The New Collections! Italo Calvino & Jorge Luis Borges

The PLL is happy to announce two new collections: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges! The first book of both libraries is Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet (also found in the Robert Smithson Personal Library.) Both Calvino and Borges wrote about the novel about two scriveners searching for universal knowledge; an unattainable quest. Below are two pages from the novel and are part of the PLL First Book Postcard Series.


There are already overlapping books in Italo Calvino's and Robert Smithson's Personal Libraries, including Musil's The Man Without Qualities, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake & Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. And, of course, the tangled knot continues with Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones.


Also newly accessioned to the Calvino library is Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec (a close friend of Calvino's), Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

Members are invited to check out books from the Calvino & Borges Personal Libraries!

Italo Calvino Personal Library Collection

FICTION & POETRY
Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso - IC 3.17 2010
Borges, Jorge Luis & Adolfo Bioy Casares, Extraordinary Tales - IC 3.30 2012
Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones - IC 3.2 2010
de Quincey, Thomas, Joan of Arc and The English Mail-Coach - IC 3.29 2011
Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pecuchet - IC 3.1 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary - IC 3.15 2010
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana - IC 3.11 2010
Irving, Washington, Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories - IC 3.21 2010
Joyce, James, Finnegan's Wake - IC 3.3 2010
Joyce, James, Ulysses - IC 3.12 2010
Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being - IC 3.7 2010
Leopardi, Giacomo, Pensieri - IC 3.33 2013
Lucretius, The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura) - IC 3.32 2012
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain - IC 3.16 2010
Musil, Robert, The Man Without Qualities - IC 3.4 2010
Perec, Georges, Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties - IC 3.19 2010
Perec, Georges, Life, A User's Manual - IC 3.5 2010
Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Prose, Poetry and Eureka - IC 3.24 2011
Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive & Cities of the Plain - IC 3.20 2010
Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night's Dream - IC 3.25 2011
Shakespeare, William, As You Like It - IC 3.27 2011
Sterne, Laurence, Tristam Shandy - IC 3.28 2011
Stevens, Wallace, Poems - IC 3.26 2011
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels - IC 3.8 2010
Valery, Paul, Monsieur Teste - IC 3.22 2011
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass - IC 3.13 2010
Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days - IC 3.10 2010

ART & CRITICISM
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida - IC 3.6 2010
Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky - IC 3.23 2011
Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale - IC 3.18 2010
Valery, Paul, Variety, Second Series, including "The Position of Baudelaire" - IC 3.31 2012
Zellini, Paolo, A Brief History of Infinity - IC 3.34 2014******

SCIENCE
Galilei, Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - IC 3.9 2010
Hofstadter, Douglas, Godel, Escher, Bach - IC 3.14 2010

* indicates last book accessioned to the library

Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Collection

FICTION & POETRY
Bennett, Arnold, Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days - JLB 4.35 2012
Blake, William, The Complete Poetry - JLB 4.24 2011
Burton, Sir Richard, The Book of the Thousand and One Nights - JLB 4.28 2011
Cortazar, Julio, A Change of Light and Other Stories - JLB 4.6 2010
Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders - JLB 4.25 2011
Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pecuchet - JLB 4.1 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary - JLB 4.11 2010
Flaubert, Gustave, The Temptation of St. Anthony - JLB 4.22 2011
Garnett, David, A Man in the Zoo - JLB 4.27 2011
Gide, Andre, The Counterfeiters - JLB 4.7 2010
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol I - JLB 4.39 2014
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol II - JLB 4.40 2014*****
Ibsen, Henrik, Hedda Gabler - JLB 4.16 2010
Ibsen, Henrik, Peer Gynt - JLB 4.37 2012
Kafka, Franz, Amerika - JLB 4.10 2010
Joyce, James, Ulysses - JLB 4.3 2010
Melville, Herman, Four Short Novels: Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Encantadas - JLB 4.29 2011
Meyrink, Gustav, The Golem - JLB 4.34 2012
O'Brien, Flann, At Swim-Two Birds - JLB 4.14 2010
O'Neill, Eugene, Strange Interlude - JLB 4.23 2011
Phillpotts, Eden, The Red Redmaynes - JLB 4.33 2012
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe - JLB 4.38 2012
Stevenson, Robert Louis, New Arabian Nights - JLB 4.36 2012
Sturlisson, Snorri, Egils Saga - JLB 4.2 2010
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels - JLB 4.9 2010
Walpole, Hugh, Above the Dark Circus - JLB 4.31 2011
Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man & The War of the Worlds - JLB 4.17 2010
Wells, H.G., The Time Machine - JLB 4.13 2010
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass - JLB 4.5 2010
Wilde, Oscar, The Works of Oscar Wilde - JLB 4.19 2010

HISTORY, ECONOMICS & POLITICS
Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History - JLB 4.4 2010
Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 2) - JLB 4.15 2010
Polo, Marco, The Travels of Marco Polo - JLB 4.8 2010
Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class - JLB 4.20 2010

SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS
Dunne, J.W., An Experiment with Time - JLB 4.18 2010
Kasner, Edward & James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination - JLB 4.32 2011

PHILOSOPHY
Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling - JLB 4.30 2011

RELIGION
Aldous Huxley, Intro, The Bhagavad-Gita - JLB 4.12 2010
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience - JLB 4.21 2011

LITERARY CRITICISM & THEORY
Cocteau, Jean, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau - JLB 4.26 2011

Italo Calvino Personal Library Wish List

This ongoing list has been gleaned from Calvino's books Six Memos for the Next Millenium and The Uses of Literature. The vestiges of Six Memos can be seen in a sorting of books into Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility & Multiplicity (these make up five of the six "memos," the sixth (Consistency) was never completed.) Other forms of categorization are to follow.

