Promising opening lines #238: "It was April and there was the smell of elephant in midtown Manhattan." From Hush-a-Bye Murder, by David Alexander (1957)

I devoted 2017 to reading and writing about neglected short story collections and their writers. Looking back, by far the stand-out from the year was Virgilio Piñera’s Cold Tales. Rumor has it that a new edition will be coming from NYRB Classics sometime soon. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I'm not finding the Scampi Belt in my atlas. Any suggestions?

"Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it just was not done." On this date in 2009, I wrote about a long-lost little novel by Herbert Clyde Lewis called Gentleman Overboard. It's since become my greatest rescue. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I went to look up Structured Procrastination, a brilliant concept developed by John Perry back in 1995 about how to get work done and still remain a human being, and I was delighted to see that his website still looks like it was designed in 1995. 100% gobbledygook and AI free.

Bottoms up! ... Literally. From the New York Times, Nov. 2, 1958

I never saw my first computer. It was some IBM mainframe we were allowed to submit batch jobs to in my high school programming class. So this was my user interface.

Back in 2020, I read the British Library's only copy of Gertrude Trevelyan's A War Without a Hero (1935) in my quest to discover her complete oeuvre. Peter Quennell said it would have been better at half the length. I think he was being too nice. It's a turgid mess. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Great title for a burlesque show: The Sway of All Flesh. Debuting at Minsky's Oriental in January 1937.

In the wake of the German invasion and the surrender of the government on 22 June 1940, more than a million people were refugees, displaced from their homes. Back in 2023, I surveyed a dozen accounts of people high and low caught in this debacle. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Seattle World's Fair was further ahead of its time than I thought.

As a novel, Dorothy Wegman's Glorified (1930) is forgettable. As autobiography, however, it's candid and entertaining, one of the few first-hand accounts of life as a chorus girl and as one of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies girls in roaring 1920s New York. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Once upon a time this was a single entendre.

I was forced to watch Top Gun after avoiding it for over 30 years. Oy, vey! Where to start? I'll just note that if being able to turn and look behind you was such a key factor in air combat, fighter jet cockpits wouldn't be designed to make that pretty much impossible.

Verity Bargate and the Revenge for Lies. Bargate wrote three short novels between 1978 and her death in 1981. Isabel Colegate wrote of them, "Verity Bargate has her machine gun on her hip and is spraying bullets before she even dynamites open the door." neglectedbooks.com/?...

Zoot Sims, Copenhagen 1972. From a concert with the Benny Goodman sextet. Just brilliant.

One benefit of taking typing class back in the days of typewriters was that you also learned the basics of formal correspondence. Business letters, greetings, closing salutations, etc. I still use them in business emails and emails to people I don't know, but are these archaic practices today?

Paperbacks of Susan Kale's The Fire Escape blare: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute." Which is a bit like plastering “The Story of a Cockroach” across Kafka's The Metamorphosis: kinda missing the point in a big way. A weird, fascinating, possibly true book. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I've now seen most of Stephen Poliakoff's TV dramas & they all seem simultaneously intriguing & empty. It's like being enticed into an ornate building, but after following the guide up & down stairways & hallways, you're led back onto the street having seen nothing.

MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap is a book you begrudge the rest of your life for taking you away from. When you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, when you feel as if you are hurtling forward along with the protagonist. I'm proud to have helped bring it back into print. neglectedbooks.com/?...

No More Giants, Joaquina Ballard Howles’ novel about a girl growing up on a ranch in Nevada in the late 1940s came out in 1966 as part of Hutchinson’s New Authors Series in the UK. Its subject pretty much guaranteed that few British readers or reviewers took notice and it slipped into obscurity.🧵

One thing few schools teach is how to work in an organization. Not how to do a job, but how to do it with other people. Its title is misleading & its language outdated, but W. J. King's The Unwritten Laws of Engineering is perhaps still the most succinct guide to working effectively with others.

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick) (1935) is a fun body-swap story that brings the lives of a middle-class housewife and a landed noblewoman into collision. Since I wrote about it in 2020, it's been reissued by the British Library. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Internet Archive preserves the original and Anarchist editions of Thornton Wilder's The Cabala.

