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Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.

His heir, not sharing the old man’s passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalog of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l’Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840.

Unfortunately for those collectors, neither Comte de Fortsas nor the collection existed.

The man behind the hoax was a local antiquarian named Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon (1802-1889). The planning that had gone into the deception was incredible. He had carefully researched the interests of all the major bibliophiles in Europe in order to ensure that they would make the long and fruitless trek to Binche. And he had done all this merely for the sake of a practical joke.

The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector’s item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price.

Librarian and bibliophile Jeremy Dibbell has posted the contents of said catalog to LibraryThing. You can also view scans of it on Google Books.

[via ZPi]

Tijuana Bibles were pornographic tracts popular in America before the advent of mass-market full-color glossy wank-fodder such as Playboy. A typical bible consisted of eight stapled comic-strip frames portraying characters and celebrities (eg. John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters) in wildly sodomistic situations. Many could be considered grossly racist, sexist, and otherwise wholly “politically incorrect.” Browser discretion is advised.

My name is Quinn, and I’ve scanned in a few dozen of these literary gems.

Read (and view) on.

Associated Press:

Canadian director David Cronenberg is swapping his camera for a pen.

The moviemaker, who was attending the Rome Film Festival on Thursday, said he has written 60 pages of a novel, but besides ruling out that it would be a horror or science fiction, offered few details on the project.

I love Cronenberg’s work and can’t wait to read this. Actually, I find it interesting that Cronenberg has waited this long to do this. His two major, avowed influences have been Nabokov and Philip K. Dick (No wonder I love his cinema.) and has said he’s been more influenced by them and other novelists than any filmmaker.

Link! Via CHUD

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.

We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.

This book sounds fascinating. An interview with the editor.

Halfway through an exchange of emails with the science fiction writer Charles Stross - a virtual meeting in cyberspace which might have had something of the exotic as little as five years ago - it strikes me that our text-based communication feels almost archaic now.

It’s a realisation that might have come straight from the pages of one of Stross’s novels. These days, email tennis feels almost boringly routine, and the rapid normalisation of the technologies which are changing people’s lives is a recurrent theme in his fiction. Despite their hard-edged technological focus, Stross’s worlds are often as quotidian as they are fantastic.

Link! The only novel of Stross’ I’ve read is Accelerando, but it was fantastic. Via Reddit.

If I were to tell you that a theatrical version of William Gibson’s famous novel Neuromancer was going to be performed in a rural Missouri town, starring a radical leftist activist and members of an amateur theater troupe from a local Baptist church, what would you say? It probably wouldn’t be: “Yeah, and wouldn’t it be great if all the cyberspace scenes were done with cardboard cutouts that people move around on stage, accompanied by Indonesian Gamelan music?” And yet that’s exactly what Brody Condon is going to do, next summer, with grant money from the Rhizome Foundation. I know it sounds insane, and that’s precisely the point.

Oh my god. This sounds amazing. Read on.

Beyond the Multiplex:

First of all, hasn’t anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn’t like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading “The Lord of the Rings”? Here’s what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”

Let’s see, he doesn’t like “little guys and dragons” or hairy-footed hobbits, and “The Hobbit” would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he’s right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling. And I’m riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving “3993″ (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone”), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” or his “Doctor Strange” blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.

Like Del Toro, I’m not a fan of this kind of fantasy at all, and I totally agree with this writer on wishing Del Toro would do something from his infinite list of awesome vaporware projects. Just because he’s a fat, bearded genre director, doesn’t mean he has to take Peter Jackson’s sloppy seconds.

Oh, well. If Del Toro is distracted from “At the Mountains of Madness,” maybe I’ll still be able to take a stab at it. That’s one of my dream projects. Link!

R.I.P., Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

Wired (again):

Here’s my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender’s Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

Read on.

Ever wonder who the “His” is in His Dark Materials? Apparently it’s Pulickel M. Ajayan:

A scientist at Rice University has created the darkest material known to man, a carpet of carbon nanotubes that reflects only 0.045 percent of all light shined upon it. That’s four times darker than the previously darkest known substance, and more than 100 times darker than the paint on a black Corvette.

Read on. [via Reddit]