As it happens, this will be—to borrow the title of the third installment of Alec Guinness’s autobiography—my “positively, final appearance,” at least as the Friday “Browsings” columnist. No doubt the SCHOLAR’s persuasive editors will occasionally inveigle me into writing a book review or article for the print magazine. In the meantime, thank you all for reading my effusions of the past year.

By this point anything else I say is bound to sound anticlimactic, and I should probably just take a bow, wave cheerio, and exit stage left. But I do have a few last thoughts to share. Let me number them, as it conveys the impression that I’ve thought systematically about all these matters.

1) To my mind, reading should be a pleasure and, through these columns, I’ve tried to pass along some of the excitement and rewards of my own bookish life. All too often the work of today’s literary journalists calls to mind a remark made by Wilfred Sheed about the once-well-known critic Irving Howe. What Sheed said, more or less, was this: When you read Irving Howe’s criticism, you can tell that he’s not doing it for fun.

I certainly hope these various essays, in their differing ways, have been fun. I’ve done my best to be amusing, silly, and sometimes a little weird. As my old friend Bill Greider, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, once told me: Writing that isn’t fun to read usually doesn’t get read.

2) I hope that the past 50 or so columns have reminded readers that the world of books is bigger than the current best-seller list. Thirty-five years ago this spring, I was hired as an assistant editor at The Washington Book World. My ambition then, and now, has remained pretty much the same: to entice people to try unexpected books, old books, neglected books, genre books, upsetting books, downright strange books.

May I share a favorite, and famous, passage from Kafka? “The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

Once, this seemed to me to describe the sort of soul-shattering literary experiences we should always be seeking. Not so much now. For Kafka, reading, like criticism of the Irving Howe school, was something you didn’t just do for fun. It was hard work and you needed to use an ax and you probably felt exhausted afterwards and ready for some hot compresses.

There are, of course, books—great, good, and bad—that do require the last full measure of devotion. A reviewer’s lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, despite the novel’s consummate, unmitigated tedium. Some people—not I—have complained about Proust’s meandering sentences, Henry James’s fine distinctions, or Thomas Aquinas’s logic-chopping. Well, I say if you don’t like them, don’t read them. You’re not in school any more. Even the best mountaineers aren’t always up for an ascent of Mount Everest. Sometimes a reader just wants to spend some idle days on the Yann, or drift slowly along with Hercule Poirot as he solves some hideously complicated murder, or quietly revel in the mishaps of Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Just remember, though: keep trying books outside your comfort zone. At least from time to time. True readers ought to be explorers.

3) Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know. When I was growing up, there used to be a magisterial librarian’s guide entitled Living with Books. I think that’s the right idea. Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.

Well, I could go on with numbers four, five and six—whatever they might be. But I don’t want to be overly pedantic or allow this farewell to go on too long. Elizabeth Bibesco once said that a goodbye, like a welcome, shouldn’t be over-extended. “It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.”

Still, I’ve never been able to write even a note to the milkman—back when there was a milkman—without a P.S. So just let me stress, one last time, that the world is full of wonderful stories, heartbreakingly beautiful and witty poems, thrilling works of history, biography, and philosophy. They will make you laugh, or hug yourself with pleasure, or deepen your thinking, or move you as profoundly as any experience this side of a serious love affair.

None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we’d like, but we can still make a stab at it. Why deny yourself all that pleasure? So look around tonight or this weekend, see what catches your fancy on the bookshelf, at the library, or in the bookstore. Maybe try something a little unusual, a little different. And then don’t stop. Do it again, with a new book or an old author the following week. Go on—be bold, be insatiable, be restlessly, unashamedly promiscuous.

Over the past year I’ve enjoyed writing these “Browsings” essays, meditations, and rants. The time has quite sped by. I hope you—whoever you are—have enjoyed reading them. Some of them anyway.

At all events, last week I decided it was time to pass this particular torch to someone else. The SCHOLAR’s editors have not yet announced my successor, but fairly soon you will discover a new name gracing the Friday slot on the magazine’s website. I hope you’ll give that new person a try.

While I’ll probably contribute columns for another week or two, I thought it worthwhile to try and settle in my own mind why I am walking away from work that I enjoy. Time is one reason—I find, to recall a favorite saying of my father, that every 15-minute job now ends up taking an hour. Another is coming up with new topics. I envy those bloggers who can express strong opinions about everything. Me, I just metaphorically saunter along, whistling a happy tune, and hope that my effusions turn out to be mildly entertaining. More and more, though, I worry that my pen has gleaned my teeming brain and that what I produce is weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. (Guess the sources of the two quotations buried in that previous sentence and win a prize!) The furrows of the brain occasionally need to lie fallow.

And still another reason is money. I do live by my pen, or keyboard, and while there’s considerable prestige attached to writing for the SCHOLAR, it doesn’t reward its contributors as handsomely as, say, The New Yorker or Esquire—not that I’ve ever written for either of those magazines. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR is an intellectual quarterly and what it lacks in lavish compensation, it makes up for in intelligent, appreciative readers.

Still, I have developed some low-grade champagne tastes, especially in my book collecting, which all by itself requires a healthy bank balance. In my youth, I was happy just to unearth a paperback copy of, say, E. F. Benson’s mystery The Blotting Book. I now own both the English and the American first editions. These aren’t terribly pricey items, but one cost $35 and the other $15.  If you buy lots of such treasures, it gradually adds up.

For instance, just this past Wednesday I tore myself away from this desk and drove downtown to have lunch with the poet and translator A. M. Juster. Juster is the pen name of a very senior government official who translates Latin poetry, often fairly obscure Latin poetry, as a pastime. Sounds positively Victorian, doesn’t it? And wholly admirable too. Gladstone, England’s most famous 19th-century prime minister, built a personal library of more 32,000 volumes and it was for use, not ostentation. His rival Disraeli, when out of power, brought out excellent and witty novels. At best our leading politicians may occasionally open a book if shown how. Former presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich did crank out some pot-boiling adventure fiction, but that’s not quite the same thing.

After an extremely enjoyable lunch (Juster had onion soup, I had moussaka) with talk of Maximianus’s elegies, acrostic poetry, and the riddles of Aldhelm, I said goodbye and hurried back to my car with three minutes to spare on the parking meter. At that point I should have pointed my wife’s Prius toward Silver Spring and gone home.

Needless to say, I didn’t.

Instead I drove toward Second Story Books in Dupont Circle and spent 15 minutes looking for a place to park. I then scouted the offerings ($3 each) on the bookstore’s sidewalk shelves and turned up a nice first of The Panic Hand, a collection of Jonathan Carroll’s elegant and eerie short stories. Long ago, when I reviewed one of his early novels—Sleeping in Flame—I described it as a cross between Weird Tales and Vanity Fair.

At which point, I certainly should have plunked down my $3, taken my purchase, and gone home.

Needless to say, I didn’t.

Instead I sauntered into the store itself and began, just idly, to look around. Right away I noticed a copy of Baron Corvo’s Hubert’s Arthur for $100, but decided that was too much, especially since I’d recently written about Corvo and his biographer A. J. A. Symons for The Weekly Standard. I wasn’t likely to read any more of this paranoid decadent’s work for a while.

So I poked around some more. I nearly bought a very nice first of M. F. K. Fisher’s Map of Another Town, her account of a long sojourn in Aix-en-Provence. I’m fond of this book because I too once lived in Aix, and, as it happened, roomed for six weeks with the same landlady as Fisher.  But I knew Madame Wytenhove 20 years later. I sometimes fantasize that the gorgeous Mary Frances and I had slept in the same bed.

But I already owned Map of Another Town, so I left it on the shelf—even though it was just $6—for some other lucky Francophile.

I kept on browsing. I thought about a somewhat worn copy of Mark Girouard’s The Victorian Country House, but I’ve got a stack of his books on the piano now, including Life in the English Country House and The Return to Camelot. I figured I should wait and see if I read those two before I began buying more Girouard. Sound logic, yes, but I now rather regret leaving the book.

After exploring the fiction, art and architecture, literary criticism, and poetry sections, I lingered over science fiction and fantasy. The store was selling paperbacks of William Morris’s prose romances, in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter, for $4 apiece. The thing is, I own some of the Morris books already—I knew I had The Well at the World’s End because it bears one of the most haunting titles in all of English literature. But did The Sundering Flood and The Wood Beyond the World repose somewhere in a box in the basement? I couldn’t remember, so left them there.

As usual, I then wandered through mythology and folklore—nothing—followed by history. In the Medieval section I pulled out a first edition of Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, translated by John Jay Parry and published by Columbia in 1941. I’d studied a paperback of this 12th-century rulebook for lovers back in college, and then a revised version in graduate school. But I don’t really like paperbacks—except for 1950s mysteries with sleazy covers featuring blondes in dishabille—and this was a handsome, if jacketless, hardback, and I just wanted it. So, I shelled out $15 and finally prepared to go home.

But I didn’t.

On the way out a bookcase full of elegant sets, some leather-bound, caught my eye.  Now I admit to mixed feelings about Oeuvres Completes and long rows of matching books—altogether too official-looking—but I noticed that there were seven or eight Pleiade editions displayed, including the two volumes of Flaubert’s novels. As God is my witness, to quote the immortal Scarlett O’Hara, I opened one of them and my eyes lit on my favorite passage from The Temptation of St. Anthony, the section where the Queen of Sheba appears to the austere saint to tempt him with the delights of her body. Her enticements rise to a climax with the words: “Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde.” And it was just those words I opened to: “I am not a woman, I am a world.”

So, naturally I had to buy the Flauberts, since one doesn’t just casually defy the Sortes Virgilianae: The book gods would withdraw their favor. Still, I like Pleiades and own quite a few. Okay, more than a few. As everyone says, they really are more attractive than the slightly clunky Library of America titles—and these two were bargain priced. In a twinkling, the Dirda bank balance was down another $40.

At which point, I really should have gotten in my car and driven home.

But did I? Need you ask?

Instead I headed down P Street to Georgetown and The Lantern Bookshop, operated for the benefit of Bryn Mawr College. There I wandered in and noticed, on the rare and vintage shelf, a copy of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, the 1930s travel classic about the Middle East and Central Asia. I already possessed the Oxford paperback of this book and the handsome Folio Society hardback of it, too. But this John Lehmann edition called to me—it had been published in 1950 and it would match my John Lehmann edition of Byron’s The Station (about Mount Athos). It wasn’t the first edition, which appeared in 1937, so I discussed the price with the manager and it was dropped to $25.

