The Widening Stain
by W. Bolingbroke Johnson
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Pub Date 4 Aug 2020 | Archive Date 31 Jul 2020
Penzler Publishers | American Mystery Classics
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Description
Murders plague a university library—and only an intrepid book cataloger can solve them.
For the staff of the library at the center of The Widening Stain, it’s easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It’s more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica. And that’s not all—a valuable manuscript has vanished from the stacks, which means that both a killer and a thief are loose in the facility’s hallowed halls. It’s up to chief cataloger Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she’s careful, the next death in the library might just be her own...
A humorous and literary Golden Age mystery, The Widening Stain is adorned with as many playful limericks as it is with bibliographic details. The book, which offers a satirical glimpse of academic life at an institution strongly resembling Cornell University, is one of the most beloved bibliomysteries (mysteries involving books) of all time.
About the Author: W. Bolingbroke Johnson was the pseudonym of Morris Bishop (1893-1973), an American scholar, historian, essayist, translator, and versifier. While best known for his writings on the Middle Ages and his work with light verse, he was an authority on many subjects, including the history of Cornell University, where he taught and served as the university historian. The Widening Stain is his only work of fiction.
Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of nine works of cultural history, with a particular emphasis on various aspects of books, book history, and book culture. In addition to his books, Basbanes has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, and lectures widely on a variety of cultural subjects. Among his most well-known titles are A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books and On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781613161692 |
| PRICE | US$25.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 288 |
Featured Reviews
Annie W, Book Trade Professional
Thanks very much to Penzler for introducing this great piece of classic crime to me! I loved it so much that I scoured Abe Books for an ex-Library copy, and am about to start featuring it on my @bodiesinthelibrary Instagram (from 10 April), which is a place I share pictures and quotes from my reading on a project examining crime set in libraries.
The introduction is really helpful, and although I’ll be sharing quotations from my second-hand copy, I’ll flag the new edition and recommend it to people who want to read the book - as well as being a better price, Brasbanes’ essay sets the scene, and certainly for those of us outside North America, it is tremendously useful to read about Bishop aka Johnson and, indeed, the inspiration he drew from Cornell and it’s University Library.
I’ll also point to the book from my @BeginningCataloguing Instagram and Twitter accounts, and from my personal (locked) @AnneWelsh Twitter, as I think former students, colleagues and friends will be interested in the catalogue room itself and, of course, the marvellous Gilda Gorham. I am astonished that I had not heard of her and The Widening Stain before in my three decades of learning, practising, teaching and researching Cataloguing and its history. This would have been great fun to highlight to students when I was full-time iSchool faculty, and I hall certainly drop Gilda into my future trainings and articles. Bishop must himself have known the Cornell cataloguers well to create such a fun mix of common stereotypes and actual, real-life women working at an often-overlooked task at the heart of the library.
The story itself is tremendous fun. Some of the attitudes are of their time, so misogynistic, but that is to be expected and I am sure all of us who like the classic crime genre are aware of such issues. (The titling of Christie’s Ten Little Indians over the years is, of course, the most frequently-cited example of this kind).
In short, I am really delighted to have found this book, thanks to Penzler, and am grateful to them and NetGalley for the ARC.
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