The widening stain /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Introduction by Nicholas A. Basbanes Academics at venerable institutions of higher learning throughout the United States must have had great fun back in the 1940s wondering who, exactly, among their lofty ranks had taken pen to paper and written a delightfully irreverent biblio-mystery that took gentle aim at the foibles and passions of their profession, while ostensibly considering the untimely deaths of two scholars who had been working with rare books and manuscripts in the University Library. As a work of fiction, The Widening Stain was a one-off performance for the mysterious author drolly identified on the original dustjacket by the publisher Alfred A. Knopf as being one W. Bolingbroke Johnson, "a native of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky" and former librarian for the American Dairy Goat Association and Okmulgee Agricultural and Mechanical Institute--an unsophisticated rube from the hinterlands, in other words, whose previously published works (or "so he says") included modest contributions to the Boot and Shoe Recorder and the American Musselman--none of which, of course, could have been further from the truth. In reality, W. Bolingbroke Johnson was the nom de plume of Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893-1973), a greatly admired educator and scholar whose reputation as a widely published biographer, historian, and authority on Romance Languages would be responsible for wooing Vladimir Nabokov to join the Cornell University faculty as a professor and lecturer of Russian Literature in 1948, and become his closest friend during his eleven years on the Ithaca, New York, campus. Bishop's body of professional work was formidable--a "polymath in his field," according to Alden Whitman's three-column obituary in The New York Times--with fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Swedish among the feathers in his linguistic cap, along with an ability to "sight-read" Latin. His corpus embraced a broad spectrum, some four hundred published works over half-a-century, four dozen of them books he either wrote or edited, including respected biographies of Petrarch, Pascal, La Rouchefoucauld, Ronsard, Samuel de Champlain, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Spanish explorer Álvar Núnez Cabeza de Vaca. To that was a two-volume Survey of French Literature that went through multiple printings, a critically-acclaimed history of the Middle Ages, translations into English of Moliere's dramatic works, and an institutional history of Cornell, where he spent sixty productive years as student, instructor, professor, official historian, and provost of the university, his time there interrupted only by a brief stint in advertising and military service in Europe during World War I. Quite apart from Bishop's scholarship--which was unfailingly praised for its accessibility and clarity of expression--was a more whimsical side that found rich expression in light verse and casual prose, and a genius for composing limericks--the latter a skill that is brought to bear in The Widening Stain by one of the faculty members at the heart of the murder mystery. From 1927--a year after receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell--to 1960, a span of thirty-three years, Bishop wrote, on average, fifteen poems and prose pieces a year for The New Yorker. Of his 1929 collection of verse, Paramount Poems, William J. Strunk Jr., author of the legendary Elements of Style, wondered if William Wordsworth was "ever more simple and direct than Bishop when he begins a lyrical ballad with the words, 'The modern boys were bold and bad,/The modern girls were worse?'" Bishop's attitude on the role poetry had to play in contemporary society is relevant to the laid-back tone and self-effacing approach he had employed in his mystery novel. "Our serious poets, writing deliberately for an elite and despising the average reader, have ruined poetry in the mind of the general intelligent public," he wrote in the introduction to his 1954 collection, A Bowl of Bishop. It was the light versifiers, Bishop maintained, who were "helping to keep alive in the general mind a consciousness of poetic form and thought. They are holding poetry's little forts amid the desert sands of the commonplace, awaiting the relief that shall come when the Poet arises, to fill our world with his overwhelming music." What prompted Bishop, in his mid-forties, to set a tongue-in-cheek murder mystery on a college campus much like his own--the fictional library he describes with painstaking detail is a dead-ringer for Uris Library at Cornell--he never said publicly. With the exception of a few confidantes, he pretty much kept the work-in-progress to himself during the ominous days of 1941, with world conflict looming on the horizon. "I am writing a mystery story," he informed one friend that June, six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "The mystery itself would not deceive an intelligent chimpanzee, but I think I can make it more obscure on second writing. The background may carry it. Most of it is laid in our University Library, a kind of Notre-Dame de Paris. I have written half the book in three weeks, so there will be no great loss if no one wants to publish it, and in the meantime it serves as a most admirable retreat. Come to think of it, 'The Corpse in the Ivory Tower' wouldn't be a bad title." As things turned out, there was not one corpse lying amid a "widening stain" of blood in the Ivory Tower, but two, the first victim an instructor in the Romance Languages Department named Lucie Coindreau, a "black-eyed, black-haired Frenchwoman in her early thirties," good-looking "in the smoldering southern incipient-hairy way," with an accent, according to some of her countrymen, that "took on a flavor of garlic" when she got excited. Lucie's death one night after a cocktail reception in the home of the university president is thought at first to have been nothing more than a horrible accident during an after-hours visit to the rare books wing of the library, a head-first fall from an upper gallery where the young scholar was believed to have been retrieving a difficult-to-reach volume--a high-heel, possibly, getting stuck in her long evening gown triggering the fatal plunge. Not everyone is convinced, however, least of all Gilda Gorham, a summa cum laude graduate of the university whose day job is Chief Cataloguer of the library--"the brain of the Library's sluggish body"--unmarried, also in her thirties, with an alert and inquisitive mind. "She was bright and pleasant," everyone agreed, "and knew what people were talking about," qualities that earned her invitations to all the faculty parties. The obvious suspect, in Gilda's view, is Angelo Casti, a tenure-tracked assistant professor like Lucie vying for promotion to associate professor, with whom she had at one time been romantically involved. The previous spring, Gilda is told, the two had "spent a lot of time in the Phonetics Laboratory, prolonging their research late into the night, and it is suspected that the time was not devoted exclusively to recording each other's vowels and consonants." Casti's "pseudo science" scholarship, as some call it, involves studying the pronunciation of the vowel sounds in the combinations of "uff" and "ugg," according to the medievalist Professor Hyett. "He has determined, I believe, that the average subject pronounces the 'uh' of 'uff' in 169 thousandths of a second, while they take 176 thousandths of a second to pronounce the 'uh' of 'ugg,'" raising an eminently logical question: "But what good does that do?" Professor Hyett explains: "We seek pure learning, knowledge for its own sake. That knowledge may well be of some practical use to someone some time, but we don't care whether it is or not. We just seek the fact. It's the essential difference between pure and applied science. Wouldn't you rather be pure than applied?" That the first death was most assuredly not an accident becomes evident with the discovery, in an inner sanctum known as the "locked press" where the rarest books and manuscripts are stored, of Professor Hyett, strangled where he sat before a reading desk, and a twelfth-century manuscript of rhymed verse in Latin gone missing. How does it all fit? Who among Gilda's list of suspects could be responsible? It gives nothing away to say that the epiphany for her comes during a concert she attends with Francis Parry, composer of the clever limericks that enliven the pages of this smart and witty book. At novel's end, there is the hint of romance in Gilda's future, which leaves the reader to wonder if there may have been some thought to her becoming a continuing character--a female amateur detective, perhaps, a research librarian who solves crimes in her spare time. Appearing in print during the early days of World War II, The Widening Stain proved to be something of a distraction for an anxious nation, going back to press several more times, appearing in English and French editions, generating a degree of curiosity as to the actual identity of the author, which Bishop never confirmed publicly. "We do not know who W. Bolingbroke Johnson is," a reviewer for The New York Times wrote, "but he writes a good story with an academic atmosphere that is not so rarefied as we have been led to believe it should be in university circles." The closest Bishop came to outright acknowledgement is to be found in a limerick he composed and inserted in a volume of the novel, now housed in the Cornell University Library: A cabin in northern Wisconsin Is what I would be for the nonce in, To be rid of the pain of The Widening Stain and W. Bolingbroke Johnson. Excerpted from The Widening Stain by W. Bolingbroke Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