That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that I’d also spotted a copy of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies for the same price—as well as nice $5 editions of Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After, and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, the latter the English first. Plus there was this book called Twenty Years in Paris, by some guy named Robert Sherard I’d never heard of, but that featured photographs of 19th-century literary eminences, including a striking one of Maupassant. At $5 I had to get that too.  I later looked Sherard’s book up online and discovered it was, in theory, worth quite a bit more than I’d paid for it. Always gratifying. Often it turns out the other way round.

In the end I dropped $75 at The Lantern.

And at that point finally went home, where I surreptitiously smuggled my new acquisitions into the house.

Now this is bad, very bad. These days I can hardly step away from this desk and not find myself gravitating to a used-book store and pulling out my credit card. I can almost always justify my purchases as sensible, reasonable courses of action. All addicts do this. Still, those book outlays add up quite dramatically when the monthly Visa bill comes due.

So that’s why I’m bringing the “Browsings” column to a close. I’ve got to figure out how to break into Esquire or GQ, where the big bucks are. Either that or take a part-time job at Second Story Books or the Friends of the Library Book Sale Room in Wheaton. Those employee discounts would come in mighty handy.

Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to New York for the 2013 birthday weekend of The Baker Street Irregulars. The BSI, as many of this column’s readers probably know, is the 80-year-old literary and dining society devoted to honoring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Yes, a few people do dress up in Victorian garb or sport deerstalkers, but mainly the BSI meets for talks, presentations, and what churches call “fellowship.” In effect, this means three days of eating and drinking, followed by more drinking.

There is, technically speaking, a good deal of planned programming. I attended the Lunch of Steele—honoring Sherlockian illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele—held at The Players in Gramercy Park, a bibulous Special Meeting at The Coffee House Club (of which BSI founder Christopher Morley was a member), the Gillette Lunch at Moran’s Seafood Restaurant (a double homage, as William Gillette played the Great Detective on stage for 40 years and the name Moran recalls that of Professor Moriarty’s chief assassin, Colonel Sebastian Moran), the black-tie BSI banquet at the Yale Club, a late-night champagne party hosted by Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Bookshop, a private cocktail party on Central Park West on Saturday afternoon, and, finally, a gathering of the Pondicherry Lodgers for Indian food later that same evening, followed by nightcaps even later before the fireplace at the Yale Club.

Of course, those with real stamina could also attend several additional lunches, dinners, and alcoholic get-togethers. But, alas, I’m not the man I once was. During the few hours my dance card wasn’t penciled in, I sped woozily away—via subway—to visit the Strand Bookstore, the Housing Works Bookstore, James Cummins Bookseller, and The Grolier Club. I naturally acquired a few items in the Sherlockian dealers’ room, as well, including two T-shirts, Robert Veld’s immensely informative The Strand Magazine and Sherlock Holmes, Nicholas Utechin’s diverting “Occasionally to Embellish”: Some Writings on Sherlock Holmes, and the latest magisterial production of the BSI itself: The Wrong Passage: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript of “The Golden Pince-Nez,” with Annotations and Commentary, edited by Robert Katz and Andrew Solberg. Needless to say, it was a heavy suitcase that your Browsings columnist rolled down 6th Avenue when he boarded the nine A.M. Bolt Bus for the trip back to Washington.

While the BSI blowout is always fun, especially for those who have trained for it or possess, by genetic gift, the capacity for drink of 1930s newspapermen, I was constantly being asked a question that bothered me. It’s one that any writer, journalist, or scholar will recognize: “What are you working on now?”

This actually means: What is your latest book project?

While I explained, with the becoming modesty for which I am widely celebrated, that I was writing every day and contributing regularly to a half dozen newspapers and periodicals, such journalism, no matter how exigent or ambitious, doesn’t really seem to count. People want to know about books. On Conan Doyle came out in 2011, and it’s now 2013—shouldn’t I be finishing up something new?

Well, yes, I should. Or at least starting on it. But what?

I’ve never found it easy to come up with publishing projects. Three of my books—Readings, Bound to Please, and Classics for Pleasure—are essentially collections of my columns and reviews. In some instances, the pieces have been amplified or reworked so that they read like essays. An Open Book is a memoir, focused on how comics, adventure stories, and classics shaped my early life. Book by Book is a little compendium of quotations drawn from my commonplace book, i.e., from the bound volume into which I’ve been copying favorite passages from my reading for the past 40 years; B3—as I sometimes call it—is organized by subject and supplemented by mini-essays and book lists. On Conan Doyle chronicles, from an autobiographical viewpoint, my lifelong involvement with the novels, stories, essays, and memoirs of A. Conan Doyle, starting with my discovery, in 5th grade, of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s only 200 pages long, part of a Princeton series called “Writers on Writing.”

Obviously all these titles fall, more or less, under the category of “books about books.” Stories and poems and works of history and humane letters are all I ever write about, albeit through a very personal lens whenever possible. As I’ve said more than once, I shy away from calling myself a critic—I don’t possess that kind of analytic mind, though I also hope that I’m more entertaining than most of the critics I read. (Sorry, no names.) In fact, I’m a bookman, an appreciator, a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized, and the forgotten. On sunny days I may call myself a literary journalist.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them. Last week, for The Washington Post, I reviewed a reissue of Shepherd Mead’s humorous How to Live Like a Lord Without Really Trying; this week, I’m indulging a lifelong fascination with religion by writing about Trent: What Happened at the Council, and the week following that I’ll be discussing the noir fiction of Cornell Woolrich. Harper’s Magazine recently ran my overview of Thornton Wilder’s varied and undervalued work, while The Weekly Standard published my reflections on the nonfiction of A. J. A. Symons (author of the biographical classic, The Quest for Corvo) and Bookforum brought out a piece about George Minois’s The Atheist’s Bible, a historical study of a late-medieval polemic attacking “the three impostors” Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. In the next couple of months I’ll be taking on subjects as various as John Keats, the fantasies of M. P. Shiel, the short stories of Sherwood Anderson, some recent science fiction scholarship, and the fiction of James Salter, among much else, including those inexorable weekly reviews for The Post. Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I’m just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style. You be the judge (and for those who’d like to be in my pay—please send in your application).

Of course, all this work is merely journalism, and it’s hard to make it seem anywhere near as important as a book. Indeed, it isn’t. Books possess a shape and permanence that scattered pieces—disjecta membra—don’t.

When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I’m tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity. I don’t want to submerge myself in another man or woman’s existence, I want to write about me, about the books and writers that I like. And I want to be able to finish any commitment within a year at best, so that I can get on to something else. I have, it would seem, the temperament of a reporter—always intensely interested in a subject for a short while, but soon ready to move on to the next assignment.

For a while now I did have one big project in mind: “The Great Age of Storytelling.” I hoped to write about the amazing flowering of popular fiction in England and elsewhere from roughly 1860 to 1930. All the modern genres really start then, and during this period many of our iconic figures were born, from Peter Pan to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Alas, no trade publisher was willing to fork out enough cash to support my household for two years, the time I felt I’d need to do a good job. Sometimes I still think of approaching a university press with the idea, but I would still need a significant amount of money. That’s something in short supply at universities these days.

Of course, what I really should do is turn my energies to creating a reality TV show called Books. While I was in New York, I managed a couple of quick coffees with my son Mike, who works for a big public relations firm there. He told me that his classmate from Oberlin College, a young woman named Lena Dunham, was voted the coolest person in America by Time magazine. She is, I’ve since learned, the driving force behind an award-winning television series called Girls. I’ve never seen it. It would be kind of creepy if I had. Still, I just read that the fortunate Ms. Dunham has received a $3.5 million book contract. I suppose that whatever she writes will attract one or two more readers than something called “The Great Age of Storytelling.” Sigh. Cutting edge I’ll never be, unless, of course, old-fashioned suddenly becomes hip and cool. Which could happen, right? Right?

While reading the papers this past Monday, I paused over two stories. One was a Washington Post review by Patrick Anderson—who specializes in writing about crime fiction—of a new thriller by Dick Wolf called The Intercept. In his opening paragraph Anderson mentioned all the millions Wolf had made from his TV shows, Law & Order in particular, and ended by observing that the writer owned a home in Montecito, California, “which is, as the saying goes, where God would live if he had the money.”

The second story I lingered over was in The Wall Street Journal. According to reporter Jennifer Smith, prominent law firms are now letting go partners who don’t bring in enough business or bill enough hours. As one unidentified source said, quite plainly, “It isn’t enough to be a good lawyer. The job is to make money for the firm.”

Apparently, these are tough times for that most generally despised of all professions. Some years back, and perhaps still, the Folger Shakespeare Library sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” (That’s from Henry VI, Part Two, if you want to look it up.) Of course, nowadays lawyers enjoy lots of competition when it comes to being reviled. Consider, for instance, Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund operators, and overpaid CEOs (i.e., virtually all of them). Many of these are, of course, lawyers as well.

Like most people, I have a troubled relationship with money. Long ago, when I took “Introduction to Economics,” my teacher, Robert Tufts, scribbled on one of my term papers (which had vigorously defended the radical views of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty), “Mr. Dirda, you actually write pretty well, but you don’t understand economics at all.” Perhaps so.

Basically, I think that most people either make too much money or not enough money. The jobs that are essential and important pay too little, and those that are essentially managerial pay far too much. In a reasonable society, for instance, all elementary education would be public education and the highest-paid profession would logically be that of schoolteacher. The men and women to whom we entrust the formation of our children’s minds and characters would be deeply honored and appropriately rewarded. That teachers are not is largely because the rich send their kids to private schools. These should be prohibited. At that point, our politicians—one of the overpaid groups, in my view—would quickly ensure that public schools employed the best and brightest people that money could buy.

But when was the last time you heard any middle-class parents say that they hoped their most gifted child, the one with the double 800s on his or her SATs, would find a job as a third-grade teacher?

