JD Stockpile

So, I've been trying to get a copy of Salinger's as yet unpublished story 'Hapworth 16, 1924' and have gone so far as to go to the library and copy it out of the New Yorker [fair use, I was writing a paper on it at the time] but someone's gone and put it up here as well as a bunch of his other under-published writings.

Under-published in the sense that they were published in various magazines at the time, but Mr. S has refused to publish anything in the past thirty-odd years. Thank god someone invented the internet. Otherwise, I'd be crawling around old libraries, and exchanging packages through the mail with people I met through literary magazines or something.

Comments

[M]

Thank god someone invented the internet. Otherwise, I'd be crawling around old libraries, and exchanging packages through the mail with people I met through literary magazines or something.

You jest. For surely someone who praises a song called "Your Cover's Blown" off an EP called "Books" from a band whose name was inspired by a book is not entirely averse to frequenting libraries. And let's face it: exchanging packages and correspondence with strangers met through literary magazines isn't all that different from exchanging packages and correspondence with strangers met over the internet. Or is that a parallel one does not draw in polite company?

But then again, I've always been fond of archives. Real archives, not their virtual descendents. To page through the manuscript of, say, Watt, with marginalia penned by Samuel Beckett, is a rather heady experience.

What would Borges make of the internet, I wonder? He once wrote, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

[ben]

Guity as charged, my friend. I [heart] books more than I [heart] the internet. I've spent my share of time in archives, libraries, and antiquariums, I must confess a love of old books. Stacks and stacks of them.

What would Borges make of the internet, I wonder? He once wrote, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

That, my friend, has all the makings of a story, perhaps even a mcsweeneys submssion.