Floor Time for the Significant Other

So many books come through Beatrice headquarters that I can't possibly read them all--so sometimes the Significant Other gets to them before I do. It dawned on me yesterday, as I was making my way through some PW work, that as long as she's dipping into the review copies, maybe I can expand my coverage a bit...I mean, hey, if Mark Sarvas can exploit his own mother for blog entries...So here's the first in an irregular series of book reviews from the Significant Other.

I enjoyed Nabokov’s Butterfly, by Rick Gekoski. Gekoski gossips freely not only about the world of rare book dealing--one of the more amusing anecdotes concerns an American mobster with an enviable collection of James Joyce first editions--but about the authors of the books he deals. We learn, for example, about the short volume of poems that Graham Greene had published for his mistress, Catherine Walston; according to Gekoski, there are only 25 copies extant, although Gekoski refrains from quoting any of the poems "out of deference to my old friend." Gekoski, who has a Ph.D in English from Oxford and was a lecturer in English at the University of Warwick, also offers a number of thoughtful insights into the works themselves; I was particularly impressed with his take on A Confederacy of Dunces. The book is not without its drawbacks--Gekoski obviously thinks highly of himself, and is perhaps a bit too fond of name dropping--but if you don't mind the not-so-thin thread of self-aggrandizement, you’ll likely have a good time reading it.

Editorial Note: Gekoski may demur at publishing his old friend's love poems, but other folks have no such scruples, so you can read an excerpt here.