And why don’t parents wish this, rather than hope that little Chauncey or Rasheeda will grow up to become a corporate attorney or cardiac surgeon? Because of money and status. We still measure success by the Mercedes in the driveway and the size of the McMansion.

The goal of a just society should be to provide satisfying work, with a living wage, to all its citizens. The jobs that are vitally important, truly dangerous or stressful, or inherently unattractive, should be the best compensated: teachers, coal-miners, emergency-room nurses and physicians, and trash collectors should all be extremely well paid. But work that deals mainly largely with intangibles, with the manipulation of words or numbers, should largely be its own reward. Corporate executives, who love to wheel and deal, ought to earn no more than poets, who love to play with language. In fact, I think that everyone employed by a business, whether a guy on the assembly line, a secretary, or the chief financial officer, should make exactly the same amount. Each does what he or she can do best for the success of the product or the company. A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one’s gifts and talents, is what truly matters.

Tolstoy once asked, How much land does a man need? The answer, you may recall, was basically six feet by three: the size of a cemetery plot. How much money does a 21st-century American need? Not millions a year, not the kind of salaries we bestow on many in what is loosely called “business.” The rich soon come to think that they deserve to take home grotesque sums annually, that they are, in essence, being reasonably compensated, and that any attempt to tax them a tiny bit more is unjust and undemocratic. Yet why is this? A life is a life. Self-fulfillment, the expansive exercise of one’s abilities, should be, and usually is, what matters to most of us. The only reward that counts, in the end, is to be honored for one’s accomplishments, whether by colleagues, employees, or the nation.

No doubt such thinking will be dubbed, or denounced, as socialistic or un-American. It’s certainly completely Utopian. But I am a child of both the working class and the 1960s. I don’t like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

Of course, no one ever listens to me. But after the deplorable behavior of our legislative officials this past fall in dealing with the fiscal crisis, after the childish, know-nothing recalcitrance of the Tea Party, after the almost weekly corruption scandals among our moguls and financial “advisors,” after the outrageous golden parachutes allocated to inept executives, and, most of all, after the general and ongoing contempt demonstrated by the haves for the have nots, it’s enough to make even a mild-mannered book reviewer depressed and ashamed for his country.

For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. My father would often intone on significant birthdays or anniversaries: “That which I did I ought not to have done, that which I did not do I ought to have done.” His pseudo-biblical lament unfortunately reduces the past to one long series of regrets, to the memory of foolish choices and rosy thoughts about what might have been.

That way, I suspect, madness lies. Also, the ire of one’s spouse and children—What about us? they might rightly complain. Are we chopped liver or something? After all, people do make good choices, often very good choices. But in recollection we inevitably tend to think about those mysterious and alluring roads not taken. Could I have become a novelist or a poet? Would I have loved living in New York or San Francisco? Might I have been happier as a small-town librarian—or a plumber? Did I use my small talents in the best possible way? Such dreamy speculations are, happily, of no real consequence. They make us thoughtful for a moment; then we sigh and get on with the day’s work. To those who do what lies within them, according to nominalist theology, God will not deny grace.

Like most people, at the beginning of a new year, I get revved up about what I want to accomplish in the coming 12 months. In 2013 I resolve to go to the gym every other day. I will lose 15 pounds and get back into what a friend used to call, when she was looking for a fresh boyfriend, “fighting trim.” I will write a short story and start a new book. I will travel more and see the world. I will fix up this dilapidated house, or sell it, and make a proper library for myself. I will … I resolve to … I must …

Some of these high-minded resolutions will almost certainly come to pass. (Hmm, I must be channeling my father’s biblical rhetoric.) But what I really want to do, if I were to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell used to counsel us, is simultaneously modest and fanciful: to travel around North America in a van visiting second-hand bookstores. During my travels I’d also make occasional detours to spend a day or two with old friends, now too little seen—with my high school buddies who live in Houston and Missouri, my college chums in Maine and Chicago, my former book-collecting partner David Streitfeld, ensconced in the Bay Area, even some folks up in Toronto and British Columbia. Being a hero (and heroine) worshipper, I’d naturally take the time to genuflect at the final resting places of writers I admire. (Even now, two of my favorite photographs depict a reverent me at the tomb of Stendhal in Paris and the grave of Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi.) Come lunchtime I would obviously eat in diners and always order pie for dessert, sometimes à la mode. During the evenings, sipping a local beer in some one-night cheap motel, I would examine the purchases of the day and fall asleep reading shabby, half-forgotten books.

Why would anyone want to do this? Mainly for the adventure, to recapture a little of the swagger and inexpressible sense of freedom that belong only to youth. It’s certainly not as though I need any more books. Just yesterday I was up in the attic creating neat stacks of those I would like to read Right Now. While admiring one such ziggurat, I suddenly flashed on the famous Twilight Zone episode—“Time Enough at Last”—in which Burgess Meredith, amid the ruins of a post-nuclear holocaust world, makes his own To Be Read pile—and then stumbles, breaking his glasses.

What books would I read if I could simply read for my own sweet pleasure? Well, there are at least a dozen major classics of English fiction that I’ve never quite gotten round to—yet. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, for example, and—hangs head in shame—Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. There are, alas, others comparably important. But, in truth, the books I really want to read are far stranger, and far lesser works. What titles, you ask?

First, two books by Cutcliffe Hyne: The Lost Continent, a classic novel about Atlantis, and The Adventures of Captain Kettle, tales of the criminous and fantastical that once rivaled those of Sherlock Holmes in popularity, just as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle—another book I look forward to—outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Then there’s the autobiographical Paul Kelver, by Jerome K. Jerome (author of the comic masterpiece, Three Men in a Boat), and Maurice Baring’s Daphne Adeane, about a strange portrait and the interconnection of ghosts and living people, and Robert Ames Bennet’s Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit, in which explorers encounter a Viking-like civilization living within the hollow earth, and Russell Thorndike’s The Slype, a hard-to-find mystery by the creator of Dr. Syn, AKA The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

I’ve read, and written about, Claude Houghton’s existential thriller I Am Jonathan Scrivener, but I’d like to look into his other books, especially those with male names in the titles: This Was Ivor Trent, Julian Grant Loses His Way, Hudson Rejoins the Herd. Similarly, I’ve long meant to read more T. S. Stribling, not just his mystery stories about Dr. Poggioli, such as Clues of the Caribbees, but also his satirical novels, especially his semi-fantasy about academia, These Bars of Flesh. I’ve also got copies of several minor classics of supernatural fiction just waiting for their moment: Alexander Laing’s The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, Hans Heinz Ewers’s Alraune, Frances Young’s Cold Harbor, and Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber (a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft).

Then, too, I’ve been saving for the right holiday or vacation such oddball whodunits as Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s comic A Bullet in the Ballet and T. E. B. Clarke’s alternate history Murder at Buckingham Palace and Michael Fessier’s mix of fantasy, Grand Guignol, and mystery, Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. Isn’t that an irresistible title? Given time, I’d certainly sample more of the work of Clemence Dane, starting with The Moon Is Feminine, and explore that of Phyllis Paul, beginning with the recently reissued A Cage for the Nightingale. And then there’s J. A. Mitchell’s The Last American, subtitled “A Fragment from the Journal of Khan-Li, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy.” It was written in 1889.

Not least are all the works I long to read but that are essentially unprocurable, except through inter-library loan or to those who can afford to pay more than $500 for a single book. Frank Walford’s Twisted Clay, written in the 1930s, set in Australia, and immediately banned, is about a lesbian serial killer. Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, published in 1937, envisions a horrific Nazi-controlled world, 500 years in the future. Then there are R. C. Ashby’s He Arrived at Dusk and Eugene Lee Hamilton’s The Lord of the Dark Red Star and Mortimer Collins’s 1874 occult novel, Transmigration (which includes a section set on Mars), and Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (by the author of the famous ghost story “The Beckoning Fair One”) and Frederick Irving Anderson’s two volumes about master criminals, The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl and The Notorious Sophie Lang. And many more.

What with many of these alluring titles on my bookshelves or precariously arranged in stacks up in the attic, I really do need a long life, with my mental faculties intact and reasonably good vision. Hope springs eternal! Of course, the id side of my reader’s brain tells me that I really should reread War and Peace and The Magic Mountain, or start on The Portrait of a Lady, rather than pick up that copy of The Messiah of the Cylinder, by Victor Rousseau, or Dr. Nikola’s Vendetta, by Guy Boothby. Sigh, truth is, I really do enjoy big, serious, life-changing Great Books of the Western World-style classics. But I also like weird, old stuff.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction—mysteries, fantasy, and adventure—as eccentric or merely antiquarian. Still, these books do offer good storytelling, moral clarity, and an escape from our meretricious times. Best of all, for me, they also deliver something of the cozy pleasure I got when, as a boy, I first opened The Hound of the Baskervilles, or followed Tarzan into the forbidden city of Opar, or tagged along on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Besides, I’m also an invested member of The Baker Street Irregulars, which meets next weekend for its annual get-together in New York. To a serious Irregular it is always 1895—or at least it is for one long weekend in early January.

Last month my friend Tom Mann—author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research and, as Washington insiders know, the man to see at the reference desk of the Library of Congress—handed me a copy of a book entitled Shakespeare, In Fact, by Irvin Leigh Matus. Originally published in 1994 as a hardcover by Continuum, this carefully researched, data-rich, and beautifully written account of Shakespeare’s life and career has now been reissued, quite handsomely, in paperback by Dover Books. I recommend it strongly—especially to Oxfordians, Baconians, and all the other groups who imagine that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to write such brilliant plays.

Irv Matus, who died in 2011, by himself gives the lie to that elitist canard. As Tom points out in his introduction to this Dover edition, Irv “had no formal education beyond a high school diploma, but he wrote two of the best books ever on the Bard and his era. At the time he finished the first one, Shakespeare: The Living Record, 20 years ago, he was living on a heating grate behind the Library of Congress.”

I won’t say more about Tom’s vivid portrait of Irv, except that it could have been printed by The New Yorker back when Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, and Wolcott Gibbs were writing profiles of gifted and eccentric characters. It almost goes without saying that Irv Matus was a proud member of Washington’s most mysterious and exclusive association, facetiously referred to as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but consisting of specialists and authorities on everything from forensic pathology to fingerprints to South African politics and sociology. You can’t apply to join the League, by the way, you can only be invited by its all-powerful president.

