"What's New" at The Silver Stallion: The James Branch Cabell Website

Beginning to roll now... as features are added and posted in the What's New on the SS site, we'll post the News here too...

8th February 2013 - Still working on bringing new features on line. Uploaded the first issue of the Cabell Pictures page, with photographs of the the Cabell family gravesite, taken by Jim Glanville. This page will showcase contemporary and historic photos, drawings, artwork, cartoons, and other images related to James Branch Cabell that have been submitted by our readers.

20th January 2013 - We are continuing development of the site. Most of the pictures (those that we have available) for works originally issued prior to 1915 have been uploaded. We request help from you, the reader, to supply pictures of issues of these early titles that we don't yet have on the site. In a few cases (Chivalry is the most complete at the moment), we have also uploaded the text portion of the entries. Pictures and occasionally text have been uploaded for a handful of later titles, too; search the site and you might get lucky! We have also rebuilt the front page and its index (Yet again! Development continues...) and added a number of other features, including Editor Bill Lloyd's Why a site devoted to James Branch Cabell?, which is probably about as close as we are going to come to a "Mission Statement".

1. Like the occasional reminder here of new content on The Silver Stallion: great idea.

2. Very much liking the links section on TSS, have to explore that in the coming days.

3. The front page is strong, I like that there are placeholders there for content not-yet-uploaded, it rounds out the page and is a nice taster for what's to come. (That may have been there originally, but I didn't note it, so am doing so now.)

Glad you like it... and more already...

9th February 2013 -Uploaded a new section called From the Kalki Archives. This section discusses Kalki, one of the two Cabell journals founded in the second half of the 1960s (The other was The Cabellian, which we plan to address in future). The section has three parts: (a) Kalki Indices and Tables of Contents - the first installment has been uploaded; (b) From the Kalki Archives - where we will reprint selections from the magazine - the first upload is an article by W.L. Godshalk entitled "James Branch Cabell at William and Mary: The Education of a Novelist", which appeared in Kalki, Vol II, No.4, Whole No.8 (1968); and (c) Special Features - the first of which is an interview with Professor William L. Godshalk. We've published part 1 of this interview, with the second installment to come in the near future.

As I recall, I found that essay by Godshalk crucial to my current understanding of Cabell's literary approach, but read it as reprinted in a compendium of Godshalk's essays on Cabell.

I believe several Kalki articles are later reprinted elsewhere. Perhaps provide an opportunity for readers to note when / where, if that's not known at the time you upload the article itself?

In any event, I'm really excited about this feature. I don't have access to Kalki except the trove you made available a couple years ago, and I'm looking forward to reading these and getting to know the Journal itself.

We will. And did: in the headnote to that article we note that it was first published in the Wm & Mary Quarterly, then in Kalki and then in Godshalk;s book -- and in fact it's the text from the book that we used, as it is slightly revised and corrected from the earlier texts.

Don't know if you noticed but if you click on the images that come with the article (and indeed on almost any image on the site) it will enlarge; and the ones accompanying the Godshalk article when enlarged give more info in their captions.

15th February 2013 - Revised the Kalki Indices and Tables of Contents page to add scans of the covers of each issue.*

*It's worth noting that this is an image rich site. Most (but not all) of the pictures on this site are shown in thumbnail but are linked to larger versions. Clicking on a linked thumbnail will take you to a higher resolution picture. Clicking again will return. On most browsers, the pictures that are linked to larger versions will show up with a coloured border. Linked pictures aren't otherwise designated, so if you want to see more detail, just try clicking on the picture. It might work.

18th February 2013 - Added a new page - Trifles Found by Moonlight, featuring unusual and entertaining bits of Cabell-related trivia, poems, anecdotes, and what-have-you.▫

8th March 2013 - Added a new section: Special Features. This section will include articles on various subjects related to James Branch Cabell, which we will archive and replace from time-to-time. Our Silver Stallion Special Feature No. 1 is titled Cabell and Machen Through the Decades - Three Essays. General revision to SS front page. Continuing to add new titles and pictures to the Bibliographies.

3rd March 2013 - Continuing to add new titles and pictures to the Bibliographies. Added the new Letters to the Editor feature page.

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_new.html

Just got 'round to Special Feature No. 1: astounding. I've not read any Machen yet, though he's long been on the TBR list, and this only cements it: I really must.

More than that, though, what an inaugural for the Special Feature! The editorial, the illustrations (I actually enjoyed the Van Patten with the affected typography), and most of all, the selected essays. Again: astounding. This has made the entire site for me, I'm as giddy as after reading The Silver Stallion for the first time.

