Wild flowers in Saudi Arabia

This time of year, we're used to this kind of scene in Texas--a proliferation of beautiful wildflowers painting the spring landscape.

Bluebonnets in Independence, TX

A mixture in my backyard, west of Houston
So wildflowers weren't far from the forefront of my thoughts when I came across this book: Wild Flowers of Central Saudi Arabia, photographs and text by Betty A. Lipscombe Vincett (1977).


Texas and wildflowers go hand-in-hand in the spring, but Saudi Arabia? That was news to me--news that the country had any wildflowers, let alone such a beautiful variety as found in this book.


The author wandered the wadis (dry river beds) and sand dunes near the Tuwaiq Mountain Range in the vicinity of Riyadh to capture these images. Click on the image below of the book's endpapers for an enlarged view of a map of the area.


Spring rains help this area come alive with a colorful array of flowers during the spring months, which parallels our own season of wildflowers in Texas and other parts of the US. The following images represent a sampling of the variety the author/photographer found in her Saudi Arabian explorations and included in this book.













A word of caution... I don't know about Saudi Arabia, but in parts of Texas, hidden among the beauty of the spring flowers, you want to watch where you're walking in fields of bluebonnets and other wildflowers. You just might rattle one of these critters!

America's first bookshop caravan

Nearly one hundred years ago, the idea of a portable book shop, motorized on wheels, was just that--an idea. Then along came Christopher Morley's little book, Parnassus on Wheels, in 1917, and the idea soon became a reality in the summer of 1920 thanks to a woman named Bertha Mahony, whom I'll introduce a bit later. First, here's the roundabout way I discovered her.

The following book introduced me to the first book shop caravan in the United States: The Truth About Publishing, by Stanley Unwin (Houghton Mifflin, 1927). This book appears to have been from a special edition published for the American Booksellers Association, with the compliments of the Houghton Mifflin Company.


Almost hidden, deep inside this book on page 191, is a footnote about the first attempts to put a motorized caravan into action for selling books to rural customers.

In a chapter titled, The Actual Selling, the author wades into a subject he's long been interested in--the idea of a caravan book shop to serve the rural areas. He makes the comparison to libraries and the loan of books through traveling caravans, or what came to be known as bookmobiles. He goes on to describe a scenario for how such an undertaking might actually be successful. He foresaw a group of publishers managing the caravan bookshop as a cooperative working closely with local booksellers' associations. The goal would be "to put every new customer in touch with the nearest bookseller from whom supplies could be obtained between the caravan's visit."

The author asks the question, "Is this Utopian?" He then answers his own question: "I think not." He ends his thoughts on the subject with the following footnote:

In the summers of 1919 and 1920 the Women's Industrial Union of Boston, through its Bookshop for Boys and Girls, with the backing of a group of American publishers, made the experiment of sending a motor caravan, equipped as a bookshop, throughout the country districts and summer resorts of New England. The enterprise was not a financial success and the supporting publishers lost heart after two seasons. It is possible that greater perseverance would have brought about a different result. In any event, valuable educational work was done. In the summer of 1926 several adventures in the field, undertaken by enterprising young women, achieved a modest success.

And with that chapter's footnote, I put the book down and began searching for a footnote in history--the first book caravan in America. Akin to an early bookmobile, this caravan was for selling books, not renting them out. I thought it an intriguing bit of history and soon learned others felt the same, as there was a good bit of material on the subject.

Bertha Mahony was the driving force (no pun intended) behind the book shop caravan. She was the founding editor of the Horn Book Magazine (publications about children's literature) and later founded the Bookshop for Boys and Girls in Boston in 1916. She began to envision selling books from a rolling caravan throughout rural New England before Morley's Parnassus on Wheels was even published, but Morley's book may have provided the encouragement she needed to make her dream a reality.

The Horn Book site has a Virtual History Scrapbook with articles and images of the Bookshop Caravan. Barbara Bader wrote an excellent piece in 1999, titled Treasure Island by the Roadside.