A few days after Tom gave me that new copy of Shakespeare, In Fact, I ran into Paul Dickson at a used-book store. Paul—immensely genial, in both senses of the word—is himself an obvious candidate for the League. He’s the biographer of legendary baseball manager Bill Veeck, one of the world’s experts on language (War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War is in its third edition), and a scout for Dover Books. In this last capacity, he keeps an eye out for old and odd works that should be returned to print. For instance, Paul introduced Dover’s 2012 reissue of Old-Time Camp Stoves and Fireplaces, a practical manual first published in 1937 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. (My father might have used the original, since he joined the CCC in his youth and worked in some out-of-the-way parts of California.) Paul also wrote the text for Courage in the Moment: The Civil Rights Struggle, 1961-1964, a recent Dover “original” built around Jim Wallace’s you-are-there photographs of protests and sit-ins. Not least, this astonishingly energetic and prolific author helped Tom engineer the re-publication of Shakespeare, In Fact.

On my way home from chatting with Paul, I started to think about Dover Books and their importance in my own reading life. Because of Dover paperbacks, I was introduced to M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and to the adventures of Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, marveled at the great cases of Jacques Futrelle’s Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen, known as The Thinking Machine, and was awed by the cosmic science fiction of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker. Because of Dover Books I was gradually able to accumulate a small library of wonderful and unusual titles, ranging from the mysteries and ghost stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, to H. P. Lovecraft’s groundbreaking essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, to Martin Gardner’s first great debunking classic, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

In those days of yore, Dover proudly trumpeted that their paperbacks were “designed for years of use,” that the paper wouldn’t deteriorate, and that the pages consisted of sewn signatures, with ample margins. Sometimes the outer cellophane layer of the covers would delaminate, but this didn’t affect the book in any serious manner: It would still open flat, and the type face, except in those publications that reproduced the actual pages of old magazine serials, would always be large and legible. In short, a Dover book was “a permanent book.” Best of all, the company’s offerings were cheap—only a few dollars new and often findable in thrift shops and second-hand bookstores. There must still be a couple of dozen Dover editions scattered around this house. Even now I sometimes take one out and study the lists of the many other Dover titles printed either on the inside covers or as an appendix.

For example, at the back of Three Martian Novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, there are 15 pages describing books about science, philosophy, history, and languages. You could then buy W. P. Ker’s extremely readable Epic and Romance, or E. K. Rand’s Founders of the Middle Ages, or W. G. Sumner’s Folkways. In my copy of Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, the inside cover carries an extensive list of “Dover Mystery, Detective, Ghost Stories, and Other Fiction,” including Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and Five Victorian Ghost Novels, edited by E. F. Bleiler.

Everett F. Bleiler! Even as a boy, I noticed that this Bleiler guy introduced many of the books I most cared about. He seemed to have read everything, and, as I later learned, he actually had. To this day, I keep The Guide to Supernatural Fiction and Ev’s two similar volumes about early science fiction near my bed for late-night browsing: They are among the world’s most beloved, and valuable, reference books. In the first, Bleiler lists and annotates—i.e. summarizes, with capsule judgments—1,775 books from 1750 to 1960, “including short stories, weird fiction, stories of supernatural horror, fantasy, Gothic novels, occult fiction, and similar literature.” Because many, if not most, of those 1,775 titles are collections or anthologies, that means Bleiler has read literally thousands of pieces of great, good, and wholly ephemeral genre literature. The science fiction volumes cover many additional thousands of novels and stories.

These splendid books—perhaps the greatest publications ever of The Kent State University Press, yet now sadly out of print—are the harvest of a lifetime of reading. For more than 20 years Bleiler worked as an editor, later an executive vice president, at Dover, and was responsible for resdicovering and making available some of the greatest names in Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. He was himself an exceptionally learned man, too, having written a Japanese grammar, produced a scholarly edition of Nostradamus, and contributed regularly to specialized journals about arcane works of Renaissance allegory and fantasy.

He was also kindly, generous, and modest, and I am proud to have exchanged letters and phone calls with him, and once—only once, alas—to have met him for a bookish lunch in New York. He is one of the heroes of modern literary scholarship, and I wish I’d gotten to know him more and better.

But his legacy remains. Many—and it really should be all—of his Dover editions remain in print. His great reference volumes are standard bibliographic tools for antiquarian bookdealers: “Not in Bleiler” is the sign of a truly rare work. His son Richard Bleiler, moreover, continues to extend his father’s scholarship, and has added his own researches to it.

Sigh. What I wouldn’t give to be 14 years old again, on Christmas break from school, and reading, for the first time, Gods, Men, and Ghosts, Bleiler’s selection from Lord Dunsany’s gorgeously written and clever fantasies. Oh, well. There’s one thing the adult me knows for sure: If Ev were alive today in Washington, and if he could be persuaded to join, he would certainly be one of the most extraordinary members of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Giving books for the holidays is always a crapshoot. Sometimes the recipient will gush, “Oh, just what I always wanted—a deluxe pigskin-bound copy of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.” At other times, he or she will reply, “Oh, a book. I just love books. I used to have some when I went to college.” Most well-bred people are polite: “How thoughtful of you! One can never have too many novels by James Patterson.” But others may blurt out: “Oh, darn! Another copy of Fifty Shades of Grey! What I was really hoping for was a cotton chenille housecoat and a pair of comfy wool socks. Or maybe a new toaster.”

Given the general rate of failure and misfire, I’ve come to believe that one should simply give attractive copies of the books one loves. So here, arranged by age group, are some of my favorites (with a focus on literary and biographical/historical works). I’ve listed just one or two titles by the chosen authors, but in most cases their other books are often just as good. I’ve also avoided classics that are either over-familiar or that seemed to lack an appropriately festive or fireside feel to them. So you won’t find Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”), nor is there anything here by, say, Kafka, Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf.

Bear in mind that the chronological ordering is, obviously, only approximate. Some people are more advanced readers than others, but good books for even the youngest kids are still enjoyable by the most mature grown-up. I would normally annotate such a list, but this would make for an inordinately long column, so I simply urge you to seek out some of these writers and their works in your local bookstore or online. A few titles may be out of print, but old copies are worth tracking down. Indeed, I’m firmly convinced that an old hardback—whether a first edition or not—is better than a recent paperback. But then I’ve never believed that a gift needed to be absolutely new, otherwise people wouldn’t be buying antique earrings, let alone pre-owned BMWs, for their sweethearts.

Ages 1-4:

The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen (illustrated by Helen Oxenbury)

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Jack Prelutsky; illustrated by Arnold Lobel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton

The Travels of Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff

Ages 5-7:

Any good edition of the classic fairy tales

Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell Hoban (illustrated by Lillian Hoban)

A Day with Wilbur Robinson, by William Joyce

Jumanji, by Chris Van Allsburg

Miss Nelson is Missing! By Harry Allad (illustrated by James Marshall)

Ages 8-11:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (illustrated by John Tenniel)

Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame; illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard or Arthur Rackham

Homer Price, by Robert McCloskey

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (illustrated by Jules Feiffer)

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Blackhearts in Battersea, by Joan Aiken

5 Novels: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Last Guru; Young Adult Novel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, by Daniel Pinkwater

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White

A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ages 11-15:

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by A. Conan Doyle

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser

Collected Ghost Stories, by M. R. James

101 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, edited by Ellery Queen

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg (volume one: short stories; volumes two and three: novellas)

The Golden Argosy: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language, edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson

The White Nile and The Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing

Ages 16-19

She, by H. Rider Haggard

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope

The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees

The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

The Thurber Carnival, by James Thurber

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance

True Grit, by Charles Portis

Ages 19 and up

Fiction:

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm

Leave it to Psmith, by P. G. Wodehouse

Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos

The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin

The Locusts Have No King, by Dawn Powell

Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter

A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley

Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger

Small World, by David Lodge

Amphigorey, by Edward Gorey

Nonfiction:

Poets of the English Language, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (five volumes)

Individual editions of the poetry of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anthony Hecht

Eothen, by Alexander Kinglake

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

The Best of Myles, by Flann O’Brien

Hindoo Holiday, by J. R. Ackerley

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, edited by Simon Karlinsky

The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, by John Dickson Carr

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley

The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport

In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt

United States: Essays 1952-1992, by Gore Vidal

Well, I’d better stop. I’m beginning to think of more and more titles. But remember: these are just some of the books that I enjoy giving to people. Tastes may differ, and I’ve no doubt overlooked the one work that a) changed your life, b) to which you return regularly for comfort and renewal, or c) that you wished everyone in the world knew about. At all events, I do think any of treasures listed above would make for good reading on a cold winter’s night (or two or three). Happy holidays.

’Tis the season when choral societies start practicing their “Hallelujahs” and theaters around the country stage A Christmas Carol. Readers have their December traditions too. To my mind there are two kinds of literate diversion particularly appropriate to the weeks just before and after Christmas: either Golden Age mysteries and ghost stories or what one might call “seasonal” poems and stories.

Into that first category falls the so-called “Christie for Christmas.” For years, publishers brought out an Agatha Christie whodunit just in time for holiday gift-giving and, one assumes, post-holiday reading. But all sorts of genre writers have traded on the association of Christmas with cozy chills, Dickens being the pioneer and the story of Ebenezer Scrooge remaining the undisputed champion.

Yet there are many other fine, lighthearted Christmasy works, including the wonderful Dingley Dell chapters of Dickens’s own Pickwick Papers, P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit,” Damon Runyon’s “The Three Wise Guys,” and Jean Shepherd’s “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” (the basis for that nostalgia-rich and hilarious film A Christmas Story). To this day I am still moved by those two old-fashioned, sentimental classics, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Henry Van Dyke’s “The Story of the Other Wise Man.” Still, I’d like to recommend three of my particular favorites for the upcoming holidays—a novel, a poem, and a short story.

