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Dueling Duels and Illuminations from Melville House
Inasmuch as duel has its meaning in the root for “two”—a modification of bellum, the Latin word for war, to result in duellum or “fight between two men”—Melville house has expanded the parameters of that particular duality. This Tuesday, August 16, they’ll be publishing no fewer than five books in their Art of the Novella series, each one titled The Duel: by Giacomo Casanova, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Heinrich von Kleist, and Aleksandr Kuprin, translated by Joshua Billings.
Besides being notable for making the word “duel” look vaguely silly after a while from all the repetition, the dueling Duels also mark the debut of Melville House’s new HybridBook Project. The concept here is to incorporate eBook-type enhancements with all the comforts of paper: Each print novella comes with a printed QR code that can be scanned via smartphone and a URL that can be entered manually (the eBook versions come with them already embedded). These access a series of “Illuminations,” or supplemental material—“highly curated text, maps, photographs and illustrations related to the original book.”
The good folks at Melville House are offering up a sampler during the month of August to whet your appetite a bit. And I have to admit, even if the idea of “Illuminations” sounds a little precious, The Duelist’s Supplement is a lot of fun. Articles have covered dueling sites, etiquette, personalities and lore, all done with a joyful kind of research that evokes that pursuit of arcana that was so much fun in the first days of the Internet, before everyone’s computer time got overridden by email and social media and work. Or, to really date myself, it’s for those kids who could spend a whole afternoon geeking out with the family encyclopedia, going deeper and deeper into some topic until half the volumes were pulled off the shelf and it was time for dinner. I’m particularly fond of the post about a duel by billiard ball—“then he hurled the ivory sphere with deadly aim and effect, for it struck Lenfant in the middle of the forehead and he dropped dead without uttering a word. The survivor was arrested and tried for willful murder, and convicted of manslaughter”—which is accompanied by an engraving entitled “An Air Balloon Engagement for the Empire of the Sky.” More teasers, from publisher Dennis Johnson:
The Illumination for the HybridBook version of Anton Chekhov’s The Duel contains an essay on dueling by Thomas Paine, poems by Lord Byron, philosophy by Nietzsche, an anti-dueling church sermon, an argument in favor of dueling by a U.S. Senator, and the rules to the game of vint—a game that plays a role in the plot…. In the Illumination for Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel you’ll find a comic essay by Mark Twain on French dueling and an account of a famous duel fought from hot air balloons. And there’s so much more—maps, cartoons, recipes, photographs, paintings—to enhance the reader’s experience.
As resistant as I’ve been to the idea of print and digital book enhancements, going through the whole litany over the past few years—that they’re gimmicks, that a good book needs no distractions, that they’re like plastic surgery for literature—I’ve had to dial that reaction back. Well done, eclectic, interesting extras, like Melville House’s Illuminations (maybe if they lost the capital “I”?) or The Waste Land iPad app, which I had a great time with and would go back and play with again, are definitely worth taking the time to explore. I think the operative term here might be “playing with”—these supplemental apps are toys for big kids, and as long as they retain that sense of fun—along with good production values and earnest research—I’ll keep seeking them out, and recommending what’s good. In the meantime, five Duels at one time should make “pistols at dawn” interesting, at the very least.
Buy a Book From Melville House to Help Japan
I’ve sung the praises of Melville House’s lovely editions on a number of occasions—I remember putting in a good word for their Neversink Library and the Art of the Novella series, and at least a few individual books have shown up here as well. If you’ve been looking for justification to go ahead and click on any of these beautiful items, take note that they will be donating all profits on internet orders for the next week to Japan disaster relief.
So go ahead, click, and do some good.
Random House, I Really Hate Your Ass Right Now
With the news that Random House has adopted the Agency model effective tomorrow, I have one thing to say.
Cee Lo Green "Fuck You"
Uploaded by Push36. – Link to the original video.