Don't judge a Dorothy Parker by her cover

If you were at a book sale and saw this book on the table amid hundreds of other books, would you look twice at it?

The old adage about not judging a book by its cover must have been reverberating through my subconscious the other day when I came across the book above, a soiled, jacketless specimen with a splitting spine.

I about passed it over, but saw the author's name, Dorothy Parker, and, being a fan of her wit and writing, I decided to give it a courtesy look. I didn't have this particular title of hers and wanted to browse its contents. I could always buy a decent copy if I liked it. The book is After Such Pleasures, a second printing from Viking, 1933, a short story collection that includes her O. Henry award winner, Big Blonde.

But I was in for quite a shock when I opened the book.

Signed copies of her books are scarce, even more so for this title. For the price of a junk book, I brought it home to research the mystery surrounding the inscription.

Parker inscribed the book: "To Helen DeWitt-- Who was so darn nice to me-- Gratefully, Dorothy Parker Presbyterian Hospital January 16- (I think)"

I wish she had added the year to the date. It could be a contemporary inscription with regard to the book's second printing in 1933. Or it could be from Parker's last years when she was frequently in and out of hospitals--the 1960s. The ink would indicate a fountain pen, which would have been more consistent with the 1930s, though.

And what of Helen DeWitt? She took good care of Parker at Presbyterian Hospital (New York, I assume), so undoubtedly she was a nurse. And did DeWitt already have the book and asked Parker to sign it, or did Parker send it to her as a thank you? And why that book?

Clues for nailing down the background on this inscription are thin, to say the least. I have a copy of her biography, You Might As Well Live, by John Keats (Simon & Schuster, 1970) and have researched it for clues. All I could find out about hospital stays is what I reported above--that she was a frequent patient in her final years in the 1960s.She lived from 1893-1967. A sardonic sense of humor and razor-sharp wit most often characterize her writing and personality, but happiness eluded her through several marriages, alcoholism, and suicide attempts. Her poem Resume, from Enough Rope,1926 is perhaps her best remembered:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

This poem was recited by Angelina Jolie in a scene from the film Girl Interrupted.

Not wanting to get too biographical of Dorothy Parker, I'll just mention a few more books in my collection that may be of interest to anyone wanting to get acquainted with her prose and poetry. In addition to short stories and poems, she also was well known in the 1920s and 1930s for her book reviews for the New Yorker, collected in a volume titled, Constant Reader (Viking, 1970).

But if it's her verse you're interested in, try her collected poems from Viking, 1936, Not So Deep As A Well, which includes her first three volumes of poetry.

Young actors frozen in Time

Found between the leaves of some inconsequential book (translation: I forgot which one), these young actors are forever young on this accidental bookmark.

Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow (their images anyway) were supposed to travel back to Time for a new subscription for the sender. At least that's what Time Magazine hoped with this magazine insert. Instead, they went directly into a contemporary hardbound book (that much I remember) and now to the vast impermanence of cyberspace via this blog.

The Time Archives dates this piece to February 7, 1969.

Hoffman would have been coming off an astounding pair of films, The Graduate (1967) and the soon-to-be-released Midnight Cowboy (1969), with Little Big Man (1970) on the horizon. He was definitely in a zone.

Mia Farrow had scored big with Rosemary's Baby (1968) and would be paired with Hoffman later in 1969 with John and Mary.

And you could find both appearing on this 1969 Time Magazine cover in a timeless, youthful pose. Forty years ago.

Boring Books

This post is book-related, but it doesn't really fit the format of this blog. Rather, it's a YouTube video about books. Very boring books. It's so boring that it's actually funny (your humor mileage may vary). I appreciated the humor in it and so am sharing it here.

I actually watched the whole five minutes plus, but if you just can't get that far, fast forward to the last book at 5:10 on the time bar. There, the video ends appropriately, if not mercifully, with a title by none other than M. Eugene Boring!



The creative mind behind this is author/songwriter Nick Currie, who uses the pseudonym Momus and has the YouTube name, bookofjokes. His latest book is titled Book of Jokes and is reviewed by the LA Times here.

A Shaker Sister's Drawings

Continuing down the botanical pathway I started on yesterday beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, here's a recent find that takes root in the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire: A Shaker Sister's Drawings: Wild Plants Illustrated by Sister Cora Helena Sarle (Monacelli Press, NY, 1997).

This quietly elegant volume of drawings evokes the simplicity and subtle beauty of the Canterbury Shaker Village in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to two Shaker historians, June Sprigg Tooley and Scott T. Swank, who have provided the Introduction and Afterword for this book, and to David Larkin who designs illustrated documentary books, there is a printed record now to share the creative artistry of Sister Cora Helena Sarle and the Shaker village that inspired her.

Cora Helena Sarle came to live there in 1882 at the age of fifteen and eventually committed her life to the Shakers, signing the Shaker Covenant in 1888. Under the watchful and encouraging eye of Elder Henry Clay Blinn, the village patriarch, Sarle's artistic talent was discovered and nourished. It was also seen as a useful tool for creating a record of botanical life in the village and for teaching the younger people who came to live there about nature.

Sister Helena (she went by her middle name) flourished creatively and within the Shaker community. Her notebooks of drawings were accompanied by Elder Henry's written text. Their work remained in the Canterbury village until a Shaker collector was able to purchase them for a private collection sometime after Sister Helena's death in 1956.

Now, the notebooks have returned to Canterbury where the Shaker village is a National Historic Landmark site and museum, and they inspired the publication of this book, a facsimile edition of Sister Helena's illustrations. Examples of her work follow.

Found in the Bonnie Brier Bush

I found this little volume by Ian MacLaren last night: Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1895).

The tan cloth covers with green decoration and titles was the eye catcher along with the obvious age. Just the kind of book that might yield an interesting bookplate, inscription, or a long-gone bookseller's label. Or who knows what. You want to follow that winding path on the cover into the leaves...

Ian MacLaren was a pseudonym for Scottish author and theologian, John Watson (1850 to 1907). He traveled to America at least a few times, once as the Lyman Beecher lecturer at Yale University, and the last trip would be his last anywhere. He died traveling through Iowa.

As an author, Watson/MacLaren was best known for his tales of rural Scottish life, this book, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, being his first.

The front endpapers of this volume share a bit of the book's provenance--an ex libris and a gift inscription with names other than that on the ex libris, which reads: FROM THE PRIVATE LIBRARY OF FREMONT LEIDY.


The gift inscription was dated 1897, only a few years after the book's publication. Looks like Mae Simpson gave the book to Zola Martin that year, and that's about all that can be known of previous ownership.

However, flipping through the pages, I found a few interesting surprises. Pages 24-25 opened up to reveal what looks like a four-leaf clover and a few other unidentifiable botanical specimens. Could this lucky piece of clover have been picked beside the bonnie brier bush?? I haven't a clue what a bonnie brier bush is, but it would make for a nice symbolic gesture to have stored these plants in a book set in their habitat.


I doubt it. This edition was published in America (Dodd, Mead in NY) and the folks whose names appear on the front endpapers were likely Americans who bought the book in local area book shops. So these four leaves of green are likely from the red, white, and blue.

But how lucky to find a four-leaf clover, if that's what it is (it's four leaves of something), whether in a field, a bonnie brier patch, or in a book pressed between leaves of another kind. And not only once, but twice! Toward the end of the book, there's another four-leaf clover pressed between the pages, but this one has a detached leaf. Still present, but detached nonetheless. A broken four-leaf clover? I wonder if that is something akin to a broken mirror bringing bad luck.


At least I have one intact. I thought my wife would like the book with the good luck clover. She likes small, old, decorative books accenting the decor of various rooms in our home. Plus she's half Scotch-Irish (the other half being Italian) and we have fond memories of a visit to Edinburgh, which I discovered after the purchase was where the book's author lived and ministered for a time.

But with all those signs pointing to a purchase, it was the book's dedication that sealed the deal. The author states simply: To my wife. And so to my wife it goes. After all, twenty-seven years ago today we exchanged vows and rings and got this marriage kicked off.


So in lieu of a Hallmark card, why not say Happy Anniversary with a meaningful antiquarian book? But good luck finding one with an old four-leaf clover inside.

Remembering the victims and heroes of 9/11

Remembering the disbelief and horror of eight years ago today, as well as the heroic efforts in the aftermath of the tragedy, I once again have opened this book of photographs to view the grim, necessary reminders of what happened that day:

Above Hallowed Ground: A Photographic Record of September 11, 2001, by photographers of the New York City Police Department

The book is edited by Christopher Sweet and published by Viking Studio/Penguin Group, 2002.









Two years ago, I visited New York City for the first time since 9/11--five years after the attacks. I drove by where the Twin Towers once stood and took a harbor tour to get this view from the water of that empty space. It was an indescribable feeling.


Contrasted with the NYPD photo, below, of the same spot on 9/11.


This NYPD photo shows the Woolworth Building coming into view after the World Trade Center Towers fell. It was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1931.


And my photo from the water in 2007.



National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center

Pentagon Memorial

9/11 Flight Crew Memorial

American Airlines Flight 11: A Memorial List of the Victims

American Airlines Flight 77: A Memorial List of the Victims

United Airlines Flight 175: A Memorial List of the Victims

United Airlines Flight 93: A Memorial List of the Victims

Flight 93 National Memorial, Pennsylvania

FDNY Memorial Wall

NYPD Memorial

New York - New Jersey Port Authority Police Department September 11, 2001 Memorial

For Whom the Bell Tolls Gold

When I opened this recently acquired Hemingway classic, a first edition with no jacket, I found a newspaper clipping and a typed note. I also found a silverfish.

The first two items are called flyaways, or things left behind in books, which get blogged about here on occasion.

The silverfish is an evil insect to book collectors and libraries, a destroyer of books and paper. This one wished it could have flown away, but merely scampered and was itself destroyed rather easily by my thumb.

No signs of damage to the book, so the it couldn't have been there too long.

The newspaper clipping is a 1965 column, Gold in Your Attic, by Van Allen Bradley, who wrote a book by the same title all about finding rare and valuable books, or gold, in attics and other unlikely places. The book also lists prices for many collectible books and has become collectible itself among bibliophiles.


This article focuses on Hemingway's rare first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, published in France in 1923. Bradley recites auction prices of $475 and $525 for unsigned and signed copies. I would think Hemingway's signature would have added more than 50 bucks to the value, but this was 1965.


Bradley did note "a good copy in original paper cover" and the owner of For Whom the Bells Toll made note that in the typed memo to self or any future owners perhaps:

This is a "First Edition", complete with Dust Jacket, so keep this in mind when you decide finally to dispose of it--after having read it, of course.

It should be worth retail around 8 to 10 bucks.

Somebody wasn't paying attention. I got this book without the jacket. It's also too bad that the writer of the note left a piece of acid newspaper in a book to leach out the discoloration you see on the pages in the photos above.


So what would a jacketless first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls go for in today's market? There's a wide range of prices from $50 to around $300, depending on condition and what the bookseller believes the book is worth. Add a jacket and your prices climb easily into four figures. And if your copy has Hemingway's signature on it, add another zero for a five-figure sum.

And what of Hemingway's first book, mentioned in Van Allen Bradley's 1965 column--the $475 to $525 piece of gold in the attic? Three copies turn up pretty quickly (as of this writing) and show an appreciable appreciation in price since 1965. How about $25,000 to $65,000? And if you happen to find a signed copy in your attic, you truly do have a big chunk of that precious metal. I find one copy and it's priced at $225,000... Now there's some real gold in your attic!

A. Edward Newton: The Book-Collecting Game

In a recent post about finding Helene Hanff's inscription in one of her books I purchased, I had intended to include another book with an inscription by its author. The editing process separated the two, concluding that each needed to stand on its own.

So here I want to share a nice inscription from the well-known bibliophile and writer, A. Edward Newton, in a copy of his book, The Book-Collecting Game (Little, Brown and Company, 1928)

Coincidentally it was found at the same resale shop as the inscribed Hanff book. I would think that both books were donated from the same collection and I will now be the steward of a small part of that collection for the next 20 or 30 years. Hopefully.







On the front free endpaper, Mr. Newton offers the following to an unknown recipient:

Book-collecting.
It's a great game.
If you don't believe it,
read and be convinced.

A. Edward Newton

Nov. 20, 1928

Geoffrey D. Smith (Professor and Head, Rare Books and Manuscripts, The Ohio State University Libraries) has written an informative article about Newton and his collection for the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS).

Any bibliophile will enjoy perusing FABS' list of member clubs and linking to their sites. Plan to spend a little time there.

Karius and Baktus: Thorbjorg Egner's dental trolls

Cute, lovable little trolls, right? Wrong! Unless you like cavities and tooth decay. Read on...


Here's an unusual and interesting book for children: Karius and Baktus, written and illustrated by Thorbjorn Egner. It's a European classic that uses the cartoonish trolls to teach children about proper dental care and how to prevent cavities.

Originally published in 1949, the copy pictured at left is an extremely rare copy of what I believe to be the first American printing (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962) of this children's book. It was translated from the Norwegian by Virginia Allen Jensen. And speaking of Scandinavia... troll lovers should check out The Trolls of Scandinavia.


I'm sure many books or pamphlets have been written since to educate children about good dental hygiene, but I couldn't say how many preceded Egner's story. I'd have to think that his was a pioneering effort or at least near the beginning of such such efforts to publish such literature. At any rate, the story became quite popular and the book has gone through many printings. Films and stage plays have even featured the almost likable little trolls.



These little trolls are the main characters in this humorous and charming little tale. Karius and Baktus are dental trolls who live in the mouth of a young boy named Jimmy. They thrive on candy, soda, and other sugar-based foods. This diet enables them to build a nice home (cavity) in Jimmy's tooth and he gets a pretty bad toothache as a result. A visit to the dentist destroys their home and prevents them from returning. But Jimmy must learn how to get rid of them altogether to protect the rest of his teeth. The author's illustrations add a humorous touch to deliver the message about taking care of your teeth.

I should have read this many years ago. Karius and Baktus built a subdivision in my teeth. All's well now, but these little devils didn't go quietly or cheaply.

To an unknown booklover from Helene Hanff

In my collection of books about books, one stands out for its author inscription. I found this gem on a bookscouting trip a few years ago and can only surmise the demise of a kindred spirit for this book to have found its way into a resale shop.

The book is The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, by Helene Hanff, published by J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1973. It's not really a book about books, per se, but it is the sequel, or follow-up, to the cult-status favorite of bibliophiles everywhere, 84 Charing Cross Road, the story of a twenty-year correspondence between New York writer and English literature lover Helene Hanff and Frank Doel of Marks & Co., the antiquarian book shop whose address was 84 Charing Cross Road.

The book and the movie of the same name are personal favorites of mine. So, you see, the book has to be included in the books about books section of my library and it resides right next to 84 on the shelf.

My copy of Duchess is a first edition, but what makes the book special is Helene Hanff's inscription on the front free endpaper:

To an unknown booklover,
Helene Hanff

I had read an unsigned copy before I found the signed copy, and near the end of the book she recounts her last day in London and a stop by her publisher's, Andre Deutsch, to sign twenty books for a group of Australian booksellers arriving the next day. She liked to personalize her books to fans with long or witty inscriptions, and not knowing who would get these books, she came up with the "unknown booklover" inscription.

Obviously, she repeated the practice stateside because my inscribed copy comes from her American publisher, Lippincott, in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, it has to be a fairly rare inscription I would think.

When I found the book and saw her handwriting, I thought to myself, "I am now one of your unknown booklovers!" What are the chances of finding that book with that particular inscription? I should have gone out and bought lottery tickets that day while Lady Luck was smiling down on me.


I also have an inscribed copy of the British edition published by Andre Deutsch, 1974. This one I got the more conventional way by buying it from another dealer. It has an amusing and somewhat mysterious inscription from Ms. Hanff, which I will write about another time. I'm still trying to find out if the names mentioned in the inscription tie into one of her anecdotes in the book.

In the [hopefully] very distant future, my demise will be at hand and I'd like to think that this book will find its way into the hands of another unknown booklover and the torch will pass. But until then, I'm the unknown booklover. Or at least one of a very small and very lucky group.

Napoleon's Books

I started this blog three years ago with a post about Napoleon and his disregard for a certain bookseller, Johann Palm, whom he had executed. Now I have learned of his disregard for certain books beyond the seditious pamphlet for which Mr. Palm lost his life.

The photo to the left is of Napoleon's library. Looks like Napoleon cared about his books and preserved them in fine fashion. But he didn't care about all his books. Those tomes that did not meet with his approval were tossed into the fire. If he was traveling and had been given books to read, those he did not like were simply tossed out the window of his carriage.

I discovered this bit of information in a little book compiled by Christopher Morley: Ex Libris, published in November of 1936 for the First National Book Fair, sponsored by the New York Times and the National Association of Book Publishers.



In Morley's introduction, titled This Little Scrapbook, he states,

"I have purposely avoided the famous golden texts and purple passages of the bibliophile's evangel. You will not find Emily Dickinson's There is no frigate like a book, nor Wordsworth's Books are a substantial world, etc.; not even the well-loved but now too familiar rubrics from Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Stevenson, Gissing and the others. Most of the fragments here are contemporary, and it was the editor's pleasure to choose not only literary bits but also odds and ends of trade and technical palaver."

To that end, there is the odd habit of Napoleon reported in fragment number 7, which the Index attributes to James Westfall Thompson in Byways in Bookland:

In the hour after dinner, unless that had been a state affair, Napoleon used to glance over new books, throwing those which did not interest him upon the floor or into the fire. When on the road, it was the emperor's usual practice to pitch ephemeral literature, and books which did not please him, out of the windows of his carriage. This explains why not infrequently books bearing his arms are to be found advertised in sale catalogues of London and Paris booksellers.

Luc Sante, in a Wall Street Journal article last year commented on private libraries while writing about his own. Referring to Napoleon's traveling library, he supports what Thompson's anecdote alludes to--that Napoleon was a voracious reader. Sante writes that Napoleon traveled with a field library of some 40 volumes of religious texts, another 40 of epics, 60 of poetry, 100 novels, 60 histories and some historical memoirs. That's a regular Parnassus on Wheels, which brings us back to Christopher Morley. His inclusion in Ex Libris of Thompson's anecdote about Napoleon's flinging books into fires and the countryside is taken from Thompson's essay about the books Napoleon possessed and read. As stated earlier, this and other of Thompson's essays were collected in a volume titled Byways in Bookland, a copy of which is now on its way to my library. I look forward to reading more about what Napoleon read. In the meantime, I'll be reading more of what Christopher Morley compiled in Ex Libris and will post here about the more interesting fragments, as he calls them.

Chennault - Way of a Fighter

I read an article about something going on over at Facebook where users are asked to pick up the book closest to them, turn to page 56 and update their status with the fifth sentence on that page. Closest book, page 56, fifth sentence. Verbatim.

Why? I have no idea, but I'm sure there are some intriguing entries. I don't know if this has spread to the blogosphere, but after reading the article, I went upstairs to my office and the first book I saw amid a pile of books on my desk, work table and floor, was a 1991 reprint of the 1949 Flying Tiger history, Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Lee Chennault, by Claire Lee Chennault, Major General, U.S. Army (Ret.); James Thorvardson & Sons, Tucson.

Chennault was commander of the 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941-42, otherwise known as The Flying Tigers. Hired by the Chinese government to defend China against the Japanese, their training actually began before America's entry into the war, and just days after the the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Flying Tigers were flying combat missions.