John Masefield’s The Box of Delights begins a few days before Christmas as the English schoolboy Kay Harker is en route to visit his guardian and cousins near the cathedral town of Tatchester. On the train he meets a pair of sinister strangers, has his money stolen, and loses his ticket. When Kay finally reaches his station, he encounters an aged Punch-and-Judy puppeteer, who asks him to perform a small favor:

“Master Harker, there is something that no other soul can do for me but you alone. As you go down toward Seekings, if you would stop at Bob’s shop, as it were to buy muffins now. … Near the door you will see a woman plaided from the cold, wearing a ring of a very strange shape, Master Harker, being like my ring here, of the longways cross of gold and garnets. And she has bright eyes, Master Harker, as bright as mine, which is what few have. If you will step into Bob’s shop to buy muffins now, saying nothing, not even to your good friend, and say to this Lady ‘The Wolves are Running’ then she will know and Others will know; and none will get bit.”

Kay agrees and immediately afterward, in the distant fields, begins to glimpse what look like large Alsatian dogs “trying to catch a difficult scent.” When the old Punch-and-Judy man next reappears, he gives Kay a small box for safekeeping. It is no ordinary box. I will say nothing further except that this terrific children’s fantasy novel reaches its climax during Tatchester Cathedral’s 1,000th Christmas Eve service.

Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen”—based on a legend that stable animals kneel on Christmas Eve—is short enough to quote here in its entirety. A “barton” is a farmyard, and a “coomb” is a hollow or valley:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

This poem always brings tears to my eyes.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” opens this way: “I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.”

Before long, the great detective is dazzling poor old Watson with one of his most astonishing feats of deduction. A possible client has left behind his old hat:

“It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,” he remarked, “and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”

With that, Holmes and Watson are off on the case of the stolen Christmas goose. Many Sherlockians reread this story every year, usually on December 27. It is, as Christopher Morley famously declared, “a Christmas story without slush,” and one of the most charming of the adventures of the immortal duo of Baker Street.

Books don’t only furnish a room, they also make the best holiday gifts. Note that I said “books.” Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts, but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books. Come Christmas morning, what do you tell your significant other? “Darling, I can’t thank you enough for this download of The Hobbit for my e-Reader.” I don’t think so. Somehow, this isn’t quite the same as unwrapping a signed first printing of The Hobbit in a fine dust jacket (many bucks), or Douglas Anderson’s information-packed annotated edition (invaluable), or any of the handsome versions illustrated by Michael Hague or Alan Lee or Tolkien himself.

No, a Christmas present should be, well, something present, right there in your hands after you’ve read the gift card and ripped aside the ribbons and bows and red-and-green paper decorated with snowmen and Santas.

So hie thee to your nearest bookstore, be it an independent like Washington’s Politics and Prose or a big-box Barnes & Noble. What could be a better way to shop for the holidays than to spend an hour or two, alone or with your family, looking at books? In my own case, of course, I try to make it Christmas every day—or at least once a week.

All of which said, I want to make a pitch for some works you aren’t likely to find in your local bookstore, no matter how extensive its holdings: small-press titles. In recent years, as trade houses increasingly gravitate to wholly commercial “product,” specialty publishers and independent presses have risen up to make available wonderful books, real books, of all kinds. Let me stress that I’m not talking about those generic print-on-demand titles, most of which are bare-bones ugly and little better than photocopies bound in bland paper wraps. Nor am I talking about self-published work, so much in the news these days. No, I’m thinking of legitimate small publishers with a mission to bring neglected authors back into print and to produce the kind of books that dreams are made of.

My own tastes are fairly eclectic, but in recent years I’ve grown intensely interested in science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and adventure stories written between roughly 1865 and 1935. This “golden age” of storytelling is being served by a number of presses, all of which host websites where you can purchase their books. I’m going to list, in alphabetical order, some of my favorites. Just type their names into your search engine, and you will soon be daydreaming over their offerings.

—Ash-Tree Press specializes in classic English-language ghost stories and weird tales, with a subsidiary imprint, Calabash Press, that publishes material relating to Sherlock Holmes. Recently, much of their backlist has been made available for e-books, but I still recommend the original editions. Some are out of print, but many are still available. Here you can buy the complete supernatural fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee and Sheridan Le Fanu or John Meade Falkner’s eerie novel The Nebuly Coat or M. R. James’s memoir Eton and King’s.

—Centipede Press brings out several kinds of books—oversized portfolios, such as the complete art work of Lee Brown Coye, collections of commentary on influential horror movies such as Carrie, handsome editions, often illustrated, of classic titles (most recently Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and the major works of important genre authors. For example, this fall Centipede is offering five volumes devoted to the great noir writer Cornell Woolrich. The edition of Phantom Lady comes with a haunting dust jacket by Matt Mahurin, an introduction by Barry N. Malzberg (who was, for a short time, Woolrich’s agent), and a gallery of the covers and film posters for the book and the movie based on it.

—Crippen & Landru takes its name from two of the most famous real-life murderers of England and France. The press only publishes story collections, usually gathering together for the first time the best of an author’s scattered short fiction. In their “Lost Classics” series you can acquire perfect holiday entertainment from John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, T. S. Stribling (Dr. Poggioli), Michael Gilbert, and Vera Caspary. Crippen & Landru doesn’t just focus on the dead, however: here are collections by S. J. Rozan, Lawrence Block, and—this fall—Melodie Johnson Howe, whose “Diana Poole” stories are set in Hollywood.

—Gasogene Books/Wessex Press is the major purveyor of books by Arthur Conan Doyle or about Sherlock Holmes. Any fan of Robert Downey Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, or Jonny Lee Miller should explore the greater world of Sherlockian works and scholarship, and this is where to start. Gasogene/Wessex has reissued Vincent Starrett’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, an edition of the 1910 stage production of The Speckled Band, a 10-volume collection of the entire Holmes canon (annotated by Leslie S. Klinger), Sherlockian pastiches, CDs, and much else.

—Hippocampus Press is to H. P. Lovecraft what Gasogene is to Sherlock Holmes. For Hippocampus, the great scholar of the weird tale, S. T. Joshi, has edited HPL’s letters, occasional writings, and fiction. The press has also brought out Joshi’s massive, and massively enjoyable, biography of Lovecraft, as well as the horror and science fiction of other important authors, notably Clark Ashton Smith, M. P. Shiel, and Barry Pain. But Hippocampus casts a wide net, and its list also includes weird poetry, several journals, and outstanding younger talents like Richard Gavin, author of At Fear’s Altar.

—Night Shade Books struck gold a couple of years ago by publishing Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, one of the best and most-honored science fiction novels of recent times. While the press brings out work from many new science fiction and fantasy authors, I’ve long particularly admired Night Shade’s single author collections. Here one can find the complete works of William Hope Hodgson (best known for The Night Land and The House on the Borderland), all the short fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote a lushly poetic prose of almost hypnotic beauty, and my own favorite, Lord Dunsany’s brilliant “club stories” told by Joseph Jorkens, three delicious volumes of tall tales about mermaids and ancient curses, unicorns and trips to Mars.

—Tachyon Publications covers the full spectrum of fantasy and science fiction. Interested in steampunk? Here are basic anthologies by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Like the work of Kage Baker, author of “The Company” novels? Here are her essays on silent film. A fan of Peter Beagle, Michael Swanwick, James Morrow, Joe R. Lansdale, Tim Powers? Here are some of their best works. Indeed, Tachyon’s edition of Powers’s The Bible Repairman and Other Stories just won this year’s World Fantasy Award for best short-story collection.

—Tartarus Press books are immediately recognizable: Most of the volumes have the same muted, mustard colored jackets: only the authors and titles vary. The books themselves stand out for their elegant design, thick paper, good printing, and comfortable heft in the hand. If you buy one Tartarus Book, it’s safe to say you’ll want to buy them all. And why not? As with Ash-Tree and Centipede titles, the books tend to go up in value, sometimes dramatically, when they go out of print. Tartarus has recently been bringing out the complete works of Robert Aickman, the premier English author of “strange stories” of the past half-century (with Ramsey Campbell a close second). But they have also issued the major works of Arthur Machen, Lafcadio Hearn, Sarban, and Edith Wharton, among others. Tartarus, like the other presses, also publishes several outstanding contemporary masters of the eerie tale, including the incomparable Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, Rosalie Parker, and Michael Reynier.

—Valancourt Books makes available in attractive paperback editions fairly rare books from the late 18th century to the present. Here one can find the gothic classics that frightened the heroines of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the works of Bram Stoker other than Dracula, many of Richard Marsh’s novels, starting with The Beetle, and some of THE stranger weird or decadent literature of the 1890s. How can you possibly go wrong with Florence Marryat’s 1897 The Blood of the Vampire, in which the heroine is the daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess?

The above are just a few of the more important small presses. But there are many others. This year Black Dog Books brought out With the Hunted, a magnificent collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s scattered nonfiction. Sirius Fiction published Gate of Horn, Book of Silk: A Guide to Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun, by Michael Andre-Driussi—and since Gene Wolfe is our greatest living writer of science fiction, and one of our greatest living writers period, this is an important study. Sundial Press has produced an exceptionally attractive edition of Phyllis Paul’s A Cage for the Nightingale, likened to James’s The Turn of the Screw in its power and artistry. One of our best writers of unsettling fiction, R. B. Russell, can be sampled in collections from Swan River Press (Ghosts) and PS Publishing (Leave Your Sleep). The stories of the writer-scholar Mark Valentine (some written with another fine fantasist, John Howard) can be enjoyed in collections from Swan River and Tartarus, while Exposition Internationale has produced an exquisite volume of his prose poems titled At Dusk.

Sigh. This Browsings column has gone on rather longer than I expected, but all these publishers—and authors!—deserve your attention and support. I know my own life has been deeply enhanced by the work of these devoted bookmen and women.

P.S. Despite that obvious close, I just realized I haven’t mentioned my favorite small press publisher for kids: Bobbledy Books. Matthew Swanson writes the words, and his wife Robbi Behr creates the pictures, and together they are silly, poetic, surreal, and incredibly cool. Their latest title is Bobby and the Robots, which ends by giving instructions on how to build a robot. Wise parents are advised to check out, then join the Bobbledy Books club. Some readers may recall that Swanson and Behr, under their Idiots’ Books imprint, produced that timeless, modern classic The Baby Is Disappointing.