My search on the subject led to an ad for the "Miniature Bookshop on Wheels." Extracted from a contemporary publication, it offers an illustration of the caravan, which I now have in my collection of book trade ephemera:



Real photos of the caravan, as well as related images of a log book, can be seen HERE. For another set of scrapbook entries, which feature original clippings of publicity for the bookshop caravan, click HERE. There, you'll also find a link to a readable format for the clippings. And finally, for a related post on book automobiles, see Larry T. Nix's recent article on the subject HERE.

For you bibliophiles and history buffs, once you start digging into the story of the bookshop caravan, you're in for an intriguing journey through the history of bookselling, bookshops, and caravans and bookmobiles, not to mention books, during the early twentieth century. It's a fascinating trip with some interesting stops along the way.

Mysterious Saturn

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. We were already more than a few weeks into it before I realized this and my last blog entry in March had been about the poetry of Walt McDonald. Looks like I unknowingly jumped the gun a bit on a topical post.

In recognition of National Poetry Month, before it slips away, I'm writing something about the mystery of Saturn. This Saturn is a poet, not a planet. And this is her book below, a book that seems to have slipped away somewhere under the radar. It is undetectable in an age when virtually nothing goes undetectable.


The Other Side of the Moon was published by W. & G. Baird in London, (1963)1971. What you see with this book is about all you're going to get, with respect to Saturn's identity. Whomever wrote the review on the jacket's front flap seems to think we will come to know who Saturn is by the end of the book, if we don't know already. She seems to have been well-traveled, well-read, and an active participant in life with myriad interests.

Here are some clues from that review about the identity of the author, Saturn:

Born in Wales of English parentage, Saturn has enjoyed the unique atmospheres of Cornwall and Italy. A good golfer, skier and rider, her writing began after she broke her back in a riding accident.

Her poems are an apologia for her wide travels and experiences: the reader feels her love for Swinburne, Keats and Shelley.

A true European, Saturn enjoys life and in "On looking at a portrait" and "Shadow" her courage in adversity comes through to the reader. In "Negative" and other poems the reader feels her realistic insight, and by the end of the book knows Saturn well.

With all these clues about who the pseudonymous Saturn is, I might as well not have any clues about her real identity. I have no idea who Saturn is. Even the mighty Google offers nothing about this seemingly prominent woman and the tragedy that befell her.

The dedication page states at the top of the page:

To the Immortals I have known. Their virtues--their frailties--but always their greatness.

At the bottom of the page, there is this:

For Marian with love

Perhaps these offer more clues. Immortality pops up in several poems. So does the idea of lost youth and a waning life and of not dwelling on the past, but trying to live life in the present and into the unknown future.

There's the poem, Hera, with its allusions to a female lover coming to the author's bed through the mist, and then disappearing like a shadow, leaving her "forlorn." Could this be Marian in the dedication?

The other side of the moon is what we don't see. Also referred to as the dark side of the moon, this may serve as a metaphor for the darkness--fear, depression, certain passions--that one struggles with while trying to live with what life doles out.

The fact that the author broke her back while horseback riding makes me wonder if she is not paralyzed and struggling with the inner conflict of living or dwelling in the past and what could have been, versus living in the present and looking optimistically toward the future.

One of the poems, Negative, mentioned in the jacket review bears out this philosophy of engaging in the present, with optimism for the future, rather than dwelling in the past and what might have been:

I must not think of the years that were
when my Lover was young.

Several lines follow about what she must not think of before balancing her thoughts with the perspective of having been able to enjoy a lover at all, or spring colours, or a blackbird's song, etc.

The poems aren't great, but collectively they create a discernible theme of loss through unforeseen circumstances or the natural processes of aging and dying. There is some attempt at balance through feigned optimism, but it falls short.

I feel the sadness and loneliness from the "dark side of the moon," so in that respect the poems achieve a certain effect. There is a pervasive mystery that envelops the collection, from the source of the darkness to the identity of the poet.

