Bookish Links — May 2016

Image via Pixabay.

• For the past few weeks, The Oddest Inkling has hosted a guest post for each poem in Charles Williams’s 1938 collection Taliessin through Logres. In case you missed them, here’s the whole list of posts.

• Speaking of Arthurian literature, here’s a great post by David Russell Mosley on why the King Arthur legends have been such a fascination for writers and readers for so long.

• Just in time for Memorial Day, Rob Stroud from Mere Inkling published this very moving piece about Geoffrey Bache Smith, a poet, World War I veteran, and one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s first writer friends.

• In that same post, Rob recommended this half-hour documentary about Tolkien’s early life, his service in the First World War, and how the war effected his writing. I recommend it too.

• Not one but three recordings of W. H. Auden, the first of which is him discussing Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve.

• And they said print was dead: sales of physical books are on the rise, while e-book sales drop.

• For lovers of medieval marginalia, here’s an article on the surprisingly-detailed history of medieval rabbit cartoons. (HT: Daniel Esparza)

• And on the subject of art, here’s a compilation of Gustave Doré’s amazing illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”