WRB—Feb. 11, 2026

“Professor of BOOK-AUCTIONEERING”

We were somewhere around Washington on the edge of the swamp when the drugs began to take hold.

Links:

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Seamus Perry on pluralism and modernism:

  “And” is a conjunction, so one might think there is some purpose in placing it in so awkward a position in lines that are, after all, about discovering a sad disjunction between people. The Friar inquires at the aborted wedding service in Much Ado about Nothing if there is “any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined”; The Waste Land is all about inward impediments to conjoining of one kind or another. Well, okay; but I nurse another thought, which, I admit, is the reason I chose that passage. For the word “and” is a hallmark pluralist word: a thought that is not my own fancy, but what James tells us in the closing lecture of A Pluralistic Universe—“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.” And, he might have added, every sentence effectively begins with an “and” as well. Remember the wonderful opening lines of Pound’s Cantos: “And then went down to the ship . . . ” Every sentence in the pluralistic universe enters in on some previous, unfinished business.

  In “And,” an essay collected in Habitations of the Word (1984), William H. Gass writes: “If we were suddenly to speak of the “andness” of things, we would be rather readily understood to refer to that aspect of life which consists of just one damned thing ‘and’ after another.”

  [I recall reading in something about Milton, which I cannot now find, that in his work “or” frequently means, in effect, “and.” (I’m sure one of you will write in with the source; the WRB is Milton Weekly, after all.) I also recall once being given the writing advice that, if you have written “but” to combine two clauses or sentences, you should see if you can replace it with “and,” since they mean basically the same thing and “and” flows better. From this I conclude that there is only one conjunction. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer’s classicism:

  Rohmer developed his early vision further in his first essay for the Cahiers du cinéma, “Vanité que la peinture,” in which he claimed that cinema was not merely the art form of the future but that the other arts, including literature and painting, were exhausted, and increasingly inadequate in their current form for dealing with reality. He asserted that in breaking off from nature, modern art degraded man, whereas it ought to elevate him. Now that modern art and literature had run out of things to say, and had unsatisfying means of saying them, we should turn to a “classicism” within the cinema.

  According to Rohmer’s provisional definition in 1951, in a classical art, the artist serves the transparency of nature instead of sticking “critically” out of it. Here, for the first time, he spelled out what he saw as the classical virtues: elegance, efficacy, naturalness, and sobriety. Like the French classicist critics of the early twentieth century, Rohmer identified classicism with the capacity to represent, with a detached serenity, the intricate, contradictory obscurities of human beings; he associated it with a sense of measure, of balance, of order, and of unadorned simplicity. Yet instead of building on the precedents of Sophocles, Pheidias, and Aristotle’s Poetics, Rohmer extrapolated his classicism from the films of Howard Hawks and Hitchcock.

  [Rohmer was a subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. (It was a different time; my feelings on Whit Stillman have changed some since then.)

  When Rohmer said all this he had written a novel (coming out in English translation later this year). His suggestion that this novel served as the “matrix” for the Six Moral Tales, then, seems like an indication on his part that the novel did not succeed in depicting life as he wanted, and he needed to use another art form in order to do so. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Thomas Keymer reviews two books about publishing in the eighteenth century (Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of Print, by Jennifer Buckley, 2025; and The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America, by Matthew P. Brown, 2025):

  Among the bracing provocations of The Novel and the Blank is Brown’s insistence that the arrival of print in any given community needn’t change very much. What matters is “the presence of a second printer”—the upstart player whose rivalry ushers in a new world of competition, controversy and contestation. A rich cast of incumbents and insurgents fleshes out the point: Samuel Keimer, Franklin’s “knavish” associate and later adversary, who never lived down his fanatical past with the Camisards, a millenarian sect notorious for their “violent and strange Agitations or Shakings of Body”; George Whitefield, celebrity preacher (and favorite theologian of Fielding’s Shamela), who berated bishops as infidels and idolaters, and wrote an autobiography at the age of twenty-five; Robert Bell of Philadelphia, self-styled “Provedore to the Sentimentalists” and “Professor of BOOK-AUCTIONEERING,” whose wares included everything “Old or new, that is come-at-able, in the American World of Books”; William Goddard, the Rhode Island stationer who invited female customers to send in their underwear, “and he will cause it to be wrought into the finest Paper, so that it may be returned to them in Letters, from kind Correspondents who are abroad.” Goddard may in fact have taken this play from a rare moment of sauciness in Addison’s Spectator.

  [From this review I learned the word “colporteur,” which refers not to a writer of such songs as “I Get a Kick Out Of You” and “Anything Goes” but to “an itinerant hawker of cheap print, especially religious.”

  Really unsure why I gave myself the title “Managing Editor” when I could have gone with “Provedore to the Sentimentalists.” You live and you learn. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• The end of the local Post’s book section, the teachers I owe the most to, and why I put this thing together

• Love in the ruins of the monoculture

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and weird images

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]