As one of my favorite songwriter/poets, Townes Van Zandt, once wrote, "There ain't no dark till something shines" (from the song, Rex's Blues). I suppose I'm just trying to put a little spotlight on these poems and bring the darkness to light and maybe solve a mystery.

Walt McDonald poems

A cozy New Hampshire village and the wide-open plains of West Texas may seem like an incongruous pairing, but one segued naturally into the other in my mind recently.

I began reading May Sarton's, Plant Dreaming Deep, a 1968 memoir of living in Nelson, New Hampshire. I got as far as page 21, when I came across the following:

When I made the first of many lecture trips, in 1939-1940, I was unknown, the former director of an off-broadway theater that had failed during the Depression, the author of a slim volume of poems and of one novel... I set out alone on an autumn, winter, spring of unhurried exploration... The whole trip was not at all what a lecture trip usually is, a hurried kaleidoscope of places and people, but rather a leisurely odyssey, the discovery of my America. I was always looking for the humanizing and illuminating perception of writers and poets about these landscapes I was seeing for the first time, and was amazed at how much has not been celebrated. Where is the poet of the secret wild Arkansas valleys? Of the great golden empty Texas plains? Of the Delta?

Stop.

I don't know about the Arkansas Valley or the Delta, but the poet of the great golden empty Texas plains made an eager leap from my subconscious to the front lines of cognizance. That poet is Texas' former Poet Laureate, Walt McDonald.

At the time of May Sarton's lecture travel, McDonald was 5 or 6 years old. Perhaps the landscape of his environment was already composting and fertilizing his young mind for sowing the rich poems that would come later in life in a region known at times for its unyielding soil.

Several years ago, I did a book show in Fort Worth and met the former director of the Texas Tech University Press, Noel R. Parsons, who was also exhibiting there with a representative sampling of the university's publications. Among the books on the tables, I saw some Walt McDonald collections of poetry and bought a couple of the press' recently published titles:

Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains, Poems by Walt McDonald, Photographs by Wyman Meinzer (2003)

Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating Texas and the Near Southwest, New and Selected Poems by Walt McDonald, with Photographs of the Southwest Collection Selected by Janet Neugebauer, Foreword by Laura Bush (1999)

I spoke to Mr. Parsons of my admiration for McDonald's writing and he was kind enough to extend the offer of obtaining McDonald's signature on each of the books when he returned to Lubbock. As McDonald still had an office at the university, Parsons would see him when he came in and get the autographs. I received the books in the mail a few weeks later, signed as promised. That was very thoughtful and very much appreciated from both Parsons and McDonald.

When I read May Sarton's passage above, I knew instantly I would share some of McDonald's writing here. His poetry celebrates the relationship of the vast land and sky of the Texas Plains and its inhabitants, man and beast alike. Themes of survival, aging, death and the inherent paradox of beauty and struggle that we are given each day on this earth comprise the artistry of McDonald's writing.

Laura Bush, a West Texas native, writes eloquently in her Foreword for Whatever the Wind Delivers:

Despite its paradoxical nature, or perhaps because of it, the region commands the respect of its inhabitants. If one thing could be said of those whose lives and livelihoods revolve around the place, it is that they don't simply live on or off the land; they live with it--and thrive.

To survive, every day is a negotiation, an agreement, an acceptance of terms that the soil and the sky outline without the slightest bit of consideration. And yet, even at its worst--at its dustiest, hottest, and driest--the region is rich with anticipation and hope for a merciful change. And it does change.

This is the paradox of West Texas and the mighty Southwest. It is at once dull and unpredictable; subtle and grand.

She could have been writing about the substance of McDonald's poems instead of the region he inhabits. Perhaps she was in a metaphorical sense. McDonald has "lived with the land" and his talent for observation from the ground as well as from a pilot's wide perspective in the sky has inspired his poetic art for capturing the essence of it all. Examples of that art follow.

