Notorious Books
Notorious Books
Notorious books are books that have caused great turmoil within the literary world, either on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, or in the streets of Montparnasse.
Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Berthe: or the Memorable Fart
L.D.L. [Lombard de Langres]
Paris: Léopold Colon, 1807.
First mentioned in the Bibliotheca Scatologica.
“A wind released involuntarily procures for the impoverished Berthe a most brilliant marriage; which confirms that which is said somewhere, that a fart is sometimes good for something.”
Immediately following publication of the first edition, the remarkable illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley caused a six-barricade riot in St. Germain.
Byron’s Memoirs
GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON
Unpublished manuscript.
Burned at London, May 17, 1824.
Byron said it showed “the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation,” and before his death, he ordered the book destroyed. In 1824, after violent argument, it was burnt by his publisher John Murray and John Cam Hobhouse on the hearth at Murray’s digs on Albemarle Street. Only 28 people got to read it. This biblioclasm was called “the greatest literary crime in history” [a title more typically predicated of Fifty Shades of Grey].
Tributes: The Poetry of Emmeline Grangerford
EMMELINE GRANGERFORD
Hickman, KY: Privately Printed, 1840.
First mentioned in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Elegies for the dead, written by a fourteen-year-old girl, a daughter of the Grangerford family and a past master of “obituary poetry.” Said Twain, “Every time...a child died, she would be on hand with her ‘tribute’ before he was cold. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker.”
She herself referred to the poems as “Tributes.” The most famous is the great “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.”