libraries_  (2014), a collection of essays and interviews edited by Richard
> Oram and Joseph Nicholson which includes a long list of authors' libraries
> with data on how much of each library survives, and where. Twain's library
> fares quite well when compared to the libraries of  Kate Chopin, Stephen
> Crane, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William
> Dean Howells, Henry James, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David
> Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Catalogues of many of those libraries have
> appeared over the decades, but none compare to the comprehensive
> investigation that Gribben has devoted to Twain.
>
> Gribben's astonishing accomplishment is one of the handful in Twain studies
> that will stand as a foundational reference work for generations. Of
> course, new volumes from Twain's library will continue to appear, and in
> another fifty years--if luck holds and enough long-lost volumes from
> Twain's library continue to come to light--there may be a need for an
> addendum, but the solid foundation laid by Gribben will endure. In the
> meantime Twainians should count themselves lucky and get to work
> immediately, exploring the new avenues of enquiry suggested by Gribben's
> tireless labor, while those who study the writings of Dickens, Hawthorne,
> James, Melville, Poe, Whitman and other literary giants look on helplessly
> from the sidelines and lament that no Gribben has yet appeared among them.
>