I keep promising myself to one day bring my books in Europe, North Africa and the US to a single location. I imagine every volume finally nestled in some final, all encompassing mythic library, like in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, a booby trapped  labyrinth filled with mirrors and secret passageways.  There are however, a number of advantages in having your books scattered on the shelves of different collections, sometimes thousands of miles apart: the joy of rediscovery when you return after a longer absence, of stumbling across a volume you had forgotten you owned. The trouble is of course when you look forward to reacquainting yourself with certain books, and then seem to have trouble locating them, and you then assume (hope) that the volume in question is likely sitting on some shelf on another continent. (Where is my first hard back edition of Silence of the Lambs? Or what happened to the signed copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary?) I thought I would pick some books from my collection in Denmark at this point in time. I was going to add some pictures of graphic novels and comics as well, and maybe even mumble some words about each volume. But I think all these books below gave me a great deal of enjoyment, and just seeing them again, ignites all sorts of memories, fragments, sensations. I thought I would pick thirty or so books, snap some quick shots of them one snowy afternoon and put them here in alphabetical order.

THIS HERMETIC LEGISLATURE: A HOMAGE TO BRUNO SCHULZ

Edited by D.P. Watt and D.T. Ghetu

Ex Occidente Press

 At the end of a curious parallel track of imagination the Twentieth Century is frozen by the memory of early spring snows, the lascivious gaze of tradesmen, dark July nights and the chatter of exotic birds. Every face in the crowd is as still as a travelling waxwork exhibit. It is an Age of Genius writ in crumbing ledgers and announced in the margins of charlatans’ advertisements. Everywhere the agony and ecstasy of its times may be read. Upon every mouldering wall there is a rich mural of creation and beneath every glittering plastic jewel of technology hides an ancient fermentation. In each shop window, with its teetering mannequins, a universe of magical forms unfolds —a pageant of infinite life begging to be rewritten, to live again!

‘Panta Rei!’

1. Fugue for Black Thursday by George Berguno
2. Great Ruins of Tomorrow by Stephen J. Clark
3. The Fall of a City Planner by Karim Ghahwagi
4. The Messiah of the Mannequins by Rhys Hughes
5. Letters in Black Wood by Joel Lane
6. The Original Light by Mark Valentine
7. With Shadow All the Marble Steps by Oliver Smith
8. Manual of Quiet Destruction by Charles Schneider
9. Silver on Green by John Howard
10. The Subjugation of Eros by D.P. Watt
11. All in a Hot and Copper Sky by Dominy Clements
12. My Ruined Father by Douglas Thompson
13. The Notched Sword by Adam S. Cantwell
14. A Calendar of Cherries by Colin Insole
15. The Vile Game of Gunter and Landau by Michael Cisco
16. A Posthumous Messiah by Reggie Oliver
17. The Restaurant Saint Martin by R.B. Russell
18. My Heretical Existence by Mark Samuels

This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz is an over-sized sewn hardcover book of 300 pages with endpapers, a full-colour frontispiece and a dust-jacket. Deluxe cloth boards with folio.

Ongoing Real Time review