OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

264244 Thomas Conroy 2017‑12‑14 Re: Thumb screw wanted
Ed Minch wrote: "Some really lovely work in there, Tom.  I could not find any
names associated with the pieces."


I've struggled for years to get proper bibliographical entries for the catalog
entries. The problem is that the members who design the catalogs are usually
interested in visual things, not texts. By the time I get one to understand the
need, she has resigned and the next designer has to be educated from scratch.
The 40th anniversary piece in scarlet is Donn Byrne's Destiny Bay (1928),
stories set among the Anglo-Irish gentry before WWI; a favorite book of mine,
though no longer well known. The two in the 41st show, that were sitting so
long, are T.H.White's The Sword in the Stone and The Witch in the Wood. When
White wrote The Once and Future King he cannibalized these; most of The Sword in
the Stone was kept, except that he replaced a couple of funny episodes with
dreary sententious preachy boring ones. Most of The Witch in the Wood was simply
cut to get rid of the funny scenes. It  TWITW is as good as TSITS,  but I don't
think its has ever been reprinted and it is (due to White's hatchet job) almost
unknown. Strange, but common enough, that a writer should have such poor
judgement of what his best work is. My delay in completing the two bindings was
because I had done the covers but couldn't figure out what to do with the
spines. Once I got the breakthrough it went fast.
Thank you for the compliment.

Tom

Recent Bios FAQ