Fantastic Metropolis

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Mike Simanoff

When I was a kid, my dog Chelsea used to chew on the corners of my books (humans in my family do not generally bite books). She would do this for hours, until she was caught and shooed—and immediately forgiven. You had to see her eyes. I believe she enjoyed them tremendously.

Brian Stableford

I went into an antique shop in Epinal a few months back to look at their wall of books. I found Contes Fantasques et Fantastiques by Adrien Robert, priced at 300FF (45 euros in new money). I bought it because it looked interesting and had nice pictures. I looked up Adrien Robert in all the reference books. Nothing anywhere, except for the Catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the 1872 edition of Larousse—although AR (his real name was Charles Basset, but he used a pseudonym to distinguish himself from his father, also a now-forgotten writer) wrote lots of fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories in the 1850s and 1860s. Not a single book of his is on sale on the Internet and he generates no hits on Google. He translated “The Embalmed Hand”—a fantasy about a detached hand that wreaks vengeance on its former owner’s daughter’s nasty husband (a doctor) by cunningly rewriting one of his prescriptions. I am now, in all probability, the only living person who gives a damn about whether or not Adrien Robert ever existed, and the only person ever to have read anything by him in English. You don’t get that sort of experience from collecting beer mats. (If anybody ever happens upon a copy of one of AR’s fantasy novels or other short story collections—some of which were issued under the pseudonym Charles Newil or Newill—I’d be really interested to see it.)

Anna Tambour

For those of us who grew up reading, it is hard to remember our first loved book, but when I taught a fifty-five-year-old farmer to read a few years ago, his first loved book was obvious, and a surprise. It was a dictionary. He read it for pleasure at night, after work.

Jeffrey Thomas

When I was maybe three or four my maternal grandparents gave me a beautiful book on flying dinosaurs, which represent to me both the marvels of the natural world and the fantastic realms of the imagination, borne on wings. The dust jacket and interior paintings were gorgeous, still my favorite illustrations of prehistoric animals. Four decades later the dust jacket is gone, the binding split and frayed, some pages scribbled on by a brother lucky to still be alive, but I have that book and count it amongst my most cherished possessions. It has directly inspired some of my own writing and illustration.

Jeff Topham

About 10 years ago, my then-girlfriend and I spent two delirious months on a rambling cross-country road trip. The only book I brought was Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction, whose endpapers, and eventually even its margins, became filled with my travel journal. It traveled with me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was soaked during a thunderstorm at Glacier National Park. Its front cover was singed during a hilariously inept attempt to smoke a small amount of opium we’d bought. It is a ruin of a book. It is priceless to me.

Alan Wall

I was in Florence. I realised that I wanted to try to read Dante in Italian, though my Italian was minimal to sub-zeroic. I went to a bookshop. No parallel text in English and Italian. But they had Dante, of course, how could they not? And so I bought a serviceable Divine Comedy and an Italian-English dictionary. A man intervened while all this was going on. A small, bearded man who, in my memory, has half-transmuted into Primo Levi, someone else I’ve only ever met in books. He asked why I needed it. His English was impeccable, though I knew he was Italian, probably because he was so exquisitely dressed.

‘I found myself walking round the city, thinking of Dante. Everything I looked at in Florence made me think of Dante. It seemed a shame that I’d never tried to read one of the world’s greatest writers in his own language.’ Then I shrugged. What more could I say?

I left the shop with my little brown bag containing the two books. Half-way down the street there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the man who had intervened in the bookshop.

‘I just wanted to wish you well,’ he said and bowed slightly. ‘You have so much pleasure ahead of you, reading Dante. A lifetime’s pleasure.’

‘What do you do?’ I said.

‘I am the Professor of English at the University.’

We smiled at each other and parted. Words written six hundred years before, in a language I didn’t understand, now held in their thousands of stanzas in a book in my hand, had brought us briefly together. I still have the book somewhere, though it’s mingling at present and doesn’t seem unduly inclined to surface. It will return, no doubt, when the time is right. In the meantime I now have David Jones on my desk. I thank you for that.

Liz Williams

Many to share, but too many to mention. Books hold me up in this difficult world.

Richard Winters

There’s nothing like the thrill of finding something you’ve searched for (in a vague way) for years, like my musty three-volume, turn of the last century edition of Dampier’s Voyages, for example. But for emotion, the feeling of sitting in a chair with my nine-year-old son and reading him a child’s edition of Homer… well, that’s what literature is all about. Passing to the next generation the best stories we know, and hearing it anew in the process. Unforgettable, irreplaceable.

Paul Witcover

I once squashed seven cockroaches with a single copy of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.

Gene Wolfe

Of course I have ten thousand memories connected with books. How about being introduced to Dickens by my friend David Taylor, who had been reading Pickwick and talked like Mr. Jingle when he described the book? David has been dead for more than 40 years, but you will find him as David Arimaspian in my story “The Arimaspian Legacy.”