P.P.S. And how could I overlook Ramble House? Yes, its books are print-on-demands, but where else can you acquire the complete works of Harry Stephen Keeler, author of The Man with the Magic Eardrums, The Skull of the Waltzing Clown, and many, many others? Keeler is either the worst or the most original detective-story writer of all time. Ramble House is, in fact, pulp heaven, with reprints of Weird Tales authors and numerous oddities, such as Adams Farr’s unique World War II novel, The Fangs of Suet Pudding. They certainly don’t write ’em like that anymore.

This past weekend, I wandered into downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, to attend a book arts festival sponsored by Pyramid Atlantic, a cooperative devoted to teaching and promoting every sort of paper-based art and craft. Part of the two-day festival included printing and papermaking demonstrations at the Pyramid Atlantic studios, as well as lectures by noted local artists. For instance, it was fun to learn how all those wonderfully garish posters—the kind tacked to the sides of telephone poles or kiosks—were designed and produced for visiting carnivals, county fairs, and rock concerts.

Did I mention that there was also a related book fair at the Silver Spring civic center?

As I sauntered among the booths, I noticed that one vendor was selling what she called Mean Cards. Instead of saccharine Hallmark greetings and congratulations, these were inscribed “Just Go Away and Die,” “Everyone Hates You,” “Jerk,” and “You Look Awful. Seriously.” When I pointed these out to my Beloved Spouse, that gentle dove immediately bought the entire stock. You don’t want to cross Marian Dirda.

I, of course, Mr. Sweetness and Light, continued my usual aimless meandering, pausing to check out the fine-press offerings from Baltimore’s Kelmscott Bookshop and to page through various limited editions published in runs of just 200 copies. In short, I was enjoying myself in a quiet, low-keyed sort of way—quiet and low-keyed because almost nothing at the fair seemed quite to my taste.

No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I’m seldom drawn to a book unless it’s by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me. Most private press items, however, tend to be of largely regional interest—California history, the journals of some early pioneer, descriptions of the natural world. All worthy subjects and worthy of support, but, as we used to say in the ’60s, not my thing.

So I felt free and easy under the apple boughs, or rather among the booths, until I came to Bowerbox Press. The proprietor, Val Lucas, mainly offered a wide supply of cards, handsomely decorated with birds. Ms. Lucas was clearly fascinated by all things avian because she’d also brought along two large woodblock prints, 18 inches by 24: one featured a gull-like seabird in full flight, the other a somewhat sinister crow-like creature.

The seabird first caught my eye, in part because of the bold title: “The Albatross.” I then noticed a bit of squared-up text, obviously stanzas, underneath the image. Now there are only two well-known poems that feature an albatross, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Baudelaire’s “The Albatross,” in which he compares the artist, mocked and out of place in society, to the soaring seabird, which is comparably clumsy and awkward on land. I stooped down to see if the poem was a section of “The Ancient Mariner” or if it might be the Baudelaire. Instinctively, my eyes went to the last line, and I read: “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher”—“His giant wings prevent him from walking.”

As for the black bird: since it wasn’t the Maltese falcon, it could only be, and was, a raven, with Poe’s Halloween classic somewhat tightly printed underneath. I suspect that “Quoth the Raven: ‘Nevermore!’” may be the most famous line in American poetry.

“The Albatross” and “The Raven”—studies in light and dark—certainly looked very handsome together. The pair, however, were hardly what you’d call cheap. Though neither were they impossibly expensive. Still, with wholly uncharacteristic resolve, I finally walked away. I eventually walked home, too, albeit in a thoughtful mood. And the next day I hurried back to the fair and bought both prints.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that M. Dirda is a sucker for anything bookish in the way of artwork. On the mantel in my living room you will see Leonard Maurer’s big etching of James Joyce—another copy used to hang in the offices of Book World above art director Francis Tanabe’s desk—and Dan Miller’s woodblock of W. B. Yeats and Ray Driver’s pen-and-ink portrait of Shakespeare as a sleek Broadway-style theatrical impresario. Back in the happy days when I taught and had an office at McDaniel College, I was able to deck the walls (and shelves) with the following:

A photograph of Borges

A framed postcard of W. H. Auden petting a cat

An old publicity shot of M. F. K. Fisher, with her hair sleeked back and looking to-die-for gorgeous

The reproduction of a photograph of bookman Vincent Starrett, with the caption “A cigar and lots of old books—what more could one ask for?”

A high-quality reproduction of a drawing of Ezra Pound by Guy Davenport, in the Easter-Island style of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

A colored photograph of Chekhov, set in an elaborate frame that I bought at a Russian store in New York

Two Richard Thompson caricatures of T. S. Eliot and Bernard Shaw, drawn in what looks like a soft gray conté crayon

A poster of Tenniel’s Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland: “Who are you?”

A framed post card of M. R. James, author of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, seen in profile at his desk

A period-style lobby card for a new translation of Jules Verne’s play Journey Through the Impossible

A poster advertising the Atlantic Center for the Arts (where I once taught writing and later worked on two of my books)

Lots of small pen-and-ink images, drawn by the much loved and still-missed Susan Davis as illustrations for my Readings column in The Washington Post

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned the Sherlockian art or the poster of Bettie Page or the facsimile cover of the first Batman comic. Still, like many of my books, most of this material is stored away in boxes, awaiting the day when I’ll wake up and find myself the owner of a proper library. If I’m lucky, my eyes will still be good enough to read with and my liver will be functioning, so that I’ll be able to sprawl in a leather armchair and sip brandy and gaze at these mementos of a bookish life—while listening to Ben Webster or Mozart on the sound system. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

When Philip Roth recently announced his retirement from writing fiction, I was surprised and impressed. After all, one of the great artistic rules, less often observed than it should be, is knowing when to stop. Roth has won all the prizes except the Nobel, and he’s been producing bestsellers and critically acclaimed (and controversial) books since he was in his 20s. Over the past decade the Library of America has been reissuing his complete works in its familiar, stately editions—a nice rounding-off in an enviable career. As Kenny Rogers told us long ago, you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to walk away.

Some years back, I happened to interview John Updike and asked him if there would be more novels about Harry Angstrom—perhaps “Rabbit Resurrected”—or any more stories featuring the writer Henry Bech. In essence, Updike said no. Those characters’ adventures were over, and he himself was now largely focused on “clearing his desk.” Updike did keep writing up to the end, but, apart from some moving poetry, most people would agree that his later work added little to his reputation.

Should older writers keep at it until they breathe their last? It’s a hard call. Sophocles supposedly brought out Oedipus at Colonus when he was in his 80s. The elderly Tolstoy turned himself into an Old Testament prophet, producing cranky attacks on Shakespeare and numerous political and religious tracts. Yet he also wrote Hadji Murad, one of his greatest works (and a particular favorite of Harold Bloom).

What must be hard for all established writers of a certain age is seeing the world turn its spotlight elsewhere. Once they were the stars, up front and center, and now other names—sometimes those of their understudies—are in neon at the top of marquee. Gods that survive too long tend to be taken for granted or ignored or even mocked. How many young people still read John Barth? I can remember the excitement I felt over the linked novellas of Chimera, the imaginative experiments of Lost in the Funhouse. But when was the last time anyone opened Giles Goat-Boy? And yet Barth is an absolutely wonderful and astonishing writer. It’s just that the stage now belongs to David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, and the Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer. But 30 years from now, they, too, will be yesterday’s news.

Still, some lucky writers do manage a late flowering. Philip Roth reblossomed, after a period of relatively minor works, with The Human Stain and American Pastoral (and, a favorite of mine, that harrowing novella, The Dying Animal). In old age an artist, whether in paint, music, or prose, will sometimes cast aside his usual manner and indulge in some playful romp. Mann brought out his lighthearted paean to the counterfeit in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man; Faulkner producted the rumbustious odyssey of The Reivers, Thornton Wilder reimagined his young self as a kind of amateur trouble-solver in Theophilus North. Matisse, though nearly blind, produced his glorious paper cut-outs. These works are distinctly exuberant, even comic, but other late works show us the artist confronting age, the loss of powers, and death. Just look at the final self-portraits of Rembrandt, or listen to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The rest is silence.

Old men ought to be explorers, said T. S. Eliot. But mainly they’re not. Feckless, irresponsible young whippersnappers break the new paths in art and letters (and in other fields too). As the years go by, aging masters try to explore their own visions ever more deeply, even if the public just wants the mixture as before or really doesn’t care at all what they do. Those big fat volumes called Collected Poems are tombs as much as tomes. Hic jacet.

Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one’s books in print, one’s reputation alive. Doubtless even the most unassuming poet or novelist can get used to reverence and genuflection. Of course, there remains the possibility of betrayal: Judas writes the biography, that mousey acolyte may turn out to be Eve Harrington (from “All About Eve”). After all, new writers do need to clear a space for themselves, even if it means pushing aside a once-revered elder of the tribe.

And what about “senior” critics? Ah, their fate is the worst of all. They lose touch with the new, start to go on and on about the old days, either turn into literary Kris Kringles or bitter curmudgeons. And then they are, most of them anyway, forgotten altogether. Where now are William Troy and Vernon Young, Orville Prescott and John Mason Brown, Agnes Repplier, Diana Trilling, and even, Mary McCarthy? Once they were powers in the land, their judgments feared and their praise yearned after, but today their names scarcely raise an ironic smile of recognition.

Ah, the House of Fame! Sometimes it is as harsh and cruel a place as Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain. What is the law? Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself—of poems and stories and essays—delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

As soon as I decided to write about language for this Browsings column, my sentences started to grow clumsy and fall all over one another. Nothing sounded right, and I questioned the grammar and syntax of virtually every clause. Isn’t there an old joke about how a bird couldn’t fly or a creepy-crawlie couldn’t skitter along once either started to contemplate how the flying or skittering was done?

Like most writers, I confess to a number of linguistic tics and crotchets. While ambiguity seems to me a plus in poetry—I didn’t write my honors thesis on William Empson for nothing—it is something I tend to avoid in prose. I try to practice … But wait. Look again at that sentence with the dashes: Shouldn’t there be a comma after the word “poetry”? The dashes make that impossible, but in such a case do they render a comma superfluous? Will anyone care besides me?

Not for the first time do I wish that I hadn’t disdained the study of grammar when young. Nowadays, I would just reconfigure the above sentence to avoid this punctuational uncertainty, but I’ll let it go this time as an example of the kind of linguistic bump that tends to trouble me. Nothing, after all, should interfere with the smooth flow of my mellifluous and pellucid paragraphs.

