David’s Insane Reading Project [#3]

Another excerpt from essay, "Oblivion"

Last year, for my 1806 book, I read The Castle of Berry Pomeroy, a Gothic potboiler (attributed to Edward Montague, likely a pseudonym). Besides the full catalog of Gothic horrors—evil sister, nefarious priest with secret past, poisonings and beheadings, characters lost at sea, confined to dungeons, buried alive, plus oodles of backstory, miraculous returns from the dead, reunited lovers, etc.—The Castle of Berry Pomeroy has the distinction of completing the years of the 19^th century for me. If you’d like, you can download it to your Kindle for $4.99, as I did, thanks to Valancourt Books, a small Virginia press dedicated to “the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction.”[1]

When Valancourt resurrected The Castle of Berry Pomeroy, only two copies were known to exist. One turned up amid a trove known as the Corvey Collection, 72,000-some volumes assembled at Corvey Castle by a German nobleman, Victor Amadeus, between the 1790s and his death in 1834. This library has proved to be one of the foremost collections of British popular fiction of the period, anywhere. Many of the works are rare, some unique. But until the 1970s, the collection remained largely unknown; only since the 1990s has the massive task of cataloging, microfilming, digitizing, and indexing the works made them widely available to scholars.

If The Castle of Berry Pomeroy was down to two copies, it’s impossible not to wonder about novels down to no copies. Should we mourn the loss of books we’ve never heard of? Gothic romances? Plenty have survived, including the “seven horrid novels” recommended to Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Valancourt has recently re-issued them as a set, with new introductions; after Austen’s death in 1818, though, they were so little remembered that until new research in the 1920s it was thought Austen had invented the titles.[2] Is it important to have these novels? Or, to ask it differently: Is it sufficient to have only the major, the canonical works of the time? Can horror be canonical? What about Dracula and Frankenstein? Necessary? What about Poe? How would we feel about Stephen King’s books vanishing? Or the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 40s? What about comic books and graphic novels?

The past yields to the present is the world’s operating principle. Despite this, some artifacts survive, some works of the imagination are remembered. It’s consoling to believe a collective wisdom informs this winnowing, that it’s each era’s cream that’s preserved. Yet we know how fraught with cultural bias and accident the process is.[3] Every now and then, I find myself at a shelf of old books in an antique mall, jacketless hardcovers from the first half of the last century. Amid the Zane Greys and Pearl S. Bucks and the names I don’t recognize, are a few that ring a bell, faintly—Warwick Deeping, Louis Bromfield, Ruth Suckow, Henry Bellamann, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Harriette Arnow. Sometimes I take a book down—I like the look of the old typefaces, the smell of the paper, and I like that they’re older than me, yet overlap the heydays of my parents and grandparents.[4] Once in a while, I buy one; more often I just move on, a touch melancholy, perhaps, quietly conflicted. How should I feel about old books? How should I feel about the prospect of my books winding up here?

Or not even here?

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[1] Valancourt’s catalog includes literary fiction by recognizable names (Isabel Colgate, Michael Frayn, Christopher Priest, J. B. Priestly, James Purdy, Nevil Shute, Keith Waterhouse), but its principal mission is re-issuing horror/Gothic/fantasy, LGBT-themed works, Victoriana, plus a category called “vintage thrills and chills.” 

[2] For the record, they are: The Castle of Wolfenbach [Eliza Parsons, 1793], The Necromancer [Lawrence Flammenberg, 1794], Horrid Mysteries [Carl Grosse, 1796], The Mysterious Warning [Eliza Parsons, 1796], Clermont [Regina Maria Roche, 1798], The Midnight Bell [Francis Lathom, 1798], and Orphan of the Rhine [Eleanor Sleath, 1798]. 

[3] It was an essay by historian Daniel Boorstin, “A Wrestler with the Angel” [in Hidden History, 1987], that got me thinking about the vagaries of preservation/obliteration. Boorstin cites what he calls The Law of the Survival of the Unread: texts from centuries ago are often official documents or books of high intrinsic value that were infrequently handled. Therefore, it’s easy to find “heavy tomes of Puritan theology,” he says, whereas the New England Primer, of which over 3 million copies were printed, is quite scarce. We might, as a consequence, misread the degree of piety of a place and time.

[4] Or sometimes I come upon a batch of Signet pulps. These were mostly reprints and though luridly covered, their slogan was: “Good Reading for the Millions”; easily a third of them were first-rate novels—Faulkner, Mailer, Dreiser, Mann, Nabokov, Dylan Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nevil Shute, Arthur Koestler, etc. It was among the Signets I found Maritta Wolff (Night Shift, 1942), Ann Petry (The Street, 1946), William Fisher (The Waiters, 1953), and Theodora Keogh (The Fascinator, 1954).