Volume 48, Number 10 · June 21, 2001
Within a Budding Grove
By Charles Rosen
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition
edited by Stanley Sadie
Grove, 29 volumes, $4,850.00; on-line subscriptions at grovemusic.com for $295.00 per year, with other pricing plans available
The bibliophile and founding father of French Romanticism, Charles Nodier—or, rather, his invented alter ego, the bibliomaniac Théodore—walking in Paris along the quais of the Seine lined for several miles with secondhand booksellers, was appalled at the vast quantity of recent books remaindered and exposed to the rain and the urban dust, 'the inept scraps of modern literature never to be ancient literature.... The quais henceforth are only the morgue of contemporary celebrities!'[1] The miles of dead literature arranged in rows were, and still are, terrifying to behold.
Review, 4068 words
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