Tuesday 2 March 2010

on the flyleaves of inexistent tomes

Following on from my last entry, a couple of people have suggested their dream books, to sit on the shelf alongside Baxandall's On Memory: Tottel's Miscellany and G. K. Chesterton's introductory guide to Lacan. And then I thought of Ken Cockburn's poem 'On the Flyleaf of Jack Kerouac's Kidnapped', which imagines Kerouac in Scotland with Norman MacCaig:

Kerouac took to the Rose Street scene
like a duck to water, except water
was the last thing on anybody's mind.

But he quickly tired of the confines of 'Auld Reekie'.

It was MacCaig who opened him up to the mountains
on those legendary drives to the far north-west
on endless late-June nights [...]

A note to the poem refers the reader to Thomas A. Clark's 'The University of Pittenweem, Library of Scottish Culture', in Alec Finlay's The Libraries of Thought & Imagination. I'm going to look this up at the library in the next few days (if this stinking cold eases up). But wherever the idea comes from, the poem's presence in a collection of poems all written (so their titles assure us) 'on the flyleaf' of real books, such as Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parma or a monograph on Yves Klein, throws those works too into a shimmering fictional - or at least factitious - realm.

Anyway, if anyone else has good made-up tomes of either sort (that is, books never written by real authors, or 'what-ifs' combining authors and titles along the lines of Cockburn's poem/Clark's library) I'd love to hear them - if I get enough I'll try to put them together in a post (all attributed, of course!).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At the risk of lowering the tone and introducing the ordinary into this rather extraordinary blog, here are a few real, rather than imagined books I have encountered through readers’ requests while wearing my librarian hat – perhaps they were only hilarious (and they were to me) because in the world of visitor flowcharts and throughput statistics one looks for light relief anywhere. There exist the following titles:

Report on a Survey around Scotland of Potentially Exploitable Burrowing Bivalve Molluscs.
I think I’d like to know what was exploitable, potentially, about those Bivalve molluscs.

The Book of the Wine Label accompanied of course, by Wine labels, 1730-2003: a Worldwide History.

Successful Sprouting.
Published in 1978 this lavishly illustrated book contains ideas for a sprout picnic.
One might also like to refer to The Sprouters Handbook, 1997 which in regard to Brussel Sprouts has a connection to that well-known organisation, the Quick Frozen Food Specification Working Party.

And last, but by no means least –

Adventures with Fudge.