First published in 1941, this sparkling academic mystery from Johnson (the pseudonym of Cornell professor Morris Bishop) takes place at "the University" (a stand-in for Cornell), home to self-absorbed professors, anxious instructors, and quick-witted Gilda Gorham, the chief cataloguer at the University Library. When French instructor Lucie Coindreau, "the oomph-girl of the Romance Language Department," leaves a party at the university president's house suspiciously early, curious Gilda follows her to the library. Inside, Gilda hears a scream and a crash. Lucie is lying dead on the marble floor below a high gallery, having apparently taken an accidental fall over the gallery railing. When a professor is later strangled in a locked room filled with ancient erotica, Lucie's colleagues have to wonder whether Lucie, too, was murdered. A master of lively word play, Johnson exposes the foibles of his characters with sly wit. Readers will regret that this funny, erudite novel was poet and scholar Bishop's only foray into fiction. This is a most worthy addition to the American Crime Classics series. (Aug.)

Kirkus Book Review

The latest discovery from American Mystery Classics is a brightly waspish account of murder in a thinly disguised version of the Cornell University Library that's the only novel by the prolific academic, translator, and light versifier Morris Bishop (1893-1973), writing under a pseudonym. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly very interested in manuscript B 58, the library's copy of Hilarius' miracle play Filius Getronis. Professor Belknap (history) plans to publish it with the cooperation of professor Hyett (classics) and professor Francis Parry (dramatics). And now assistant professor Angelo Casti (romance languages) wants to borrow it for some investigations he proposes in his phonetics laboratory. Absolutely not, says Chief Cataloguer Gilda Gorham, believing that now everything has settled down. Her cozy assumption is promptly exploded by the death of assistant professor Lucie Coindreau, a rival of Casti's for a coveted tenure line, who leaves a reception at President Temple's house, lets herself into the Wilmerding Collections, and plunges from a gallery to the floor below. As if to prove that her demise is no accident, it's followed by Hyett's strangling in the Wilmerding Collections. Gilda must sort through a wide range of decorous secrets her colleagues are hiding--an indebtedness to a predatory lender, a taste for erotica, an affair with Lucie Coindreau, a link to the earlier theft of a valuable manuscript--to identify the duly pedantic killer. No marvel of plot construction but a wryly amusing look at academic life that's dated all too little since 1942. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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.