Looking for Wolfe

(wording from August 2004;
compare current wording – compare wording from January 2004)

Collections of quotations from all works by Rex Stout will be continually added to this Book of Quotations as the volumes become available for study to the webmaster. I started reading Rex Stout in English in 1989, as soon as the Iron Curtain fell down – to wit, the barbed wire that used to mark the south-western (Austrian) frontier of my home city of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, back then still Czechoslovakia (click for more geographical details). The endless extent of the coiled barbed wire could be observed from my family’s garden, situated on a hilltop in that edge of Bratislava. The barbed wire, my hate of it, and of the people who concocted and guarded it with machine-guns, along with the shimmering view across the Danube river of the sprawling free country (not guarded by anyone) beyond the wire, are some of the permanent images and emotions of my childhood.

So, as an 18-year-old I for the first time set out to travel to Vienna – a laughable 40 miles away, but Communists would not let people cross the Austrian border prior to November 1989. One of the first things I searched for in the famous Viennese shopping street of Mariahilferstraße was an English-language bookstore; and there, a Rex Stout book in original English. In my teens I had only known Stout from Czech and Slovak translations of mixed (mostly poor) quality; Slovak libraries (and those in the neighbouring countries) have never, to this day, carried Rex Stout in English. Wolfe would sooner read Shakespeare in a Bulgarian translation than I would read Wolfe in any other language than English now that I’ve managed to learn English – to a great extent thanks to studying Rex Stout’s exquisitely idiomatic prose in the original language. Ironically, the only Stout volume that that Viennese English-language bookstore had available back then in November 1989 was the final (posthumous) volume 47 of the Nero Wolfe œuvre: Death Times Three. (That collection of novelettes was fairly new in those days, having for the first time appeared in 1985.)

Of course my burning desire right then was to find and read all 47 Nero Wolfe volumes in the original language as soon as possible. Little did I suspect what apparently impossible task this would turn out to be. Today (August 2004), nearly 15 years after I found and bought my first English Nero Wolfe paperback volume, it is with frustration and sadness that I conclude that I still haven’t been able to find/buy/borrow and read all 47 Nero Wolfe volumes – let alone Rex Stout’s other works. Five Wolfe volumes still remain unavailable to me to this day. Well, I know some of you folks will envy me this “delayed gratification” – and one has to hope it is only delayed – but this has been excruciating.

There have been dramatic improvements lately, though: in January 2004, a vastly expanded update of this webpage first appeared on the Internet; the Internet is an amazing thing; this page daily gets about 3 to 6 unique visitors from around the world, and guess what? Some of those who read my original January 2004 lamentation on this webpage were so moved by compassion as to send me, in all, no less than 12 totally new (for me) Wolfe volumes in only 7 months’ time, all the way from Indiana and Britain and Singapore (!), and previously, California and Florida and Colorado, whereas prior to the appearance of this webpage I had to go without a “new” Wolfe for a bunch of years, so that I was actually forced to start re-reading some of my “older” Wolfe volumes. I’ve spent dozens of hours creating this Rex Stout profile webpage, and it’s nice to see it reap such sweet rewards – heretofore unavailable Wolfe volumes; one cannot imagine a better or higher fee for a Rex Stout webpage creator! Most of the Wolfe volumes I’ve been fortunate to read I bought here in Slovakia; no additional ones can be purchased today (August 2004). I was lucky to borrow 2 Wolfe volumes years ago from a local library in central Germany where I spent a few seasons studying. Approximately seventeen Wolfe volumes were sent me for free by generous fellow Wolfe fans from around the world: some of these donors said, “keep them”, others graciously accepted the offer as stated below on this webpage and lent me the volumes (without getting anything in return from me), after which I sent the volumes back to them. (I of course kept electronic versions of these precious volumes with me for private study purposes, which is no violation of copyright.) Here are just a few names of those benefactors who, over the last 5 years or so, either sent me Wolfe volumes or have been instrumental in helping me locate some of the long sought-after Wolfe volumes: Mary Holm aka “WordDance”, Rich Friedman aka “Schwartz”, Suzi Johnson aka “Stampsuds”, Donald L. Smith aka “The Man About the Chair”, Sim Li Chuan, and Bevis Benneworth.

In this way Nero Wolfe, enamoured of inertia though he may be, has to travel thousands of miles around the globe these days, so that he can meet all those who need him. Fortunately – as always – he has Archie to keep his company. I wish we could all visit them in the Brownstone instead!