Or should that be “pellucid and mellifluous paragraphs”? I wrote that as a bit of self-mockery—ironic deflation as a way of deflecting charges of vanity—but I do tend to be leery of alliteration and those two “p” words next to each other give me pause. On the other hand (but where was the first hand?), reversing the order of the adjectives leads to a less pleasing rhythm. What to do? Perhaps being a little jokey is simply a mistake?

Too much consciousness, observed Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, is a disease, a positive disease. All writers long to lose themselves in the creative moment, to find themselves caught up in what was once dubbed “the divine afflatus,” when the words come trippingly and the thoughts achieve a profundity that Plato might envy … Sigh—look again at that last analogy: I recognize it immediately as one of my go-to rhetorical tricks. Such and such a writer is so witty that Oscar Wilde might envy him; another is so precise that she could give lessons to Flaubert. The formula strikes me as mildly amusing, but I do it all the time—unless I catch myself.

While a writer would like his inner daemon to guide his pen, an editor needs the kind of cold clinical intelligence that Sherlock Holmes might learn from. (See what I mean?) When I rewrite—and sometimes I’ll spend hours making a piece sound as if it had been tossed off in 15 minutes—I carefully go over every sentence. (Oops, that same dashes problem again.) Somehow, one hopes to achieve a balance, so that the prose all tracks properly but doesn’t sound costive, constrained, or too carefully considered. (Hmm, should I change all those “c”s?) Unless you’re actually after a Thomas Browne-like oratorical solemnity, you probably want to sound natural, whatever that is. (Hmm, I’ve moved from “I” to “One” to “You” in almost as many sentences—that seems wrong, but will anyone notice?)

In fact, this column wasn’t really meant to be about my own flaw-specked writing, but about linguistic puzzles and anomalies. Last month, the October issue of Consumer Reports carried the headline: “America’s Worst Scams.” Looking at it, I wondered if that shouldn’t be “America’s Best Scams”? Really terrible scams wouldn’t be particularly effective, would they? I went back and forth on this and still haven’t decided.

Or take the expression: “It goes without saying,” as in “It goes without saying that Dirda isn’t half the writer he thinks he is.” If it doesn’t need to be said, does one need to say it? And, to stick with this same sentence, how can anyone know how good a writer I think I am? Personally, I hold a rather low opinion of myself, constantly desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope. (There’s another of my quirks—the buried allusion, the embedded quotation without any identification of the source. Shakespeare, by the way, Sonnet 29.)

A lot of idioms trouble me. Every time I try to use “Notwithstanding” in a sentence, I find myself confused. Should it be “Notwithstanding his sheer brilliance, Dirda is …” or, “His sheer brilliance notwithstanding, Dirda is …”? I can never decide and so just give it all up and poor Dirda loses his claim to brilliance yet again.

I could go on. Sigh. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. (Beckett, this time.) Just bide with me a little while longer, and we’ll soon be done.

In my hot youth (Byron, of course), I used to study books such as—or should that be “study such books as”?—Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, Bonamy Dobrée’s Modern Prose Style, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing (Q, as he was known, is the source of the notorious “murder your darlings” rule of writing), Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and of course, the esteemed works of my predecessor in this Friday column, William Zinsser. Today, I occasionally dip into an old copy of The Oxford Book of English Prose, and often wish I could achieve the grand flights (slight echo there of Wallace Stevens) and Olympian grandiloquence of Gibbon and Ruskin. But Thoreau was my earliest model—as it was E. B. White’s—and I seem locked into a plain, Shaker syntax, albeit one gussied up with the borrowed finery (now where’s that from?) of pervasive quotation and allusion.

Somerset Maugham used to say—and I’ve quoted this a dozen times if I’ve quoted it once—that if a man would write perfectly, he would write like Voltaire. In truth, I’d settle for being able to write like Rousseau or Diderot, or even Arthur Machen, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, or Joseph Mitchell. I wouldn’t want to write like Henry James, though, or Virginia Woolf—too much consciousness is a disease, a positive disease. Alas, there seems small likelihood that my style will ever be perceived as anything but a poor thing but mine own (Shakespeare, again, slightly skewed).

Early in October I attended Capclave, Washington, D.C.’s annual science fiction convention. Over the course of a long weekend I manfully served on five panels: “A Princess of Mars’ One-Hundred Year Reign” (2012 is the centennial of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous first novel); “Classics with Class” (about which I can remember nothing); “Unsung Author” (an ongoing category, this year’s focus being the sly, black-humored short-story writer Robert Sheckley); “The Heritage of Edgar Rice Burroughs” (a panel with several Burroughs fans from the National Capital Panthans), and finally “Who Are the Early Masters of Modern Science Fiction?” I was also interviewed for Fast Forward, a long-running series of video conversations with people involved in sf.

In short, I kept pretty busy over the weekend, though not so busy that I couldn’t spend some time in the dealers’ room, where I bought an Ace Double paperback, consisting of Ron Goulart’s Clockwork’s Pirates and Ghost Breaker. It was the latter title I wanted, a humorous collection of stories about the occult detective Max Kearny. The book’s come-on line—beneath an illustration featuring a green-tentacled blob, a shapely young woman in nothing but stiletto heels and A bikini bottom, and a Bogart-like figure wearing a slouch hat and trench coat—reads: “Having trouble with psi powers, spooks, or E-T visitations? Take it up with Max Kearney!” (As readers of this feature may recall from a previous column, books featuring occult or psychic detectives—like John Silence and Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder—are a little sideline of my collecting.)

I also bought eight little matchboxes, each imprinted with the first-edition cover of some fantasy or sf classic. Last spring I acquired a couple of these novelties at the Malice Domestic convention—Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—and these have now been joined by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, and several others. They look great, like a little row of miniature books, as they face me amid the pencils and postcards, the action figures (Poe, Sherlock Holmes),  the Betty Page tumbler and the photograph of Louise Brooks, the Edward Gorey bookmark, the “Don’t Panic” button, various small rocks, and all the other detritus that clutters my desk.

On the Saturday evening of Capclave I went out to dinner with the aforementioned Panthans. This group, affiliated with the national Burroughs Bibliophiles (whose meetings are called Dum-Dums), consists of ardent collectors of, and experts on, the books of ERB. A highlight of one local guy’s collection is the original $400 check paid by Munsey publications to Edgar Rice Burroughs for the 1912 magazine serialization of Under the Moons of Mars, the original title of A Princess of Mars. Another member collects Burroughs trading cards, often depicting scenes from Tarzan comics or reproductions of old paperback covers. Certainly no red-blooded American male of my generation can fail to remember Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta’s illustrations for the 1960s softcover reissues of the Tarzan and Mars books—if only for the delightfully underclad lovelies such as Dian of Pellucidar and Thuvia, Maid of Mars.

Saturday’s dinner was going along pleasantly enough when suddenly a tablemate gasped, laughed, looked up at me, dropped the issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal she had in her hand, and said, “You’ve been tuckerized.”

So, finally, I’d been tuckerized. My life was complete.

If you look up “tuckerization” on Wikipedia you will find it succinctly defined as “the act of using a person’s name in an original story as an in-joke.” (The word derives from Wilson Tucker, the sf writer and publisher who gave some of his characters the names of his friends.) These days charity events often feature an auction in which people bid to be “tuckerized” by a favorite author. In effect, this is the equivalent of winning a tiny walk-on part in a TV series or film.

My old Book World colleague Michele Slung was the first person I knew whose name was “borrowed” by an author. Michele had enthusiastically reviewed Jonathan Carroll’s eerie classic, The Land of Laughs, and in Carroll’s later book Bones of the Moon, a character encounters a mysterious tribe known as The Slung People. At about the same time, another friend, sf reviewer Greg Feeley, was also “tuckerized,” but not quite so pleasantly. A novelist, offended by a Feeley review, didn’t just shrug it off: in a subsequent book he featured a race of loathsome, subterranean creatures called the Feelies.

In my own case, a group of people—characters in an ongoing Burroughs’ pastiche called Invaders of the Inner World by Lee Strong—are said to inhabit the Utopian city of Dirda. While it was a kick to find my name in Strong’s serial, for a long while I have wondered if Jack Vance, now in his mid-90s and the dean of American fantasy and science fiction writers, didn’t somehow possess precognitive knowledge that a critic with my name would love and champion his books. After all, one of Vance’s novels bears the title The Dirdir, he has a series called The Durdane Trilogy, and throughout his vast oeuvre there are other names surprising close to Dirda.

Once upon a time, I started to write an “impossible crime” mystery and decided to give its characters punning names: I now only remember a gay guy named Perry Bathhouse and a young woman called Gloria Mundy, but there were at least a half dozen other examples of sophomoric wittiness. Since there were already famous detectives named Marlowe and Spenser, I dubbed my P. I. Dekker, after still another Renaissance writer. Alas, I don’t remember much about the story itself, except that the villain—or was it a villainess?—had to be absolutely naked to commit a murder and not leave any trace. The modus operandi was, I think even now, quite ingenious. Perhaps it’s time I unearthed that manuscript and gave it another look, or, maybe, even finished the story. Start watching the best-seller lists.

Last week, the distinguished cultural historian, teacher, and man of letters Jacques Barzun died at the age of 104. For a while there, it seemed that Barzun—rhymes approximately with “parson”—might go on forever, adding to our knowledge of the past, assailing the decline of standards, both exemplifying and fighting for cultured, civilized values. Certainly up through his 90s, he had remained active as a scholar and writer, even producing a surprise best seller From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, in 2000, when he was 92.

This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which Barzun played marbles with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire through a brilliant career at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate, then as a teacher, and finally as the university’s provost. Murray relates a particularly delightful story about young Professor Barzun. In one of his first history classes, Barzun recalled, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin; he was done up to the nines. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. This means so much. I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’”

Barzun then added, “I have strewn the byways with my victims.”

