| July 8th, 2009 |
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"After all, if you go to North Carolina, you have to expect what you have found. A friend of mine once made elaborate preparations for a vacation down there, gave a party and said goodbye to everyone as if he was going to be gone for several months, and that really was what he had in mind. When he got there he stayed over night and left immediately for New York and gave another party to celebrate his escape."
Wallace Stevens to Hi Simons, 18 April 1944 |
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Several years ago, when I was in Iraq, one of my professors from college wrote me a note with a line like "Among the great many reasons to deplore war is the inconvenience it causes archaeologists."
Tonight I was reminded that war does not only inconvenience archaeologists, but booksellers as well--for example, the Loeb edition of the Greek Literary Papyri (ed & trans D.L. Page) has the note
The first edition was destroyed by enemy action, and the translator has revised this reprint.
In reality, I imagine that this means the printing works were bombed and the first printing and proofs were destroyed or the like, but perhaps there is a romantic story of the author being saved from a flurry of machine-gun fire on the front by having the mss of Greek Literary Papyri under his overcoat.
Wallace Stevens also writes on the annoyances of transporting books in wartime:
"I had heard that it was not possible to send books to Australia, that all books had to come from England if they came at all. If that is true as to Australia, it may be true as to Ceylon, at least of books meant for sale. Just as you have been receiving papers from England regularly, so we have had no trouble her, and my information about Australia may be wrong. The NATION, which I have taken almost from its beginning, comes fairly regularly, and every now and then I receive a few books. The only difficulty that I have experienced was with a set of Nietzsche; this consists of something like 20 or 25 volumes; I received 5 of them. Very likely the others will turn up by and by. Just before the First World War, the Harvard Law Library, which had been making very extensive purchases of difficult books in Europe, shipped a whole lot of them to this country. None of them came and the Library thought of them as lost. After the war they all turned up, without the loss of a single one."
Wallace Stevens to Leonard C. van Geyzel, 29 January 1945 |
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