First up, a few poems from Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains:

A Round Horizon Without a Town

The prairie on any day is endless,
too much to take in between blinks.
My wife and I aren't Atlas
toting the world. We carry the cosmos,
not a globe but stars and rocks

in a billion different directions,
if we could track them, like canoeing
the Brazos River after a rain,
ripples and flow forever changing.
Horizon is fragile on the Plains.

Grazing cattle shift, the buzzards glide,
vast details that don't match. Boots
and horses' hooves turn the globe,
and skyline rolls. We raised four babies
on the Plains. They toddled off and fell,

shoved up and now they're gone.
Explorers learned the signs,
established trails highways bypass.
Step any direction and pastures shift,
a herd of antelopes galloping

while binoculars change hands,
strap quickly off and my wife
lifting them with a twist to fit
her eyes, counting four pronghorns
or five, not the ten I claimed I saw.

Leaving Sixty

Riding flat, hardscrabble plains,
we hold the reins of geldings
with fingers stiff in leather gloves.
The sun burns mirages blue as oceans:
Shanghaied, we're trapped in a fleet
of boats, these creaky bones.

Charming Columbus, his scrolls
rolled into a globe, his tales of gold
and spice enticing. Look ahoy,
they're dropping off the horizon,
old friends once young as Columbus.
The world is flat: Isabella's fool

proved that by dying, leaving a skull,
the only gold of a dunce.
Columbus found the edge of the earth
years later, and no charts
or spinning globe could save him.
Only his nurse saw the old man vanish.

Far from port, my wife and I
wave semaphores of love
like Santa Maria scrolls:
We're headed west, loaded with gold
and spice, stiff riggings locked,
no way to shift the sails.

And from Whatever the Wind Delivers, here is the title poem about the negotiation and acceptance Mrs. Bush wrote about and the struggle to take what comes and thrive:

Whatever the Wind Delivers

This is the rage for order on the plains,
barbed wire clenched tight from post to post.
Acres of land each year go back to sand

and disappear. Nothing not tied down
stays home. Canadian geese fly over us
each fall, each spring, and never stay.

Our steers two times a year trudge up
board ramps to slatted walls of trucks
from the slaughterhouse. Even our children

rise up like owls and fly away. Nights,
you turn for me to hold you. We pretend
we go away by writing French love notes

in dust on the headboard. At dawn,
you smooth oiled cloths over all we wrote
the night before. By dusk, the film is back,

the earth we live on, the dust our fingers
string new fences on, holding each other
one more night with loving words.

The Orphans' Nine Commandments

When I met William R. Holman last month, the author of The Orphans' Nine Commandments (TCU Press, 2008), I couldn't have known of the overwhelming adversity this man had to overcome to be where he was at that point in time, telling me about the broadsides in my hands that he and his wife designed, about the books he had designed and printed, his work with libraries, and even showing me his wife's picture in the book and speaking so lovingly of her.

As he talked about the book, a narrative began to unfold that could have undermined the success and happiness so evident in my brief meeting with him. He showed me the book mark with its teaser about his incredible journey and a quote from Larry McMurtry. And then he asked me to please let him know what I thought of the book. He indicated his contact information on the bookmark with red notation.

I would encourage anyone to read this powerful and engaging memoir and let Mr. Holman know your thoughts. I did and what follows is a modified version of that correspondence with Mr. Holman.


The first chapter of The Orphans' Nine Commandments will knock the wind out of you and lay the foundation for the emotional, gut-wrenching journey a young boy (Holman) is forced to take through orphanages and foster homes during the 1930s and the Great Depression.

As you recover from the shock of what happened to William, who starts out in life as Roger Bechan and is given new names along the way, you'll learn of the human spirit to adapt and survive, even in a little boy stripped of his family, home, and name. This compelling memoir is fraught with cruelty from adults and countered with the resilience and adventure of a young boy growing to manhood, carving out, painstakingly, an existence and new identity for which he seeks meaning and worth and, above all, love and acceptance.

