In 1987, when this map was printed, many streets and squares in Prague still bore names favored by the Communist regime. Don’t use it to navigate the city today, or you’ll get lost! Click the image to enlarge it.
If this image were included in an extra-illustrated binding of the novel Necessary Errors, it would follow page 166. Or it might be the endpapers. (For an explanation of extra-illustration, click here.)
“Of all bookish fads, that of extra illustrating is the most interesting,” the New York Times wrote on 19 June 1897. By 22 February 1903, however, the Times had changed its collective mind: “The extra-illustrator of books, when he has stalked abroad in modern days, has been a pathetic figure.”
Extra illustration was—is?—the practice of rebinding a book so as to include lithographs, portraits, maps, original manuscripts, and ephemera. It was also sometimes called “Grangerizing,” because it caught on after readers began DIY-illustrating James Granger’s 1769 Biographical History of England. Its heyday was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because so many source materials were gathered and protected in extra-illustrated volumes, examples are prized by archivists and scholars today. The Huntington is currently showing an exhibition of extra-illustrated books, and the Folger has an online exhibit on its website.
All this is by way of saying that I’ve put together a collection of photos, ticket stubs, maps, and postcards that an extra-illustator could, if he were so inclined, bind into a copy of my novel Necessary Errors. Some are personal mementos; some I bought last month on Ebay. I’m going to be posting them on this blog in bits and pieces, over the next couple of months, under the tag “extra illustrated.” I’ll also try to post them on Tumblr, which I don’t really understand, so have patience. In each post, I’ll append binding instructions—that is, I’ll say which page the illustration should follow. But please don’t take this too seriously!
In a real-time phone interview, Michelle Dean of Flavorwire asked me whether I’ve written a flâneur’s novel and wondered how obsessed I am with the nineteenth century. Also recently published were two email-mediated Q&As: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle asked me about my neighborhood and my favorite Brooklyn authors, and I told CBS News that the answer to their question about my reading habits was classified.
My novel Necessary Errors goes on sale today. Norman Rush has called it “very well put together, polished, dry but tender, ferociously observed,” and Christine Pivovar has written that “Reading the novel feels like meeting up with friends.”
Please visit your local bookstore and consider buying a copy, or consider ordering one online from McNally Jackson, Barnes & Noble, or another retailer (more links in the right sidebar and here!).
And if you’re in Brooklyn, please come to Brooklyn’s Book Court tomorrow, Wednesday, at 7pm for the launch, featuring a reading by me and special guest stars Christine Smallwood, Seth Colter Walls, Mark Krotov, and Alice Gregory.
Three thoughtful new reviews of Necessary Errors have just been published. In the Kansas City Star, Christine Pivovar writes that
Crain does a fantastic job of immersing the reader in the setting, capturing both Prague’s physical details and its atmosphere. He handles the characters with equal depth and heart. They feel simultaneously realistic and storylike, which might be an effect of their being the sort of people who like to picture themselves as characters in a novel.
Meanwhile, in Open Letters Monthly, Y. Greyman reflects on the book’s themes in an almost philosophical register:
As Crain’s novel so wonderfully captures, there’s something to the experience of wandering, or aimlessness searching for an aim. In some ways, as Jacob finds in his frustrated efforts to write a story, “it was a story about not wanting to tell a story.” Necessary Errors is 480 pages, but it might have been half or twice that; it might have been any number. Since there’s little plot to be had, few ribbons to tie up, we, alongside Jacob, roam the city restlessly, exploring for the sake of exploring, going down side streets that may reveal meaningful, memorable moments or may, on the contrary, not lead anywhere. Those who have wandered will recognize how poignantly Crain distills the essence of that time.
And for Bloomberg, Hephzibah Anderson focuses on the novel’s fiscal analysis, including “the economics of ambition, love and idealism against the backdrop of a country on the cusp of wrenching fiscal and social change.” Writes Anderson, “As the novel unfolds, money becomes a versatile metaphor.”