Before I get to the Facebook game, there is something much more important to mention about what I found in this book, other than the 5th sentence on page whatever, whatever. I found this book last spring at a library sale and was thrilled at what I discovered inside. The blank page preceding the title page (verso of the frontispiece) has a wonderful inscription from famed World War II ace fighter pilot for the Flying Tigers, "Tex" Hill:

To my dear friend and fellow Fighter Pilot, a man I admire most. Thank you for the sacrifice you made for our country. All the best. "Tex" Hill

My first thought, after getting over the excitement of finding this inscription, was whose book was this? As Chennault died in 1958, he's quickly ruled out, but would have been the top contender otherwise. So who, or which fellow fighter pilot, did "Tex" Hill admire most? Perhaps some biographies of Hill would shed some light on the provenance of the Chennault book.



Back in January, I blogged about another Flying Tigers fighter pilot named Joe Rosbert. He lived in the Houston area where I found the Chennault book. I also read that he died recently, so the possibility exists that the Chennault book signed by Hill could have belonged to Rosbert.

At any rate, I now have a companion book to for the Rosbert book and what looks like the beginnings of a Flying Tigers collection.

Finally, for anyone interested in the fifth sentence on page 56, here you go:

More strained silence and the faint buzz of approaching heavy-engine noise.

This sentence is part of a scene being described by Chennault as he surveys an airfield in Nanking under attack by Japanese fighter planes.

Something Permanent: Walker Evans, Cynthia Rylant

You know there are moments such as these
when time stands still
and all you do is hold your breath
and hope it will wait for you.
-Dorothea Lange

A picture is worth a thousand words. So goes the old adage. And so goes the haunting photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975), best known for his documentation of everyday folk and scenes during the Great Depression in America.

Cynthia Rylant, in Something Permanent (Harcourt, Brace & Company; 1994), doesn’t need a thousand words to tell the stories she sees in Evans’ photographs. She employs the poetic form to marry simple subjects with lean verse. Even the titles of the poems cut right to the subject; all but one contain a single word.

But you’ve only to spend a few minutes with an Evans picture to realize that the subject matter is anything but simple. Rylant’s poems, inspired by the stories in the pictures, accomplish the same thing, inviting the reader to look beyond the immediate image that emerges in an economy of language.

I found this book a few weeks ago while out bookscouting and was captivated by the Walker Evans photos. After I got home with it, I began to examine the photos more closely. Evans’ photos are famous and some looked familiar, some did not. I also looked more closely at the interpretive poems created by Rylant for each picture. The short poems, like the accompanying images, invite you to imagine more, to read between the lines, to expand the story and try to understand the circumstances of a frozen moment, and, perhaps more importantly, what might have happened afterward.



This image of a cemetery and the unusual grave marker was my initial favorite in the book (favorites rotate in this work like a carousel) and aroused a flood of questions and imaginative thinking. And I think Ms. Rylant gives a fine accounting in the companion poem, Tombstone:

There wasn’t much excitement to be found
anywhere nearby,
so people would just go to the cemetery
when they wanted to give their
visiting company something interesting to do,
and they’d show them the man and the dog,
and folks would marvel
and say things like,
how do you s’pose they
got them ribs in that dog
and
how much you figure a tombstone
like this’d cost?
Then, without fail,
Before leaving
Each had shyly to
Lean over and stroke that lovely dog’s head,
Swallowing back the “good boy”
That was on their wondering lips.

This is interesting. Rylant chose to imagine the reactions of strangers upon visting the cemetery and spotting the life-like sculpture of a man and his dog. I might have been inclined to approach the image from an historical perspective, wanting to create a story about who the man was, how he died, and what happened to his dog.

But Rylant travels back to rural Mississippi (photo credits indicate this photo is titled Mississippi, December 1935) and creates a mood for the time. During the Great Depression, in a small town or rural area, there couldn’t have been much to do nor money to do much of anything. Going to the cemetery could pass for entertaining visitors, where it was certain a particular tombstone would capture their imaginations.

This must have been the case with Walker Evans as he traveled through Mississippi and came across this tombstone in this cemetery. And that’s how Rylant chose to approach the image in verse—from a visitor’s perspective.

Cynthia Rylant, I discovered, is a writer known primarily for her books for children and young adults. I thought she might have been primarily a poet so I was looking for more information about her and her writing. Apparently, this book was aimed at a young adult audience, but its content transcends any age group she or her publisher might have intended for this book. There are a couple of informative sites that provide the details of this author’s background and bibliography:

http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1628/Rylant-Cynthia-1954.html#ixzz0LyrO1bF1

http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/children/rylant.html


Interestingly, or appropriately, the first image I found of Rylant was a picture of her with her dog. That on the heels of the cemetery picture and her poem, Tombstone.

And about that cemetery… that got me to wondering about the title of this book, Something Permanent. Where do we find permanence in a constantly changing world? Death? Or is it the perceived permanence of a moment captured on film, a split-second from the continuum of time? But photographs aren't permanent; they fade away eventually, revealing an impermanent medium.

A quotation at the beginning of the book, repeated at the beginning of this post and again below) may hold a clue. From photojournalist Dorothea Lange, a contemporary of Walker Evans, Rylant has included the following lines:

You know there are moments such as these
when time stands still
and all you do is hold your breath
and hope it will wait for you.

These poeticized lines are taken from a statement by Lange in reference to her first attempt at social documentary through her lens. But she will always be best known for the photograph, Migrant Mother.Could it be that Something Permanent refers to time and these photographs represent an attempt to borrow a piece of the permanence, much like the displaced migrant mother seeking more permanence in her life--home, food, etc. Perhaps Something Permanent speaks metaphorically for the human condition and the spirit of hope against hopelessness, both of which flow through these images and words. I don't know for sure.

But one thing I do know, Something Permanent is truly something exceptional to read and absorb.

One giant leap... forty years ago

Forty years ago last night, we stayed up late to witness history being made on the grandest of scales. I was with my family on vacation at my grandparents' home in South Tamworth, New Hampshire. My grandparents were born in the horse and buggy days when the novelty of motorized vehicles was still just that--a novelty. And now we sat with them watching three men fly to the moon nearly seventy years later. We were staying up late to witness two of those men actually walk on the moon.

A few months shy of 13, I must have struggled to comprehend the magnitude of what was taking place. Having traveled by commercial jet all the way from Houston, where the astronauts lived and trained for this mission, I might have taken it somewhat for granted, having "grown up" with the space program in my back yard, so to speak. I had no perspective of life without cars, airplanes, or rockets. But I knew my grandparents did and that became part of the story for me. Metaphorically, 1969 was a coming of age for both the space program and me.

Twenty years later, I went to work at NASA, for one of their many contractors, reporting for duty at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Building 17. From 1989 to the late 1990s, I enjoyed working in an environment steeped in a young, but vibrant, history and scientific innovation. The opportunity arose from time-to-time to see some of the pioneers of manned space flight through presentations to our branch and signings at area bookstores.

I wanted to share some of those books here. I started to include biographical information about the astronauts and a synopsis of each book, but have decided to just share the evidence of my brush with these heroic men--their handwriting in my books.

This is far from being a great collection, nowhere near complete. No signed Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, Wally Schirra, or Neil Armstrong. And Buzz Aldrin's latest book, Magnificent Desolation, along with his 1973 autobiography, Return to Earth, are waiting patiently for signatures (hopefully!) at a signing later this week.

But this little collection has a great deal of meaning to me, not only for the signatures I obtained in person, but for the memories they evoke for a period in my professional life as well as a period in my childhood when the heroes were baseball players and astronauts.


For reviews, thoughts and opinions on these and other books about space exploration, I recommend the blog, A Space about Books about Space. In no particular order, the books are listed below.

Here’s Moon Shot by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. Slayton died in 1993, a year before the book was published, but I did get the signature of the first American in space, co-author Alan Shepard. That's pretty special.



Jim Lovell’s book is Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, and I got to meet him and get his autograph on this book a year before the Apollo 13 movie reintroduced the drama of his failed flight to the moon, but successful return home against great odds. Tom Hanks played Lovell in the film.




John Glenn may have been the most special because I returned to the neighborhood where I spent my childhood between 1960 and 1967 to meet Glenn and his wife at a book signing just blocks away from my old house.

Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth, having accomplished that feat in 1963. In 1998, at the age of 77, he flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-95).

His book, John Glenn: A Memoir was published the following year. He and his wife were both very gracious and kind at the signing, as I got to shake his hand and exchange a few words.

Preparation for lunar orbital and subsequent lunar landing missions was accomplished by Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo flight. Walter Cunningham was one of the astronauts flying that mission and wrote The All American Boys in 1977 and updated it in 2003 (my copy below), as a review of the manned space program from his days to present.



Michael Collins was the third, and often overlooked, member of the Apollo 11 historic mission to the moon. While Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, Collins circled, as the command module pilot, amid fears that he would return alone to earth. There were reservations about the reliability of the lunar landing module being able to get Armstrong and Aldrin off the moon. They all thought the chances were 50-50. I have Collins' 1974 autobiography, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, that covers his Apollo 11 mission and the rest of his astronaut career that preceded the mission (he retired in January 1970), but it's his 1990 book, Mission to Mars, that I have signed. Actually, he signed a bookplate for this one.



Scott Carpenter, another of the Mercury Seven astronauts, signed my copy of his 1991 novel, Steel Albatross--the only fictional work in this collection.



The Flight Director during the Gemini and Apollo programs was Gene Kranz, best remembered for his work with the Mission Control team in guiding Apollo 13 back to earth safely (see Lovell's Lost Moon above). He was portrayed by Ed Harris in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 movie of 1995. Harris also played John Glenn in The Right Stuff (1983), making him the only actor I know of that has played both an astronaut and a flight director.

I did not get to meet Kranz in person for this signature, but I did have the pleasure of hearing him speak at a branch meeting one year and recount his days at Mission Control. His book came out in 2000 and I was lucky enough to find a signed copy a few years ago on a bookscouting trip.

There are other books in my collection by astronauts of the era represented by those above, such as Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon and Chris Kraft, the first flight director, who was instrumental in establishing the Mission Control Center. They are not signed, nor have I had the opportunity to meet the authors.

And that brings me back to my small collection that looms large among my other collections. It's the personal touch associated with the books and the special memories associated with the space program, particularly those of my family sitting around a black and white television with poor reception, in a small New England village, to watch a man walk on the moon--the same moon we could see from the front lawn. How fantastic and magical it all seemed. Forty years ago.

The Declaration of Independence

Today, July 4th, or Independence Day, Americans celebrate the day a delegation of colonists under the rule of George III and Great Britain declared the United States (thirteen colonies) an independent nation.

During the 1970s, in conjunction with the approaching Bicentennial anniversary of this event, the United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service published Signers of the Declaration: Historic Places Commemorating the Signing of the Declaration of Independence. This title is Volume XVIII in the series, The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings. The series editor was Robert G. Ferris. My copy is a revised edition, dated 1975, but it retains the Foreword written by Richard Nixon from the White House, Washington, D.C.


Part I of this book provides historical background , Part II provides biographical sketches of the signers of the Declaration, and Part III surveys the historic sites and buildings connected to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is this last part that is of particular interest to me because of family history.

In June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson was asked to draft a document to present to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in support of the Resolution for Independence favored by most colonies. Jefferson sought a quiet place where he could work on his assignment. Near the edge of town, at the corner of 7th and Market Streets, he rented a third floor room from Jacob Graff, Jr.



I am a descendant of the Graff family. Jacob Graff, Sr. was my fifth great-grandfather, but my direct line of descent goes through another son, John Graff, brother of Jacob, Jr. So it's actually a great-uncle of mine who built the Declaration House in 1775, and a year later rented the room to Thomas Jefferson for a few weeks so he could draft the Declaration of Independence. The house was destroyed in 1883, but the National Park Service rebuilt it in 1975 from old photographs in time for the Bicentennial.

The rear endpapers of the book depict the Graff House as it may have appeared in 1776 when Jefferson rented a room there. The sketch below is of the proposed reconstruction to be completed in 1975. Below that image is a photo of the finished house.


The Declaration was submitted to Congress on June 28th, where it was debated and edited (minor edits by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin). But Congress created a final draft with some pretty significant omissions, including Jefferson's passage condemning the slave trade.



Some interesting facts from the book:

• On July 4th, all colonies except New York voted to adopt the Declaration.
  
  
• The document was first read to the public on July 8th outside the Pennsylvania State House.
  
  
• New York approved the Declaration on July 15th. Four days later Congress ordered the document prepared on parchment for signature.
  
  
• The 56 signers did not sign as a group and did not do so on July 4th.
  
  
• The official signing took place on August 2nd, 1776. Fifty men signed at that time, five more signed later in the year, and one more the following year.
  
  
• On January 18th, 1777, Congress finally authorized the printing of the Declaration.
  
  
• Declaring one's independence is one thing, actually getting it is another. The fighting had begun before the Declaration and continued for seven years afterward. In the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain officially recognized the Americans' independence, which they had declared in 1776 and fought so hard for in the ensuing years.

One of the Patriots in the fight for independence was my fifth great-grandfather, Caleb Whiting.

Happy Birthday, America!

Kids on Strike!

Kids on Strike! by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1999) provides a fascinating, photographic trip into 19th and early 20th century America, with a focus on child labor in the streets, mills, and mines.


I found myself thumbing through all the images first and then going back to read the text. The images are poignant and captivating. When I first picked this book up a few weeks ago, I was immediately reminded of Shorpy, a site I've linked to here for a few years. I almost expected to find Shorpy in the archival photos in the book that documented children working in the coal mines. The mines, and the children laboring in them, featured in this book were in Pennsylvania. Shorpy worked in Alabama. But the photographer, Lewis Hine, was the same for both Shorpy and for the photos in the Kids on Strike! book.

In addition to the photographs, a well-researched text also deals with child labor and the attempts to organize, strike, and change the laws to protect the children. Text and images comprise an interesting historical document about American labor history and the children who helped build American industry.

I'll let some of the photos speak for the subject matter of this book:

The Autobiography of David Crockett

Yesterday, April 21st, was San Jacinto Day in Texas, an observance of the anniversary of the Texians' defeat of Santa Anna and the Mexican Army, the final battle in Texas' fight for independence. That battle took place on April 21, 1836 amid cries of "Remember Goliad!" and "Remember the Alamo!"

While the massacre at Goliad does not resonate outside of Texas the way the Alamo's legacy does, the Battle of the Alamo enjoys enduring historical recognition beyond state lines thanks to larger than life heroes fighting against overwhelming odds, as well as the numerous books on the subject and, in the last century, cinematic portrayals. The epic battle spawned its shares of heroes, legends, and myths, all of which apply to the heroic fallen defender, David Crockett. And it's his autobiography that inspired this post today.

Yesterday, I was cataloging books from a recent purchase (Friends of the Houston Public Library Sale) and got to The Autobiography of David Crockett (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), with an Introduction by Hamlin Garland. This is actually a reprinting of three autobiographical Crockett narratives. I was oblivious, until later, of the significance of the day and its connection to what I was reading. At least I recovered in time to take the cosmic cue and get a few thoughts down on paper, or the hard drive as it were.

Garland's Bibliographical Note, which follows his Introduction, outlines the books that comprise this volume. A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834) is presented here "precisely as it originally appeared, with a few misprints corrected" (so "precisely" isn't really accurate). Next up is An Account of Col. Crockett's Tour to the North and Down East (1835), reprinted here with the omission of all "verbose and repetitious political speeches" except one. Scattered arguments and reflections at the end have also been omitted. The third and last “autobiography” in this volume is Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836) and is not seriously accepted as having been written by Crockett (it ends with him writing about his last hours at the Alamo). It is included here, minus the Preface by Alex J. Dumas and the final chapter recounting the last hours.

The last volume ends with Crockett’s supposed thoughts as conditions deteriorated rapidly around him.

March 4. We have given over all hopes of receiving assistance from Goliad or Refugio. Colonel Travis harangued the garrison, and concluded by exhorting them, in case the enemy should carry the fort, to fight to the last gasp, and render their victory even more serious to them than to us. This was followed by three cheers.

March 5. “Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! Throughout the day.—No time for memorandums now.—Go ahead!—Liberty and independence forever!”

The next day, March 6th, the Alamo fell into the hands of the Mexican Army as they routed the greatly outnumbered Texians.

In the days leading up to March 6th, can you see Crockett writing this and more as the final hours--his final hours-- counted down? That Crockett would spend any precious time with a journal, dipping his pen into an ink well to scratch out a paragraph or two, between Mexican cannon volleys into the crumbling Alamo walls seems ludicrous. That the manuscript found its way to a publisher after the bloody battle ended with Crockett dying is even more preposterous. And how he died is a subject for much debate (another forum, another time).


Here is one version about how the last Crockett narrative in this 1923 volume came to pass. In Studies in American Humor: Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas: Death and Transfiguration, William Bedford Clark writes:

Under various imprints, the Exploits sold steadily and well on both sides of the Atlantic in the decade or so following its appearance and so pervasively was its authenticity accepted at face-value (despite abundant internal and external evidence to the contrary) that as late as 1956 Crockett’s definitive biographer, James Atkins Shackford, felt compelled to devote an appendix to what he hoped would be "its final refutation." Shackford cited a reminiscence of the Philadelphia publisher A. Hart as to the work’s genesis:

The late Richard Penn Smith was in Carey & Hart’s one day, when Edward L. Carey told him that they had a large number of copies of Crockett’s "Tour Down East" which didn’t sell. Crockett had just then been executed by the Mexican authorities at the Alamo, and Mr. Carey suggested to Mr. Smith, that if they could get up a book of Crockett’s adventures in Texas, it would not only sell itself, but get them clear of the other books. They secured all the works on Texas they could lay their hands on, and Smith undertook the work. Mr. Carey said he wanted it done in great haste, and asked him when it would be ready for the printer; his reply was, "Tomorrow morning." Smith came up to the contract, and never kept the printer waiting. The result was that a great many thousands of copies of the book were sold and all the balance of the edition of the "Tour Down East." (Shackford, p. 274)

So a publisher with less than admirable motives knowingly published a fabricated "autobiography" and helped elevate an already popular Crockett into a hyper-mythologized American hero. Many future writings about Crockett and the Alamo would refer to this journal as a source of factual information.

I don't know how early or how often the Carey publication might have been debunked, but Hamlin Garland did just that for the 1923 Scribner's collection. More than 30 years later, James Shackford, referenced above, published the most factual and historically accurate biography of Crockett to date in 1956. Unfortunately, "historically accurate" ran into a buzzsaw of "mythical" and media marketing with the Disney Davy, starring Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. For the youth of the 1950s and 60s, myself included, Crockett was all about coonskin caps and swinging his rifle, "Ol' Betsy" at the Alamo. And so the legend grew, from Carey to Disney, some 120 years of an enduring popularity.


Back to the 1923 Scribner's collection, which may or may not have contributed to perpetuating a myth with the Crockett's Texas narrative, Hamlin Garland wrote in the Bibliographical Note that it was worthwhile to reprint "not only because it is itself interesting, but because the existence of such a book shows that there was current at the time a popular legend and literature of the frontier which made it possible for catchpenny hacks to manufacture a reasonably characteristic, reasonably convincing "autobiography" of a dead hero while his death was still in the news."

Some things never change. Biographers, regardless of the medium, would serve history better by adopting Crockett's motto (which I think learned as a kid from Walt Disney):

"Be always sure you're right--then go ahead!"

