While I wait to read what Ivan Vladislavic has written about loss, I will say that for me a sense of loss underscores, or is at least in a measure of everything. Some of that is being that age I am. Some of it is being in and of this country at this time. And no small part of it is being in the area of work — books and bookselling — that I’ve been in since the mid-1970s, and continue at present.

Loss is not decline, is not defeat, not death — though those may be entailed. In some forms of loss there is something clearly reciprocal going on — loss here means gain there. Right now I’m 600 pages into Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, and I would say that it is more about loss than anything else, and how loss — with longing — is carried by people trying their best to live life. The more life is lived, the more it will be imbued with loss. Loss is a part of the mystery.

Right now, I’m also beginning to learn how to work with publisher lists that will now only be found if you have access to computer — and are online. Hundreds of titles on a given list, where large publishers are concerned. Each one looking dully — and very dully alike. That’s within lists — and when looked at in sequence with any other list. They all look the same.

After 35 years of this work — and more, knowing printed publisher catalogues existed long before — for me, the increasing shift away from such catalogues constitutes a form of loss. That’s a little ironic to say in this context — for a publisher devoted to print — but this year I am feeling that evermore, the sudden disappearance of publishers’ seasonal announcements in the form of printed catalogues.

Words keep coming. This is the last time you’ll have this information in printed form. Meanwhile, here.

Here it is. The catalogue in different shapes, sizes, some busy with images and busy graphics, others spare, much white space. Fonts are generally familiar for whom they come from — this is Knopf, this is Farrar, Straus, this is Simon & Schuster, this is Melville House, this is Shambala.

All of this part of the aesthetic taking-in, part of the initial engaging of the imagination. Ideally, there is good talk along the way — advice, response, back and forths, depending on who has read or knows what.

Pages flipped, slipped, pored over or past. With a good list, a sizable list, you know where in the catalogue it is, which book is its opposite. Author’s photograph, book cover — to arrest and entice. To do so in a way that works whether it’s the breeziest of perusing, or slow, page-by-page reading. Some catalogues you want get through quickly — find what little you might need and get on. You can apprehend what you know you want to look at, what you know you don’t want to look at, and the middle ground of that which you probably should look at, more readily, more fluidly, with the printed catalogue.

It’s reading which can happen anywhere. (Not everywhere has wi-fi access.) Buses, backseats, convention-centre aisles, bars, bathrooms, beds, dining tables, airplanes.

You can spill on them, write in them, draw, doodle, make lists about something else altogether.

They represent a place for imagination, that which it takes to speculatively contemplate books, their subjects, authors, styles — all with the nuts-and-bolts of price, size, page count, ISBN.

I know it doesn’t have to be this way. Those that say it is say it is, They say it’s the only way, there isn’t room, money, time for more. I don’t like the all eggs-in-one basket approach.

Not everyone is going this way— thankfully.

Whatever I have to do with those publishers and lists that are only online I will do. But I will relish more those that still present themselves, physically handed over or physically sent, that have their weight, texture, pages, a cover, asking you to open … and see what’s in store.

RICK SIMONSON is Book Buyer and Co-Director of the Author Readings Programme at the Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Washington.

Extract taken from the Seagull Catalogue

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On a midsummer morning, three or four months into my residency in Stuttgart, a drawing appeared in my apartment.

The sunlight in the south of Germany is a gentle critic. I was standing at my window reading through the previous night’s work, letting the light soften its rough edges, when noticed something on the white melamine surface of the table beside me. Curious, I stooped closer. It looked like a drawing. Some of the lines were faint and curly; others were emphatic, shooting off at angles like fragments of a graph. Together they made up an image as tangled as a ball of hair in the bristles of a brush. My first thought was that a previous occupant of the apartment had scarred the surface with a knife during a careless cut-and-paste job. But when I rubbed at one of the lines, graphite came off on my fingertip.

The drawing made no sense. All I could say for certain was that it had been done very recently. I used the table every day and something so striking could not have escaped my attention for long. Where on earth had it come from?

Several possibilities passed through my mind, the most compelling being that one of the resident artists had come into my apartment— while I was sleeping? — and left a calling card. Someone was playing a practical joke.

The drawing was the size of a dinner plate. Again I thought about knives. But then its precise position on the table snagged another association: this was where I had been working the night before. I drew up a chair and sat down facing the drawing. My computer was here, to the left, the mouse over there. Reaching out with my right hand, miming the action, I discovered that the drawing was exactly where the mouse had been.

The little mystery dissolved in an instant. I uncoiled the mouse from my laptop and turned it over. Lodged in a recess in the plastic was a fragment of lead, the tip from

A propelling pencil. The artist was me, blindly making pencil marks as I slid the mouse over the smooth white surface.

How many movements in three or four hours of work? I imagined my hand in the shadows, a manuscript beside the computer on a lily pad of light, the cursor wavering across the screen, blocking, dragging, deleting, inserting, cutting, pasting. Clicking on icons, dropping down menus. Do, undo, redo. In the chance drawing on the table top, every single thought, second thought and final action had been translated into a line.