Larry McMurtry calls Holman's book "an important and compelling memoir." Of Holman's struggle and private hell, McMurtry states further that Holman will take his readers along in a way "that will move you, inform you, and haunt you."

This is a horror story as well as a success story. It's repugnant and poignant, humorous and jubilant. Mr. Holman succeeds in taking us lockstep through his darkened childhood with vivid detail against a backdrop of characters, good and evil alike. At times, it reads like a picaresque novel with the pathos and humor of Dickens and Twain.

The reward in the reading is the triumph of the spirit with threads of hope for love and understanding woven into an achievement of family and success, against overwhelming adversity in the formative years.

Survive, Man! (and Steer)

My trip to the warehouse to retrieve a book this morning turned into an eerie confluence of words, music, art, and imagery.

About 9 a.m., I head east on the Farm-to-Market road out of my neighborhood for the quick five-minute drive to pick up the last sale of January--an order that came in late last night for a book called Survive, Man! Or Perish: Sculptural Metaphors That Command Allegiance to Life, Resistance to Race Suicide, with the Art of Survival: a Critique of the Survivalist Art and Philosophy of Randolph W. Johnston.


I tune in to The Motor City Hay Ride with Don Was on Sirius and pick up a Grateful Dead song, the twangy country strains of Dire Wolf, with the lyrics, Don't murder me. Please, don't murder me. A tenuous connection there between book title and song.

But a second or two later, I spot a Longhorn steer making his way nervously down the shoulder on the west-bound lane. He's busted out of a nearby ranch and is making his getaway.

Now, I get it! The book title, the song lyrics, the runaway survivalist steer! Don't murder me, the Grateful Dead call out. The book I'm about to pick up encourages, Survive, Man! I'm wishing I had my camera with me, as the runaway steer trots across the gravel entrance of a business parking lot.

I fetch the book and double back to the west, hoping to pick up the trail of the Longhorn. He's nowhere in sight. Must have gone into some adjacent brush. And maybe he survived whatever Dire Wolf it was that put him on the highway. I've lost him.

But back home with the book, I find some interesting sculptures from an equally interesting artist, Ran Johnston. At the Mother Earth News, I discover a profile on Johnston (the best available--not much on this elusive man), which starts out with the following:

Back in the '20's, Canadian sculptor Randolph W. Johnston coined a word—Megamachine—to describe a society that swallowed people up and excreted them as look-alike pellets. And it was back then that the young sculptor conjured a dream of being able to leave the Megamachine to live in freedom, alone, on a tropical island.

So the metaphorical coincidences continue for the escaped Longhorn...

Big books

The Klencke Atlas holds the distinction of being the biggest book on the planet at about five feet tall and six feet wide. It's never been publicly displayed with its pages open, but that's about to change. The 350-year-old atlas will be displayed as part of the British Library exhibition on maps later this year.

Not to be outdone (actually I have been), here's my biggest book--a collection of New York Times newspapers from 1936, hardbound by the New York Public Library.


While it takes six people to hoist the Klencke Atlas, I can lift my Times book all by myself. I'm over six feet tall, so you get an idea from the photo how big my book is. At two feet, eight inches tall by a foot-and-a-half wide, it's not exactly dwarfed in my hands. It wasn't that easy to hold open. I only thought I was holding a Krecke Atlas! So I can't imagine actually trying to wrestle with that monster.

Following are some interesting things I found in my little bitty 1936 New York Times book.

First up is an Eastern Air Lines ad. I didn't know they went back as far as 1936, but I was pleased to find it because it complements an old Eastern ticket I have and wrote about on one of my ephemera blogs, Paper Matters. Some pretty cool video of the old "Connies" in that post.



Next, President Roosevelt pays a visit to Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl days. Deep into the Great Depression, Roosevelt hits the road to visit those who are really suffering through some tough times.



