- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Kennedy & Boyd (18 April 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1904999417
- ISBN-13: 978-1904999416
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 669,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
"The library is situated," said the short entry in the Guide to British Libraries A-L, "in pleasant rolling countryside not too far from Hereford, and is perhaps most readily accessible by private motor vehicle." This statement was quite accurate. Inaccessibility had always been one of the Library's most prized qualities. "The Last Resort Library was founded in 1962, and is a forward-looking institution with very much its own sense of mission," it continued. The truth was that the Guide compiler had never heard of the Library himself, but someone had mentioned it to him right at the last minute, and he was improvising while correcting proofs. "Researchers should be aware that, despite the size of the Library's holdings, there is no published catalogue of any kind." That's what he had been told, and it seemed only sensible to make a formal note of it. - Prologue
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rejection Slips R Us,
By
This review is from: The Last Resort Library (Hardcover)
Lying somewhere unbookmarked in the depths of the west country is to be found (if you are careful to ignore its own directions) the Last Resort Library - an institution of apparently unlimited financial resources dedicated solely to the preservation of manuscripts that no one has ever published. And not for want of trying on their authors' parts, for it is a strict condition of acquisition that each item be accompanied by at least one and preferably a handful of genuine rejection slips - from which, when the Chief Librarian is feeling jaded, his secretary reads him a selection of the latest and most humiliating examples by way of a tonic. The only subjects on which the LLR will not accept accessions, however numerous and noxious the rejections, are, of course, cookery and gardening, for reasons that are not explained but will be intuitively obvious to all self-respecting book-lovers. (It also has no works on cricket, but only because no one has yet written a book on cricket that no one else would publish.) Dr Finkel's cast of eccentric characters cope manfully and womanfully, as the case may be, with all the vicissitudes attendant upon an institution whose permanent aspiration is "the MAXIMUM of accessions with the MINIMUM of personal contact and absolutely NO personal visits". This is the funniest book I have read since "Reinforced Concrete Made Simple", which I once found in a second-hand bookshop in Norwich but never actually got round to reading as its content could not possibly have lived up to the promise of its title. The Last Resort Library, by contrast, delivers content in abundance. What a wonderful TV sitcom it would make! I'm mentally casting it already...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
They aren't forgotten,
This review is from: The Last Resort Library (Paperback)
Think of a book as a kind of inanimate Candide, thrust into the best of all publishing worlds to brave the ignorant agents, the cruel critics,the capricious editors and the venal publishers. Imagine it turning up its jacket against a blizzard of rejection slips and trudging on into a hostile howling wind. Where can it find warmth and sanctuary? The author Irving Finkel has just the place: the Last Resort Library. Here the arcane history, the obscure novel, the opaque poem can find a home; an orphnage for the unpublished and unpublishable.
The Library offers the last promise of immortality to those authors who lost sleep, divulged secrets, sweated blood and gained no recognition for their efforts whatsoever. Here works that would otherwise be forgotten acquire categories, abstracts, entries in a card catalogue, cross indices - all the trappings of literary respectability. Never fear being buried along with the novel you slaved over for ten years; the Last Resort Library will carry you into posterity. The Library is, of course, a battlement from which Dr. Finkel intends to fire salvos of satire at the postures and presumptions of the book world. He lines them up like ducks in a shooting gallery - the bottom-feeding publisher, the formulaic writer, the sadistic editor, the BBC, Californians - and over they go with a bang, knocked flat within the surreal confines of the Last Resort Library. If librarians as a breed are generally considered an odd lot then of course those at the Last Resort must be the final word in eccentricity. The book's literary cousins might bear the names of Waugh and Vonnegut but in its Through-the-Looking-Glass dreamscape terrain and willingness, in defence of literature, to slay the poseurs, its closest relation is probably Nathaniel West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Have fun.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Publishers beware,
By
This review is from: The Last Resort Library (Paperback)
The book is a delight as the English is superb and the syntax fluent. Then the story which rests on it is enchanting. The characters are so much alive that one can almost remember them from a distant, or even an illusory past. Indeed this story excites the imagination to the extent that it is certain that the library and its employees exist somewhere, somehow. It is a Voltarian caricature of the publishing mafia as Finkel makes of rejection a status of meritocracy. After all, who wants to be published in the light of the stupendous quantity of literary garbage with which one does not wish to be associated...
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