
The Company They Keep–now in paperback
November 10th, 2008 | Skip to comments
Just in time for you to buy yourself the Christmas present you wanted last year, The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer’s magnificent work on the Inklings, has just been released in paperback.
Amazon (and other online vendors) has them in stock for a mere pittance ($19.80).
Here’s what I said in my original review:
The best book on Lewis since David Downing’s Most Reluctant Convert is Diana Pavlac Glyer’s engaging and comprehensive study of that formidable writers group known as the Inklings. As I said in the blurb I created for the dust jacket:
“The Company They Keep is an astonishingly thorough work, lucidly and boldly illuminating the collaborative writing processes of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and their colleagues during the most fruitful period of their careers. Diana Glyer’s impressive achievement immediately supersedes in scope and authority all previous treatments of the Inklings in extant biographies and encyclopedia.”
And I can add that the impressive documentation featured throughout is complemented by the stirring annotated bibliography provided by David Bratman, components that only increase the value of this amazing work that should be in every library, and on the shelf of every Lewis enthusiast. Diana’s careful biocritical research gives us uncommon insight into the effects of Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams on each’s other in-progress manuscripts, and serves as a corrective to many hastily arrived at conclusions drawn by previous commentaries following Humphrey Carpenter’s lead. This volume so surpasses in wisdom and cogency the late Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, I would urge you to sell your copy back to the used bookstore from whence it may have come, take the proceeds, and buy this one. It is a model of responsive, responsible, lucidly written scholarly work worthy of Lewis’s own high standards. It both educates and entertains. Selah.

[…] Many thanks to Bruce Edwards for reminding the readers of his popular CS Lewis & Inklings Resource Blog that The Company They Keep, Diana’s book about the Inklings, is now in paperback: […]
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