Dirty Pictures
This past weekend I spent a too-short hour in the National Gallery wandering through a big retrospective exhibition devoted to George Bellows (1882-1925). Bellows is most commonly remembered today...
View ArticleGoing, Going, Gone
On any given day I’m likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent...
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Castles in Space
The other day, while roaming through the book-sale room at a local library, I spotted eight or nine issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. All of them were from the early 1960s, with...
View ArticleWaving Not Drowning
People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I’m addicted, that I’m no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers. There may be a little truth in this view,...
View ArticleOberlin
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Oberlin College, my alma mater. During the National Book Festival weekend, held on the National Mall in late September, I spent much of...
View ArticleJacques Barzun—and Others
Last week, the distinguished cultural historian, teacher, and man of letters Jacques Barzun died at the age of 104. For a while there, it seemed that Barzun—rhymes approximately with “parson”—might...
View ArticleWhat’s in a Name?
Early in October I attended Capclave, Washington, D.C.’s annual science fiction convention. Over the course of a long weekend I manfully served on five panels: “A Princess of Mars’ One-Hundred Year...
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Language Matters
As soon as I decided to write about language for this Browsings column, my sentences started to grow clumsy and fall all over one another. Nothing sounded right, and I questioned the grammar and...
View Article“I’m Done”
When Philip Roth recently announced his retirement from writing fiction, I was surprised and impressed. After all, one of the great artistic rules, less often observed than it should be, is knowing...
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Poe and Baudelaire
This past weekend, I wandered into downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, to attend a book arts festival sponsored by Pyramid Atlantic, a cooperative devoted to teaching and promoting every sort of...
View ArticleIn Praise of Small Presses
Books don’t only furnish a room, they also make the best holiday gifts. Note that I said “books.” Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts, but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books. Come Christmas...
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Christmas Reading
’Tis the season when choral societies start practicing their “Hallelujahs” and theaters around the country stage A Christmas Carol. Readers have their December traditions too. To my mind there are...
View ArticleBooks for the Holidays
Giving books for the holidays is always a crapshoot. Sometimes the recipient will gush, “Oh, just what I always wanted—a deluxe pigskin-bound copy of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.” At other times, he or...
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Let Us Now Praise Dover Books
Last month my friend Tom Mann—author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research and, as Washington insiders know, the man to see at the reference desk of the Library of Congress—handed me a copy of a...
View ArticleA Dreamer’s Tale
For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. My father...
View ArticleMoney
While reading the papers this past Monday, I paused over two stories. One was a Washington Post review by Patrick Anderson—who specializes in writing about crime fiction—of a new thriller by Dick...
View ArticleBook Projects
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to New York for the 2013 birthday weekend of The Baker Street Irregulars. The BSI, as many of this column’s readers probably know, is the 80-year-old literary...
View ArticleEnding Up
Over the past year I’ve enjoyed writing these “Browsings” essays, meditations, and rants. The time has quite sped by. I hope you—whoever you are—have enjoyed reading them. Some of them anyway. At all...
View ArticleA Positively, Final Appearance
As it happens, this will be—to borrow the title of the third installment of Alec Guinness’s autobiography—my “positively, final appearance,” at least as the Friday “Browsings” columnist. No doubt the...
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The Best Course
Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature, by Robert D. Richardson, with an interview by John Paul Russo, David R. Godine, 127 pp., $19.95 Walter Jackson Bate...
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