TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Edward Lear's Egyptian Sketches While Edward Lear is famous as a nonsense poet, his work as a painter is little-known. A keen traveller, he visited Egypt four times between 1849 and 1872, and documented his voyages up the Nile in a series of watercolours and sketches feeds.guardian.co.uk |
No typewriter for old men: Cormac McCarthy to part with beloved Olivetti Veteran novelist to auction treasured portable that he bought in a pawnshop in 1963Hemingway stood before his to hammer out tales of men and bulls who were noble and brave and doomed, EE Cummings used his to innovate and discombobulate, and now Cormac McCarthy is ending a five-decade partnership that has corralled 5m words by selling his.However, McCarthy's decision to retire the portable Olivetti typewriter whose ribbons have unloosed such novels as No Country For Old Men and The Road is not wholly of his own choosing.The machine, which he bought in a Tennessee pawnshop for $50 in 1963, is beginning to betray understandable symptoms of old age and hard usage. If the Lettera 32 had hooves, it would have been dragged out to meet the bolt gun years ago."It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose," said the writer. "I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence, I would put this at about 5m words over a period of 50 years."When a friend offered to buy the 76-year-old Pulitzer-prizewinner a replacement, McCarthy volunteered to auction his machine and has promised the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a "transdisciplinary research community" dedicated to expanding the boundaries of scientific understanding.Christie's, which is due to auction the machine – complete with a letter of authentication from McCarthy – in New York on Friday, reckons the typewriter will fetch between $15,000 (£9,000) and $20,000.Although some might argue that such a sum is a bit steep for a pawnshop purchase, the rare book dealer acting for McCarthy in the sale insists the Olivetti is now almost an icon in its own right."When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac's typewriter," Glenn Horowitz told the New York Times. "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss army knife."McCarthy himself told the paper that it was those very qualities that had won him over. Before heading off to Europe in the early 1960s, he said, he had used a Royal machine – the make beloved of Hemingway – but had been won over by the little Olivetti. "I tried to find the smallest, lightest typewriter I could find."Despite the advent of the PC, the author remains attached to the sound of the metallic keys, even if others struggle to understand their archaic appeal.He recalls working at the Santa Fe Institute one summer and attracting the attention of a curious visitor."I was in my office clacking away," he told the NYT. "One student peered in and said: 'Excuse me. What is that?'"McCarthy is not the only writer to stick by his faithful machine.Will Self, who admits to "fetishising" typewriters, has often extolled the virtues of doing things the old-fashioned way."Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think," he said. "You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it."On McCarthy's side of the Atlantic, Don DeLillo is another famous devotee."I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter," he told one interviewer."The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape."It's an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better."McCarthy, whose post-apocalyptic novel The Road has been turned into a film set for release in the UK next year, hopes the sale of the typewriter will go some way to reversing the "not-so-benign neglect" to which the 1950s building that houses the Santa Fe Institute has been subjected.The writer is now helping to renovate the property and its library. "It's just a great place," he said.Even if the Olivetti makes only its lower estimate later this week, it will dwarf the $2,750 that one of Hemingway's manual Royals fetched two years ago.McCarthy himself would doubtless bridle at paying so much for a simple machine.His generous friend has already tracked down a replacement Olivetti which, miraculously, cost even less than the original."I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95," said McCarthy.Cormac McCarthyUnited StatesSam Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Trade Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson2. PUSH, by Sapphire3. THE SHACK, by William P. Young4. THE PIANO TEACHER, by Janice Y.K. Lee5. THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, by Garth Stein feeds.nytimes.com |
Stung Together This novel, set in a near future when bees are thought to have become extinct, is not a sequel to but rather a thematic wink at Douglas Coupland’s 1991 debut, “Generation X.” feeds.nytimes.com |
Los Angeles: Portrait of a city | Photography book review Edited by Jim Heimann. Essays by Kevin StarrWhat feels like the entire history of Los Angeles is laid out in this great slab of a book, one of the gloriously opulent productions in which photography publisher Taschen specialises. The first known photo of LA was taken in 1862, 12 years after California's accession to the Union, when the city was little more than a ramshackle collection of smallholdings. By the start of the 20th century, elegant boulevards had sprung up in its centre, as well as a smattering of villas in the surrounding hills. The industry that has come to define LA – film – got going soon after, and there are plenty of scenes here of Hollywood grinding into gear: shots of early film studios, of the inaugural Academy awards, of forgotten silent movies being filmed downtown. A tawdry glamour has long been one of LA's hallmarks, and this too is much in evidence – in the various shots of strip joints and bunny girls, as well as in this 1957 photo of Jayne Mansfield reclining amid novelty bottles made (for what purpose, exactly?) in her bikini-clad image. Yet LA's more disturbing undercurrents feature prominently too – there are shots of Prohibition-era gangland killings and of the racial riots that convulsed the city in 1992. Artfully mixing photos of the famous with more everyday scenes (early drive-in restaurants, Venice boardwalk in the 50s), and not neglecting the city's often remarkable architecture, this compliation reveals the life of the City of Angels in all its weirdness and wonder. PhotographyWilliam Skidelskyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |