P A U L C O L L I N S .
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Homepage
Collins Library
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Biography
Paul Collins is the author of Sixpence House, Banvard's Folly, and Community Writing. Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism, a memoir on raising his young autistic son, will be published in 2004 by Bloomsbury. Collins edits the Collins Library imprint at McSweeney's Books, and his Collins Almanac compilation of literary oddities appears daily at collinslibrary.com. His work has appeared in New Scientist, Cabinet, and The Village Voice. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son.
He is currently writing The Trouble with Tom, a travelogue on the disappearance and posthumous travels of Thomas Paine's body, to be published by
Bloomsbury in 2005. His most recent title for the Collins Library is David Garnett's novella Lady Into Fox (McSweeney's, 2004).
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Books
Lady Into Fox, editor (McSweeney's, 2004)
Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (Bloomsbury USA, 2003)
To Ruhleben—And Back, editor (McSweeney's, 2003)
English As She Is Spoke, editor (McSweeney's, 2001)
Banvard's Folly: Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (Picador USA, 2001)
Community Writing (Erlbaum, 2001)
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Press and Interviews
December 2003
Tin House
Interview
By P. Genesius Durica
"I'm always thinking about the narrative. A lot of the time when I'm walking around my neighborhood on my way to the supermarket or something, I'm going over different narrative permutations in my head, like working a Rubik's Cube."
October 2003
The Believer
Read the Book That You Are Reading
By Paul Collins
"Discussed: The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, Italo Calvino's Bathroom, Repo Man, Mein Kampf, Stephen Glass, Mythical Golden Apples, The No Name Series, Emily Dickinson, Extremely Young Writers, Pandora's Box, The Thing Itself."
May 2003
The Village Voice
Review: Sixpence House
Human Remainders
By Mark Swartz
"Even literary travel writing should make you want to travel, not read. Take Alain de Botton's recent The Art of Travel. Relying on the able guidance of Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, and Charles Baudelaire, de Botton tours the Sinai Desert, England's Lake District, and Mauritius and offers meditative aphorisms like 'Travel is the handmain of thought' to send you on your own journey to the library. Paul Collins's version of the genre, on the other hand, makes you want to hit the road yourself."
May 2003
The Onion
Review: Sixpence House
Lost in a Town of Books
By Andy Battaglia
"Not much happens in Hay, but Collins' charmed storytelling wraps his random digressions into an engaging whole. Above all, Sixpence House amounts to a breezy meditation on books and the human foibles they chronicle and amplify."
April 28 - May 5, 2003
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Paul Collins Week
"Paul Collins is the founder and editor of The Collins LIbrary, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works."
April 2003
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Interview: Paul Collins Week
By Tommy Thornhill
"There was a headline in the magazine that read something like: 'Doorknobs Made from Blood and Sawdust.' When I saw that headline I had to read it. I then contacted the Plastics Historical Society in Britain and they had never heard of this stuff. That's when I knew I was onto something. When I find stuff and I have the reaction of What the hell is that?—that is usually when I start working on something."
April 2003
Booklist
Review: Sixpence House
By Keir Graff
"Collins' travelogue/memoir is a book lover's delight, minus the pretense you might expect from someone schooled in obscure eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature."
April 2003
Library Journal
Review: Sixpence House
By Scott Hightower
"This book is unique in its modesty in handling the largely historical topic of books as tokens of our humanity."
2003
Book Page
So Many Books, So Little Time
By Linda Stankard
"But with Sixpence House written and another book in the works, Paul Collins feels good about the future of his obsession and his livelihood."
December 2002
The Guardian
(London)
Review: Banvard's Folly
By Steven Poole
"This charming compendium of history's brilliant losers pays homage, in its title, to eccentric artist John Banvard, 'the most famous living painter in the world' in the 1850s."
August 2002
The Village Voice
Slips of the Tongue
By B. Kite
"An insidious device for producing unwitting comic stereotypes, English As She Is Spoke has sputtered incoherently in the background of our culture for nearly a century and a half now, and the extent of its damage to Anglo-American/Portuguese-Brazilian relations can only be estimated."
January 2002
Linguist
Review: Community Writing
By Heather Conrad
"Paul Collins's Community Writing: Researching Social Issues
Through Composition is a textbook designed to facilitate
the teaching of socially responsive writing within a
traditional classroom. In it, Collins puts forth a writing
curriculum focused on the practical application of theories
of social constructionism and pluralism to conventionally
structured composition courses."
January 2002
The Portland Mercury
Review: Banvard's Folly
By Kevin Sampsell
"Collins, who recently moved to Portland, has a great natural knack for telling these odd histories, and Banvard's Folly proves to be a great history book for fans of the weird underdogs of culture."
2002
Bookloons
Review: Banvard's Folly
By David Pitt
"Banvard's Folly is a splendid book, compassionate and smartly written. Collins does not hold his subjects up to ridicule, does not make them into drooling morons or nitwits."
September 2001
The Onion
Interview
By Andy Battaglia
"There's a tendency to have a 'greatest-hits' approach to history and literature, where a relatively small number of people or events are covered intensely while many, many others are not..."
July 2001
Insight on the News
Review: Banvard's Folly
By Jack Matthews.
"All the stories in Collins' book are interesting in their documentation of extravagant single-mindedness and unbalanced ingenuity."
May 2001
San Francisco Chronicle
Interview
By James Sullivan
"When I was doing work-study as a grad student, a professor wanted me to photocopy the table of contents of every issue of Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly—ever. I never got remotely close to finishing. I would just read the articles. It struck me how many of them were either by or about people I'd never heard of. It got me to thinking—to what extent is history buried?"
May 2001
Library Journal
Review: Banvard's Folly
By Michael D. Cramer
"All of Collins's subjects possessed character in abundance, and talent that may have been less so, and all have been reclaimed from obscurity for our enjoyment and edification. Highly recommended for all collections, particularly public libraries."
May 2001
Booklist
Review: Banvard's Folly
By Mike Tribby.
"An excellent assemblage of ingenious creators and their fascinating and bizarre brainchildren."
2001
Tucson Weekly
Review: Banvard's Folly
Historical Hysteria
By Jeff Yanc
"And in the end, Banvard's Folly even manages to become kind of inspirational, a twisted primer on the importance of self-confidence in the face of adversity, as well as a reminder of how thin a line separates true genius from rabid eccentricity."
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Photo by Kenneth Ulappa
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