The Book That Never Was, Part Trois

The appropriate materials have been requested through interlibrary loan, so now all there is to do is wait and see if they can solve the mystery.

The Book That Never Was, Part Deux

A bit of digging has led me to believe my sentiment that "Ben Jonson's Cipher" was never written is incorrect. I am attempting to verify this through the Ignatius Donnelly Papers in Minnesota, but I found out today that my local library has a two month waiting list on interlibrary loans. I'll be off to a bigger, and hopefully faster, library in the adjoining county on Monday morning before work to see if I can't get better service there. Meanwhile you can enjoy this painting of "Shakespeare and Jonson Engaged in a Game of Chess" by the artist Karel Van Mander (attr. 1604).

Fomalhaut

Wow. And wow. Am I wrong in remembering that this is the star system from Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World?

The Book That Never Was?

Because it's been almost a week since I've posted anything Donnelliana-related and because this once is one of my absolute favorites as there's a mystery involved. And also because this has never to my knowledge been explained on the Internet before.

The following is a back-page advertisement from Ignatius Donnelly's last published book, The Cipher In the Plays, and on the Tombstone (Minneapolis, Minn., The Verulam Publishing Company, 1899):



That's right, Donnelly planned to take his theories a step further with a book demonstrating that Francis Bacon, in addition to authoring the Shakespeare plays, also wrote Ben Jonson's plays and left a cipher in them. What intrigued me even more when I first saw this advertisement were the words "IN PRESS," and I have even seen the book listed in some online bibliographies. Ridge, however, says this:

Donnelly asked W. Waldorf Astor, who had indorsed the Baconian cipher, to underwrite the cost of publishing a new book, "Ben Jonson's Cipher," in the summer of 1900. Astor refused, and the manuscript was never published.

I am supposing that the manuscript never in fact existed at all, but I will have to do some digging into the records in Minnesota. If I find anything definitive, I'll post about it here on the blog.

The Verulam Publishing Company, by the way, was Donnelly's own creation, as he self-published the book (did a fine job of it, too; I'll post images of it in the not-so-distant future). As for where he got the name of his company, all of you Baconians out there already know (but for the rest, you can find out here).

Veterans Day writing

I can't remember the last time I had Veterans Day off (maybe never). Kind of appropriately, I'm working on the afterword to MonkeyBrain's new edition of Philip José Farmer's Two Hawks from Earth (Roger Two Hawks is a lieutenant in the Army Air Force). Originally titled The Gate of Time (against Phil's objections, because the story has nothing to do with time travel), the novel comes from Phil's heyday while he was in the midst of writing the first few World of Tiers books. MonkeyBrain is publishing the revised and restored version of the story (as Belmont, the original publisher, besides changing the book's title, also rewrote a scene against Phil's wishes). Parallel universes, alternate history, and adventure--what's not to love?

October Locus

(Via) Nifty. Locus has their latest issue up online. You can see a photo of Pierce Watters and me at the Planet Stories table at Denvention on p. 35. :-)

Update: Certain Fathoms

I had my weekend all planned out to work on some writing that I have due in December (but which I've been wanting to get done early). But in the end I got sidetracked on researching and brainstorming for Certain Fathoms (the sf/historical/conspiracy novel), reading through musty nineteenth century tomes and adding some more pages of notes. The villain(s) are starting to shape up, as are some of the historical characters and their relationship to the plot. Everything seems to be indicating that a main part of the story will take place in 1888, although there are strong arguments I'm trying to reconcile for setting other scenes somewhere in the period 1863-1882. There is, however, a key scene that needs to take place in 1888. I'd prefer to keep it mainly at one time period to maintain narrative flow, so I may just end up referring to events in the past while keeping my protagonist firmly rooted in 1888. At the same time, as long as the plot is truly driving the story, time jumps are not necessarily a bad thing. This is a big problem faced when trying to write historical fiction, fitting all the known historical events together so that they don't undermine the thrust of the story, but rather back it up and strengthen it. And when writing about a historical character, knowing that the character has a whole lifetime of experiencing up to the point at which the story takes place which the reader may not know about but which is extremely important to what follows in the story. But really, in principle it comes down to the classic writer's dilemma of "when" to begin the story and also characterization, neither of which are exclusive to historical fiction. But I do think there is a seduction for the historical writer to throw in a laundry list of cool events at the expense of story, and that I don't intend to do.

Now to set all this aside and let it percolate for the next week while I get back to what I need to write now. . .