The mouse drawing, as I called it, haunted the following days. I willed it to represent something. I remembered a newspaper article about a man who found a cinnamon bun shaped like Mother Teresa, another about an amateur photographer who captured a dollar sign in a cloud. But my image remained stubbornly indecipherable. At best, there was the white of an eye in the swirl, a quieter centre where the lines were sparse.

Naturally, I turned the incident into a fiction. In my story, ‘Mouse Drawing’. A writer discovers a mysterious image on a table top. Like me, he works out how it got there. But he is luckier than I am: for him, the drawing is full of meanings, he recognizes people and places in it, he sees figures and signs. Convinced that the world s talking to him in a strange tongue, he embarks on a series of experiments, typing up his  fictions in the dark, with the mouse resting on a clean sheet of paper secured to the table top. His every creative act now excretes a secondary product, a shadowy illustration, in which he discovers a surfeit of new meanings: faces, animals, ships, the profile of his father, a map of his country.

When the story had been drafted, I fetched a kitchen sponge and wiped the table clean.

As you can tell, perhaps, the fiction was more elaborate but less satisfying than the factual account I’m giving you now. And this factual account is only possible because the fiction came to nothing, just as it had come out of nowhere, by chance.

By the end of my residency in Stuttgart, I had accumulated a quantity of papers and books. These I packed into two sturdy boxes, which Herr Friedrich had hauled down from the attic for me and reinforced with packaging tape. Another conspirator, Frau Babel, helped me to bind the boxes as tightly as hostages and address them to myself in Johannesburg. All twelve sides were inscribed with my name and address in indelible ink.  Then Herr Friedrich and I delivered them to the airport: two loaded dice freighted with my work of the past year. Despite every precaution, the boxes were lost in transit and I never saw them again.

In the decade since then, I have forgotten exactly what was lost. The books that mattered were replaced long ago, and I soon learned to live without the half-formed fictions and copies of correspondence. But ‘Mouse Drawing’ will not rest.  Hear it rustling now in the waste-paper basket. It wants to begin again.

This extract has been taken from:

The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

Ivan Vladislavic

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THOMAS COMBRINK.  In the foreword to Chronik der Gefuhle (Chronicle of emotions) you write that, for you, the Library of Alexandria is still burning. What do you mean by that?

ALEXANDER KLUGE. There was a fantastic Hellenistic library in Alexandria where all the works of Antiquity were once available. Preserved there, among other things, were eight plays by Sophocles, which today are unknown to us. I have always been very interested, for example, in ‘The Death of Odysseus’. We now only know the content from three fragmentary quotations in other plays. It was all lost, first when Julius Caesar was besieged in the city and then when a fanatical Christian bishop incited the people of Alexandria to storm the library, the seat of paganism. But I do not believe that something like that simply catches fire; on the contrary, it is still burning. And it will go on burning until we have restored the texts.

THOMAS COMBRINK. How can we restore the texts?

ALEXANDER KLUGE.  Libraries, after all, are medicine chests of knowledge. They lead a double life as precious containers. If they are destroyed, they are not simply destroyed and that’s the end of the matter. You can compare it to Freud’s conception of the human psyche. In a healthy psychic tissue nothing gets lost; what we have forgotten is not irretrievably destroyed. The soul is also a collector, but we cannot at will draw on the stock of collected things. At particular points in our life, we can experience emotions, which we perhaps last felt at the age of six. And so the Library of Alexandria only burned de facto: everything it contained is to be found in older strata in us, which are stored away somewhere and await their regeneration. Put another way: Klaus Reichert has translated the beginning of the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew and he maintains that the true rendering is not “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ but ‘In his head and in accordance with his Book, God created this world.’ So, first of all, there is a book — first of all a text — just as we have texts in our cells, which are also something, like libraries because they provide an account of the knowledge of our blue planet, the knowledge of evolution and so of ourselves. These libraries in our cells presumably represent the basic form of what then emerges as libraries. In Alexandria, knowledge is stockpiled in the library and hence available as far as the borders of the empire. If something like this marvelous library is burnt, then it goes on burning in our hearts until we light it again.

THOMAS COMBRINK.  But how can we light it again?

ALEXANDER KLUGE.  We can go on writing. Where Sophocles wrote, we wait for other writers who renew Sophocles if his texts were destroyed. Shaped knowledge in the tragedies of Sophocles or the texts of Homer is more than the knowledge they transport. These are poetic figures and they have eternal life. And just look with what precision Homer writes. Closeto the end of the Odyssey there is the scene in which the maidens, who at night slept with the suitors, are hanged, and there’s a brief moment in which their feet still twitch. That is as matchless as some passages in Tacitus. It is laconic brevity, appalling brevity. If one writes anew, these are the passages by which one may set oneself alight.

ALEXANDER KLUGE. Translated by Martin Chalmers.

Kluge was instrumental in launching the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s, and has directed several films. He is also one of Germany’s major fiction writers and social critics. The English translation of Kluge’s December: 39 Stories, 39 Images (with Gerhard Richter) is forthcoming from Seagull Books (February 2012)

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