About:

Documenting the quest to track down everything written by (and written about) the poet, translator, critic, and radio dramatist, Henry Reed.

An obsessive, armchair attempt to assemble a comprehensive bibliography, not just for the work of a poet, but for his entire life.

Read "Naming of Parts."

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Henry Reed, ca. 1960


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Reeding:

I Capture the Castle: A girl and her family struggle to make ends meet in an old English castle.
Dusty Answer: Young, privileged, earnest Judith falls in love with the family next door.
The Heat of the Day: In wartime London, a woman finds herself caught between two men.


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Posts from April 2005

Reeding Lessons: the Henry Reed research blog

19.3.2024


Strawberry Ice

I managed to break free of the apartment's gravity this afternoon, and drop into the University's main library for a few hours, to do some work without the Herculean distractions of cable television and an attention-starved cat. Currently, we're in the reading period which preceeds exams, the carrels are full, and the only sounds are the squeak of ungreased office chairs, the opening click and closing clack of serials binders being filed into, and the clearing of anxious throats.

I left the house without white index cards.

I'm actually fairly high-tech, filing citations into an online bibliography, but a laptop is still a bit clunky for walking up and down the stacks, looking for as-yet-unseen volumes. So I write everything down on index cards, first: white for the things I have a copy of, colors for wants and needs. When I find an item on a green or red or blue card, it gets tossed and a new, white, card gets written out with a description, and the database gets updated to an "Own?" Yes. Ridiculous, right? This is the system I came up with.

Plus, I throw away the sickly, yellow cards that come in the pack.

Last night I was trying to nail down a concrete date when Reed stopped working for the BBC Features Department: his last translation was broadcast in 1978 (Sorrows of Love, by Giuseppe Giacosa). But there was a nagging doubt that I had, somewhere in my pile of cites from the London Times, seen mention of a play I hadn't found anywhere else, which may have been later than '78.

Today, due to my lack of having white cards to fill out, I was catching up on plugging new entries into the database, instead. And, bam! There it was: The Strawberry Ice, by Natalia Ginzburg. Translated by Henry Reed for the BBC, and broadcast on January 24th, 1973.

It was a Wednesday afternoon.

«  Ginzburg Plays  0  »


1537. Radio Times, "Full Frontal Pioneer," Radio Times People, 20 April 1972, 5.
A brief article before a new production of Reed's translation of Montherlant, mentioning a possible second collection of poems.


Whaddyacallit

There's still a lot to do around here before going live with these pages. I'm still struggling with if-do-while-else loops in php, and the template's not really quite what I would like. I'm also in the process of copying over the relevant posts from the old blog, and some from the defunct "News" page (the old posts made for tasty test data). All posts from before today's date originally existed somewhere else.

More importantly, I have no idea what to call the thing. It's like getting a band together: the best part is dreaming up a cool name. The choices so far:
  • bibliographomania (Too cutesy.)
  • hyperbibliographia (Alternately.)
  • Bellum Libellum (Not real Latin? How do you say "Battles with small books"?)
  • Vixi Libris Nuper Idoneus (Ibid.)
  • Reeding Lessons (Leaning strongly toward.)
  • The Piling Swivel
  • Henry Reed Research (Dullsville.)
I'm sure the best name will present itself, probably not long after I change all the templates to my first choice.

«  Updates  1  »


1536. L.E. Sissman, "Late Empire." Halcyon 1, no. 2 (Spring 1948), 54.
Sissman reviews William Jay Smith, Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart, Thomas Merton, Henry Reed, and Stephen Spender.



1st lesson:

Reed, Henry (1914-1986). Born: Birmingham, England, 22 February 1914; died: London, 8 December 1986.

Education: MA, University of Birmingham, 1936. Served: RAOC, 1941-42; Foreign Office, Bletchley Park, 1942-1945. Freelance writer: BBC Features Department, 1945-1980.

Author of: A Map of Verona: Poems (1946)
The Novel Since 1939 (1946)
Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from Herman Melville's Novel (1947)
Lessons of the War (1970)
Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio (1971)
The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio (1971)
Collected Poems (1991, 2007)
The Auction Sale (2006)


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