Keep up the great work, there's still loads there for me to explore but it can never be enough.

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_new.html

(Here's the latest text from the link:}

20th October 2013 - There has been continuous development of the bibliography section since our last update to the What's New page. We have added hundreds of photos, including many (if not most) of the various issues of Cabell's numerous works. We can now present photos of at least one variation of the first printing of every Cabell title except Of Ellen Glasgow. So far, all of the Cabell title scans have come from works in the collections of the editor or webmaster, but neither one of us have a copy of OEG-A1. We are requesting your help - can some kind reader please come to our rescue by providing scans for us to publish? And not only that one - if you can provide scans of any issues we don't have posted, we will be grateful. Of course, any phots you submit will be attributed to you and you will retain copyright. Additionally, you will be added to our Honor Roll of contributors.

As you'll notice, we have been concentrating on photographing, scanning, and uploading pictures of the different titles. We still have a lot of heavy lifting to do in order to turn this site into a genuinely useful bibliography. If any of our readers would like to volunteer to assist us in this huge effort, please email the editor. Assistance in this will get your name on our Honor Roll, too.

In addition to the work on the main bibliography, we have published scans of most titles in the Other Writing by Cabell: Original Material in Books and Other Writing by Cabell: First Appearance in Books of Periodical Material sections. These are based on Hall's "A" and "B" series listings, expanded and (where necessary) corrected.

In the section on Writings about Cabell, we have substantially completed the scans for the sections on Critical and Biographical works and Other Bibliographies. These are based on Hall's "E" and "F" series listings, again expanded and (where necessary) corrected.

And finally, we have redone the Cabellian Arts section, and added new scans of The Jewel Merchants in Lino-Cuts. More to come soon in this section, including works by the Silver Stallion's Artist-in-Residence (virtual) Mike Keith.

26th October 2013 - Added a new page - Contributors and Friends of The Silver Stallion.
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_contributors_main.html
Anyone we're missing?

25th October 2013 - A MAJOR MILESTONE FOR THE SILVER STALLION. Thanks to the generosity of Virginia Commonwealth University and Ray Bonis, Archive Coordinator, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, VCU Libraries, we have just added scans and PDF's of the elusive Of Ellen Glasgow, OEG-A1. This is a milestone for us - we now show scans of at least one state of the first edition of EVERY title by James Branch Cabell. Many thanks to Ray and VCU for this contribution.
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/bibliography/xyz/ellen_g/oeg_a1.html

And in case you hadn't noticed, we've also added Taboo in Lino-Cuts to the Cabellian Arts section. http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/arts/arts_visual/linocuts/taboo_index.ht...

What's New log: http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_new.html

New stuff at The Silver Stallion include an interview with former Kalki editor Paul Spencer and several reprints of articles from Kalki:
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/kalki_archives.html

Thanks for the prompt! Try to head over there tonight for the interview and then stroll about to see what I've missed.

Quite a few updates over the last year:

http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_new.html

Good stuff, especially the shorter fiction scans. I'll be curious to see what I can learn about what is stand-alone, and what was later incorporated into novels.

The German translation also caught my eye, hadn't thought about the various translations out there.

I had a Dutch copy of Jurgen that was adorable: It had a silhouette of a crucified frog on the cloth cover. I would have kept it just for its material attraction, but I gave it to a Dutch friend who could actually enjoy the text as such.

I'm wavering between reading Jurgen and Beyond Life next, after finishing a couple books already underway. Been considering this for months, it's been exceedingly frustrating in terms of not getting dedicated reading / reviewing time. Everything in dribs and drabs, making for unsatisfying reading experiences.

In any case, I assume the frog has some connection to the story, but haven't read it yet.

Yes, it's the end of Ch. 22, though in no way central to the book as a whole, it perfectly emblemizes my special relationship to it.

14> always interesting to spend time at your site.
17> I hope you'll read Beyond Life. That's gotta be the most quotable book I've read in a long time. "Beyond Life In Quotes" would make a great thread.

That's a great idea. I've not been as good as I want to be in entering quotes into LT, though I always mark suitable lines as I read. Maybe this will help change that. Now if only we could have posts autoupdate to the book entry.

I've read Jurgen twice; I could certainly do with a re-read of Beyond Life. Choosing between the two shouldn't be difficult. Good as both are, they are very different texts: one a picaresque novel in the style of Cabellian folkloric fantasy, the other philosophy and criticism framed with fictional conversation.

