1. Paul Collins

A few days ago, we finished Paul Collins’ just-published The Book of William. For no other reason, we decided that Collins should be the focus of the first installment of this series.

We have read every book Collins has published except his first book, a textbook called Community Writing: Researching Social Issues Through Composition. All of his other five books are worth reading.

How we discovered Paul Collins:

When we were teaching English as a Second Language, one of our co-workers lent us a copy of McSweeney’s no. 5 (this was in 2000 or 2001), which included an amazing article by Collins called “Solresol, the Universal Musical Language.” A year or two later, we checked out Banvard’s Folly from the library.

Where to start:

• Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (2001)
• Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism (2004)
• The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World (2009)

Why he’s worth reading:

Collins unearths unbelievable stories that happen to be true. He brims with enthusiasm for rare books and old newspaper articles. In these sources, he always finds eccentric characters and remarkable nuggets of information (or misinformation). He also peppers his works with a great selection of quotations from peculiar sources.

The books:

His first book, Banvard’s Folly, focuses on thirteen once-famous people who are now long forgotten. They include an artist who painted an enormous canvas – reputed to be three miles long - that moved past the viewer, the creator of the Concord grape, and the inventor of a music-based universal language. The book is held together mainly by the underlying glue of fame-to-obscurity narratives. This may be Collins’ funniest book. (The other contender would be the delightful Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books [2003], which is about trying to buy a home in the Welsh town Hay-on-Wye, a town with pop. 1,500 and 40 bookstores.)

Not Even Wrong is Collins’ second memoir (the first being Sixpence House), and it’s his most personal (and emotional) book to date. It focuses on the author’s discovery that his son Morgan is autistic, causing Collins try to find out what he can about autism and its history. His discussion of Peter, a ‘wild boy’ in the early 1700s who Collins suggests may have been autistic, is particularly fascinating. We have recommended this book to a few people and they have all enjoyed it. This may be our favourite of Paul Collins’ books.

Collins’ most recent book, The Book of William, looks at how Shakespeare’s First Folio became the most expensive and the most revered secular work in the world. It is packed with illuminating historical details. (For example, after stating that a printer and his assistants nailed several copies of a book’s title page to nearby posts, Collins writes, “This is the eminently practical reasoning behind old title pages – their ludicrously prosaic subtitles make sense when doubling as posters.” Huh.) Though we had no interest in reading about Shakespeare, we knew that we would like this book because of its author. (That said, we were somewhat disappointed by his previous book, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine [2005]. Though the book is animated by a great cast of characters, including Walking Stewart and Moncure Conway, we felt that Collins lost the narrative thread at times.)

Whether writing about warring 18^thC wags Pope and Theobald or unfolding the story of why a business consultant decided to track down every existing copy of the First Folio, Collins always manages to be both entertaining and informative. His enthusiasm for the past is contagious. He makes us care about history.

Other reading:

Collins maintains an enjoyable, wonderfully-named blog, Weekend Stubble, which often includes links to his latest articles. Since 2002, he has also been the editor of the Collins Library (published by McSweeney’s). These books tend to be out-of-print and obscure. The few titles that we’ve read in this series include Curious Men (a slim, rather slight selection of writings on Victorian curiosities; from the mid-to-late 1800s), English as She Is Spoke (a hilariously atrocious English phrasebook; first published in 1855), and Lady into Fox (an astonishing novella about a man whose wife suddenly transforms into a fox; first published in 1922).