Levi Stahl

Discount this as you will for the fact that I’ve been reading Deighton, but: A man just trotted out of a mews carrying a camera, then quickly took photos of the back, side, & front of a Porsche parked in front of a church. Glanced around, disappeared back into the mews. Spy? Detective? Car now gone.

He turned around and smiled the sort of smile that is the legacy of ten years behind a bar.

—Len Deighton, Berlin Game

A close-up of some orchids from Kew’s annual orchid show.

Good morning, friends, from London!

He liked clichés. They were, he said, the best way to get simple ideas into the heads of idiots.

—Len Deighton, Berlin Game

It was the sort of interior that is designed at great expense by energetic divorcées who don’t take cheques.

—Len Deighton, Berlin Game

An entry from a guidebook for the branch in Whiteley's of Bayswater, which praises the staff, "with genuine enthusiasm for books that is really refreshing."

From Book Lover's London (2006), on the branch of Books, Etc. where I worked thirty years ago. The store (and the small chain of which it was a part) is long gone, but it's nonetheless nice to see this praise for the staff, some of whom are still my friends.

He rushed off to London, and consoled himself with his millions.

—Anthony Trollope, Ayala’s Angel

Chapter 2 of Berlin Game is basically the set-up for Black Bag (which was one of my favorite new movies last year).

Bret was the sort of American who liked to be mistaken for an Englishman.

—Len Deighton, Berlin Game

I saw it at Hatchard’s last night and they had to shelve it on its side, long side sticking out, because it was too tall to stand up in the section with Taylor’s other books.

A breakthrough: The bell captain at my hotel, where, COVID aside, I’ve stayed annually for 15 years, recognized me as a regular.

And in book news, one of the porters is reading Henry Kissinger’s The White House Years.

A painting by Yati Sharma from a pedestrian underpass in Hammersmith. It’s a cartoon-style painting of three pigeons sitting around a table in a pub, a couple of pints in front of them, while another pigeon circles in for a landing.

Good morning, friends, from London!

Just bought these at Daunt yesterday. I’ve only read a bit of Bainbridge, but I recalled you’d championed her.

You’d come home and your hair (which I had then) and clothes would -reek- of smoke. Wild to remember.

I wish I could take a vacation from myself.

—John O’Hara, to his friend Robert Simmonds

Text from Gayle Feldman’s Bennett Cerf bio: true, Kr editors, like those elsewhere, weren't paid princely salaries, and for years had had to moonlight. Saxe, Belle, and Linscott all compiled anthologies and received lump-sum payments or royalties in re-turn; Saxe also taught a publishing course at Columbia. But Linscott devised a canny alternative: a rider inserted into many of his authors' contracts-the "Linscott clause" - specifying that once a sales target for that title had been met, he—in addition to the author-would earn a small royalty on sales.

what

Text from Gayle Feldman’s biography of Bennett Cerf: On June 2, 1947, Life ran a long feature headlined "Young U.S. Writers—A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything." War was over; who would take up the mantle of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and go one better? Life piqued readers' curiosity with photos of those it was betting on. The vote for "most brilliant" of the new fictionists went to two: Jean Stafford— who'd already been compared to Proust and was Mrs. Robert Lowell-and Thomas Heggen, whose critical and bestselling success Mister Roberts would later be adapted for stage and screen. Names like Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow were not yet lighting up the horizon, although Bellow had published his first novel during the war. Instead, the magazine pointed to Calder Willingham, Elizabeth Fenwick, Peggy Goodin, Ann Chidester, Peggy Bennett, Gore Vidal, and husband-and-wife Nancy and Benedict Freedman —who, with the exception of Vidal, have faded into obscurity.

We are almost always wrong in the moment.

My copy of the new Bennett Cerf biography on a bar next to a pint of English bitter at Angel in the Fields.

The rain today meant I already got to do one of my favorite London things: Read for a while in a quiet pub.

(Been coming here 30 years and am still impressed at the weather in which Londoners are willing to stand outside a pub and drink. It is 49° and seriously drizzly, and that’s no bar.)

Moonrise Kingdom is the one I have the hardest time being objective about. I love everything about it.

The alien puppet from Asteroid City, an impossibly gangly gray-green creature with big round eyes.

Two of the vending machines form Asteroid City, designed to look as if they’re from midcentury. One is pink and vends stockings, one is green and vends martinis.

The canoe from Moonrise Kingdown, a wooden canoe with simple paintings of water and a buffalo on its side and a rough carving of a raccoon on the prow.

A rubber model of a strange-looking purple fish from The Life Aquatic.

OMG, the Wes Anderson exhibition. At the Design Museum is wonderful.

MacCarthy is so, so skilled a biographer.

I think this was my first time in Hammersmith since January 1997, when my usual branch of Books, Etc. seconded me as a fill-in to the Hammersmith branch for a couple of weeks. It was in that little mall that one of the station entrances is in. Looks like our space is now a Sainsbury’s.

The cover of the Modern Library Anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Super Stuart, which features the house from the Random House colophon in an illustration where it almost looks like a face mid-scream.

Alas, my later copy of this book does not look this good.

I made it to Red House a few years ago, though next time my wife comes with me I want go back so she can see it.

I made it to Red House, which is marvelous, a few years ago. I’ve not seen the boyhood home yet.

Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of William Morris is one of the best biographies I’ve read, of anyone. I can also recommend Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s book on William & Jane Morris, & Penelope Fitzgerald’s book on Edward Burne-Jones. (I should read MacCarthy’s Burne-Jones. And probably a Rossetti bio.)

I know William Morris’s worldview and methods are rife with contradictions and challenges, a reality of which he was far from unaware himself. But that doesn’t make the ethos and the work any less inspiring.

Morris’s Cray pattern textile (1884), which features sinuous plant stems inspired by tributaries of the Thames, and red and pink flowers against a background of green leaves.

Good morning, friends, from London, where my first stop was the William Morris Society in Hammersmith!

Yes, when Meet Me in St. Louis is published in November, we will all read it together, then watch the movie. It’s the done thing for the holiday season. Y’all are invited over.

Text from the new Bennett Cerf biography: The office was partitioned down the middle. The partners shared one side, their desks facing each other, as they would for years; everyone else was on the other side. Stacked in piles all around was the inventory they'd inherited from B&L-only half what had been expected: while Bennett was abroad, contrary to his deal with Liveright, Pell had discounted cop-ies, and sold off many for cash. Bennett fumed, but perhaps it was for the best. In high summer, in the days before air-conditioning, no one could escape the stench coming from the books. Castor oil used to "cure" the covers— the fake leather bindings had been a selling point-went rancid in humid heat. Donald summed it up: "They stank to high heaven." The binding would be cloth from then on.

The biological aspect of this anecdote reminds me of the story that one of Twain’s books, IIRC when he ran a publishing company himself (?), failed largely because a horse disease made deliveries of inventory to stores all but impossible right around the publication date.