A Boy's Vacation Abroador Serendipity in an Antique Mall

This book was a nice find years ago when I was doing a lot of genealogical research on my family history: A Boy's Vacation Abroad: An American Boy's Diary of His First Trip to Europe, by C.F. King, Jr. The book was published by the C.M. Clark Publishing Co. in Boston, 1906.

I thought about the book recently while reading a passage from Nicholas Basbanes' Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture; HarperCollins, 2001. The passage is found in the book's chapter titled, A Splendid Anachronism, page 199. Basbanes writes:

The first known usage of the word serendipity--its provenance in antiquarian terms--can be dated precisely to January 28, 1754. On that day, Horace Walpole, a prolific eighteenth-century author remembered mostly for the letters he posted to a wide range of interesting people, characterized an unexpectedly pleasant occurrence to one of his correspondents as typical "of that kind which I call Serendipity." Walpole cited his source for the coinage as The Three Princes of Serendip, an old Persian fairy tale in which the central characters are "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

A few years before the young King published his trip diary, my great-great-grandparents had also taken a trip to Europe, the letters and photos from which were recorded in booklet form by their four daughters, who presented it to their parents as a gift. The book centered on the trip, but also segued into family history and provided historical photos for illustration. It's truly a treasure in my family history archives.

One day, browsing around a bookcase of old books in an antique mall, King's book caught my eye. Why I picked it up, I can't say. The shelves were full of old books with similar spines and covers. But this one had something--maybe the envelopes depicted on the cover--that made me select it to look through. What I discovered right away were photos from the same ship my great-great-grandparents had sailed on--the S.S. Arabic, out of Charlestown, Massachusetts.


I had been immersed in family history research when I found the book, but I had not been looking for, or even remotely thinking about, finding books that had direct references to some aspect of my family's history. That I should stumble upon this book was pure serendipity. And now I had photographic images to apply to the written descriptions of the ship from my great-great-grandmother's letters. I could almost see her and my great-great-grandfather walking around on one of the ship's decks.

Aside from the family history connections, I found the book interesting because of the young man who wrote it and because of a letter laid in the book by, presumably another young man, across the country, who had read the book and been inspired enough to write the young author. King wrote back--the letter I found in the book--and was humbled by how far his little memoir had traveled.

If this book had no reference to an episode in my family history, I would have still purchased this book. I'm a sucker for old letters found in old books--tucked away and preserved for some future book hunter to extract from among the leaves. I also like first-hand accounts of travel or adventure from other times, long-ago enough that I can't relate to them in my world. That creates a new adventure for me.




King wrote from his school, Saint John's in Manilus, New York, as evidenced by the school's letterhead. He writes to a Mr. Pendexter in Austin about his astonishment over someone as far south as Texas reading his book. He then proudly reports that the first printing is sold out, most of the second printing is gone and a third is underway. And he must have really been beaming about the money he earned from it--a bit of financial serendipity for the young traveler/author. He provides the following sales figures in his letter: "I get $750 on the first edition or fifteen cents a copy and $1250 on the other editions." The next sentence belies what I presumed was a privileged status in life because of travel to Europe with his brother and father on vacation: "Every little bit helps and I need the money."




I found this old photo of the School King attended in Manlius, NY on a rootsweb site for Manlius. Looks like a place for the wealthier kids, but maybe he was barely able to get in and needed to earn money to stay.


I suspect Mr. King grew up in a well-to-do home with a certain amount of privilege, but you couldn't tell by the way he wrote. He seemed truly appreciative, if not humbled, by his opportunity to travel abroad, conveyed in his words at the beginning of the book:

"This is my first book. I have worked awfully hard to write it. It is the first time I ever tried to write a book and, of course, I do not know how well I have succeeded. It may be a terrible "frost" and then again it may "catch on." I hope it will "catch on." I lost a lot of fun writing it.

I am proud of the pictures because they are good. That much of my book I feel sure will not be criticised very severely, because I had a good camera and everybody who has seen the pictures says that they are all right.

This book is the result of a promise I made to my father. He told me that if I would be good at school and catch up in my studies, and also if my brother Cabaniss was good and caught up in his studies, and I would agree to write a complete diary about my trip and write it every night, he would take me with him on his vacation to Europe. And so this book is the result."

King writes further that while he was recording the days' events in his diary, he never dreamed it would be published as a book. he wrote only to keep a promise to his father and because he thought it would be a good keepsake to look back on in later years.

And at least one other reader in Texas has enjoyed reading it, albeit more than a century later.

Amanda Dunbar

I recently discovered a young artist of immense talent, Amanda Dunbar, when I found a copy of her book, Guided by Angels: Divinely Inspired Paintings, Longstreet Press, Atlanta, 2000.

The book exhibits 132 pages of the young Texas artist's work, which has landed her on Oprah, ABC's World News Tonight, PBS, and many other regional and national broadcasts.

Dunbar's amazing talent and vision extend to three distinct styles: French Impressionism, American Expressionism, and Abstract. From the video below, you can also see what a genuinely gracious and giving person she is.



Her painting A Journey in Brotherhood, pictured below, captured my attention as I had just come across a few books that featured photos and paintings of people reading books. With Dunbar's book, I noticed the trend and think I may have the start of a pictorial post about reading, or readers. Stay tuned for that.


I find something in this painting that I connect with--something that evokes the words Amanda Dunbar wrote to accompany A Journey in Brotherhood: "Reading builds knowledge and knowledge builds understanding."

Farewell, Horton Foote

I just learned that Horton Foote died yesterday. A wonderfully gifted writer with a seemingly simplistic style that belied much deeper themes and complex characters, Foote wrote the Oscar-winning screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies and the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama The Young Man From Atlanta. I am only familiar with several of his works, but The Trip to Bountiful is my favorite.

I had an opportunity to meet him several years ago at a book signing in Houston. His Texas home in Wharton was south of Houston about an hour or so and I suppose he came up from there to talk and sign books at a Houston bookstore in conjunction with the publication of Charles Watson's, Horton Foote: A Literary Biography (University of Texas Press, 2003). Also, if my memory is correct, The Trip to Bountiful, in which his daughter Hallie was performing, was being presented in Houston at that time. Yes, the Houston Chronicle article on Foote, in the first link of this post, just confirmed that for me. Whatever it was that brought him to town, I was glad of it and made sure I was there well in advance of his arrival.


When I got to meet him and have some books signed, he was such a kind and gracious man to exchange a few words with. When I showed him my copy of Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow, his eyes lit up and he asked in an excitable tone that caught me off guard: "Where in the world did you get this?" He looked up at me, eagerly awaiting my answer. He really wanted to know. "Down the street, actually, at another bookstore almost twenty years ago," I answered.

I don't know that he had ever seen this book before, though it's hard to imagine he hadn't. He held it and really looked it over, and said something to the effect that it was really something or really rare--I'm not sure what exactly. But I was thrilled that I had brought something that elicited such a reaction as that. I almost gave it to him, but couldn't make myself do it. I had really been planning on getting his signature in that book.

Published by the University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, 1985), the word Tomorrow is repeated three times to represent three different pieces: William Faulkner's 1940 story of the same title, Horton Foote's 1960 teleplay for CBS's Playhouse 90, and the 1972 screenplay for the film version that starred Robert Duval as Fentry. Duval contributed an essay for this collection, in which he states: "I still point to Fentry as my favorite part." This was before Lonesome Dove and Mr. Duval may have updated that statement to replace Fentry with Augustus "Gus" McCrae.

Mr. Foote signed my books and I asked him about Wharton and if he kept in touch with Robert Duval. He said he did and had talked to him on the phone not long ago. I commented that I'd love to have him sign the book as well. Mr. Foote smiled and said yes, that would be nice and that maybe it would happen one day.

I thanked him, we shook hands, and I moved on. For awhile, I watched others talk with him and observed what kinds of interesting things they brought for him to sign. I never heard another exclamation to equal the one my little paperback got. Little could I have known when I bought the book in 1985 that it would provide such a treasured memory for me.

Horton Foote lived 92 years. The few minutes of those 92 years that he gave me will last a lifetime. The world lost a class act and a true artist.

Farewell, Horton Foote.

The cadaver that went to war

What happens to dead bodies, the subtitle of this book asks. Well, I "dug up" a fascinating anecdote in this intriguing book that provides an answer for one dead body that went to war.

Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?, by Kenneth V. Iverson, M.D. (Galen Press, Tucson, 1994) is the book. Despite it grisly title (and there are some squeamish chapters), it is packed full of literary and historical references about death that are quite interesting.

The most fascinating incident I came across in a random sampling of contents concerns a dead body used as a decoy in World War II and the key role it played in the war's outcome.

As the Allies planned an assault on Sicily, they schemed to deceive the Germans that they intended to land elsewhere. Cutting to the chase and an ingenious plan... the cadaver of an anonymous pneumonia victim was dressed as a Royal Marine and provided with phony papers about plans to invade areas east and west of Sicily. The corpse was strategically placed in the sea, in a simulated drowning, to where it would wash up along a part of the Spanish coast into the hands of German spies in the area.

Operation Mincemeat, as the plan was called, worked beautifully. The Germans took the bait hook, line, and sinker (if that's not too distasteful an analogy). They moved a significant number of troops to the suspected area of attack and the Allied invasion of Sicily ensued successfully against a much reduced defensive force. Mincemeat had the further benefit of causing the Germans to disregard later discoveries of genuine documents uncovered a few days after the D-Day invasion and later the drive into the Netherlands. In each case, critical information recovered was disregarded as another ruse by the Allies.

A more detailed account of Operation Mincemeat can be found here or in The Man Who Never Was, by Ewan Montagu--a 1954 book about the operation.

Mickey Mantle for bibliophiles

Last weekend, TRISTAR Productions in Houston hosted a sports memorabilia show downtown. Monday's Houston Chronicle reported that the current recession seemed to be on hiatus for attendees at the show. Sales were very good with purchases trending away from trading cards and more toward autographs and other memorabilia. Many athletes (retired and current) were there with pen in hand ready to sign. For a fee, of course.

I wondered how Mickey Mantle fared in this memorabilia bubble. I have in my collection the very first Mickey Mantle book: The Mickey Mantle Story, by Mickey Mantle (with a whole lot of help, I'm sure, from Ben Epstein), Henry Holt & Company, [1953]1955, second printing. It's a great book for baseball fans, especially Mantle fans, of whom there are untold thousands.

This book is rare enough in its early printings and with the dust jacket, but what sets my copy apart from the rest is the fact that Mickey Mantle held it in his hands and signed his name to it for some lucky fan long ago. The look of the ink indicates this was an early signature. That's value added for this copy because Mantle went crazy with the autographs late in his life when the sports memorabilia industry seemed at its peak. Earlier signatures are not as easily found.


I can find only two other signed copies, which are valiantly trying to keep the sports memorabilia bubble propped up with extraordinarily high prices. Here's a signed copy for $3,500 and here's one even higher for $6,900.

Autographs on baseballs, photos and other objects don't approach these numbers. So, is the fact that this signature is in a collectible book behind the high expectations for the signature's value? Perhaps the symbiotic relationship between book and sports memorabilia is more attractive to the bibliophile than to the baseball collector.

I paid x amount for my signed book (second printing) without a jacket, and then a bit less for an unsigned first edition with a jacket. The price difference between the two was surprisingly little. I married the first state jacket to the second printing signed book. The result would be the earliest signed printing, with jacket, on the market--if my copy were for sale, that is. And if I were to list it for sale, could I reason that my copy, in comparable condition to the two above and in an earlier printing, be worth more than $6,900?

Only the market could answer that question, but I would doubt it. I don't know that $2,000 or even $1,500 would find a buyer. Of course, I would aim a lot higher. But even with the optimistic numbers at the show in Houston last weekend, in spite of the current economy, I don't think the Mick could knock one out of the park for my book.

To an Old Book, by Edgar Greenleaf Bradford

This poem, from Howard S. Ruddy's compilation, Book Lovers Verse (Bowen-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1899), speaks to all bibliophiles in describing that instant bonding experienced with the serendipitous discovery of an interesting old book.

Old Book forlorn, compiled of ancient thought,
Now bought and sold, and once more sold and bought,
At last left stranded, where in time I spied,
Borne thither by an impecunious tide;
Well thumbed, stain-marked, but new and dear to me,
My purse and thy condition well agree.
I saw thee, yearned, then took thee to my arms,
For fellowship in misery has charms.
How long, I know not, thou hadst lain unscanned,
Thy mellow leaves untouched by loving hand--
For there thou was beneath a dusty heap,
Unknown. I raised thee, therefore let me reap
A harvest from thy treasures. Thee I found--
Yea, thee I'll cherish; though new friends abound,
I'll still preserve thee as the years go round.

So who was Edgar Greenleaf Bradford?

A forgotten poet of the late nineteenth century, it appears, though he shares an unusual middle name with a fellow poet of the same century, who "made it," the better-known John Greenleaf Whittier. Was the 19th century not big enough for two Greenleafs?

I can only find a few fragments about Edgar Greenleaf Bradford, one of which was a review of his book, Search Lights and Guide Lines, circa 1890s. The reviewer's comments on Bradford's writing style are not flattering:

"The author has rather a cumbersome vocabulary, and in his endeavors to be concise is sometimes obscure."

So in this modern age of the google search, that's all that can be found about a published poet's work? Sad. But his stuffy Victorian language still gave a good account of what it feels like to find an old book to your liking.

Accidental bookmarks among the leaves

I recently found a couple of trivial things between the leaves of old books that were obviously used as bookmarks. Well, one was obvious, one debatable. At any rate, they appear to have been spur-of-the-moment markers when a conventional bookmark was not readily available. And I thought about a brief post on Bibliophemera, but they're not really ephemera.

First up, the obvious. Say you're reading Hubert Wales' riveting [yawn] The Yoke in 1908 and you just can't put the book down. But you have to. You haven't got a bookmark handy, so you have to improvise. You search your immediate surroundings for something, anything... what to use... what to use... Your eyes fixate on the dust jacket of a nearby book. Aha! Just take that useless thing off the book and tear off a piece to mark your place.

Apparently that's what happened with this book's long-ago reader. A stiff piece of paper, say in the neighborhood of 80-100# stock (look and feel of a paper jacket), torn in such a way as to leave a message for a reader (me) 100 years later to ponder: The book title on the back of the jacket. The more I look at the shape and design, I'm not sure it was a dust jacket. It could have been. It certainly appears to be a cover of some kind because of the thick stock. No matter, it's the printed message found on it that counts.


Could there be a more appropriate emergency bookmark than a piece of paper with IN AN EMERGENCY printed on it? This was either the donor book's title or an ad of some kind for another book. Either way, this emergency bookmark came with its utility printed on it.


Bookmark number two: A leaf among the leaves of Essays: English and American. This item is not so obvious as a bookmark. It could have just been put in the book to press and was forgotten. This leaf marks the beginning of the essay, Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, by Charles Lamb. I can't place any significance on the relationship between it and the essay. Again, it may not have been a marker at all. In a kind of role reversal, the book may have been preserving the leaf. One-hundred years later, it still looks as though it were picked up off the ground on a cold fall day in New England.


Now to research the bookplate in The Yoke (the reason I bought the book), which will find its way into Bibliophemera.

Countee Cullen and "A Birch" to Katherine: A gift of two poets on Inauguration Day

Arriving back home late Sunday from a weekend trip, I was greeted with a copy of this book in my mailbox: Color, by Countee Cullen (Harper & Brothers, NY, 1925).

Cullen was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, an explosion of black literary and artistic creativity comprising a cultural and social movement within the African-American community.

When I purchased the book more than a week ago, the significance of its probable delivery date was lost on me. I was busy preparing for a book show and was interested in the book for two reasons, and resale was not one of them.

One, I remember stumbling onto Cullen's writing in one of my college literature anthology texts. I had no recollection of having studied Cullen's work in the classroom or on my own. Those bloated Norton anthologies are packed with so much literature, that a professor can only hope to skim off a representative sampling of the intended theme of the collection (American literature of the twentieth century, British literature to 1800, etc.).

I recall thumbing through a twentieth century anthology many years later, mid-90s maybe, and really liking what I found in the several poems that made up the Countee Cullen section. I do remember wondering why I had never heard of him before. So when I saw this book for sale online, I decided to buy it and get reacquainted with his work. I knew he was a fine wordsmith and I would enjoy new discoveries in his art.

The second reason for the purchase was the mention of some items lurking inside the covers waiting to be discovered and explored. The book's description included a bookplate and a poem handwritten on the front endpaper to "Katherine" from another poet, H. Campbell Scarlett (a literary name if ever there was one!). Mr. Scarlett's obituary was also included. All that sounded like a story, maybe even a mystery, waiting to be unraveled. Certainly, I knew I would explore it here in this format.


I have not been disappointed with either the content or the artifacts of the original owner. This book arrived a few days in advance of Inauguration Day, and today America has its first African-American president. In honor of this historic event and in deference to President Obama's theme of unity, here's an offering of Countee Cullen's writing from Color:

Tableau
For Donald Duff

Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day,
The sable pride of night.

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.

Oblivious to look and word
They pass and see no wonder
That lightning brilliant as a sword
Should blaze the path of thunder.

I expected such writing, but the real prize in this book is what was preserved in it by the book's owner, Katherine. Her... what... lover, admirer, friend... H. Campbell Scarlett wrote the poem and is described in the obits as a writer and a teacher. That he aspired to write poetry is evident. That he ever ascended to a higher stage than book inscriptions is not. Doesn't mean he didn't--I just can't find any hint of evidence to support it. But he summoned his poetic muse to express his feelings to Katherine and Katherine apparently was moved enough by his feelings, his friendship, or his love to keep it for what I would suspect was the rest of her life. Here is Scarlett's heartfelt attempt to compare Katherine's beauty to that of a birch tree against a deep blue sky:

A Birch
To Katherine

The trunk, cream white picked out in black
The leaves part green, part touched with golden brown
A birch, etched 'gainst the sky's deep azure blue
By this, dear one, shall I remember you.

A birch, all gold and white and black and green,
A birch, caressed and teased by every passing wind
A birch, as lovely as these words would be
By this, dear one, do thou remember me.

On the facing page are two clippings of the poet's obituary. I am intrigued by the bread crumbs of a life or lives left behind in books. Just a trace of something--a poem, an obit, an inscription, a photo--can create an event, a story, or an entire life around that something.

Certainly, more questions than answers exist. Questions that come immediately to mind are: Why this book for a gift? Why the birch tree for a metaphor? And what exactly is the metaphor? And if the two were lovers, why was that love unrequited, as evidenced by the fact that Scarlett died unmarried and without children? There is no way to know the answers to these questions, but that's okay--I have my own.

This was a teenage romance. Scarlett's obits list his age at death as 55. The date of the obits is May 17, 1965, which means Scarlett was born about 1910. This book by Countee Cullen, Color, was published in 1925. This particular copy is an early reprint, likely within a few years. That makes Scarlett somewhere around 16 or 17 when he wrote to Katherine, who was part black, part white... and there's the the birch tree metaphor--the black and white skin of the tree. That's also a scandal within the Scarlett family. Campbell was survived by by his father, who is listed in the obits as a judge, which, in the 1920s, most assuredly makes him and son Campbell white. The judge's re-election could not withstand an interracial dating scandal in his family and so young Campbell was forbidden to see the light-skinned black girl he was so smitten with. He had the heart of a poet, but the firm hand of the judge overruled his emotions. And Katherine never forgot her young poet and the gift of his feelings inscribed in a book by an exciting young African-American poet. Katherine kept the gift of two poets close to her and when Campbell died some 30 years later, she felt moved to leave another scrap of Campbell's life, symbolic closure perhaps, and, in effect, her own feelings toward a young man whose love could not overcome the social conventions and restrictions of the day. A sad ending.

Of course, I could be way off base here and probably am. But however else the story might have unfolded, I'm sure it's not near as interesting as my version.

A Flying Tiger in the kitchen

Joe Rosbert is a charter member in the Greatest Generation. During World War II, Rosbert trained as a Naval aviator before America's involvement in the war. Later, he left the Navy to serve with the Flying Tigers of the original AVG (American Volunteer Group) in China, 1941-42.


After the war he traveled around the globe, combining business with pleasure as a businessman, airline exec, and chef. He documented his life in an interesting and unusual format: An adventure story cookbook.


Rosbert published his life story in 1985: Flying Tiger Joe’s Adventure Story Cookbook, Giant Poplar Press, Franklin, NC. He chronicles the interesting and the dangerously adventurous into six parts, further divided into chapters, and concludes each part with recipes pertinent (sometimes) to the regions represented by these stories.

Naval aviator training in Philadelphia segues into hoagies, scrapple and crab cakes. Part II concludes with a chapter on the Flying Tigers in combat. Appropriately, Rosbert invites his surviving fellow pilots to contribute recipes for this part of the book. "Tex" Hill contributes Oriental Barbecued Pork Ribs and that's about the only recipe with flying and fighting in China. But these guys are guest contributors and anything from them is welcome. Rosbert kindly provides a brief bio of each.

The chapters that comprise Part IV give way to the "real" Chinese dishes such as Duck Tongues Moon Chen, Kung Pao Ching Ting, and Szechuan Duck. Following a lengthy list of Chinese recipes... what's this? Pasha. A traditional Russian Easter dessert. Skip over the next recipe and you crash into Squirrel Stew a la Chennault (contributed by General Claire Chennault). Still ahead in the same section, the Flying Tiger Joe ventures into Southern Style Biscuits and Clam Chowder and Whiskey Sours.

Don't try to make sense of the placement or sequence of these and other recipes in certain chapters--just enjoy the ride! You're flying through this book with a fighter pilot after all.

Rosbert had a passion for living--from flying to fine cuisine--that is undeniable the deeper you get into his book. He engaged Japanese pilots in dogfights over China, survived a harrowing crash in the Himalayas and the months-long journey back to civilization, helped start a cargo transport airline, opened and operated a hotel and later a restaurant that shared a name with the title of this book.

Flapper doodles and water chairs

This English text book belonged to a teenaged girl in 1925, who seemed more interested in art than in her English lessons.


Then again, check out the subtitle of the book (Projects in Expression) and maybe she was doing just as the subtitle suggested. The young artist here is assumed to be Anna Grace Caughron from Manhattan, Kansas. That's the name written at the front and back of the book.

I call these drawings flapper doodles because the women portrayed look like the young girls of that era who were called flappers. The drawings are pretty elegant for doodles, but I'll stick with doodles because obviously the young lady in a long-ago English class was doodling in her book while she should have been paying attention to her lesson. Or maybe she was multitasking.













Her doodles are quite good, actually, and capture pretty accurately the style of the flapper girl of the Roaring Twenties. In case you're wondering what a flapper is, or was, check out the girls in this video. Their parents must have been horrified!

Now for the water chairs...

Turning the pages to see what might be of interest in this old book, I came upon a section that sought to instruct the student on persuasive writing. Example No. 5 is titled Persuasion Through Comparison. This exercise shows a written advertisement with the heading, Years ago they killed by dripping water. Below that is a picture of a water chair with the caption, The Water Chair - a form of torture of the Middle Ages.


This is actually the inauspicious lead-in for a persuasive ad for Sullivan's Heels. As in shoe heels. This misguided example strives to show how walking around in shoes with hard heels results in virtually the same physical torture, over time, as does the constant drip of water upon the hapless victim of the torturous Water Chair. I'll bet one hundred percent of all victims that suffered in the Water Chair would have jumped at the opportunity to walk around in "torturous" shoes with hard heels. Talk about a cake walk!

But what a wretched comparison and writing lesson to impart on a young mind! No wonder young Anna Grace took solace in her flapper doodles. As she could have been only 16 or so in 1925, I doubt she ever got the chance to live the flapper lifestyle, which was out of vogue several years later, and may never have been in vogue in Manhattan, Kansas. I always associated that style with that other Manhattan on the east coast.

But that was the style of the day for young women and it must have fired the imagination of a Midwestern teenage girl struggling through her English and writing lessons. And she wouldn't be the last to create her own projects of expression to exchange classroom drudgery for artistic fantasy.

That long forgotten artwork of hers now lives on within the confines of cyberspace. And I'd like to think that young Anna Grace would have been one flattered flapper-wannabe.

The dark side of bibliophiles

One might think of bibliophiles as a friendly lot. Biblio-friends, so to speak. So what did artist Oliver Herford have in mind when he offered up this dark interpretation of, not biblio-friends, but biblio-fiends for A.S.W. Rosenbach's "Unpublishable Memoirs?"

This drawing is from Rosenbach's
Books and Bidders in the previous post.
Click on the image for an enlarged view.

Decorate your mind with books

I'm rereading Books and Bidders, by A.S.W. Rosenbach; Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1927. Rosenbach was one of the giants of the bibliophile/bookselling world and any bibliophile would enjoy reading about his book exploits.

I came across a gem of a quote that I wanted to share here. Rosenbach wrote this in the Roaring Twenties, a necessary frame of reference for the quote below. He writes a sentence about increasing wealth in the country and, with it, an increasing appreciation for material things such as old books, old prints, paintings, and antique furniture. Then he offers this:

Books are the final appeal; when the collector is through with the things that decorate his house, he turns to the things that decorate his mind--and these last forever.

I like that. A nice collector metaphor applicable to anyone, collector or not, who opens a book and feeds (decorates) his mind.

A Christmas Day Visit to Christmas Cove, Maine

What do Maud H. Chapin and Theodore Roosevelt have in common? They were both authors, autographed one of their books, and donated their signed copies to a little library in Christmas Cove, Maine.

On Christmas Day today, it seems doubly appropriate to revisit The Cowboy Christmas Ball and follow the journey of its author, Larry Chittenden, all the way from Anson, Texas to Christmas Cove, Maine, where he started a very unique library.

The Poet Ranchman of Texas, as Chittenden was known, had a second home far from the panhandle plains of Texas. This unlikely place was Christmas Cove, Maine. Yep, the old rancher, seemingly out of place Downeast, was right at home with his library concept. He got authors to autograph their books and donate them to his little library. The town folk could then check these books out, read them, and return them. Sometimes they might keep them all winter while the library was closed and return them in the spring.

Word got around about this “autograph library” and its donated signed books. It attracted the attention of more and more authors, some some vacationing nearby, who liked the idea and thought it worthy of a donation. One of these authors was Theodore Roosevelt. He may have been the most famous. Can you imagine going to your local library and checking out a book out that was signed by a President?

After Chittenden’s death, the books in the library eventually scattered hither and yon. Roosevelt’s book recently wound up at an auction house in Dallas and sold for $1,434. I found these pictures on Heritage Auction Galleries’ site.



I was able to find and purchase one of the library’s books earlier this year, but it did not have the library label pasted inside the front cover, which would have become one of my bibliophemera collection’s more interesting pieces. Nor was its signature that of a well-known author. My book is Rush Light: Stories, by Maud H. Chapin.



Different from the Roosevelt book are the stamps used to identify the Chittenden library. The front endpaper stamp identifies the library's location as The Autograph Library in the Sea Bird's Nest, Christmas Cove, Maine.


And the rear endpaper sports a different stamp from the front endpaper, inviting readers (in addition to authors, it would seem) to donate signed copies of their books:



Finding one of these books with the Chittenden library markings and author signature makes a nice souvenir of a very benevolent concept that epitomized the spirit of giving in a place with a name that is synonymous with giving.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Reading New Year!

A letter from the Great Depression

Sometimes what you find tucked inside an old book is more interesting than the old book. And when the two work in concert to reveal clues about a life or lives touched by both, an imaginative mind has at its disposal the necessary tools to flesh out the characters and situations that spring to life from old ink and paper. That was the case with this book: How to Criticize Books, by Llewellyn Jones, W.W. Norton & Co., 1928.

I like to do a little time travel when I find something like this. I find it interesting to create an historical context for analyzing the artifact I’ve found and see if there is a story there worth exploring. Here, I think there is, with relevance to the tough economic times many find themselves in today.

Inside the front cover of this book was a letter written about 70 years ago from Horace to Bess in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I don't know where Horace was, but he was very unhappy. I'm guessing Bess is Horace's sister back home and he is thrilled to get a letter from her. I thought she might be a romantic interest until he signed off with "love to you and Floyd."

Two possible assumptions about the letter and the book:

Assumption #1: The book belonged to Bess and she saved her brother’s letter in this book. If so, she was interested in reading writing and possibly had a desire on some level to write book reviews.

Assumption #2: The book belonged to Horace. He was an aspiring book reviewer. He wrote this letter, but never sent it. Maybe because it was too depressing. He stashed it inside one of his books (he evidently read a lot) and forgot about it.

Both assumptions have some common ground, but each veers off into dramatically different stories. I’d love to write a story for each, but for now I’ll just give a general overview of what I found and why it’s interesting to me.

This brief one-page letter reveals many pages about a man struggling psychologically as well as financially. This is a life not being lived well. From Horace's lines, we learn that Bess seemed concerned about his mental state and urged him to focus on the things he has that he can enjoy and don't require money. Evidently, Horace is feeling quite a financial pinch and generally hating his life at the moment.

I also learn in the first paragraph that the things he enjoys are books and music and studying because he states that his present job is so demanding that it keeps him from indulging in them. Except for reading metaphysics. This subject must be important enough to him that whatever free time he can muster will be devoted to reading and studying that subject. From that piece of information, I think I can safely assume that Horace has a nice little stack of books and old 78s for his intellectual stimulation and pleasurable diversions.

The date of the book and the tough times Horace seems to be going through indicate that the Great Depression has a grip on the country and on Horace. The book predates the stock market crash by a year, but the letter could easily have been tucked into an older, used book.

Further down in the letter, Horace critiques a book Bess gave him for Christmas:

It was so sparkling and refreshing that it was sipping a long cold drink. That Margaret Halsey has a flow of language and the most marvelous gift of pertinent synonym.

He goes on to say that although he hasn't had time to read, that doesn't include metaphysics, which he still indulges in, if in an unorthodox way.

So is he the wannabe book reviewer or is it Bess? Sounds here more like Assumption #2 is the likely scenario. This mention of Margaret Halsey is the clue I need to pin down the approximate year this letter was written. Halsey’s first book, With Malice Toward Some, was published in 1938. The Great Depression was in the process of bottoming out after nearly a decade of ravaging the economy and lives of millions.

He pines away for an opportunity to return home to Louisiana or Mississippi (they must have lived in both places growing up) and just have a normal life where he could work for enough to be comfortable and have time to enjoy leisurely pursuits. One of the most poignant lines in the letter reveal his resignation and frustration:

I realize we are always in our rightful places, but it is difficult sometimes to understand it.

His present employer is having trouble, much like his previous employer, whom he names as Saenger Co., which appears to started business as a chain of theaters for both vaudeville and movies in the early twentieth century.

This sad letter finishes with advice for Bess to make a change in her life by leaving Hattiesburg. He believes the change would be good for her. This opinion injects a new idea about just how well Bess is doing. Likely, she is not too happy with where she finds herself at this point in time, else why would Horace suggest a leaving Hattiesburg? I wonder if that change of address would include Floyd?

Also in the closing paragraphs, Horace laments a busted relationship between Bess and her girlfriends, and then Horace lapses into memories of a happier time when he and Bess would visit and play among friends, travel to the Gulf coast, etc. Horace seems to be retreating into the past to escape the present. A sad commentary on circumstances of the day, soothed somewhat by fragmented escapes into the pleasure of a book and memories of a happier time.

I'll never know whether Horace or Bess saved the letter. Whether it was sent or not. Times may have gotten worse before they got better. Did Horace's prospects ever get better? Did he eventually prosper and build a respectable library of books (emphasis on metaphysics, of course!) and music? Did Bess stay in Hattiesburg? Did either sibling ever find happiness?

Parallels to our present economy and its southward sprint of late makes me wonder what current-day ephemera of an unsatisfied or unhappy life will offer a future reader a time-capsule glimpse into that life and today's times. Maybe 70 years from now, sometime around 2075 to 2080, something laid in an "old" book from 2008 will give that reader pause to stop and consider it. And, hopefully, the chain of relevance will be broken, with respect to the economy.

Quiz: Name the authors

For the one or two readers I have on this thing... This husband and wife teamed up to write a book together in the 1980s. Who are they?




DING DING DING... We have a winner! Anonymous correctly stated that the authors are Lynne and Dick Cheney, "America's Sweethearts!" (Anon's comment, not mine). Dick was still a young guy with only five heart attacks and three hunting accidents under his belt.

Here is the 1982 book they co-authored (their photo was on the back of the jacket):

Message of the Bells

I set this book aside last month in advance of the holiday season. As Christmas is "in the air" now, I thought I'd share it here. The Message of the Bells, or What Happened to us on Christmas Eve, was written and illustrated by Hendrick Willem Van Loon, with music by Grace Castagnetta, in 1942. As it's a small, 16-page book, I thought I'd put the whole thing here for anyone to enjoy. An inscription indicates the book was a Christmas gift. The giver may have had the book's subtitle in mind with instructions to read the book on Christmas Eve, 1942. The story and the publication date occurred during World War II. One wonders what special significance Van Loon's tale had for the original owners of this book during a war-time Christmas celebration... or might have for present-day readers with family members fighting in a war overseas?


Click on the images for an enlarged view in a new window.

Mormons in the Major Leagues

Major League baseball concluded the 2008 season more than a month ago, but now the Hot Stove League is in full swing. After a lengthy layoff from this blog, why not come back with a baseball entry as winter sets in? Here's one of the more unusual titles you'll find in baseball literature: Mormons in the Major Leagues: Career Histories of 44 LDS Players, by Jim Ison; Action Sports, Cincinnati, 1991.


I was actually surprised to learn about which players were Mormon. Many, I grew up watching or following and never once heard anything about them being Mormon. Quite simply, it was not relevant to hitting, itching, fielding or anything else baseball. So why this book?

You'd have to ask the author, but he acknowledges in the book that this project (writing the book) began out of boredom with all the sports card shows he was attending with his kids. He began collecting cards of Mormon ballplayers as a diversion and the interest grew and dveloped into the idea for a lengthy treatment of the subject. I would assume the author is Mormon also. Either that or he came across a Mormon ballplayer and wondered how many others were of that faith.

Not all Mormons who played at the big league level wanted to be included in this book for various reasons, and the author has honored their requests. I found it interesting that one of my Houston Astros players, Alan Ashby (a fan favorite in Houston for years), was Mormon. Had no idea. And there is another Houston Astro connection: Ron Brand, the first Astro to get a base hit in the Astrodome, is also Mormon. Others around both leagues could almost fill an All-Star roster: Harmon Killebrew, Wally Joyner, Dennis Eckersley, Dale Murphy (him, I knew about), and Jack Morris. Pictures of some of these players follow.

Harmon Killebrew

Dale Murphy


Dennis Eckersley

Alan Ashby

Ron Brand


UPDATE: Thanks to Ron at famousmormons.net (see comments below), I remembered something I meant to include in this entry. Spencer Adams was the first Mormon to play in the Major Leagues. He played in back-to-back World Series; 1925 for the Washington Senators and 1926 for the New York Yankees. He got to room with Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri. There are a couple of interesting anecdotes in the book I should share.

Quoting the author verbatim: When Babe Ruth was on a trip to Utah, he was asked whether he knew Spencer Adams. Babe said, "Sure I do, he was the best poker player in the American League." This unexpected praise had its origin in a train car carrying the Yankees to a game. The Babe was engaged in a favorite pastime, playing poker. When he needed to leave game temporarily, he said to Spencer, "Hey Rookie, sit in for me." When Babe returned, he was $300 richer!

A second anecdote involved the great Ty Cobb, as mean a player as there ever was. He regularly sharpened the steel spikes on his shoes and intentionally tried to spike any fielder trying to tag him out on the base paths. One game, he came in hard against Spencer Adams at second, spikes flying. Adams held his ground, got the out, and paid for it with scars across his chest that lasted the rest of his life. As Cobb started to leave the field after the play, an angry Adams threw the ball at Cobb, missing his head by inches. This cleared both benches and triggered a screaming response from Cobb: "The base path is mine. If you're in the way, I'll kill you!" And despite Cobb's violent actions, Adams always regretted losing his temper with him that day. Sounds like a class act, but Cobb deserved to get conked on the noggin.

The Codex Sinaiticus

Four international partners have collaborated to present to the world the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the earliest known version of the New Testament. The Codex Sinaiticus is a handwritten Greek manuscript from more than 1600 years ago that contains the Christian Bible (including the New Testament). Read all about this fascinating project here.

Pinkletinks

I was looking for a book in my library today and stumbled upon a volume of poetry I don't believe I'd ever looked through. Not sure when or why I even bought it, but something about it must have appealed to me.

The book is simply titled Poems, by Emma Mayhew Whiting, privately printed at San Francisco in 1948.




I thumbed through the pages and landed on a poem titled Pinkletinks. What the heck is a pinkletink? Too interesting a word to put the book back on the shelf. I had to go pinkletink googling.

From the Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by Joan Houston Hall, a pinkletink is defined as a small tree frog found on Martha's Vineyard. Also called a spring-peeper, it makes a sound that inspired the moniker pinkletink. I have found other theories that challenge that etymology. Maybe nobody knows for sure how such a strange name evolved, but it did.

Scouring the Internet, I think I found a photo of a pinkletink:


Interesting onomatopoeia (or not) aside, what was it about a pinkletink that would inspire a poem by Ms. Whiting? Well, the word pinkletink is only used on Martha's Vineyard. Ms. Whiting was from Martha's Vineyard and there seems to be quite a tradition through the generations on that island of listening each spring for the pinkletink chorus. These sounds signal an end to winter and the beginnings of spring. After a long winter, I guess it doesn't take much to get excited. Tickled pink for pinkletinks they are. And if I had a nickel for everytime pinkletink got transposed into tickled pink for a cheap laugh...

The pinkletink appears in at least one other poem in the book that I've come across so far--a poem titled Granny's, which is about the authors memories of visiting her grandmother's house "near a pond where pinkletinks trill."

But here's the one that bears the title that caught my eye:

Click on the image to enlarge it

Engraving of Johannes Palm, Bookseller, on trial

I was pleased to find recently what appears to be a late 19th century steel engraving of Bavarian bookseller, Johannes Palm, on trial before Napoleon's troops, the subject of my first entry on this blog. The engraving is from Cassell's Illustrated History of England. I have only the page from the book containing the illustration, but my research indicates it came from either Volume 5 or 6 of that set.

Palm stands before the uniformed French troops in a vain attempt to defend himself against seditious charges. The look on his face says it all. He knows he's dead.

And it's interesting to note in this illustration that Palm has a full head of hair. The illustration form my first blog entry (see link above) depicts him as bald or balding. I suppose each illustrator used artistic license in his rendering, but it would be interesting to know if either had any information on what Palm actually looked like.

From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf

At first glance, Robert Manson Myers', From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), would appear to be a light survey of English literature for the period indicated in the title--a slim volume for such a lengthy range of years and a cartoonish illustration on the cover. But a second glance picks up on the subtitle (astounding and wholly unauthorized), which seems odd right away. Then you read the caption under the cover illustration, William the Conqueror. Light survey gives way to light-hearted and later to downright humorous survey. But just thumb through the pages to find out what kind of humor you are in for. Pretty wacked out and wickedly funny. And that back cover of the jacket... Take a look at the author and his write-up.

The author photo looks like some Dutch Masters painting, the photo credit goes to the unlikely name of Fabius Blackrock. A google search confirms unlikely. The author's bestselling The Case of the Missing Umlaut is referenced as having swept the nation as both a book and a movie. Googling that produces nothing. Further, his distinguished lineage includes a great-uncle Professor Dewberry Oldberry of the Newberry Library. There's more, but the write-up ends with the author's current occupation-- teaching Creative Listening at Pamunkey State College for Women. By now, I'm smiling at the humor revealed from peeling back pretentious, dry layers of my own making because of a title. And at how I was a bit duped. Time to thumb though the book and investigate the extent of the intended humor.

Facing the title page is a Literary Map of England, which includes Scotland and Ireland as well. Here you'll find Northanger Abbey as well as Rin-Tin-Tin's Abbey. You'll find Pepys' Dairy (not Diary), Drake's Bowling Alley, Sussex, Middlesx and Nossex, Wed Loch, Yale Loch and Rape Loch. And more nonsense like that.

The copyright page (does anyone ever read these?) indicates First Edition and has a long paragraph, titled Note that explains how the book was previously published in a literary journal and thanks are expressed for permission to reprint. More thanks are given to Viking for using material from their series of Boners books (very recently augmented by Bigger and Better Boners). What?!?! Back to google... Yes, Viking did publish a couple of books called Boners and More Boners in 1931. Guess who illustrated them? Theodor Geisel (his first illustrated books), better known years later as Dr. Seuss. And in 1952 there really was a Viking Press volume of Bigger and Better Boners, apparently lacking in the sexual connotation of today and the ubiquitous male enhancement ads. But Myers has me questioning everything now as he has deftly spliced the factual with fictional humor.

The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book, assuming the jacket write-up and frontispiece map didn't already do it for you. Here's the first paragraph from that chapter:

At the door of English literature stands Beowulf, the great Dane, who once upon a time inhabited the forest primeval with Ethelwulf, his wife, and is therefore known as The Noble Savage. It would, of course, be absurd to dwell on Beowulf's particulars in a brief survey such as this, especially since those details are recorded in Beowulf's autobiographical beast epic, first published in 1066 as The Doomsday Book. This famous first edition was printed on a cotton manuscript, destroyed by fire in 1731 and later purchased from descendants of the Beowulf family by Andrew Carnegie. The original duodecimo is totally ineligible. With the persistent efforts of scholars, however, it has emerged that Beowulf sailed forth boldly into the filth and froth of the Firth of Forth in the spring of 596. Following his slaughter of Grendel (a task as odious as Oedipus' cleansing of the Aegean stables), the epic hero retraced his footsteps across the sea. His spritely narrative abounds with sketches of such Cro-Magnon dignitaries as Half-Dane, High Shellac, and Wroth Child.

The illustrations are just as ludicrous with their meaningless captions. To wit:


First, this is just a strange looking scene to illustrate. What the heck is going on here? I know it has nothing to do with Myers' description of a Sunday in the country with Sir Roger de Coverlet, an old Anguische tradition (whatever that is), and chocolate being served afterward! It's so crazy, it's funny. I wanted to find out more about the illustration and put some kind of meaning to such a weird-looking scene. It is attributed to a print hanging in the Will Coffin House. There is no such place that I can find. I don't doubt there is such a print because Myers expresses gratitude, back on the copyright page, to Houghton Mifflin for their permission to reproduce illustrations from The History of the Novel in England, by Robert Morss Lovett and Helen Sard Hughes. And I can verify that this book is for real, published in 1932. But that's about all in this book anyone could vouch for.

But in researching Robert Manson Myers, I found a former student of his who wrote about him in one of her blog entries. From the sounds of it, he was no joke in the classroom. What a wonderful teacher he must have been.

Samuel Chamberlain's journal and illustrations of the Mexican War

Digging around in a book this morning about a young soldier's adventures in the American Southwest and Mexico during the Mexican War of the 1840s, I discovered some fascinating fragments of history, long-forgotten, which ultimately led to a place practically in my backyard.

From humble beginnings in Center Harbor, New Hampshire to battles in Mexico, Samuel Chamberlain left a legacy of his dramatic experiences in the form of an illustrated journal. Written accounts of the United States' War with Mexico are numerous, but first-hand artistic renderings are rare. Private Chamberlain of the First Regiment of the United States Dragoons carried a sketchbook with him throughout the war and made drawings of the people, places, events, and battles he witnessed. In later years, settled down in Boston, he recounted his experiences in a manuscript and enhanced his sketchbook drawings with watercolors to illustrate his journal.

The finished manuscript remained in the family for decades, brought occasionally for showing friends and family, but mostly kept hidden. After Chamberlain's death in 1908, his widow saw that it stayed in the family. But in the 1940s, nearly 100 years after Chamberlain's adventure, his manuscript had fallen out of family hands and was discovered in a Connecticut antique shop. A Baltimore collector purchased it and, recognizing the significance of his find, contacted Life Magazine about it. The manuscript was subsequently sold to Life Magazine, which published a condensed version of the story in three parts during 1955. Included were some of Chamberlain's paintings of his remembrance or the war.


The book I've been reading and researching, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, Written and Illustrated by Samuel E. Chamberlain, Harper & Brothers, (1956), includes five times the text from the original manuscript and 55 of Chamberlain's paintings.

Laid in at the front of the book was a small brochure from the San Jacinto Museum of History, near Houston.This led to another interesting fact about Chamberlain's art work: One hundred forty-four of his paintings were purchased by the San Jacinto Museum in 1957, the first significant purchase of history by the museum. This brochure appears to be for the first exhibition of Chamberlain's watercolors anywhere. The brochure, limited to a print run of 5,000 copies, offers eight pages of information about Chamberlain, his exploits and his art, along with information about the museum and exhibit.

Now, more than 50 years later, as the San Jacinto museum and park prepare for their annual observance of the Battle of San Jacinto (April 21st, 1836), in which the fledgling Republic of Texas won its independence from Mexico, I'll have to wander over there and see if I can find any of the original watercolors I've been so engaged with this morning.

I am particularly drawn to Chamberlain's painting of an event he witnessed--the mass execution by hanging of U.S. Army deserters, mostly Irish who sympathized with the plight of their fellow Catholics in Mexico. They came mostly from deplorable conditions in the Northeast after immigrating from equally deplorable conditions in Ireland (Potato Famine). Seeking new opportunity in a new land, these immigrants did not find it in the Notheastern U.S. and likely joined the Army as a means of escape. In Texas, they came to know the Mexican culture and the similarities of the Catholic people in their struggles. Further, the Mexican government enticed sympathizers with free land in exchange for allegiance to Mexico in their war with the U.S. For some Irishmen, this proved too much temptation, as Army life had not been any better than civilian life. They came to be known in Mexico as the San Patricios (St. Patrick's Battalion), fought valiantly against their former comrades, and have been revered in Mexico as heroes to this day.



Ultimately, they were defeated and most executed for treason. Sam Chamberlain witnessed one of the mass executions and illustrated and wrote about what he witnessed.

As my research jumped over to the San Patricios in Mexico, I discovered a film made about them and their leader, John Riley, of County Galway. Tom Berenger stars in One Man's Hero (1999) and, by a few accounts I've read, this film is a cult classic in the making. It didn't get the theatrical release or promotion it needed to show how good it was. Nor has it gotten any promotion in the DVD market.

It's now next up in my Netflix queue and I can't wait to see a dramatic representation of what I've been reading about. And then I'll definitely have to go searching for that painting at the site of the 1836 battle, without which, Sam Chamberlain likely would not have ventured into Texas, nor would the San Patricios.

http://www.sanjacinto-museum.org/

Poultry and poetry

What do poultry and poetry have in common? Seemingly nothing; I've never come across a chicken farmer who wrote and collected poetry. Until I learned of Wilbur Chapman Goodson, the author of a collection of poems titled, Dark Music (Falmouth Publishing House, Portland, Maine, 1940).


From the Preface, written by fellow New Englander, poet and Goodson's former professor at Wesleyan, I learned about an interesting bibliophile who collected autographed editions of books from all the leading American and English poets writing at that time (1930s). Not only that, but he also obtained from them holograph copies of his favorite lyrics and framed them. All while raising prize-winning roosters and pullets.

Snow infers scholastic ability at Wesleyan and a desire on Goodson's part to follow his muse. But the country was steeped in the Great Depression and apparently Goodson was motivated to try his hand at a vocation that could actually support him. A career choice between poetry and poultry at least invoked the poetic devices of alliteration and rhyme. And so Goodson started a poultry farm in Tamworth, New Hampshire and became successful at it. But he never abandoned, it appears, his love for poetry. He became quite an accomplished collector and wrote and published his own verse.

I've only been able to find a copy of the Dark Music title, one of only 300 printed. If Goodson published subsequent volumes, I haven't found them yet. But I have found part of his collection. I recently purchased, from a bookseller in Massachusetts, two volumes of poetry that had belonged to Goodson: An April Song: New Poems, by Charles Hanson Towne (Farrar and Rinehart, NY 1937) and This Unquenched Thirst, by Minnie Markham Kerr (Dorrance & Company, Philadelphia, 1938). Each is autographed from the poet to W.C. Goodson and both copies have Goodson's bookplate (full name) affixed to the front pastedown endpaper.

While I feel fortunate to have made this connection and to have obtained pieces of what I presume to have been a remarkable collection, I am puzzled that any part of such a collection would have been lost, sold, or otherwise culled from the whole. The entire collection deserved to have been kept intact to give a full measure of the bibliophile's intent for such a collection in the first place.

But that's too idealistic, I'm afraid. There are many reasons why pieces of a collection might find their way elsewhere through the years. They could have been gifts to others by the collector. The collection's theme may have evolved into something quite different from its beginnings and these titles no longer fit in.

Those poets whom Goodson collected and that have now found their way into my collection are not household names. Nor do they have much literary significance or value in the history or second-hand markets for literature. But they now comprise 100 percent of another of my quirky little collections. And I'd love to see a list of poets that comprised Goodson's collection over the years. Some of the titans of American and English poetry were writing during Goodson's collecting years. If he was able to secure signed copies of their books and handwritten passages, his collection would have become one of the more enviable libraries on either side of the pond.














And to round out this little collection, I was able to locate and purchase a few copies of Pine Top Poultry Tales, a newsletter Goodson wrote about his poultry farming operation. Looks like a pretty nice marketing and promotional piece. His writing skills are put to good use here for his business.



I end this with a poem from Wilbur Chapman Goodson. It's the last poem in Dark Music and appears to be the poem from which the title of the book emerged. I hope it was not the last poem he wrote or published.

NIGHTPIECE

Here in the quiet woods the night creeps in--
Between the slowly falling flakes of snow--
And burrows down to soft and silent sleep.

Here in the quiet woods, the topmost boughs
Of tamarack reach up against the clouds
Too thick to let the light of stars shine through.

Here in a deep and never-ending peace
There is a silence thick and velvet black
That settles over hills and leafless trees
And brings dark music to my tired ears.

Here in the early hours of dawn the stars
Break though the clouds, and wrinkled moonlight smiles
Across the frozen pond and snow-filled fields.

It must have been like this once long ago.

National Poetry Month - April 2008

Today, April 1st, kicks off National Poetry Month, and that’s no April Fool’s joke. Wouldn't be much of a joke anyway.

Poets.org has all the scoop on National Poetry Month. I'll just use this space to share a few of my favorite poets and a poem from an old volume titled Book Lovers Verse, by Howard S. Ruddy (Bowen-Merrill Co., Indianapolis, 1899), an interesting volume of old poetry for the bibliophile (see Biblioverse).

First, links to several contemporary poets whose work I admire (in no particular order):

Ted Kooser
Donald Hall
Jane Hirshfield
Nan Cohen
Larry D. Thomas (I'd be remiss in my blogging duties today not to include the Poet Laureate of my home state of Texas)

There are many more, but these are poets whose work I have collected and read in recent years. Old favorites from another time are led by Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Edward Arlington Robinson, William Butler Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson, and way too many others to get into here. Maybe there are one or two I've listed for new readers out there to get acquainted with.

And now for a poem from Ruddy's, Book Lovers Verse, mentioned above. Appropriately, it is from one of America's most celebrated poets (and from my list above), Emily Dickinson, whose work I'm sure will find a place or two in this month's observances of poetry.

The Book, by Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book
      To take us leagues away,
Nor any coursers like a page
      Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
      Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
      That bears a human soul!

A unicorn in the peach tree

I found this book the other day at a resale shop, but it turned out not to have too much resale value for me: If I Found a Wistful Unicorn, by Ann Ashford, illustrated by Bill Drath; Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., Atlanta, 1978.

It’s a nice little children’s book with a message about love, coaxed out of the gentle rhymes and soft watercolors that grace each page. But it has little resale value, even in first edition and jacket. A lot of these kids books are usually ex-library books, and I was about to toss it into the library donation pile, when I glanced upon the author’s photo on the front flap of the jacket. That started another angle of research that brought this book into a new dimension of interest for me. Maybe others as well.

The author’s photo looked like a child had written a children’s book. Very youthful looking, cute, pixie-ish. She had to be pretty young in 1978 when this was published. Maybe early to mid-20s. In the next 30 years, she must have written a bunch more books. But I couldn’t find any. What I did find was that this was her first book and she was near 40 when it was published. She would be about 70 now. I looked at the picture again and couldn’t imagine someone so youthful looking being 70!


Sadly, she never made it 70 or 60 or even 50. She died in 1988 at the age of 49. No details on her death. There's an abundance of youthful energy and optimism in that photo, though. She’s just published her first book and it has won the Award for Juvenile Literature from the Council of Authors and Journalists. She has a very bright future in the making as a writer. She had already been a group leader for migrant workers in Texas, a social worker, a teacher, an actress, and vice president of a fund-raising consulting firm. By all accounts, a full and rewarding life early on. I wonder if she only had one book in her? She lived another 10 years, but published nothing that I can find. Before 40, she had already worn a number of hats. Was "author" a case of been there, done that and she was off to new ventures?


A write-up about her book on amazon.com shared another interesting fact: Ashford’s book was the first book published by Peachtree. The very first book! I thought, ‘How many collectors or booksellers ever come across a book that they know to be the very first book of a publishing house?' Would you even know one if you saw it?

Peachtree is still here 30 years later. They've published hundreds of books during that time. But I have the very first title that rolled off the press. That lends a certain significance to it and makes it special and collectible. And then there’s something in the author’s personal story. The publisher’s first title is also the author’s first book, maybe her only book. Her death at a young age is certainly a tragedy, and in direct contrast to the sweet ending her book had.

I think I’ll hang onto this book for awhile. I find more than just trivia in the facts surrounding this book. I see the dreams and aspirations of both the writer and the publisher for their first book, which evolves into a collaboration between a unicorn and a peachtree.


Folklore throughout the ages has cast the unicorn as a both a wild, untamed animal and a peaceful bearer of good luck. Perhaps both versions came together out of necessity for the writer and the publisher to achieve their dreams together. And perhaps the wistful, bittersweet ending for Ms. Ashford a decade later is tempered somewhat by the creative spirit she shared in this story, which shall live on for future generations to enjoy.

Hydrogen bombs on the moon

With the space race on between America and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, writers and publishers tapped into the space age reader market. I like books from that era when manned space exploration had not yet begun. With nearly 50 years of hindsight to work with, and having worked at NASA myself, it's interesting and fun to read about the visions and dreams along with the fears and reservations that characterized the cradle of space exploration.

Children's books were also included in the mix. One I found not long ago is Rockets into Space, by Alexander L. Crosby and Nancy Larrick, Random House, NY, 1959. It seems to be geared toward 8 to 12 year-olds. It's pretty much a primer on rockets, satellites, man's desire to explore space, and how all that might be accomplished. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on building a space station and using it as a platform for traveling to Mars. Wow! They were thinking it out that far before man had ever left earth?

Some 30 years later, President Bush (the elder) had proposed an initiative to build Space Station Freedom and then go back to the moon and on to Mars. I think his timetable had us there by now or not long from now. Point is, that serious talk and action about getting a space station into orbit took another 30 years from the time it was talked about in this kid's book in 1959.


One thing in the book that did not happen, thankfully, is outlined in Chapter 11, Why Do We Care? Essentially, it asks why should we spend all the money and effort to go into space and even to the moon (a few years before President Kennedy declared we would do it before the 1960s ended... and we did!). The answers are adventure, knowledge, wealth, and military. Adventure and knowledge are self-explanatory.


Wealth? Well, say the authors, we don't know what kind of metals and minerals we may find on the moon. Schoolgirls one day may be wearing engagement rings made from precious gems found on the moon.

But Military is the one that will make you roll your eyes and chuckle. The authors raise the possibility of the Soviets getting to the moon first and using it as a base to fire missiles at their enemies, meaning the Americans. Talk about your Cold War paranoia! Sounds like the payload getting ahead of the rocket booster, to update an old idiom about the cart and the horse. Scare the kids with lunar annihilation and scare the rest of us by putting the U.N. in charge of the moon!

The rest of the chapter is too good not to include so here are the last several paragraphs:

The moon looks beautiful to us now. We would feel differently if it were loaded with hydrogen bombs that could be aimed at the earth.

Of course that need not happen. Mr. Pendray and other thoughtful people say the moon should be ruled by the United Nations. No one country should control the moon.

If the United Nations had charge of the moon, all countries could use it for scientific experiments.

Yeah right.

Iraan, Texas

If you’ve ever driven through West Texas on I-10, you’ve probably seen exit signs for a town named Iraan. And you’ve probably wondered if there were any kind of connection with that other Iran (different spelling). I remember hearing the story from my father about how the town acquired its name. It’s an old oil town and he was knowledgeable about such places as he was in the business.

I had forgotten about that place for a number of years until I recently came across Ozona Country, by Alan R. Bosworth, Harper & Row, 1964. In a chapter titled Annointed with Fresh Oil, he describes the oil boom that came to Crockett County, where Ozona resides, and made comparisons to other counties and fields in West Texas that were much more prolific. He offered this anecdote about the Yates field in West Texas:

Crockett County was the fourth county in West Texas to produce oil, and it was not one of the major oil counties. Across the Pecos, to the westward, the Yates field was running wild, and people told all kinds of stories about old man Yates, who had just barely managed to make a living off his ranch until the oil wells came. They said he told his wife that now she could just have anything she wanted, and that she said, 'Well, I’ve been needin’ a new ax to cut kindlin’ wood with, for a long time.'

A little town sprang up around that big oilfield and it was named for that rancher and his wife, who could finally get a new ax from all that oil revenue. Their names were Ira and Ann Yates and the town name of Iraan paid tribute to the owners of the land where all that oil was found.

For more about Iraan, Texas and its founding, see the Handbook of Texas Online entry.

Fishing ex-libris catch seeks death penalty

I fished this book out of storage the other day and found within its leaves egregious offenses I have committed, which, if the author and pending legislation of the day had its way, would have put me on death row.

Game Fish of the Northern States of America and the British Provinces, by Barnwell; Carleton, Publisher; NY; 1862.



Here’s a case of “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Scarred with library markings, a piece of the upper spine missing, dingy and dark looking with worn spots. The most interesting aspect of the outside of the book is the thin paper cover and its fish-scale texture. A clever and appropriate design to complement the subject matter inside.


But inside… First, you’re greeted with a vintage bookplate from the Houston Public Library, circa early 1900s. Bookplates are increasingly working their way into my bibliophemera collection. This one has a nice design. I'm a collector of local history in this region, and this bookplate dovetails nicely with the other artifacts I have related to that period.


The previous owner wrote his name and date, 1882, on the title page. The name matched with the name on the bookplate, which indicates the last owner of the book was indeed the man whose name is written on the title page. A slight discrepancy to ponder: The publication date is 1862 and the previous owner indicates his ownership began in 1882. Likely, he bought the book used, unless it sat new on a shelf for 20 years. More probable is that he bought the book second-hand in a used bookshop, probably in one of the Northern states profiled in the book. Houston was a sleepy little bayou town in the 1880s, completely unconscious of the oil-boom winds of change blowing its way in the upcoming new century. So it is unlikely that there were many second-hand bookshops, and any bookstore with the latest titles would not likely have stocked a book about game fish of the Northern states and Canadian provinces.

But I spent time in a particular Northeastern state every summer growing up—New Hampshire—and I learned about the native game fish, the Brook Trout, at an early age and developed a passion for it. So upon scanning the contents of the book, I took a biased interest in Chapter 2, The American Trout. And first up in the lineup of American Trout is the Brook Trout. Reading the first few pages of Civil War-era technical prose, I felt like I was reading an early scientific treatise on the species. About what I expected—dusty old writing in a dusty old book. But the last paragraph of that second page became much more interesting, dramatically so, with an unexpected twist of humor. At least I think the author had his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek. Or was that a barbed hook aimed at a segment of the fishing population he vehemently despised?

After a statement about the fishing seasons for Brook Trout in the north and northeastern regions, the author asserts that there is but one way, and you know he means one way only, to catch a Brook Trout. And that is with a fly. But he allows that there is a class of fishermen who resort to worms, minnows, nets, and even their own roe. I had to look that last one up. Roe is the fully-ripe egg mass of fish. I've never done that--seems a little weird. But first on the list of bait violations, worms, I did not have to look up. My grandfather taught me to fish the mountain streams with worms we dug up in his vegetable garden (my old bait box, circa 1940s-50s, pictured below). I knew he had fly fished some, but he preferred worms. So I bristled a bit at the author’s condescending tone toward something so indelibly imprinted upon my fondest memories. But his next sentence was the killer:

These villanies are not at present punished with death nor even imprisonment for life; but our legislature is looking into the matter, and there is no telling how soon such statutes may be passed.

Ha! After lulling his readers into the beginnings of a mind-wandering state with a dose of mundane text, the author craftily floated a fly downstream into my placid reading pool and hooked me sharply with a device that snapped me to attention immediately. Well done! I never saw it coming. His humor was the device, used in a way, I’ll bet, to see if his readers were still with him after a few pages of dry descriptors about fin characteristics and scale observations. Catching Brook Trout with worms should be punishable by death or life imprisonment? Ye gods and little fishes! How do you really feel about it, Mr. Barnwell?


And Barnwell is used somewhat pseudonymously. The real name of this author is Robert Barnwell Roosevelt. A little googling produced this biographical information: Uncle to President Theodore Roosevelt, great-uncle to Eleanor Roosevelt, who married her fifth cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt, who himself was a fifth cousin to President Theodore Roosevelt, who was an uncle to Eleanor Roosevelt... Wait, I think I said that already. Sheesh! What a tangled-up crow's nest of fishing line that genealogy is! Not that that has anything to do with the radical Barnwell. But after advocating the death penalty for bait fishermen of Brook Trout, Barnwell reverts back to serious writing, extolling the virtues of fishing with the fly. Without reading any further, I'm sure a few more barbs are floating along the currents toward the unsuspecting reader.

The Laughing Muse: Frontispiece Frivolity

I purchased this book recently, purely for the frontispiece illustration. Something about this muse that resonated with me, or with my own muse perhaps. Actually, anyone who has acknowledged a visit from their own muse will probably recognize this humorous trait that likely inhabits all muses. The book: The Laughing Muse, by Arthur Guiterman, Harper & Brothers, NY (1915). This is a collection of humorous, whimsical verse, most, if not all, of which appears to be pretty boring drivel. But there was that laughing muse holding the world in his hands, smiling down on us. It doesn't appear to be condescending. More of a laughing with us, not at us kind of look. Maybe he's employing a smile and the whole world smiles with you kind of posture. Maybe he's noticed that, as a planet, we have a few situations that could use a smile.

I'm curious about the artist, but can't quite make out his name. Looks like Hunter Clay, but not quite. Hopefully, I can pick up the trail on this illustrator and see where it leads. Right now, the trail is cold--nothing to smile about.

Habent sua fata libelli

I am intrigued at times by the coincidences of discoveries I make and the interesting paths they sometimes take me down. The Latin phrase, Habent sua fata libelli, is the latest example and unites a theme in two books I'm currently reading: A Rare Book Saga: The Autobiography of H.P. Kraus, by H.P. Kraus; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978. and On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, by Ilan Stavans, Viking, 2001. Kraus' book I'm about done with and had just started Stavans' book a few nights ago when I found a bond that needed exploring.


Anyone with a passion for books, particularly rare antiquarian books, would enjoy Kraus' tale of a rising bookman in pre-War Vienna, Nazi concentration camp survivor, immigrant to America, and the most prolific bookseller of the latter half of the twentieth century. His autobiography is a Who's Who of bibliophiles over the last century, as well as a valuable reference for the provenance of certain incunabula and illuminated manuscripts (his specialty).

In one of the later chapters, A Constitution Bought, a Declaration Lost, Kraus muses on the recent prices paid by he and others for choice Americana documents, which were outside his specialty. Specifically, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The inconsistent nature of what fetches how much at which auctions and what can be recouped through private collectors gave Krause pause to invoke the Latin Habent sua fata libelli. I liked the sound of that, and although Kraus parenthetically inserted a definition (Every book has its own price), I still wanted to research the idiom for further clarification.

That led me to Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog: On libraries, services and networks, and an entry dealing with the aura of a book and its copies in the age of digitization and mechanical reproduction. The Latin quote pops up here and is attributed to Walter Benjamin in his essay, Unpacking My Library, from Illuminations. Of course, I had to go research Benjamin, whom I'll likely write about later, but a quick wikipediac moment produced this:
A German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher, who died either by suicide or murder while fleeing the Nazis in an attempt to emigrate to the United States. And now a copy of his Illuminations is going to meet its fate with me.

But a few variants of Kraus' Latin interpretation are presented here on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Every book has its fate and, with a collector's twist, books and their copies have their fates. Is it Benjamin's style or reputation (unfamiliar to me) behind the quote or the actual quote itself that render the collective words so malleable as to cause these variations in definition? Perhaps the phrase itself, with a strategic word substitution, would have its own fate (relative to its user, of course).

Now to Ilan Stavans memoir, a book I bought while out scouting the other day. The title caught my eye and the jacket write-up made the sale. This one will go into my personal collection, at least for awhile (Habent sua fata libelli). Briefly, the author's family were Eastern European Jews who emigrated to the Jewish ghetto of Mexico City. That in itself produced a double-take from me. Mexico City has/had a Jewish ghetto? Stavans later moved to the United States (NY) and Israel. He has claimed Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English as his primary language at one time or another. Hence, the title of his memoir. This book will warrant a separate blog entry at some point, but suffice it to say that the opening paragraph created for me something to think about with respect to my collection of books and how it has evolved.



In Chapter One, Mexico Lindo, Stavans packs his library, preparing to move from his New York City apartment to somewhere outside the city. He contemplates his collection and how it has evolved from the few books he brought with him from Mexico ten years earlier. This informal analysis summons comparisons with how his life has evolved during that same period of time--everything from the books he acquired to the nuances of how those books shared his living space. Then he invokes the biblio-essayist Benjamin:

Walter Benjamin was right when he claimed that a real library is always impenetrable and at the same time unique. My success in America would come when I would once again have a plentiful library, personal in the complete sense of the word, i.e., built on caprice.

With this reference to Benjamin, I recognized a bridge back to Kraus. Scanning the last few chapters of A Rare Book Saga, I found the quote again and smiled at Kraus' interpretation that "every book has its price." Of course a bookseller would put that spin on it!

So several themes threaded their way into my reading and opened a few more windows of discovery into bibliophily and philosphy. From Jewish immigrants to bookish immigrants to migrating libraries and collections of books, anything and everyone, it appears, all have their fates.

Save the books!

Support your local independent bookstore. The little guys keep going down the toilet in alarming numbers. Don't let THIS be on your conscience!

The Cowboy Christmas Ball

This time of year found me revisiting a favorite old antiquarian volume on the shelf: Ranch Verses, by "Larry" Chittenden, "Poet-Ranchman;" 1893, G.P. Putnam's Sons, NY. My volume is a Fourth Edition from 1897, Revised and Enlarged. It's also illustrated with drawings and photographs. Perhaps the First Edition was as well--I'm not sure about that. I'm sure I read through it when I bought it circa mid-1980s, but it would be another ten years before I would discover the seasonal gem in its collection: The Cowboy Christmas Ball.

Michael Martin Murphey popularized this poem in song on his concept album, Cowboy Christmas: Cowboy Songs II, released in May of 1991. He was not the first to put the poem to music; that had been done in Chittenden's day and collected by John Lomax in 1922 in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Murphey may have been the first singer to record the song.

Chittenden's poem commemorates the first Cowboy Christmas Ball, held in Anson, Texas in 1885. Chittended, a reporter for the New York Times, was staying at the hotel while visiting his uncle who owned a ranch nearby. The dance that evening for all the area cowboys inspired his lighthearted verse an it eventually found its way to publication in 1890 in the local paper. Chittenden later inherited his uncle's ranch, moved to Texas, and in 1893 published his first book, Ranch Verse, which included The Cowboy Christmas Ball.


Incidentally, the soiree that Chittenden witnessed that night was not the first dance of that kind in Anson. The ball had been organized each Christmas for several years before that. And it continued somewhat irregularly afterward, with little regard for Chittenden's poem until Leona Barrett, an Anson teacher and folklorist, revived it under the title of The Cowboy Christmas Ball. She sought to preserve the old dance customs in such a way that her group was invited to the National Folk Fetivals, including the 1938 event held in Washington, D.C. There, her Anson, Texas Cowboy Christmas Ball dancers danced on the White House lawn.


By the 1940s, the interest and attendance had increased to the point that the event was copyrighted and a Board of Directors was created. There was even a new venue, Pioneer Hall, built as a permanent home for the three-day event. 1946 appears to have been the first year that Chittenden's ballad was put to music and sang at the ball. What John Lomax collected several decades earlier may or may not have resembled the 1946 composition by Gordon Graham, a cowboy folklorist from Colorado. Graham's rendition started a tradition of having a soloist sing the ballad before the ball. The music from that early 1885 ball consisted of a bass viol, a tambourine, and two fiddles. As the music and vocals evolved over the years, they were always held to a certain standard, which itself has been clarified over the years.


Currently, Michael Martin Murphey carries the torch for this American "old west" classic event that started with a bunch of cowboys in search of a good time, a New York reporter's creative writing, and an emerging interest in a fading way of life to preserve the old ways in song and dance. You can see Murphey's rendition via music video for however long it lasts on youtube.com. Which reminds me...

Having listened to the Murphy recording hundreds of times before picking the book Ranch Verses back up one day and learning that the song was in the book as a poem, and then learning the history, I had thought the characters in the song were fictitiously penned by Murphey or another songwriter. Characters like Windy Bill and Z Bar Dick and Cross P Charley seemed like old cowboy folk characters. But here in Chittenden's book is a photograph of one of the dancers in the song: the leader from Swensen's Ranch, Windy Bill from little Deadman's Branch. This is an old west character if ever there was one. Merry Christmas from the ghosts of Windy Bill, Z Bar Dick, Cross P Charley, old Chittenden himself and the other cowpokes and their ladies!

Breakfast served any time all day... but no trout

I think I like Donald Hall's essays more than his poetry, especially essays on poetry. Until I find a poem of his that blows me away. But right now I'm getting caught up on a collection of essays: Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected, by Donald Hall; The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003. Mr. Hall, a recent poet laureate of the U.S., offered the following quote at the beginning of his book:

Whatever we think we write, with good fortune we write something else: The Muse is the Angel of Accident.

By William Trout, from Early Notebooks.

Interesting! But who is William Trout. Sorry to say I don’t have a clue. A writer, of course. Essayist? Poet? Diarist? If Donald Hall quoted him, he must be a writer of some merit. I'm curious enough about the quotation to do some research. But I get no results from book search engines (bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, etc.). I try with just the author name and with just the title of the piece quoted by Donald Hall. Nothing. I google various combinations of spellings and key words. Nothing again. No Trout. The elusive trout. I shall continue fishing, though.


Woodcut from Dame Juliana Berners’
A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle
(1496)

from the Milne Angling Collections
University of New Hampshire Library

A road less traveled... led to Robert Frost's home

"Because it was grassy and wanted wear..."The walking path to the Frost Place from the parking lot down the hill.

I had the extreme pleasure a few weeks ago, October 5th, of driving around the White Mountains of New Hampshire and visiting Robert Frost's home in Franconia. What a beautiful setting, which has been credited with providing the inspiration for some of his most beloved poems, including Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. And before stopping by the Frost Place, we lunched in the nearby village of Franconia and I wondered if it was the village of the owner of the woods in the poem. And later, while viewing the woods around Frost's home... were they the woods Frost viewed from his front porch? I sat in an old chair on Frost's porch and viewed the White Mountains and the woods, the same view he likely had a hundred years ago. On a quiet autumn afternoon, and I imagine it's always quiet there, you could almost hear a horse in the distance giving his harness bells a shake... Had a few snowflakes begun to fall, I think I would have even seen the horse and buggy!



What a connection to a writer I have long admired and identified with because of our respective connections to the Granite State. In 1923, my great-grandmother bought a copy of Frost's new book of poems titled New Hampshire, published by Henry Holt & Company, New York, in 1923. It has passed down to me and is one of my most prized possessions--a first edition Robert Frost, a Pulitzer Prize winning book no less. And speaking of first editions, the Frost Place museum had a collection of signed, or inscribed, first editions of many of Frost's works. Seeing such a venerable collection, inscribed in Frost's hand, was quite a thrill for me, as both a bookseller and collector.


And in the middle of them was a familiar cover--the book I admired many years in my grandmother's library (her mother's copy) and for many years now in my home. The museum copy bore a nice inscription from Frost.


My copy is not inscribed by Frost (and of course I wish it were!), but it does bear my great-grandmother's bookplate, which is a nice reminder of my family connection across the generations to New Hampshire--both the state and the words of Robert Frost. Seeing the museum copy of that book I own, I was reminded of the title poem, New Hampshire, and how it ended:

Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of say a thousand
(From say a publisher in New York City).
It's restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.

A Civil War veteran's letter to a bookseller

I recently purchased a musty old book at an antique store in a small Texas town: Civics: Texas and Federal, by Triplett and Hauslein; Rein & Sons, Houston (1912). I bought it for an old document left between the pages long ago. It had more value to me than the neglected book that had archived it all these years. I had just about tossed it into the donation pile when I decided to thumb through its pages quickly for any interesting old photographs. I was rewarded for my efforts. Many historical images from around the state of Texas began to appear, but one in particular caught my eye--the Home for Confederate Veterans in Austin.


Earlier this year, I had acquired a letter written in 1922 by an old Civil War soldier--a veteran of the Confederacy living in Austin, Texas at the Home for Confederate Veterans. The envelope bore the Confederate insignia flag and address of the home. The letter was addressed to a Mr. Wolfe of Houston, a bookseller I presume, whom the old vet thought might be able to help him escape his "prison" (he states he is an "inmate of the Home") via the pages of a book about his homeland--Davidson County, Tennessee.


It's a poignant letter from an old man at the end of his life, longing to see his boyhood home. His life long ago shaped by the events of the War Between the States, he still seems to retain an important sense of place for his younger years in Tennessee. By the time he finds himself in the Confederate Home in Austin, Texas, and writing this letter at age 84, his financial situation is pretty dire, but a creative spark hatches a scheme whereby he can travel home again through the pages of a book.

John L. Young is the Confederate veteran. His brief bio is found here at the Texas State Cemetery site. From it, we learn Mr. Young's age, that he was from Nashville, and that he was listed as a deserter during the war. Apparently, he signed up for 12 months and was taken prisoner, but was released after he'd been in service for 12 months, so he just went home. Assuming his obligation was over, and presumably having no more use for the war, he tried to get on with his life. But it would never be the same, and you can hear echoes of longing for his pre-war youth in the lines of his simple request:

I wish to know if I can rent your book for one month. I propose to pay expressage both ways and promise and pledge to keep it absolutely clean and free from abuse. This will be a great favor to me. I will promise that no hands shall touch it but mine.

Every time I read this letter, I wonder how Mr. Wolfe in Houston responded to the old man. Or did he bother to respond at all? Did Mr. Young get to read about his old homeland and see images that would enhance time travel back home through his aging memories? What would a bookseller today do with such a request from, say, a World War II vet? Unless it was a collectible book of great value, I'm pretty sure I would send the old man the book with my compliments and tell him to enjoy it.

1936: The first paid air passenger around the worldMarlin, Texas man crosses Atlantic on new Zeppelin Von Hindenburg

The estimable age of the book above, coupled with the title, hinted strongly that there was an interesting adventure waiting inside. And so I took the book off the shelf of a local resale shop, opened it, and stepped into the world of an early 20th century adventurer by air.

Dr. Bolivar Lang Falconer of Marlin, Texas, a Fellow of the American and the Royal Geographic Societies, embarked on a round-the-world journey in 1936 that would make him the first person to do so as a paying passenger by air. And by the way, what a great name for an aviation adventurer--Falconer!


It was his intent to fly around the world by available paid transport--commercial Zeppelin and airplane lines. This plan included a safe journey on the Zeppelin Von Hindenburg. Yes, that Hindenburg--the same one that burned and crashed killing many on board a year later at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The same tragedy that Hollywood made one of its ubiquitous 1970s disaster movies about.

Retired in 1931 as a Senior Examiner for the United States Civil Service Commission, Falconer had traveled extensively around the world in the ensuing five years, circling the globe five times while setting foot on every continent. On page 17 of his book, he claims: Many think travel on the Zeppelins is very dangerous. This idea, however, is a mistake. The Graf Zeppelin at the end of 1935 had made 437 trips, including104 ocean crossings and a voyage around the world, a total mileage of over 650,000, and had carried safely and promptly a total of 27,900 persons. He then refers to the Hindenburg, which he is about to fly on:

The new airship, the Von Hindenburg, provides accommodations for 50 passengers in two berth staterooms, with running hot and cold water. There are in addition a Reading and Writing Room, a Lounge, and a cozy Smoking Room and Bar, besides a Gallery or Promenade deck on each side. The articles of furniture (beds, tables, chairs, piano, and so forth) are made of aluminum and are very light and the walls of the cabin are very thin. Shower baths are also among the comforts found on the Von Hindenberg. The cabins, lounges, and decks are all enclosed in the shell of the ship. Three meals are served daily and in addition morning and afternoon snacks. The passenger accommodations on the airship are comfortably heated in cold weather. The baggage allowance is only 45 pounds and there is a charge of $1.40 for each pound of excess baggage. The cost of transportation from Lakehurst to Frankfurt (Germany) is $400. This includes meals and tips.

I guess I was more than a little ignorant of just how massive these airships were. I never saw the disaster movie about the Hindenberg tragedy and I never read much detail about the airship itself until I came across Dr. Falconer's little travel book from nearly three-quarters of a century ago. I was struck by the enormous size of the dirigible and found the picture below for comparison at ciderpresspottery.com. The 747 is dwarfed by the airship above it.

Falconer is clearly quite impressed with airship travel and his tone seems to echo other forecasts that the airship would be a viable competitor with the airplane in emerging airline travel for ocean crossings and other long-distance trips.

He describes the take-off from Lakehurst, cruising over Manhattan at 1300 feet and the sights below, followed by a bird's eye view of the many luxurious estates along Long Island Sound, and a trip to the bar by many of the passengers once the excitement below evaporated into the expansive view of the Atlantic Ocean. Certainly sounds like a better time than an airplane hop across the pond in Falconer's other mode of air travel on this journey:

And I'm not sure that you could just "hop across the pond" in 1936 by commercial air. The answer to that appears to be contained in an interview with Dr. Hugo Eckener about Zeppelins, included in this book. Dr. Eckener, who headed operations at the Zeppelin factory in Germany, and had piloted a number of record setting flights, stated this in the interview: "I am very optimistic about the future of the Zeppelins, even if airplane lines are established. For ten years or more they have been saying that airplane service was about to be established, but now they are saying it will be three or four years more." He cites safety and comfort as advantages over airplanes and travel time as an advantage over ships. The interview is not dated (the editors at Stratford should have clarified this oversight), but it's reasonable to conclude that it was conducted inflight during Falconer's trip because Eckener talks about the Hindenberg's next trip being back to New York.

A little research and deeper digging into this book reveals that the Hindenberg's maiden voyage was May 8, 1936 from Frankfurt, Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey. Falconer boarded on May 11th, in what turns out to be the Hindenberg's inaugural voyage from America to Germany, or the return portion of its first round trip.

Falconer writes of his original itinerary that he would fly to Miami, connect with Pan-American Airways to Rio de Janeiro, and there board the Graf Zeppelin airship to Germany. While planning this trip, it was announced that a new German Zeppelin, the Von Hindenberg, would begin trans-Atlantic service in May. Falconer modified his plan accordingly and embarked on the first leg of his journey (10-hour flight from Dallas to Newark) on May 8th, the same day the Hindenberg was embarking on its maiden voyage. Falconer was waiting for the airship when it arrived a few days later and recorded its landing in his travel journal. Beyond the Hindenberg, Falconer traveled through Europe to the Middle East, including stops in Gaza, Palestine and Baghdad, "Irak." Other stops included India, Burma, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Pacific islands of Guam, Wake, Midway, and Hawaii, before flying to San Francisco and back to Dallas. Oddly (sadly for his readers), the travelogue stops in Manila, or about half-way through his trip. No explanation is given, but a few photos help document the remainder of the trip. As Falconer's friend, J.G. Harbord, writes in the Foreword:

This is unquestionably the shortest description written of 26,130 miles of travel, begun and ended at Dallas, Texas, every night spent in a hotel except three nights spent crossing the Atlantic in the Zeppelin. When you read it, you wish the author would expand the story.

Populuxe & Googie Architecture

Surfing in and out of local history sites for my hometown the other day, I came across some info on buildings, restaurants, and other establishments I remembered as a kid. This led to photos of their old "jet age" signs (1950s-60s) and a reference to a site on Googie architecture. And THAT reminded me of a book I bought many years ago for nostalgic browsing: Populuxe, by Thomas Hines; Alfred A. Knopf, NY (1986).


I love this stuff! It’s from the era I was born in and grew up in. Very nostalgic. Takes me back to my childhood. And now I know that style has a name. While Googie Architecture refers specifically to the design of buildings, Populuxe is all encompassing in its examination of early modern culture in the two decades immediately following World War II. From furniture to buildings to automobiles and television sets and appliances, Populuxe captures the essence of a style that came to define that era and is looked upon so favorably by aging baby boomers.

Mark Twain saved American pornography

In free association, if you heard "Mark Twain," you would probably respond with Huckleberry Finn, a 19th century American literary masterpiece. You would not associate this giant of American letters with a masterpiece of erotica. But in An Unhurried View of Erotica, by Ralph Ginzburg; The Helmsman Press, NY (1958), the author offers his opinion that Mark Twain stepped up to the challenge of producing a fine piece of erotic literature that could stand up against the European benchmarks of the day. That book was titled 1601... Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors.

In the Introduction to An Unhurried View of Erotica, Theodore Reik, a prominent psychoanalyst who trained as one of Freud's first students in Vienna, writes:

This little book deals with the universal interest the Anglo-Saxons had and have in all aspects of sex in a surprising manner. It shows the powerful undercurrent of pornography that runs faithfully with the great stream of literature. It follows the erotic trend that moves under the surface of literature from its beginning of the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book until the pornographic works of our time.

Reik writes further, from his psychoanalytic background, that this book shows which components of sexuality and which disavowed impulses strive for satisfaction and which appeal to the appetite of the average man (and woman). Woman seems a parenthetical afterthought. Although it was written in the 1950s, it's still a curious notion coming from a famed psychoanalyst. Or was it the editors that objected to assigning equal drives to women? Who was at the helm of the Helmsman Press at that time? A valuable contribution to the exploration of unconscious emotions makes this book an interesting read to the psychiatrist, psychologist, sociologist, and historian of civilization.
In one of Reik's concluding paragraphs, he notes:

The author justifiably includes the scatalogical interest in the area of erotica. The discoveries of psychoanalysis and analytic child-psychology leave no doubt that the functions of evacuation are not only biologically but also psychologically intimately connected with sexuality.

This is a good point to jump off the psychoanalytic ship and back onto Twain's riverboat humor, with references in a 1601 scene to flatulence, as well as fornication, during a fictitious meeting of Queen Elizabeth's inner circle in the year 1601 (hence the title of the book). The terms erotica and pornography get tossed around in An Unhurried View of Erotica with a pretty wide net to catch references such as these and assign them pornographic status. Today, where the nearly hardcore has become nearly mainstream, we would laugh at what passed for pornography back in the (Twain) day.

But Twain had written 1601 in between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, at a time when America's output of erotically-tinged material was sorely lacking in comparison to Europe's erotic masterpieces in morocco bindings, elegant papers, and fine illustrations. Written for the amusement of Twain's closest friend, Reverend Joseph Twichell (wonder what his sermons were like?), 1601 was later first published by another friend, John Hay, who later became Secretary of State. Hay had 4 copies printed in pamphlet form in 1880. If any of these still exist, I'd have to think they are among the rarest of Twain collectibles, if not the rarest.

The first hardcover printings did not come out for another two years. Yet another friend was involved, this one a Lieutenant C.E.S. Wood, who was in charge of the Academy's printing press. Lt. Wood published an elegant edition of 50 copies on handmade linen paper and distributed to dignitaries around the world. Even the Pope got a copy!

Subsequent U.S. editions to date of A View of Erotica's publication brought the total editions to 44. Around the world, many more editions flourished in places like Japan where it is still more popular there than in America. Twain's new found status as America's premier creator of fine erotica landed him some unusual invitations, which he gladly accepted during his celebrated trip abroad.

One was a chance to visit the secret treasure vaults of the Berlin Royal Library and browse the Kaiser's pornographic holdings. And another invitation was to address the Stomach Club in Paris, where his topic was "Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism." One wonders at the self-gratification Mr. Twain experienced having been invited to address that auspicious group... Regardless, American erotica would never be viewed the same by our friends overseas. All thanks to the witty whims of a former Mississippi River steamboat pilot.

Books become an artist's canvas

This has nothing to do about the interesting things we find among the leaves of used books, rather it has to do with the covers. In the photo above, Los Angeles artist, Mike Stilkey, has used the spines of stacks of used books to create portraits of the human condition befitting the worn canvas upon which they reside.

The Rice Gallery at Rice University in Houston recently exhibited Stilkey's work titled, When the Animals Rebel, through the summer. Stilkey is described as

a passionate collector of old records, cameras, and especially books, to which he is attracted, " … sometimes by the title, or more the look of it, the antiqueness of it, or the wear and tear of it. Sometimes there’s a weird illustration. I’ve got these books and I’ll never read them, but I want them for some reason and I’ve never known why.

Ah... Kindred spirit! But Stilkey's art paints a new image of the old phrase about judging a book by its cover.

Spinach Days

I recognized the title of this book when I saw it recently on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop: Spinach Days, by Robert Phillips, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (2000). A few of the poems in this volume have made their way to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, and I remembered liking them. So I pulled it from the shelf and had a look. A nice surprise--it was signed by Phillips. For six bucks, and it being a first printing, I decided to buy it. There is some fine writing here with memorable lines (including such intriguing titles as John Dillinger's Dick and The Man Who Fell in Love with his Cat), but the following lines from Houston Haiku provided me with the sharpest (pardon the pun) imagery in the entire volume:


Trying to love her
is just like licking honey
from the razor's edge.

Willkommen... to Frenchman Bay, MaineGermany's 1899 Plan for Invading the United States

How do you say "More lobster, please" in German? If German plans more than a century ago had actually been implemented, that phrase may have become part of the new Maine vernacular.

Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941, by Holger H. Herwig; Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1976).

This book caught my eye for historical reasons (intriguing history!) as well for the lone illustration in the book which shows plans for a German invasion of the United States in 1899. Two routes were mapped out with the first depicting the would-be conquerors landing in Frenchman Bay, Maine.




This book details the history of the German-American Naval rivalry dating back to an encounter in 1889 and culminating World War II. Incidents in that initial encounter of the two navies in Samoa generated such antagonism that the Kaiser developed plans for an invasion of the United States in 1899. An Invasion Plan (map above) is presented as an illustration on this book.

Mehr Hummer, bitte!

A plate of Belgian lace

I have a chromolithograph plate, for which I am trying to find the book it illustrates. I found the folio-size plate (12 X 17 inches), matted and framed (since removed), hanging in a resale shop, and walked out with it for $7. Bargain? I don't know for sure, but I think so. I only know that it reminded me of a trip to Belgium in 1994 and walking through the old city of Brugge along the aged cobblestone streets, window shopping for chocolate and lace with my wife. I thought she might like the old plate I found the other day. She did. It may have a new home in our home, but first I want to find out something about where it came from. Depending on value, it may have a new home elsewhere via ebay.


The title of the plate is Brussels Lace, by V. Washer of Brussels. In small print above the title, and just below the chromolithograph, are some good bibliographic clues that help identify the book from which the plate may have originated:

London. Chromolithographed and published by Day & Son,
Lithographers to the Queen
J.B. Waring, direx.t


Using this information in a keyword search, I was able to locate a few copies of a book, or set of books, that seem to fit the bill for my plate:
Masterpieces of Industrial Art & Sculpture at the International Exposition, 1862 (3-volume set), edited by J.B. Waring. There are more than 300 chromolithograph plates in the set. Other books I found were ruled out if the number of plates in the book was less than than 109, the number assigned to my plate. The International Exhibit was like a World's Fair type of event, and was held in London in 1851 and 1861. Images, like the one below, of the 1862 Exhibit can be found at the Science and Society Picture Library site.



I may have even found the lithographer who actually did the chromolithographs for the book and, thus, the plate now in my possession. Researching the International Exhibition of 1862 led me to a related book, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings 1830-1880, by Edmund M.B. King, Oak Knoll Press (2003). An excerpt of the book referenced William Robert Tymms, artist and engraver, who created the chromolithographs for J. B. Waring’s Masterpieces of the Industrial Art & Sculpture at the International Exhibition, 1862.

All I need now is the final piece of proof that my detective work is on target. Stay tuned...

Happy Birthday, Lou Gehrig!

The Iron Horse is 105 today. He died a little over 66 years ago on June 2, 1941. Twenty-three years later, in 1964, I made my first trip to the school library (2nd grade) and selected Lou Gehrig: Boy of the Sandlots, by Guernsey Van Riper; Bobbs-Merril, 1959. This selection coincided with my beginning Little League Baseball. I was eight years old and in love with the sport. Lou Gehrig became my hero after I read this Childhood of Famous Americans classic.


Several decades later, before I got into bookselling and more serious collecting, I learned there was an edition that preceded the edition I grew up with. The first edition was published in 1949, same publisher (Bobbs-Merrill). It was illustrated with silhouettes instead of pictures. I could not relate to this or any other of the silhouette books in the series. I grew up with the reprints, and, as a collector now, I still look for and prefer the reprints, whose jackets of soft colors and basic geometric shapes never fail to provide me with a burst of pleasant nostalgia. I do collect the first editions, but they don't create that connection with my childhood like the later printings do.


Here are a few other Gehrig biographies from my collection. These are a bit harder to find than other books written about him.

Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero, by Frank Graham; G.P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1942


Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees, by Paul Gallico; Grosset & Dunlap, NY, 1942 (Jacket features Gehrig and Gary Cooper, who played Gehrig in the 1942 film, Pride of the Yankees)


Lou Gehrig: The Iron Horse of Baseball, by Richard Hubler; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1941


My Luke and I: Mrs. Gehrig's Joyous and Tragic Love for the Iron man of Baseball, by Eleanor Gehrig and Joseph Durso; Thomas Y. Crowell Company, NY, 1976

Bookbinder artistry

I've always been drawn to the decorative bindings of certain antiquarian books and have purchased books just for the binding, regardless of the authors or titles or content of the book. Sometimes it's the object that counts. Now, the University of Alabama has created an online digital display cabinet of these kinds of books so artistically bound. Click here to view.

Below are a few samples from my collection (1875 to 1906). Historic Philadelphia Mansions and A Boy's Vacation Abroad were actually purchased because I found references in them to some of my family history. Sometimes you get lucky and get the whole package!






Here's a related entry from October 2006.
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Herbert Faulkner West: A bookseller's sunny intervals

A nice second-hand bookstore find the other day introduced me to a passionate bookseller and collector and popular Dartmouth professor of literature via the book, SUNNY INTERVALS: A Bookman's Miscellanea, London / San Francisco / Hanover, by Herbert Faulkner West; Westholm Publications, 1972; signed and numbered by the author, below colophon (limited edition of 400 copies). Unfortunately, he died a few years after the publication of this volume, which was more than 30 years ago.


Laid in at the beginning of the book was a nice surprise--a letter from the author, as well as various correspondence from the book's previous owner, relating items about the author. Also, there were several newspaper articles about his death and long career teaching. I feel fortunate to have discovered him through this book, and am grateful to the kind stewards at the used bookshop for keeping intact the associated ephemera from a previous owner connected to Mr. West.


His book buying trips to the locales listed in the title of this book are full of detail regarding his purchases and from whom he purchased the books. That information provides interesting insight to the values and provenance of certain books and authors he collected, such as Robert Frost, W.H. Hudson, T.E. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats.

The first chapter may explain finding this copy of the book in a Texas bookshop. The book begins with a 1964 trip to Texas, where West meets with J. Frank Dobie in Austin. Dobie is legendary in Texas and he and West seemed to have had a friendship. Mr. West finds Dobie in ill health, but still getting around.

Subsequent chapters detail various bookbuying trips West took to California and London. He never fails to mention dealers and their stock and exactly what he bought. Often times he mentions what he paid for a collectible book, giving collectors and dealers alike an idea of how much certain books have appreciated over the years. For example: The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill (1898) cost West $125 during a California buying trip in the 1960s. Today, for a nice first edition of that book, he could expect to pay between $3,000 and $4,000. Another purchase, James Joyce's first book, Chamber Music (immaculate condition) set him back $182. Today, that book would quickly run up into the thousands, possibly as much as $10,000.

As for booksellers, he knew quite a few of the prominent ones in both America and England. Collectors and sellers alike, if they've been at it long enough, have undoubtedly heard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California. West recounts a 1968 visit with Peter Howard, the owner, shortly after he had opened Serendipity. West prophetically proclaims, "I think he has quite a future as a bookseller."

West was also friends with various writers, including poet Robert Frost and novelist Henry Miller. Much of his collection of Henry Miller works and correspondence with the author is now in the Dartmouth College Library. Of Miller, West has been credited with having written the first review of him in America. And that review is reproduced in this book, Sunny Intervals.

For those who enjoy a vicarious trip among the continents in search of rare books, Sunny Intervals may offer the appropriate vehicle.

Burning books... and the bookseller: Papal persecution of the Waldenses

For the last month, I’ve been traipsing about the Alps and nearby valleys between France and Italy, and on a timeline around the mid-1500s. I’ve been trying to find a bookseller who was burned at the stake for selling books he shouldn’t have been selling, according to papal authorities at that time.

I recently acquired an antique print from 1770 that depicts a bookseller being burnt at the stake in Avignon. His crime was selling Protestant Bibles, reportedly printed in the native French tongue of his customers. The print came from Henry Southwell's, The New Book of Martyrs or Compleat Christian Martyrology, published in London by J. Cooke in 1770. I wanted to know who the bookseller was and why selling certain books cost him his life. I had a similar curiosity about a German bookseller named Johann Palm, who was executed by napoleon's troops, and researched some pretty fascinating history that resulted in the very first entry on this blog. So now I have another martyred bookseller on my hands. I know from the print that it happened sometime before 1770 in Avignon, France, and the bookseller was selling French language Bibles. Time for some more research.

