Browsings by Michael Dirda

Author:Michael Dirda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

Charlottesville

A few weeks back I received, from out of the blue, an email from the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). This isn’t, I should point out, a professional organization for cinematographers who specialize in the kind of movies shown at the Silverdocs festival of the American Film Institute. In fact, the ADE represents those learned folk who oversee great scholarly editions of, for instance, the papers of George Washington, the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the archives of Willa Cather.

Why were they emailing me?

It turns out that every two years the ADE awards the Boydston Prize for the best review or essay, “the primary focus of which is the editing of a volume of works or documents.” This year’s winner turned out to be—well, aw shucks—me. The award committee was quite taken with a long essay-review I’d written for The New York Review of Books comparing two annotated editions of The Wind in the Willows.

Need I say that I was incredibly chuffed (to use a British verb I’m fond of)? As Harriet Simon, editor of the John Dewey papers, generously said, the piece I wrote “gives the strengths of each edition but also points out such pitfalls as misreadings, misprinted citations, oversights, and bemoans the lack of critical attention to the book’s inner structure, especially its leitmotifs and verbal repetitions.”

When asked if I would come to the ADE’s annual convention to receive the award at the Friday night banquet, I immediately agreed. Happily, this only meant a two-and-a-half-hour drive to one of my favorite cities, Charlottesville, Virginia.

I arrived there at 2 P.M. on a Thursday, checked into a Budget Inn, and immediately set off for the city’s downtown pedestrian mall. Lined with shops and restaurants, packed with tourists searching for souvenirs and local teens just hanging out, it’s one of Cville’s main attractions. It is also the location for three used-bookstores, with two others not far away. All the shops are worth checking out, and two are especially strong in older science fiction and mysteries, but I beelined for the biggest, just off the mall on 4th St: Daedalus Books.

Three hours later I emerged, without buying anything.

To my surprise, the store closed at five, long before I had completed my systematic inspection of its labyrinthine fiction-rich basement. So I simply deposited a box of my selections at the front desk and promised to return the next morning. As I left, I asked if any of the other bookshops might still be open? Yes. Read It Again Sam didn’t close till eight.

So I passed another couple of hours there, and bought three books: The Other Passenger, by John Keir Cross, a 1946 collection of fantasy stories in a near-fine dust jacket; a Folio Society volume entitled Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, compiled by Joanna Richardson; and Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, by Christopher Frayling. This last, based on four BBC television programs, is a lovely picture book, with excellent chapters on Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

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