A melancholy yet darkly inspirational Tale

[ish mailian]

Great stuff. Thanks.

Just skimming through I ran into this excellent book for the M-D readers:

http://www.wcml.org.uk/wcml/en/our-collections/activists/clr-james/

see  Mariners, renegades and castaways: the story of Herman Melville
and the world we live in (1985) - Shelfmark: Q36

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 7:49 PM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:
> In the late 90s I was part of the cataloguing team at the Working Class
> Movement Library. One book I catalogued was 'Agin the Governments' by Sir
> Francis Fletcher Vane (published in 1929).
> Dedicated to his dog Tox.
> M&D read not long before, my curiosity was piqued -  Vane, dog, Tox - had I
> stumbled on a odd corner of Pynchonian research?
> It turned out that Sir Francis was a direct descendant of Sir Henry Vane the
> Younger, whose 'melancholy yet darkly inspirational Tale' is referred to on
> page 225.
>
> My enthusiasm for Pynchon's books had recently persuaded the WCML librarian
> to read GR, so I shared my possible discovery with him.
> "You know those boxes in the basement", he said, "marked  'Shields Papers',
> they include an unfinished biography of Sir Francis."
>
> I had a look and, like Edward Shields and others before me, I became
> interested in this oddball aristo. I had a new project!
> I sorted the papers, created a web page on the man, his deeds and his
> writings and over the next few years had various correspondences with others
> who for one reason or another were interested in him, and along the way I
> gathered more material to add to Shields' notes.
>
> Edward Shields had become interested in Vane when researching for a songbook
> commemorating the 50th anniversary of the  Easter Uprising in Dublin.
> Now, as a result of that, then the sheer chance that I, a Pynchon reader,
> was the cataloguer of that particular book, it has come about that, as a
> part of the 100th anniversary of the uprising, a photo of Vane from the
> Shields collection has been used for one of the commemorative stamps just
> issued by the Irish Post Office.
>
>
>
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