The Book Collection Updated and I Am Visited By Despair

I have been feeling less than well, physically as well as emotionally. I suspect that I am suffering from the residue of that mercurial experience from a week or two ago ... at least I hope that's what caused all this and not something else. I don't really need something else right now. At any rate, residual mercury or not, I have been feeling physically ill and emotionally in the "why bother?" state. I have been down this road once before and that was serious bad news and I really don't want to be there again. Sometimes I believe I think and feel too much. I marvel at people who manage to sail blithely through life ... how do they do that? At the moment I'm feeling better, at least not so doomy.

Anyway, on with the latest in the book collection:

The James Ellroy Collection:

L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy, published by Mysterious Press, 1990, first edition, signed.
Devoted readers will remember that I acquired an HC 1st of Ellroy's second volume in the L.A. Noir Trilogy, The Big Nowhere, last month in Centralia. L.A. Confidential is the final volume in the trilogy, and perhaps the best. L.A. Confidential also marks a turning point in Ellroy's writing style. This would be the last novel he wrote in long paragraphs: anywhere from eight to ten (or more) sentences that were not composed of primarily adjectives and verbs. With his next novel, White Jazz, Ellroy abandoned a Chandler-esque writing style for a highly affected three-sentence-paragraph style which quickly became tedious. His characters, never models for upright morals but at least having some glimmer of humanity, became so thoroughly reprehensible as to be ... beyond loathsome. I read two pages of The Cold Six Thousand and put the book down. Ellroy has turned into a horrible self-parody. Anyway, L.A. Confidential is quite a good novel and the film does a good job of sorting out the byzantine narrative, though Ellroy appears to be less than impressed: Better than the movie!!!! he scribbles on the frontispiece above his equally scribbly signature.

The Mosher Book Collection:

An Outline of Distinguished Reading, Thomas Bird Mosher, published by Wm H. Wise & Co, 1925.
There's no point in collecting the wroks of a small press, in my opinion, after the publisher has died. Roycroft continued on after Elbert Hubbard's death in 1916, re-issuing his works and publishing new books, but they're nowhere near as interesting as the ones published in his lifetime. The same holds true for the books published by the Mosher Press after Mosher's death in 1923. In both instances, the vital spark is gone and the books are only a pale glimmer of what once was.
Tributes and appraisals, though, are always very interesting and that's what An Outline of Distinguished Reading is. Tributes and reminscences by those who knew Thomas Bird Mosher and worked with him are included as well as a general bibliography and extrapolation of books that Mosher was influenced by. Also included are a few illustrations, portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walt Whitman and illustrations by William Blake, evoking the spirit of the Belles Lettres movement of the late XIXth and early XX Centuries. All in all, rather interesting and nice to have.

The Renaissance, by Walter Pater, published by Thomas B. Mosher, 1902.
Along with Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy, Wilde's Salome and Huysman's Against the Grain, The Renaissance by Walter Pater is a book I return to again and again to marvel at the sheer beauty of the prose. One cannot read a line such as "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstacy, is success in life." and not have their spirit catch on fire as did the literary students at Oxford in the 1880s. The Renaissance still stands as remarkable piece of criticism, built on the edifice of Laocoon and Ruskin, but subtle and mysterius as the paintings of Rossetti and Whistler. And like Nietzsche, Wilde and Huysmans, Pater was thoroughly misunderstood, the established academia of his time incorrectly interpreting The Renaissance as a cry of pure hedonism.
This 1902 editon of The Renaissance is part of the Quarto Series, one of 450 copies on handmade Van Gelder paper. Half-bound in navy blue leather over marbleized paper covered boards, with an illustration of Pater tipped in at the frontispiece. A very beautiful book!