LIGHTNESS
Decameron by Boccaccio
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Voyage Dans la Lune by Cyrano de Bergerac
Baron von Munchausen, illustrations by Gustave Dore
Epicurius by Galileo Galilei
Thousand and One Nights, translated by Antoine Galland
Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
The Knight of the Bucket by Franz Kafka
Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl
History of Astronomy by Giacomo Leopardi
Ars Magna by Raymond Lully
Little Testament by Montale, translated by Jonathan Galassi
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare

QUICKNESS
Un Vieille Maitresse by Barbey d'Aurevilly (Pleiade Edition)
The Vision of Sudden Death by Thomas De Quincey
The Tester by Galileo Galilei
Essays and Dialogues by Giacomo Leopardi
Plume by Henri Michaux
German Medieval Traditions by Gaston Paris
Lettere Famigliari by Petrarch
Prose Poems by Francis Ponge
Histoire de Notre Image by Andre Virel (published 1965)

EXACTITUDE
Codex Atlanticus by Leonardo
Song of the Great Wild Rooster by Giacomo Leopardi
L’anguilla by Eugenio Montale
The Purpose of Things by Francis Ponge

VISIBILITY
The Unknown Masterpiece & The Human Comedy by Balzac
Purgatory by Dante Alighieri
Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola
The Empire of the Imaginary by Jean Starobinski (in La Relation Critique, 1970)

MULTIPLICITY
The Legibility of the World by Hans Blumenberg (published 1981)
Acquainted with Grief by Carlo Emilio Gadda
Kosmos by Humboldt
Absolute Love by Alfred Jarry (1899)
Deliberate Disharmony by Gian Carlo Roscioni
ADDENDUM: following are authors that Calvino mentions in Six Memos, without specifying a text. The PLL is researching the exact texts that Calvino read and had in his Personal Library.

Raymond Queneau, Giodarno Bruno, Wittgenstein, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Fernando Pessoa, Mallarme, Hoffmansthal, Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, Massimo Bontempelli,
Ramon Gomez de la Serna, William Carlos Williams, Michel Leiris, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, Plato, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Spinoza, Leibniz, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Leskov, Stevenson, Kipling, Wells, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Turgenev, Potocki, Gogol, Nerval, Gautier, Hoffman, Chamisso, Arnim, Eichendorff

Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Wish List

The following list has been compiled from multiple sources, most importantly Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books: 1999). In this important tome can be found numerous essays and lectures by Borges- it is through culling these texts that the library has begun to compile a Jorge Luis Borges Personal Library Collection. This collection endeavors to recreate the books that Borges read and wrote about, books that at one time were a part of his personal library. The initial source for his books in the PLL collection comes from his list "A Personal Library," the prologue of which states:

Over time, one's memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share. (Selected Non-Fictions, 513)

Following is his list of 100 texts for "A Personal Library;" also present are texts gleaned from other essays including "Joyce's Ulysses," "A Defense of Bouvard & Pecuchet," and "German Literature in the Age of Bach."

FICTION & POETRY
Fantastic Stories by Juan Jose Arreola
Vathek by William Beckford
The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
The Blue Cross and Other Stories by G.K. Chesterton
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Hour of All by Fransisco de Quevedo
Marcus Brutus by Fransisco de Quevedo
The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas De Quincey
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Mandarin by J.M. Eca de Queiroz
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
Lady into Fox by David Garnett
The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
The Bead Game by Herman Hesse
The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James
The Lesson of the Master by Henry James 
The Private Life by Henry James
Short Stories by Franz Kafka 
Tales by Rudyard Kipling 
The Idols by Manuel Mujica Lainez
The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen 
The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlink
A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
The Great God Brown by Eugene O'Neill 
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill 
The Blind Pilot by Giovanni Papini
The Tragic Everyday by Giovanni Papini
Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo 
Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwab
Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw
Candide by George Bernard Shaw
Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Aeneid by Virgil
Stories by Voltaire
Essays and Dialogues by Oscar Wilde

MATH & SCIENCE
On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

RELIGION
The Apocryphal Gospels
The Book of the Dead, E.A. Wallis Budge (Routledge, 1960)
An Explanation of the Book of Job by Fray Luis de Leon
The Song of Songs by Fray Luis de Leon
The Study of Human Nature by William James
The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones

CRITICISM & HISTORY
The Blood of the Poor by Leon Bloy
In the Darkness by Leon Bloy
Salvation for the Jews by Leon Bloy
Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by R. Gomez de la Serna
Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
The Nine Books of History by Herodotus
An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano

"Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972" & "The New Novel from Queneau to Pinget"

Two new and exciting books have been accessioned into the Robert Smithson Personal Library this week: Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and Vivian Mercier's The New Novel from Queneau to Pinget.

Lippard's riveting book actually has a much longer title:

Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.

Not to be outdone, the sub-title (of sorts) of Mercier's book is as follows:

A brilliant critical examination of the works of the leading creators of le nouveau roman: Raymond Queneau, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Claude Mauriac, and Robert Pinget