The Book Lover's Almanac: Entries
It's not easy to produce A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists but here's a little look at how it came together
When I finished my art history almanac Art Day by Day: 366 Brushes with History for Thames & Hudson a couple of years ago, I knew immediately that I wanted to have another stab at the concept but with a bookish theme. So I’m particularly delighted that today’s publication of The Book Lover’s Almanac means that I’ve finally stabbed that itch.
The most common question I’m asked about Art Day by Day was how I found the entries. The dull but true answer is “a lot of research”, but deciding what to include is a bit more complicated. Here, for example, is the first entry in the book (don’t worry, I’m not going to through the whole thing explaining each entry):
I picked Eliot and Middlemarch this for several reasons:
I wanted a big name/title with plenty of heft to kick the whole book off
But something that people wouldn’t know about it
It’s appropriate for the day and hopefully chimes with people thinking along similar New Year’s resolution lines
It indicates that the book is not going to be simply an exercise in pale, male, stale backslapping
It signposts the reader further into the book by including a second date
Ten days later on January 11 comes this:
This made the cut because:
It’s not just about a book/writing
It includes a different kind of writing (i.e. a tweet, or perhaps it’s an X now?)
Harry Potter is quite popular and as Woody Allen says in the opening credits to Manahattan, ‘I mean, you know, let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here.’
Some things are there because although it’s not a piece of fiction, it’s always good to tell a story. So I like the idea of following F. Scott Fitzgerald’s odyssey in nailing down a definitive title for his most famous book (March 19, November 7, and December 15). Others get in purely because they reflect my own tastes. Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I am a big fan of The Box of Delights. I didnt’ want to shoehorn any old nonsense about it into the book, but I think this is a nice little vignette for January 24:
On a less selfserving note, one of the reasons I write so many books about books is that I want to encourage people to try things they haven’t yet come across. So for September 27 here’s something on Christa Wolf who is well worth reading, as well as a really intriguing story:
And while it’s obviously a reasonably literary book, I always felt there should be room for the more everyday side of life, hence George Orwell snapping the handle off his spade and noting his poor crop of walnuts ( October 10), Sylvia Plath cooking her favourite lemon meringue pie (January 20), and E.M. Forster breaking his arm falling up the steps at St Peter’s in Rome (February 2) as well as more literarily visiting caves in India which provided inspiration for A Passage to India (January 28).
Overall, I also wanted to balance little titbits with longer entries to vary the read. So on February 14, Charles Dickens is feted at an American gathering that has so many fabulous details I felt it was worth recording at length. On the other hand, “French poet Arthur Rimbaud writes to his mother that he has decided to become a gun runner in Ethiopia” feels about the right length of summing up (October 22).
Next week, I’ll pick out a few of my favourite entries. In the meantime, happy shopping!