Barzun’s best-known books include Berlioz and the Romantic Century, Teacher in America, A Stroll with William James, and Simple and Direct, a guide to writing. But I’ve always thought that A Catalogue of Crime, written with his lifelong friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, could be his most lasting masterpiece. I keep it by my bedside, along with a handful of similarly wide-ranging and often idiosyncratic reference books, such as E. F. Bleiler’s Guide to Supernatural Fiction and Martin Seymour-Smith’s New Guide to Modern World Literature. All these books are dog-eared and marked up, with loosened bindings; booksellers sometimes facetiously describe their condition as “much loved.” My own copy of A Catalogue of Crime certainly fits that description, even though I generally disagree with many of its harsh judgments on modern crime fiction. Barzun and Taylor definitely prefer classic whodunits, especially those written with wit, panache, and, above all, cleverness. The Catalogue lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books, and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of detection. Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given. For instance, John Dickson Carr’s historical reconstruction The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey is summed up as “a classic in the best sense—i.e., rereadable indefinitely.” The brief account of Murder Plain and Fanciful, edited by James Sandoe, opens: “This virtually perfect anthology seems never to have been reprinted, which is a disgrace as well as a deprivation to the reading public.” Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison reads in as follows in its entirety:

“JB puts this highest among the masterpieces. It has the strongest possible element of suspense—curiosity and the feeling one shares with Wimsey for Harriet Vane. The clues, the enigma, the free-love question, and the order of telling could not be improved upon. As for the somber opening, with the judge’s comments on how to make an omelet, it is sheer genius.”

I like to think of Barzun spending the first decade of the 21st century, reading and rereading his favorite authors, in particular, Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie. He once wrote that Archie Goodwin, the legman for Stout’s fat detective Nero Wolfe, was a modern avatar of Huck Finn and one of the most memorable characters in American literature.

As a teacher, Barzun taught any number of distinguished writers, from science fiction giant Robert Silverberg to the cultural essayist Arthur Krystal and the award-winning musicologist Jack Sullivan. He was also, of course, a great supporter of, and contributor to, The American Scholar. Alas, I never knew him, except through his books. But I have been lucky enough to meet two other great centenarians of scholarship: M. H. Abrams and Daniel Aaron. Abrams taught at Cornell, where—in another life—I earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature. He retired a year after I got there, so I only knew him very casually and wasn’t able to take any of his classes. His masterpiece, The Mirror and the Lamp, tracks the shift from classicism to romanticism in English poetry. From all reports he remains vigorous, this fall even bringing out a new collection of occasional pieces, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays. Daniel Aaron, of Harvard, is one of our most revered Americanists, author of the classic study Writers on the Left, editor of Edmund Wilson’s letters, co-founder of the Library of America, and famous for riding his bicycle all around Cambridge well into his 90s.

When I first began to work as an editor at The Washington Post Book World back in the late 1970s, it was my habit to call up elderly writers and scholars and ask them to review for me. My secret reason for this was simply to connect, however briefly, through letter, telephone call, or handshake, with these eminent men and women, but also with the great writers who had been their friends and associates. Favorite authors like Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh were already dead, but I could reach out to Malcolm Cowley, Peter Quennell, Eleanor Clark, Rex Warner, Stephen Spender, Sir Harold Acton, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Douglas Bush, and many others. Once a retired Boston University professor reviewed two books about T. E. Lawrence, with whom he had done brass rubbings while they were both undergraduates at Oxford. Warren Ault wrote the review at age 102.

These days I occasionally correspond with the great Dostoevsky biographer and critic, and former Princeton and Stanford professor, Joseph Frank, who is in his mid-90s. Just this year, he too brought out a new book, Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture. It includes essays on, among others, Paul Valéry, André Malraux, Ernst Juenger, T. S. Eliot, and two of his former colleagues, the critic R. P. Blackmur (of Princeton) and the pioneering scholar of the novel Ian Watt (of Stanford).

Figures like Jacques Barzun—and Abrams, Aaron, and Frank—seem to me the last representatives of a traditional literary scholarship that is now out of fashion. To this group, one might include a few octogenarians, such as Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom and the comparatist and Bible translator Robert Alter. No doubt there are others I am overlooking. But these academic eminences have all worked hard to become truly learned, and their scholarship is vitalized by a deep knowledge of, and serious engagement with, the great works of the past. Until last week, Jacques Barzun was the oldest, and one of the best, of these living cultural treasures.

Read Jacques Barzun’s “The Cradle of Modernism,” published in The American Scholar in 1990.

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Oberlin College, my alma mater. During the National Book Festival weekend, held on the National Mall in late September, I spent much of the gala on Friday night with novelist Marilynne Robinson. In her latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is one entitled “Who Was Oberlin?” (John Frederick Oberlin was a saintly, civic-minded preacher in 19th-century Alsace.) Turns out, moreover, that Robinson is a great admirer of those small, theologically grounded colleges that sprung up during the early-to-mid-19th century, and were led, as in the case of Oberlin, by men like Charles G. Finney, the most electrifying speaker of his time. Portraits show a man with piercing eyes that really do seem to bore into your soul.

Because of the strong convictions of its founders, Oberlin College became our country’s first coeducational institution of higher learning and the first to admit both black and white students. The place was, of course, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. The social and political activism of Oberlin in the 1960s—my era—grew from more than 100-year-old roots.

On Saturday at the book festival I got to talking with Tony Horwitz, whose latest book is Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. He reminded me that many, if not most, of the men who rode with John Brown had graduated from or had connections with Oberlin. I actually knew this from having reviewed, a decade or more ago, Nat Brandt’s provocatively titled The Town That Started the Civil War. Brandt’s book focuses not just on Oberlin as an abolitionist stronghold and a stop on the Underground Railroad, but also describes in detail the 1858 “Wellington Rescue,” a key event in the lead-up to the Civil War, in which a band of Oberlinians marched to an adjoining village to free an escaped slave from bounty hunters.

Oberlin, I once remarked, fosters two kinds of people: artists and activists. My middle son, Mike, who graduated from the college in 2009, occasionally still wears a beloved T-shirt that reads: “Oberlin: Where dirty, crunchy hippies go to frolic.” At the same time, no liberal-arts college produces more graduates who earn Ph.D.s than this small institution, located—as the jokes have it—either in an Ohio cornfield or “somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”

I can remember when I first became aware of the college, or to be more exact, of its celebrated sister institution, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One day at Admiral King High School, in Lorain, Ohio, the students were ordered into the auditorium for an assembly. As my buddies and I sat restlessly in our chairs, probably playing rock-paper-scissors to pass the time, the stage was suddenly invaded by these scruffy older kids in blue jeans and baggy sweatshirts. They looked like 20th-century versions of the ragtag street urchins Sherlock Holmes used to employ—except that they strode across the polished wood of the stage carrying violins and clarinets, lugging cellos and French horns. After some momentary confusion, the group sat down on folding chairs, placed some sheet music on metal stands, and, with a nod, began to play the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

Many, many years later I got to know the pianist Eugene Istomin and his wife, Martita (whose first marriage had been to the very elderly Pablo Casals). At a particularly ritzy dinner party I remember telling Eugene that what I loved about Oberlin was the easy availability of music, the way it was integrated into one’s daily life. Student recitals at Warner Concert Hall might start at 7 or 7:30, so one could drop by on the way to Carnegie Library, slump in a seat, and listen to a friend play a Beethoven piano sonata, then go on to study for a couple of hours. You didn’t need to buy a ticket (except for the special visiting artists series), and you could wear flip-flops and a T-shirt if you wanted.

Eugene could see my point, but objected: the way to show one’s respect for musicians was to dress up. Slovenliness was a sign that the music wasn’t worth any effort. I could understand his argument, and these days I do put on a dark suit and tie when attending a concert. But, now—alas—the cost of tickets, the trouble of getting downtown and parking, and a dislike of going out at night combine to make those concerts few and far between. Instead I listen to CDs and old records. But at Oberlin I must have heard live music virtually every day. Even the pianos in dorm lounges were constantly in use, as show tunes and Gilbert and Sullivan rang through the hallways.

Our age, said Emerson, is retrospective. Certainly, Oberlin has been on my mind lately, but not just because of Robinson and Horowitz. A week ago there arrived in the mail a gigantic photographic album titled Oberlin, which offers a pictorial homage to my old school. Daguerreotypes and digital photos share many oversized pages. Some of the scenes pictured I remember all too well: the silent vigils in Tappan Square during the Vietnam War, the protesters surrounding the car of a military recruiter. Most make me ache to be 19 again: classes lounging under the trees on a spring afternoon, distinguished guest lecturers on the stage at Finney Chapel, painted messages adorning the big rocks across from the old Co-Op Bookstore, the lighted shop front of Gibson’s Bakery (known for its whole-wheat donuts and elephant ears pastries), blankets of snow covering the streets of the city and campus, the neon sign of the Apollo movie theater, rows and rows of Steinway pianos in the conservatory, the façade of Allen Memorial Art Museum (designed by Cass Gilbert, with a modern addition by Robert Venturi), pretty girls on their way to class carrying bookbags, Claes Oldenburg’s giant three-way plug, the farmland outside the city limits.

It’s an excellent photo album, even if—Obies are nothing if not critical—it could have been better. I would have liked more text, more pictures of teachers, more testimonials from notable alumni—though there is a very good one from screenwriter William Goldman. I’ve just finished reading a biography of Thornton Wilder, which reminded me that the future author of Our Town attended Oberlin for two years and that his best friend there was Robert Maynard Hutchins, later the almost legendary president of the University of Chicago. Wilder said that in an education that embraced many schools and universities, including Yale and Princeton, he had one truly great teacher: Oberlin’s Professor of English Charles Wager.

You probably haven’t heard of him, unless you are connected to the college in some way. But I used to study in the Wager Seminar Room in Carnegie Library. As a freshman, I took a class from one of his students, the quietly formidable Andrew Bongiorno. He, too, like so many Oberlin teachers before and since, poured his energies into teaching, rather than swanning about as a “public intellectual.”

Readers familiar with my memoir An Open Book know that Oberlin College dramatically changed my life. For a decade after I graduated, hardly a day went by when I didn’t imagine that I would eventually return there to teach, to live in one of those big old houses on Morgan Street, to become, in fact, a professor just like Bongiorno and Wager before me. I have fallen short of that dream. Still, if I were ever, like Emily in Our Town, permitted to relive one day of my checkered past, I would choose a beautiful October afternoon in Oberlin, when all the world was young.