By Stuart Mitchner
My first great book was a birthday present bound for me by my parents. Still the largest single volume in my library, it contains the first 20 issues of Classic Comics (Classics Illustrated), from The Three Musketeers to The Corsican Brothers, both by Alexandre Dumas. My favorites were Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (No. 5), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (No. 9), and Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman (no. 12), with its brilliant Headless Horseman cover, which was featured in the October 2012 Book Scene.
On “Bloomstaff”
According to Dwight Garner’s July 5th New York Times review of The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom (Yale 2026), Bloom was “a ravenous digester of literature” who read Moby-Dick at 9 (I read it at 6, thanks to Classic Comics). He could also devour 400-page books in an hour, had a photographic memory, and liked to recite Paradise Lost during an after-dinner party game, “starting from any line a tipsy guest chose.” Edited by Heather Cass White, it’s what Garner calls “an ideally slim book,” including “only eight of Bloom’s correspondents: John Hollander, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Henri Cole, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Alvin Feinman, along with the critic Northrop Frye.”
White ends her introduction by mentioning the nicknames Bloom gave to some of his literary favorites: “He wrote about ‘Hamlet’ but only ever spoke about ‘Omelet.’ Freud was ‘Uncle Siggie,’ while Kafka was ‘Cousin Franz.’ In tribute to Falstaff’s unique greatness Bloom reversed the procedure and nicknamed himself ‘Bloomstaff.’”
Classic Beginnings
The third edition of Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History (McFarland 2024) explores, in the publisher’s words, “the enduring series of comic-book adaptations of literary masterpieces in even greater depth, with twice the number of color plates as in the second edition. Drawing on interviews, correspondence, fanzines, and archival research, William Bryan Jones Jr., “covers in full detail the work of the artists, editors, scriptwriters, and publishers who contributed to the success of the ‘World’s Finest Juvenile Publication.’ Many previously unpublished reproductions of original art are included, along with … additional information on contributions from Black artists and scriptwriters such as Matt Baker, Ezra Jackson, George D. Lipscomb, and Lorenz Graham; and a complete issue-by-issue listing of significant international series.”
Close Reading
One of numerous books on the subject, John Guillory’s On Close Reading (University of Chicago Press 2025), is available as a Kindle edition. “At a time of debate about the future of ‘English’ as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study,” the publisher states, “few terms appear more frequently than ‘close reading,’ now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from?” The author of Professing Criticism, Guillory “understands it as a technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure … that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.”
Holds on Holds
There are holds on holds at the Princeton Public Library for Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf (2019). Author of Proust and the Squid, which the Associated Press says, “restores our awe of the human brain,” Wolf reveals “what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel.” In the publisher’s words, Wolf’s book comprises a series of letters she writes to us, describing “her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums.”
Books That Matter
Editor Tessaly LaForce’s My Ideal Bookshelf (Little Brown 2012), with illustrations by Jane Mount, cuts across “the disciplines of art, music, food, and literature,” says Publishers Weekly, as “the celebrities interviewed share the books that have mattered most in their lives…. Through glimpses into these personal libraries,” LaForce and Mount “hope to expose their audience to a vast variety of literature. Indeed, the layout of the book contributes to creating a sense of cultural diversity; the alphabetizing of the contributors leaves chefs next to authors next to musicians.’’
Contributors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Rosanne Cash, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Tony Hawk, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among numerous others.
Books As Survivors
In A Life Among Books: The Art of Collecting and Preserving the Printed Past (Norris Bibliographic 2026), physician and collector Andrew Norris explores rare-book collecting as both a practical discipline and a lifelong intellectual pleasure.
Another survivor’s tale is Michael Castleman’s The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Publishing (The Unnamed Press 2024), which Library Journal calls “immensely readable” and “will appeal to bibliophiles, fans of microhistories, and armchair sociologists.”
Finally, one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking 2024) is, says The New York Times, “A spirited defense of this important, odd, and odds defying American retail category.”
The Human Touch
I just checked the numbers on Bloom’s Wikipedia. He wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for Chelsea House. The book I’ve been living with since the turn of the 21st century and keep closest at hand is Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead paperback 1999), by the man hailed as “the indispensable critic of the indispensable writer,” by Geoffrey O’Brien in The New York Review of Books. The 745-page tome is scored with asterisks and exclamation points and stuffed with notes, including a 50-year-old bookmark from George’s in Bristol (“Booksellers since 1847”), a magnificent store, albeit without the gritty charm of the run-down little George’s on the Christmas Steps.
In his note “To The Reader,” Bloom calls the book “a personal statement” and says, “the plays remain the outward limit of human achievement…. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us, which is the central argument of this book.”
