I was first exposed to Paul Collins in the fifth issue of McSweeney’s, which published his essay on Solresol – a functional music based (as opposed to word based) language. This essay was eventually included in his book, ‘Banvard’s Folly,’ which I wrote about in my last update.

     Over the past year or so I’ve stumbled across articles by Mr. Collins in a few different places, so I emailed him to see if he had any sort of listing of where his more ephemeral work appears. This is what he had to say:

     “The other two places I do a lot of writing for [Besides The Believer and the Village Voice – which I mentioned in my email] are the arts quarterly Cabinet and the science weekly New Scientist. I’ve probably done 7 or 8 “Histories”
columns for NS in the last year — stuff very much in the Banvard’s Folly line. Cabinet has a couple of my articles on their website, and I think NS allows a free 1-week tour of their online archives. On the book front, I’ve got a memoir/travelogue coming out in April (“Not Even Wrong”) from Bloomsbury, and I’ve edited a new title coming out from the Collins Library in March — David Garnett’s 1922 novella ‘Lady Into Fox.'”

     As you well know, I am insane. As such, I have collected all the Collins-Penned Articles that are available online and stuffed them into a word file for convenient download.

Paul Collins Articles: Collected

Other Paul Collins Links:

  • The Collins Almanac is a “Selection of excerpts from old books, magazines, and newspapers,” which is updated every weekday.
  • The Collins Library is
    a “reprint series by McSweeney’s Books of unusual out-of-print literary works. Each volume is newly edited and typeset, and is selected and introduced by series editor Paul Collins. They are produced in very small runs, and can be bought at McSweeney’s online store , independent booksellers, and at Amazon.com.”
  • Collins on NPR, promoting the release of one of the Collins Library titles: ‘English as She Is Spoke”
  • The McSweeney’s Interview: Part One and Part Two.

     If anyone can be bothered to turn up an audio file of solresol being ‘spoken’ i’d love to hear it. I’ve had no luck with Google so far.