Dalenberg Complete Library of Antique Popular Literature
Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Winsor McCay (1905)
See also www.dalenbergfilmlibrary.com for The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, directed by Edwin S. Porter (of The Great Train Robbery fame), the 1906 entry in The Dalenberg Library's "100 Films, 100 Years." Winsor McCay's comic strip "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend" appeared...
Some Chinese Ghosts, by Lafcadio Hearn (1887)
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is one of those authors whose personal biography is as fascinating as his fiction, born in Greece, moved to Ireland as a child, essentially abandoned in his youth, finding his way to America at 19, and earning gradual success as a...
Love is Enough, by William Morris (1873)
Nowadays, William Morris (1834-1896) is remembered as the Victorian artist famous for tapestry, furniture, and stained glass designs. But in his lifetime, he was chiefly known as a poet. He also has a certain fame since the 1970's as one of the first fantasists who...
Quarry, by Max Allan Collins (1976)
After the old guard of mystery/hard-boiled/detective writers mostly died out about 10 years ago, Max Allan Collins (1948- ) has quietly assumed their mantle of greatness. I'm thinking in particular of Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and Donald Westlake. Collins was a...
“Enoch Arden” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1862)
George Goodwin Kilburne's painting is a perfect evocation of one of the early scenes in Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," a long poem that was a hit for decades among the Victorians. Two boys vie for the affections of a young girl. She marries one and puts the other one in...
Treasures from the Dalenberg Library: Ellison/Asimov–I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay
News travels slowly to Kansas. The Dalenberg Library just got word of the passing June 27 of the enfant terrible of science fiction, Harlan Ellison (5/27/34-6/27/18.) It is difficult to envision Ellison as an 84 year-old. He was somehow frozen in our mind as...
“The Dragon Masters” by Jack Vance (1962)
Jack Vance (1916-2013) burst on the scene with some finely crafted miniature fantasies about the dying Earth in 1950, then had a couple Hugo Awards in the early ‘60s, but mostly labored away, largely unnoticed, in the pages of the science fiction digests and...
Treasures from The Dalenberg Library: Dave Brubeck Trio
Here is a real treasure from the vinyl collection. The first two Fantasy Records releases were 1950 recordings by The Dave Brubeck Trio. Here is the Fantasy compilation reissue from those sessions in 1956, pressed on red vinyl. Brubeck's piano style is notably...
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Brilliant Chinese "hard" science fiction from Cixin Liu (aka Liu Cixin, if you are Chinese). The book is many things. It plays an unpredictable switch on first contact stories, because the scientists who make first contact are disaffected with their own worlds and...
Treasures from The Dalenberg Library: “From Dance Hall to White Slavery” (1912)
After Traffic in Souls made the "100 Years, 100 Films" list as our entry for 1913, it seemed fitting to dig this treasure out of the stacks. Clearly the topic of "white slavery" was much in the news shortly before Word War I. Purporting to be the results of an...
Treasures from the Dalenberg Library: Lane translation of The Arabian Nights
The Western conception of Alf Layla Wa Layla, or The Arabian Nights, or The Thousand Nights and a Night, has been influenced more by its European translators than by the original texts. In fact, there is no definitive original text of this massive work, which has...
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, by Donald E. Westlake
Charles Ardai's imprint Hard Case Crime has unearthed an overlooked 1974 novel by Donald E. Westlake, and it is a can't-put-down, hilarious page-turner. The book apparently came and went with little fanfare in the mid-70's, had a hardcover edition from a lesser known...
D. W. Griffith: An American Life, by Richard Schickel (1984)
Richard Schickel (1933-2017) was a pillar of the community of film critics who rose to dominance in the later half of the 1960's--he was film critic for Time Magazine from 1965-2010. This is the generation for whom films like Bonnie and Clyde were iconic, the...
Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak (1942)
Siodmak (1902-2000) already had 18 published novels under his belt in Germany before emigrating to the U.S., fleeing the anti-Semitism of pre-war Germany. His older brother, Robert, became a recognized name in the world of film noir. Kurt (now Curt, in the...
Treasures from the Dalenberg Library: “The Shattered Silents” (1979)
Nowadays, 90 years later, the most neglected period in film history is the transition from silents to talkies. Most people only know anything about this massive upheaval in the film world from the comic spin on it in the 1952 classic Singin' in the Rain, with its...
Axe, by Ed McBain (1964)
Modern police procedurals are generally found on television shows of the C.S.I. variety. Actors who are too "hot" to really be cops and detectives stand around making quantum leaps of deductive reasoning in a few lines of dialogue, arriving at conclusions that would...
Treasures from The Dalenberg Library: “History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph” by WKL Dickson and Antonia Dickson
Facsimile of the 1895 monograph detailing, in rather too florid language for modern readers, some technical aspects of Thomas Edison's first movie studio and the devices for capturing and playing back some of the first moving pictures. The most fascinating part of...
The Dalenberg Library’s Survey of 20th Century Music: 1900-1910
Now that we are going on 18 years into the 21st Century, the music of the 20th Century seems almost classic, encompassing a spectrum from Late Romanticism to Modernism to “Post-modernism” to the latest avant garde. To make sense of it all, and to be prepared to...
Treasures from The Dalenberg Library: Wings, by John Monk Saunders (1927)
Wings is a novelization of the screenplay for the movie of the same title. This Grossett & Dunlap edition from 1927 features publicity stills from Paramount Pictures. Therefore, it is a full-fledged movie tie-in edition, as we would call it today. The film, a...
Antique Book Report: Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Winsor McCay (1905)
Winsor McCay is a giant among early comic strip artists, famous for the epic scenery of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and famous as an early animator on Gertie the Dinosaur and The Sinking of the Lusitania. A kind of a trial run for Nemo was McCay’s 1904-1911 strip...