Slovak libraries are no help in locating missing Wolfes, as already stated; international inter-library loan is malfunctioning; and Western online bookstores (on Winnifred Louis’s incomparable Nero Wolfe page, Rex Stout fans recommend sites like – in alphabetical order – Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookFinder, Bookopoly, eBay, and Tattered Cover) are mostly useless as well, as they either charge you 300% more for the postage to Slovakia than for the book itself, or (that especially!) because a Slovak person cannot buy anything from them even if the postage were tolerable. The reason is that most Western online bookstores only accept Western posh credit-cards (Visa, MasterCard, and the lot), and not perfectly respectable Slovak credit-cards (such as my own Eliot), although within Slovakia (and on Slovak webpages) there is nothing you cannot buy with the Eliot card. To be eligible for a Visa or MasterCard in Slovakia, you need to have a higher-than-average, fixed, permanent monthly income; as a freelance translator and foreign-languages tutor I shall never meet that obligation: even if I were certain that some money would be flowing in in the months to come and could prove that, that proof would not be sufficient for the folks in the bank. (This has been tested.) And, my cash reserve tends to drop down to as dramatically low levels as Nero Wolfe’s own.

My frustration at the inability, after nearly 15 years of search, to find and read at least all of the Nero Wolfe volumes (ignoring everything else Rex Stout ever wrote) is so intense that I am willing – and I am making this offer to you right here – to trade all of the 33 Nero Wolfe paperback volumes that I currently possess, for a chance at least to borrow the 5 Nero Wolfe volumes (especially the single remaining full-length novel) that I have not been able to read to this day. If you’d like to accept this offer, please write to a@avenarius.sk .

Here is the one remaining Nero Wolfe full-length novel that I haven’t been able to find thus far (August 2004):

     Gambit   (1962)

And these are the 4 collections of Nero Wolfe novelettes that have been eluding me thus far (August 2004):

     * Curtains for Three   (1951)
     * Three Men Out   (1954)
     * Three at Wolfe’s Door   (1960)
     * Trio for Blunt Instruments   (1964)

If you’re willing to trade these 5 volumes with me (or simply lend them to me!), I shall present you with my 33 paperback English Nero Wolfe volumes in return – excellent condition. (I’ll send you the full list of the 33 volumes you can have from me after you get in touch with me – I nearly wrote “contact me” – via email.) My aim is not to collect and possess all the Rex Stout volumes; it is to read them all. If anyone could just lend me any of the elusive 5 Nero Wolfe volumes for a week or two, that would be – satisfactory.

A vision I have is that one day in this digital age (preferably sooner than in year 2046 when all of Stout’s copyright finally expires), the complete works of Rex Stout will be available for download on the Internet, for anyone anywhere in the world who intends to study them. Prior to year 2046, whether such downloads are to be free or whether they are to be purchased (for a moderate fee, it is hoped – and a fee that can be paid even by those who are denied the possession of Western credit-cards), must be decided by the copyright holder, the Rex Stout Estate. At any rate, the research of Rex Stout’s writings should not be hampered, in this high-tech age, by the embarrassing medieval circumstances in which Rex Stout scholars, particularly those outside the US, are currently forced to operate.

Today’s Rex Stout scholars are paying the price for Stout’s longevity; had the grandmaster’s life been shorter, his copyrights would have expired long ago. Rex Stout’s contemporaries, such as DH Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, are today (2004) out of copyright or are moving outside it – just because they died much sooner than Stout! There is no logic to the circumstance that DH Lawrence’s famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first published in 1928, is today outside of copyright, while Rex Stout’s premier Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, first published only 6 years later in 1934, is to be protected by copyright until 2046. Legal justifications exist for all of this – logic and common sense nevertheless protest. The copyright issue seems to be an illustration of the perversity of life; it’s as if tuberculosis or alcoholism were damnation in more ways than one: not only did Lawrence, Fitzgerald, etc. etc., die prematurely, but their heirs have likewise been punished by not being able to enjoy their ancestor’s royalties for as long a time as a healthy artist’s survivors. Rex Stout’s health was no less phenomenal than his intellect; thank heavens Stout did live long enough to write all the Wolfe yarns he wrote.

(end of wording from August 2004;
compare current wording – compare wording from January 2004)

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