Discover a creepy gem from the Recovered Books backlist from @bhousepress.bsky.social: Jane White's Quarry, featured on this episode of the Lost Ladies of Lit.

Lawrence Kasdan's elevator pitch for Body Heat.

The Sitting Room library in Sonoma is sponsoring a Pilgrimage reading group starting in September. Email sittingroomlibrary AT gmail.com for more information.

“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.” We are, too, when we learn, a little further in Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel, The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. Marian Engel and J. R. Ackerley were not the only ones to explore love between species. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The heppest, most swinging three-and-a-half minutes ever filmed in the Soviet Union. Krimanchuli (Криманчули) by the Georgian group Orera (Орэра),filmed outside Tbilisi in 1969.

David Hughes’ novel The Major (1964) is a perfect example of the gems one can find by picking through the rubbish heap of literature. It's brief, dense, and reeking with malevolence. A fine piece of work about a nasty piece of work. neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Sitting Room in Sonoma County will be starting up a Pilgrimage reading group in September. Watch their site or subscribe to their newsletter for more details. In the meantime, you can read my interview in this week's issue.

Here's the great Puerto Rican singer Myrta Silva, late in her career, doing "Nada." I understand almost none of the lyrics, but this lady was one kickass entertainer.

Ethel Mannin is fed up with Your Art: "When people start thinking in terms of My Art it is high time they put away their pens, etc. and opened up a fried fish shop or went out and weeded the garden."

Who owned this book? Her inscription in a copy of Ethel Mannin's Forever Wandering (1935) led me to discover the remarkable if sad career of Helen Welshimer, whose work, including at least a dozen serials, appeared in at many as 900 newspapers around the U.S. neglectedbooks.com?p=11301

"Letters are the only form in all literature, in all the arts, which reposes on the communication of one to one." Thornton Wilder What is your favorite collection of letters?

Ronald Fraser's A Visit from Venus (1958) is a bit like P. G. Wodehouse meets Olaf Stapledon. (This assumes you know something of Stapledon's work, and if you don't, tsk-tsk): English country house weekends with side trips to another planet. The first of four such novels. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending forth the notes in a jerky staccato..." Miriam's first hearing of a gramophone record. From Deadlock, chapter-volume 6 in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. You can hear the song she was listening to:

Not many folks seem to have read my book, but those who have consistently say they enjoyed it. Consider giving Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts a try before it's shuffled off to the remainders table.

Oakley Hall's first novel, Murder City (1949) lays on the noir slang as thick as the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger in a tale of crime and corruption in a fictional version of San Diego. It ain't subtle, but it's entertaining if you set aside your prose scruples. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"Your New Job": 1950s Bell Telephone System brochure and guaranteed nightmare fodder.

Nearly a thousand pages long, Jay Leyda's The Melville Log may be the longest biography never written. Never written in that Leyda assembles an enormous set of evidence about Herman Melville's life and work—but leaves it to us, the reader, to create the narrative from it. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Maurice Dekobra wrote a lot of trash, but it's trash full of fun little nuggets. “I must kiss these two hands that have conceived this wonderful work.” “I write with one hand only, my dear.... But my two feet are at your disposal.” The Madonna in Hollywood (1946)

The spectre of Ethel Mannin is haunting Europe. (The frontispiece of Forever Wandering (1935))

BOTD in 1890, G. B. Stern was a prolific and successful novelist, but her numerous volumes of autobiography are thoroughly entertaining -- as long as you're willing to follow her endlessly wandering thoughts, which usually take the longest route between two points. neglectedbooks.com/?...

A Mommy, Mommy joke, from Tell Me Another Joke (1963), illustrated by Susan Perl. Back when black humor was safe for kids.

Now that women no longer wear hats, we have no idea what the future holds.

I always get a kick when a squirrel cusses me out for daring to hike through his turf.

John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (1999) is one of those books that fundamentally changes how you see the world, especially the ubiquitous but often invisible world of infrastructure. Why is this book out of print?? neglectedbooks.com/?...

From the Lest We Forget department: All coffee everywhere in America used to come from a can or a jar and was completely awful.

Coming 31 August from the Recovered Books series @bhousepress.bsky.social!