Saturday Links

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, the Catholic Beethoven, rare Frank Lloyd Wright books, Vermeer’s last work, and more.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (ca. 1670-75). Source: The Leiden Collection

Good morning! John Hill writes about rare Frank Lloyd Wright books at the International Antiquarian Book Fair in New York: “Wright made many books in his lifetime, but his most famous is still his first monograph, the so-called Wasmuth Portfolio. Consisting of 100 plates in two volumes, Ausgefübrte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright was published by Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin in 1910. Although I didn’t come across a rare and very expensive first edition (complete copies go for around $70,000 online), the booth of Waccabuc, New York’s Appledore Books had a second issue of it from 1924 sitting on a shelf alongside a couple other Wright publications. This Wasmuth is a relative steal at $6,500, but given that the second version is different than the first in notable ways—it is one volume instead of two and is about half the size of the first—it is not as coveted. The relative importance of the first edition can be grasped in Appledore’s pricing of a ‘very scarce’ 1910 prospectus for it at $3,000—nearly half the price of a second edition, just for a tiny pamphlet! Appledore’s label for the item indicates that the 1910 portfolio sold for $32; this may sound like a bargain, but that is the equivalent of around $1,000 today. This makes the new $150 Wright monograph just published by Phaidon seem reasonable.”

Paul du Quenoy argues that the Met’s “big bet” on contemporary opera has been a loser:

“Hopefully we see the Met thriving artistically, and that we will have created a new artistic foundation that will help it continue to grow,” Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb told the New York Times in 2023, referring to his “big bet”: programming “new works” by living composers. That includes brand-new pieces premiering at the Met, very recent ones that premiered elsewhere, and contemporary works that have been around but are coming to New York only on Gelb’s initiative.

Just how well has this programming done? Sales for the recently completed 2023–2024 season are up slightly: 72 percent capacity versus 66 percent for 2022–2023. However, adjusted for steeply discounted tickets—as little as $25, including taxes and fees—the 2023–2024 season’s box office revenues reach only about 64 percent of their full-price potential. It’s hard to say that the “big bet” is paying off.

Brian Patrick Eha writes about homeschooling in Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai: “Homeschooling for my parents had a religious aspect. Not so for Sibylla. It is neither a refuge from a hostile secular culture nor a way of investing her son’s education with the sort of purpose that the reformer Horace Mann once recommended (­unavailingly) for American public schools: to guide students “outward in goodwill toward men, and upward in reverence to God.” At first she has no intention of homeschooling Ludo past preschool age. Indeed, the novel is not really about homeschooling; it is far too capacious for that. Knowledge and its limits, the need for roots, the burdens we heap on our children and the burdens they heap on us—these are its themes. But the note of skepticism toward traditional ­schooling is sounded early and often. ‘The business of getting a baby from womb to air is pretty well ­understood. . . . Presently its talents come into the open; they are hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility.’”