Created by geoffwisner (contact me)
An in-house marketer for a socially responsible mutual funds company, Geoff Wisner is also an author and book reviewer with a specialty in Africa, the... (more...)
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Some of the most special books are those that meant a lot to you but are now out of print and all but forgotten. If you're lucky, you have your own copy, but you're certainly not going to lend it to anyone. And yet the world should know about these books!
Although I help run a bookstore at www.indigocafe.com, these are books that you can't find there. In the old days, you could hope to find a copy in an out-of-the-way used bookstore where the stock isn't too picked over. Now there's alibris and abebooks. (The imaginary stamp on the left is by Donald Evans, whose book is one of my prized possessions.)
Art and Fiction
- The World of Donald Evans. Beginning when he was a child, Donald Evans invented a world of imaginary countries, each with its own currency and postage stamps. Then he drew the stamps, painted them in watercolor, and even perforated and canceled them. I ordered this book twice and each time it was mysteriously unavailable. On the third try it came.
- The Radiant Way trilogy by Margaret Drabble. The Radiant Way is the first volume of a trilogy that continues with A Natural Curiosity and concludes with The Gates of Ivory. All the desperation of the ruthless Thatcher years is here, and in the last volume London matron Liz Headleand finds herself in Cambodia, where an old friend has disappeared while researching Pol Pot.
- Stars of the New Curfew by Ben Okri. One of the best of the younger Nigerian writers -- and that's saying a lot -- Ben Okri's work is almost all unavailable in the US. In this collection of stories, Okri paints a picture of the city of Lagos as a pulsating termite's nest of ambition, greed, corruption, guilt, violence, and supernatural eruptions.
Travel and Nature
- Travels in the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park. Before Stanley, Livingstone, and Burton came Mungo Park, who wrote the one of the great books of African exploration. (It is the basis of T.C. Boyle's novel Water Music.) Some new editions seem to have appeared, but when I first read this book it was under the watchful eye of a librarian at the Boston Athenaeum, who put the book on padded leather supports and let me turn the pages with white gloves.
- Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley. Kingsley traveled through what is now Gabon with fortitude and good humor - whether crossing a swamp with a "collar" of leeches around her neck, or extracting herself from a pit lined with ebony spikes. ("It is at these times," she notes, "you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt.") The Virago edition is long gone, but there appears to be a Dover edition that is unabridged.
- The Lost World of Quintana Roo by Michel Peissel. Michel Peissel was a young Frenchman who set out to explore the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. Hacking his way through the jungle, he discovered Mayan ruins unseen for generations. This book captivated me when I was twelve or so.
- The Courage of Turtles by Edward Hoagland. Hoagland was a Harvard classmate of John Updike, and for my money should be just as famous. His personal essays delve into the odd corners of nature and human life, with special expertise on circuses and wilderness. See if you can also find Red Wolves and Black Bears and Walking the Dead Diamond River.
- Red, Black, Blond and Olive by Edmund Wilson. It's a sad state of affairs when most of the work of the greatest 20th century American man of letters is out of print. This one is about the Soviet Union, Haiti, the Zuni Indians, and Israel. The chapter on reading Genesis in Hebrew was my introduction to Wilson.
For Children
- Uncle Shelby's Zoo by Shel Silverstein. "In Manitoba, Canada / There dwells a lop-eared panada, / A native of Uganada / who sort of lost his way." Stranger and funnier than Silverstein's other books, this one is unaccountably out of print. I still have my childhood copy, held together with tape.
- The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron. This was a library book, so I never owned a copy. I remember it, I think, mostly because of the sensual descriptions: the metal plates the kids riveted together to make their backyard rocket, and the sulfur stink of the Mushroom Planet when they arrived.
