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Title: The Book of Prefaces by Alasdair Gray Gray ISBN: 1-58234-324-1 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Disappointed
Comment: I picked this book up at the library because it had an interesting look to it. It is unusually designed and weirdly illustrated. It's great to have all these wonderful prefaces in one handy volume, but Gray, who supplies an introduction and many of the glosses, writes in a kind of shorthand, staccato style that is unpleasant, and he has weak control of comma usage. I might have bought this book except for Gray's writing style.
Rating: 5
Summary: It was worth the wait, Mr. Gray
Comment: After a decade and a bit of footling around with pleasant but whimsical novels and the occasional killer short story, Alasdair Gray has finally delivered his long-promised anthology of English-language prefaces. And what a treasure it is. Designed and presented with the author's characteristic loving care, it's a mighty selection of beginnings-of-books from Anglo-Saxon down to 1920 or so (more recent prefaces being excluded because of copyright laws.)
Besides the sheer wealth of Stuff To Read, there are dense, canny and wonderfully sure-footed essays on the progress-or-not of English culture'n'society courtesy of Mister Gray, plus marginal glosses by a variety of highly intelligent people and also Roger Scruton. Scruton (England's dimmest philosopher) provides the gloss on the preface to Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and offers up his customary brand of simple-minded conservatism, but it doesn't matter because Gray has already neatly undercut him several dozen pages earlier with his own reflections on the revolution.
A book to keep with you for the rest of your life and leave to someone in your will. There haven't been many such in the past 50 years. And while the errata slip isn't quite exhaustive (there are a few typos that it fails to credit), how can you resist it when it's written in rhyme?
Rating: 5
Summary: A labour of love but no labour to love
Comment: For many years in catalogues of forthcoming publications Alsadair Gray's Anthology of Prefaces has been referred to. Some suspected a Gray type joke as the book failed to appear year on year. Was it a post modern joke? Gray after all was the man that had an erratum slip inserted in an earlier book reading "This erratum slip was inserted by mistake." The apparent joke was taken too far when one catalogue of second hand books published almost a decade ago suggested that the book had not appreciated in value and was worth roughly £20 second hand. This was not a bad sum for a non-existent text. Snippets of text appeared occasionally, and while the book remained unpublished it became apparent that Gray was beginnning to make serious progress on the work. It then became known that others were assisting Gray in his task of glossing the prefaces including crucially important Scottish writers such as Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Janice Galloway, and Alison Kennedy.
So now the book has arrived. The title has changed (now The Book of Prefaces, rather than an anthology). The price rather more than the suggested second hand value.
And it is well worth the wait. This will stand as a monument to Gray's achievements as an artist (of words and of pictures). His remit has been to produce a history of literature in English from the sixth century to the present day.
This is a book to revel in. Among prefaces to novels and poems (from the well known, such as Mary Shelley's genesis of Frankenstein to the less well known such as Trahern's poetry) there are prefaces (and prologues) to works of philosophy (e.g. Bentham and Franklin) and law (the introduction to Stair's Institutions, a crucially important work in the survival of Scots law as an independent legal system).
The book is beautifully illustrated, wonderfully designed, and contains a charming introduction by Gray detailing reasons for prefaces and for enjoying reading them (my favourite, enjoying watching authors in a huff).
This book will be an invaluable companion through life, and careful reading will have the desired effect of making an individual appear better read and more erudite than they really are.
Buy and enjoy this wonderful book.
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Title: Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway ISBN: 1841951838 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0198607024 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition by Merriam-Webster ISBN: 0877798095 Publisher: Merriam-Webster, Inc. Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman ISBN: 0393058506 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) by J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré ISBN: 043935806X Publisher: Scholastic Pub. Date: 21 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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