Beyond and Around and About Beyond Life...

Much of Beyond Life is based on essays (on Congreve, Marlowe, etc) that Cabell wrote as an undergraduate at William and Mary in the late 1890s. One of the essays even achieved magazine publication in 1901.

Between Friends, an annotated selection of letters between Cabell and, uh... friends, between 1915 and 1922, features a large number of working letters concerning Beyond Life between Cabell and his McBride editor Guy Holt, including much constructive argumentation and hashing out. Interestingly, much of the final section of Beyond Life is Cabell's revision of Holt's extended reply to one of Cabell's letters, so Holt is really a hidden collaborator in the text. And then of course Holt wrote the introduction to the Modern Liberry edition (which was then reused in subsequent Kalki reissues).

In the run-up to Beyond Life's publication Cabell's friend, the Chicago newspaper columnist and critic Burton Rascoe, arranged for excerpts to be published as essays in his paper's book section for a number of consecutive weeks. He also arranged with Ben Hecht that they should stage a series of back-and-forth arguments in their respective papers over these essays in order to drum up interest. This ended up drawing the sincere objections of traditionalist novelist and critic Rupert Hughes (uncle of Howard) who Cabell subjected to much straight-faced ridicule in the letters column. I think a little bit of this Chicago-Rascoe-Hughes material is among the periodical pdfs recently added to the Silver Stallion website.

Finally,Straws and Prayer-Books, the (mostly) essay collection at the other end of the Biography of Manuel, begins as a sort of sequel to Beyond Life: John Charteris re-appears, ready to continue discussing literature and life, before he is dismissed in favor of Cabell's direct voice...

Two significant new features have just debuted at the Silver Stallion site.

One is an index of titles of notes and essays found on the site, along with some from both the new and old VCU Cabell pages. http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/notes_essays_main.html
This roll-out is led by a new essay on Cream of the Jest by Rabbler Timo Virkkala (aka wirkman): https://wirkman.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/the-american-cream/

The other new feature is a bibliography of writing about Mr Cabell that appeared between 1975 and 2015, after the cut-off dates for similar compilations by Brewer (1958) and Duke (1979). http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/cabell_supplement.html This remains a work-in-progress, so any additions or corrections are welcome.

>23 Crypto-Willobie: that essay by wirkman is fantastic & funny & makes me want to read the book — finally. Will check out the other new stuff shortly.

Great to see new development! Not that I have plumbed the depths of all that is there already, mind you.

Although it hasn't been trumpeted, a LOT of the bibliographical detail for the books up to 1920 has now been filled in which was previously blank. Thanks to site webmaster John Thorne aka Iohannes Spinaeus.

Thank you for including my texts in the bibliography, it means a lot.

You might want to update the 2009 link directly to the Heidelberg server which provides the German text: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/10106 The 2010 entry is only a very short summary, I'm afraid, merely included in my bibliography when I still hoped to work as a scholar and quantity of publications still mattered. The best English version of what I had to say about Cabell is in the 2015 article (you have a typo in my last name there). Some explanatory remarks on the texts are available at http://academia.rainlights.net/index_english.html

Thanks for the updates, Oliver -- we'll get those fixed...

>27 rainlights:
OK, Oliver we've got the 2009 and 2015 corrections on our update list, should be fixed within a couple days now. (Sorry for misspelling your surname!)

Are you recommending we drop the 2010 entry as surplus to requirements? it's just redundant of 2009 and 2015?

Bill

I'm reading Gene Wolfe's book The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and in the second novella, ""A Story, " by John V. Marsch", a character speculating on the origins of humans on the planet Saint Anne says, "It is possible our home was named Atlantis or Mu - or Gondwanaland, Africa, Poictesme, or The Country of Friends.

>30 lansingsexton: Nice catch.

Where's the "Country of Frie nds"? Quakerville?

Latest posting on the What's New... Cabell in the Modern Library.
Collecting the ML can be a complicated or even frustrating activity.
("Who knew the Modern Library would be so complicated?")

Here's John Thorne's guide
http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/notes_essays/cabell_mod_lib.html

>29 Crypto-Willobie:
Thank you a lot (and sorry for the late reply)!

Yes, you might as well drop the 2010 entry. The entry is almost longer than the two sentences about Cabell in there. It's really just a very short summary of my thesis, similar to the one on the university library landing page. But thanks again for linking there -- I think it's about the only German academic text on Cabell besides the afterwords to some of the old translated paperbacks.