My search led me to the Waldenses of France, a Protestant sect that broke from the teachings of the Church of Rome and suffered brutal persecution for hundreds of years. Providing some very brief background details, a certain Pierre Valdo became a thorn in the Pope's side sometime around 1150 A.D., preaching a reformed Christianity that supported separation from the Catholic Church. His followers became known as the Vaudois (Waldens), with most of their parishes being in the Alpine valley of the Piedmont. Their numbers reached about 20,000 and missionaries went forth to spread the word. They were savagely persecuted in France, Spain, and Italy. And over the next 600 years or so, the Vaudois, or Waldenses, suffered repeated persecution at the hands of Popes, and Dukes and Duchesses. But 1540-1570 seems to have been particularly cruel and horrific. That may be where the bookseller comes in, and being burned at the stake seems tame compared with the umbelievably inhuman torture suffered by most (details are spared here... see the Book of Martyrs if you have a strong stomach). Halley’s Bible handbook, 1965 estimates 900,000 Protestants killed from 1540 to 1570 in the persecution of the Waldenses. Concerning the persecutions in France, Southwell writes,

“Thus did popish malice pursue the reformed in most parts of France, and persecute them under various names, but the denomination about this time, viz. the sixteenth century, most obnoxious to the Roman Catholics were hugonots, protestants, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and as these words were then synonymous in their meaning, and implied renouncing the errors of the church of Rome, so all who were apprehended under the imputation of belonging to either, were equally martyred. Yet the reformed flourished under persecution….” [p. 93]

“the king [of France] publically declared he would exterminate the protestants from France….” “The general cry was ‘Turn papists, or die.’” [p. 108]

“Those who were not put to death suffered imprisonment, had their houses pulled down, their lands laid waste, their property stolen, and their wives and daughters, after being ravished, sent into convents…. If any fled from these cruelties, they were pursued through the woods, hunted and shot like wild beasts....At the head of the dragoons, in all the provinces of France, marched the bishops, priests, friars, &c. the clergy being ordered to keep up the cruel spirit of the military. An order was published for demolishing all protestant churches….” [pp. 108-109]

However, I can find no record of a bookseller being burned at the stake in Avignon, but a rather well-documented case of another bookseller’s demise, for the same crime no less as the that of the bookseller in Avignon, does exist about the same time in Turin, Italy. This bookseller was Bartholomew Hector, a native of Poiters in France. After his own break from the Church of Rome to embrace the Protestant faith, he had settled in Genoa to live peacefully with his family, practicing his new faith. He began selling Bibles and his journeys took him into the Piedmonts to sell French language Bibles to the Waldenses. On one such trip, he was captured by Roman soldiers and jailed for nearly seven months before being brought to trial for the crime of selling French language Bibles to Protestants. He was subsequently ordered to be burned at the stake in Turin. But the judges must have taken pity on him—a rare attitude in those times—because Hector was given several chances to renounce his faith and rejoin the Church of Rome. He refused. At the last minute, as he was about to be burned, he was offered on last chance, a most unusual gesture. Here’s what happened (from Testimony of Bartholomew Hector - A.D. 1555):

"To this faithful Christian man this last offer was but old temptation under a new form. It was in his eyes an absolute recantation of his Faith, an actual betrayed of the Savior who had died for him. This was no time for unholy compromises. Instead of returning an answer to the messenger of the court, he fell on his knees on the pile on which He was to die, and clasping his hands and raising his eyes to heaven, he exclaimed in a loud voice: "O Lord! Give me Grace to preserve unto the end; pardon those whose sentence is now to separate my soul from my body; they are not Unjust, but Blind. O Lord! Enlighten by Thy Spirit this people who are around me, and bring them very soon to a knowledge of the TRUTH." At these words the people, who had waited in a painful suspense, to see how the martyr would receive the offer of pardon, burst into a loud sob, and there were some who cried out that it was a shame to put to death so good man who gave such evidence of being a Christian. The officers, fearful of the effect of this feeling, ordered the execution to put his victim to death without delay. The martyr was seized, thrown down upon the pile and strangled, and at the same moment the flames shot up enveloping the stake and the victim from the gaze of the multitude. The soul of Hector had passed through eternity into New Jerusalem, to receive its reward from the hands of Him who has said: "To him that overcometh Will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and sit down with my Father in His throne."

Quite a story of unwavering faith. But this is just one of millions during several hundred years the Waldenses resisted the Church of Rome. It is very likely there was more than one bookseller selling French Protestant Bibles. It is equally likely that more than one could have been caught and burned at the stake. But the way in which Bartholomew Hector moved the people who had gathered to watch him burn distinguishes him from any others, of whom no record appears to exist.

Bartholomew Hector is the only “burnt bookseller” I know of from Foxe’s, Southwell's, and others’ editions of the Book of Martyrs. Is it possible that the French Protestant bookseller depicted by artist Dodd delin in Southwell’s book was actually executed in Turin? It stands to reason that if you’re going to depict a bookseller burning at the stake, your likely subject will be the bookseller well documented in the book in which your engraving will appear. Until I find out otherwise, if I do, I am leaning towards a factual error in the engraving.

Another interesting aspect of researching forgotten history subjects is what you find along the way that can take you down other roads, directly related or otherwise. For example, D.J. McAdam’s website for book collectors. Lots of interesting and valuable information here for bibliophiles. The page that linked to my research was about historical authors who met their fates because of the books they wrote. Within that page, a link to Books Fatal to Their Authors, by P.H. Ditchfield (1895) . And quite possibly, any bookseller caught selling such offensive material suffered a similar fate of mortality. With the two I have found this year, I may have the beginnings of another volume: Books That Killed the Bookseller.

Separating the idiots from the morons

An interesting look at the way our language usage changes over time can be found in You and Heredity, by Adam Scheinfeld, published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in New York, 1939.


Chapter XXIV of this volume is titled Sick Minds. It begins with a look at mental illness, as it relates to heredity, and segues from manic-depressives and schizophrenia into feeble-mindedness and subnormal intelligence: "It is the very large class of the higher type of feeble-minded, the morons, which concerns us most. Only by an intelligence test can they be distinguished from persons of normal intelligence."

For the IQ test, persons who scored below 90 were considered below average. For them, there was a scale used to further classify the levels of subnormal intelligence. And this is where we get into archaic usage and how that usage has evolved (devolved?). Apparently, the terms used on this scale were acceptable and without the insulting connotations they carry today. They are, in descending order: Dull, Feeble-minded, Moron, Imbecile, and Idiot. Morons had the distinction of being further defined as either High-grade, Mid-grade, or Low-grade Morons.


We all know how these terms are used today. Insulting as they are in their current-day slang usage, they once constituted valid terminology among mental health professionals. Modern-day equivalents include Borderline Intellectual Functioning, Mild Mental Retardation, Moderate Retardation, Severe Mental Retardation, and Profound Mental Retardation.

Fifty to a hundred years from now, it would be interesting to see if these words hold up in the context of intelligence descriptors. Likely they won’t. Language is, and always has been, constantly changing and evolving in various ways. No reason to believe that process would exclude the IQ scale.

Steinbeck's journal

A few weeks ago, while out book hunting, I came across a copy of Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, by John Steinbeck, published posthumously by the Viking Press, 1969. The jacket cover features a box that Steinbeck hand-carved for his journal, which was presented to his editor upon completion of the novel. On the box, he carved the title of the novel and the Hebrew characters for the word timshel, which appears in a key scene of the novel.


The price was $16 and I started to put it back, as it looked like a $15 book, for resale, at best. But I decided to read just a bit of it--journals and diaries usually catch my attention. Plus Steinbeck was someone whose works I read in high school, maybe college--I don't remember. And I had not read East of Eden. I was hooked by the first page or two and and quickly put it in my basket, thankful I had taken a second look at it.

This journal not only offers an interesting look at the creative process at work for writing the novel, but also offers some interesting autobiographical insights. I'm no Steinbeck scholar, so most of it is new to me. But I'd bet that any Steinbeck aficionado would find something of interest here.

Steinbeck wrote in this journal every day that he worked on East of Eden, from January 29 to November 1, 1951. The actual journal was a gift from his editor, Pascal Covici, whom he addressed as Pat in his journal. Each entry was written in the form of a letter to his editor, and contained information about the work in progress on the novel, thoughts, ideas, and debates about the course of the novel. He also let personal information seep in, such as this entry early on in the writing:

I must get into the book again at least try to even though my mind is badly cut up in all directions. Very hard to concentrate today. But I must try for my own safety.Take things in stride and particularly don't anticipate trouble before it happens. One of my very worst habits is the anticipation of difficulties and vicariously to go through them in advance. Then, if they do happen I have to do it twice, and if they don't happen I have done them unnecessarily. I know this is my habit... but not to o it requires constant watchfulness on my part. I have the recurring tendency. I guess I am what is called a worrier.

Sounds like he suffered through bouts of anxiety from time-to-time. And in a single paragraph of another entry, we learn about his recent struggle with depression and excessive drinking, and he even offers a glimpse of his sex life:

My health is generally good. I have been drinking too much, I think, and a few times in the last months I have had depressions. But it does not seem to me that the depressions are as awful as they used to be. Perhaps some acid juice is drying up. My sexual drive is, if anything, stronger than ever but that may be because it is all in one direction now and not scattered. I don't know about my thinking. It will take this book to determine if that is any good. My mind seems to me to be young and elastic but perhaps everyone thinks that always.

He is self-critical at times, very sensitive toward his young boys, dedicated to his work and getting it just right (which obviously he did). An interesting man, Steinbeck provides insight into his creative mind and his personal life through this brief journal at a time in his life when he seemed to be relatively content and on top of his game. More on the journal later, as certain entries might warrant...

Pinocchio revisited

I got bit of a shock reading what I think is one of the earlier English translations of the Italian children's classic, Pinnochio. The volume I found a copy of recently is Pinocchio: The Adventures of a Marionette, by C. Collodi, Ginn and Company, Boston, 1904. Translated from the Italian by Walter S. Cramp; with Editorial Revision by Sara E.H. Lockwood; with Many Original Drawings by Charles Copeland.


It was Copeland's illustrations that got my attention and made me start reading this classic. I had never read it before, but remember seeing some Disney book version as well as the movie, both of which were watered down versions of the original story. I vaguely remember colorful pictures from a book and certain scenes from the movie, but I never knew the original story. So I was very surprised to see an illustration of Pinocchio with his feet burned off! And later another illustration of him hanging by the neck from an oak tree while the cat and fox watched impatiently waiting for him to die! And it just keeps getting worse for Pinocchio. He gets turned into a donkey, but comes up lame and gets sold for his skin. The man who bought him ties a big rock to him and throws him over a cliff into the water to drown so that he can cut his skin off to make a drum. He also gets chased, bullied, arrested, and thrown in jail. The moral here is that he's been bad and has to atone to become a real live little boy. To become human, it seems, he has to suffer inhuman treatment. Some pretty sadistic stuff befalls this loveable character, but he perseveres. It's an endearing story, to be sure, but I don't think his suffering matched his crimes. He was just mischievous, not cruel. He took Gepetto's wig off his head as soon as he got hands, he ran from Gepetto as soon as he got legs and feet. Just having a little fun, and for that he had to get burned, hung, jailed, drowned, and more? Pretty rough retribution.



The worst thing Pinocchio did (that I can find) was to kill the Talking Cricket. He did have a temper, at least in the beginning of the story. He meets the Talking Cricket (Jiminy in the Disney story), who tells Pinocchio he is just a marionette and worse, his head is nothing but wood. This so enrages Pinocchio that he picks up a hammer and throws it at the cricket, killing him. No songs about when you wish upon a star.

Now for some background on the origins of Pinocchio. The author, Carlo Collodi was actually Carlo Lorenzini of Florence, Italy. His mother was from the village of Collodi in the Tuscany region. As an author and journalist, he began using the name Collodi for a pseudonym. When nearly 50 years old, he ventured into children’s literature, first with a translation of French fairy tales, and later by authoring a series of tales about the unification of Italy. He consequently became intrigued with the idea of using allegory in his writing and began creating a series in 1880 called Storia di un burattino (The Story of a Marionette), also called Le Avventure di Pinocchio, which was serialized in Il Giornale dei Bambini, a newspaper for children. Children and parents loved the allegorical tales of the ill-behaved puppet’s adventures, but Collodi intended to end the series with Pinocchio being hung by the neck to die by the cat and fox, and left his readers hanging instead. They were none too happy and protested so much that Collodi resumed the story. By 1883, the serialized tales had been collected into a full-length book, which was well-received and became quite popular in Italy. By 1892, the first English edition was published, which was two years after Collodi had died, never knowing how successful his story was destined to become. The Ginn edition, published in Boston, may have been the first American edition, after a false start by Cassell in New York. The president of the company was caught embezzling about the time the book was being published and it never was completed. I can't find another American edition preceding the Ginn edition of 1904. On a related note, it's interesting to learn about how the translations changed through subsequent editions to accommodate the thinking of the times in which those editions were published. In an excerpt from Children's Literature 32 (2004) 226-230, Philip Nel writes in The Transformations of Pinocchio:

Analyzing over a century's worth of Pinocchios, the authors read for the ways in which these versions reflect and respond to the ideological and historical conditions under which they were produced. In doing so, Wunderlich and Morrissey find the abridged versions marketed to schools particularly troubling. As they explain, the Ginn edition of Cramp's translation (1904) was more didactic, omitted references to social class, removed criticism of adults and was "skewed towards industrial moralism" (40). This school edition of Pinocchio responds critically to growing labor unrest, "provid[ing] guidance not only for the child's future work role, but also for the way the child's parents are supposed to act towards their own employers" (39).

Another note of interest concerns the illustrations. The first color illustrations did not appear until 1911 by Attilio Mussino, who is widely acknowledged as having created the definitive Pinocchio. From James Martin at http://goeurope.about.com/cs/italy/a/pinocchio_2.htm I learned that Mussino's last home in Italy was in the town of Vernante, and in the last couple of decades, two townspeople have paid tribute to him by painting murals on local buildings that depict his Pinocchio artwork. Martin includes a photo of the mural depicting Pinocchio about to kill the Talking Cricket:

Industrial Relations 1943: Equal Opportunity Offenders

Perusing the contents of Industrial Relations Handbook, by Aspley & Whitmore, Dartnell 1943, First Edition, I find stereotypes and misconceptions jumping off the pages. "Politically incorrect" would be politely inadequate in describing some of the ideas brought forth in this manual for today's Human Resources manager.


For starters, let's look at employing women in factories and plants where their mode of dress can create issues in the workplace. The authors assert that women hate to wear goggles. The reasoning is hilarious today, and I would think it couldn't have been taken serious 60-something years ago, but who knows. They hate to wear goggles because... "They want men to see their eyes." And, of course, they want men to see their eyes because women know that the next man they see could just turn out to be Mr. Right. Here's the full text of this unbelievable passage (click on the image to enlarge it):


If women's skills and place in the workforce were so chauvinistically treated, what about racial considerations? There is a section in the book titled Negroes in Industry, but this was not written to acknowledge achievement, rather to raise questions about the competence of Negroes in the work place and how hiring can turn out successful. You can almost see the tide trying to turn in thinking, but it is still rooted deeply in the prejudices of the previous centuries.


As this book was published during World War II, caricatures of the enemy were used and deemed appropriate humor for boosting morale. But again, in today's world, a poster like the one at the top of this post depicting a Japanese person, just wouldn't fly.

Book titles foreshadow the hangman's noose

Having just handled these books earlier in the week, oddly enough, their titles became rather topical sounding this morning. No digging in the leaves here--just some quick surface observations of the jacket titles in the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution last night. At a New Year's Eve-Eve-Eve party I attended, the host turned the tv onto a cable news channel, and about 9:00 p.m. C.S.T., somebody in the room alerted the rest of us that he was dead. We looked away (tv on the east wall, no less!) from our drinks and conversations, uttered a few comments--mostly about fears of the effect the news would have on our troops over there--then somebody changed the channel to one of the football bowl games, and life resumed at a cocktail party 7500 miles away. Barely a ripple in the rhythms of a festive evening. I hope for the same for all the troops in harm's way.

The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
- Longfellow

Joyeaux Noel en Provence

Here’s one for Christmas: Little Saints of Christmas: The Santons of Provence, by Daniel J. Foley; Dresser, Chapman & Grimes; Boston, 1959. This book tells the story behind the handcrafted terracotta figurines that have decorated the countryside in Provence, France for centuries at Christmas time. In addition to the traditional manger scene figures, the folk of Provence have included figurines representing themselves--peasant in the field, tradesmen, and artisans--all bearing gifts and paying homage to the Saviour. These figurines have become quite collectible, the author being a collector himself. As has been the tradition for generations, families prepare the crèche, or manger, at Christmas. The santons, which are often handed down from generation to generation, are placed in the crèche. Below are some photos from the book that show the artistry and tradition behind these special figurines.

Merry Christmas!

Hunting a limner in South Africa, 1855

Here’s an intriguing, if not interesting, little book that’s come into my possession: Pen & Ink Sketches in Parliament, by Limner; published by the “Monitor” Office, Castle-Street, Capetown (South Africa) in 1855.

The more I dig into this slim, leather-bound volume, the more interesting it becomes. I wanted to find out who Limner was, and I believe I've discovered an early Victorian satirist named John Leighton, who published under the pseudonym of Luke Limner. Leighton [Limner] not only wrote social satire, he also designed books as well. Seems he came from a line of book people and was a respected designer in his own right. From the University of Rochester's Rare Books & Special Collections, a sample of Leighton's work:


His design skills and interests stretched beyond bookbinding into bookplates. Recently, I found another blog about book plates (see Bookplates with reference to Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie), and I wonder if Mr. Leighton is mentioned there or in links to related sites. Apparently, Leighton was one of the pioneers in bookplate study and collection. He helped found an Ex-Libris Society and published a journal for the society called the Book-Plate Annual.

But it’s his wit that shows through the writing in Pen & Ink Sketches, if he is indeed the author. There is little to the book's design to suggest an artistic undertaking, so it would appear he had little if anything to do with that area of publication. And Leighton certainly fits the time frame, having lived from 1822-1912. The publication date of Pen & Ink Sketches (1855) would have made him about 32 or 33—young and energetic enough to travel to South Africa and stay awhile. That couldn't have been an easy trip. In a section about the himself the author of Pen & Ink Sketches purports to be a much older gentleman, but that could be part of his efforts to remain anonymous.

Much of Leighton's known work seems to have occurred after the Pen & Ink Sketches book was published. As the Exhibition of 1862 approached, London-based Leighton, an illustrator and publisher of some growing reputation was in charge of the committee collecting designs for industrial art for the exhibition.

Back to the book itself, which started all this digging for the pseudonymous author, another intriguing aspect is the section of ads in the back. It offers a good look into the business community of Capetown, South Africa in the 1850s. The colored pages are fascinating to look through for the historian interested in that area. I am neither an historian or particularly interested in that area, but I enjoyed leafing through the ads as a general reader with a lay interest in history. Sample pages follow.

Checkers

Revealing my ignorance here... I was surprised to find this book on the game of Checkers: Lees' Guide to the Game of Draughts or Checkers: Giving the Best Lines of Attack and Defence on the Standard Openings, with Notes and Variations, Revised and Extended by the Late John W. Dawson of Newcastle-on-Tyne; David McKay Company, Philadelphia (1931). Surprised because I always thought of checkers as a simple game that came boxed with about a half-page set of instructions. So here is a 271-page tome, albeit only about 4 X 6 inches in decorative cloth boards with a jillion illustrations and complicated looking diagrams of strategy and maneuvers. Did they confuse this with chess by some chance? And what is "draughts?" Checkers only gets second billing in the title.


Think of checkers and you (I) get an image of old men sitting around the cracker barrel or old Franklin stove in a country store, slowly pondering their next move on the checker board. I don't think of detailed books, with bloated titles, and this one was originally published in 1897. I guess by 1931 (this edition), the game had changed enough in some way to warrant a new edition. Revised and enlarged. What is there to revise about checkers? Perhaps this falls under the heading of "You can't judge a book by its cover."

John Adams' books

An exhibit at the Boston Public Library, titled John Adams Unbound, reminded me of a book on my shelves: The Adams Papers: The Earliest Diary of John Adams, edited by L.H. Butterfield; The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, 1966.

I looked through the index for a clue to Adams’ book collection, the kinds of things he liked to read or collect, and any thoughts he may have recorded about a passion for books. By the way, here’s a related article in the Boston Globe. Anyway, I found reference to an entry in a later diary outside the scope of Butterfield’s book, which involved an eager acceptance of book recommendations from a Mr. Tyler.

As a rising young lawyer in 1770, Adams made the acquaintance of Royall Tyler, who recommended an eclectic variety of reading that, Butterfield writes, Adams took quite seriously. I assume this means he bought or borrowed and read these works, which provides insight to the curious and interesting tastes Adams had in books. The titles he took to heart from Tyler included Dr. South’s sermon upon the Wisdom of this World; Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville; Character of a Trimmer, by Halifax; Hurd’s Dialogue upon Sincerity in the Commerce of Life, Machiavelli and Caesar Borgia.

These books are mentioned by Adams in a diary entry dated 1770, August 19—much later than the date ranges for the ent