Back east, Carl Hubbell and the New York Giants are playing some good baseball on the way to the National League Pennant. I know all this because I used to hear first-hand stories from one of Hubbell's teammates, Joe Moore, the left fielder. That's a subject for another time, but I got to know Joe and become friends with him for a good ten years before he passed away in 2001 at age 92. He had a bunch of articles like this in a scrapbook. So you can see why I had to include this one.



The Yankees also made it to the World Series in '36 and whipped the Giants. I'm a huge Lou Gehrig fan so was pleased to find him doing a pitch for anything--in this ad it's milk.



Entertainers from yesteryear are in these old radio ads.



Here's the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, before the Kennedy machine started cranking out political leaders. Looks like he's doing okay with the Roosevelt administration in the White House.



Down on the farm, the latest technology in farm equipment promises to boost production. You might be able to find one of these in a museum now.



The New York Times wouldn't be complete without news and reviews of books. Here are a few pages from yesteryear and old books that were once new with stiff bindings on the shelves.




There's so many interesting articles, ads, and photos--I could go on and on with the history found on these pages, but need to stop here.

Dorothy's new jacket

Dorothy's new jacket arrived in the mail today.


My beat-up, signed copy of Dorothy Parker's 1933 collection of short stories, After Such Pleasures, now has something nice to wear over the old fraying threads she was sporting when I found her a few months ago. Before pictures are here in a previous post.

I purchased a first edition from Argosy Book Store in New York for the jacket. They had the best copy available, price-wise, and the jacket ain't that great, but it'll do for the price.

The book is a first edition, so presumably the jacket is first state unless somebody did with it what I've just done with it--marry it to another book. I'm putting this first state jacket on my second printing of After Such Pleasures.


For this book, I wouldn't spend the extra money adding a jacket, but this book was special despite its flaws. It had that nice inscription in it from Dorothy Parker.


So she was begging for a jacket and now she has one. And, of course, you know that...

Bibliophiles seldom collect it
If the book lacks a jacket.

Okay, that was a lame attempt at parodying Parker's famous couplet:

Men seldom make passes
at girls who wear glasses.

Couldn't resist it; it was too easy.

As a bonus, the First Edition I bought had a bookseller's ticket affixed inside the rear cover (I collect and write about these occasionally on Bibliophemera). It's for House of Books Ltd, located at 555 Madison Ave. in New York.


This is why I brought up Argosy before. It looks like this Dorothy Parker stayed in New York the past 77 years, which is longer than the author lived (73). I don't know how far Argosy is from House of Books or what used to be House of Books, but it can't be that far. Now the book has retired down South for awhile.

It's warmer down here. No need for a jacket anyway.

Library and social history found at the book sale

Going through a few boxes of treasure (books) purchased at the Houston Public Library book sale last year (and then set aside), I recently came across a little booklet about the state of Texas. And I began to learn (or remember from history) that, for several decades, folks in Houston could not all go to the same library to look at this book. Skin color determined which buildings they could enter, and, ultimately, which books they could read.

Ironically, this is the least significant book I found at that sale, in terms of value or content, but it may turn out to be the most interesting in terms of the historical window it opened.

Tell Me About Texas is a booklet published by the Press of Van Boeckmann-Jones in Austin for the Convention and Publicity Bureau of the Austin Chamber of Commerce in 1935. It reads like a little factoid piece on Texas history, geography, and culture. There are even a few colored plates depicting the state bird (Mockingbird) and state flower (bluebonnet).

But there is also another colored item--the library stamp on the top of the front cover that states Houston Public Library Colored Branch. A fading relic from the segregated past that really makes you pause and consider that, as long ago and incredulous as it might seem to us today, it really wasn't that long ago that such segregation was not only tolerated, but perpetuated by conventions such as separate library facilities for black and white citizens.


This cover seemed to be asking, Tell me about... the Colored Branch, the word Texas itself segregated from the message of the rest of the cover. So I bought it for eight bits and put it in a box to research at home.

The authority on the history of racially segregated public libraries is Cheryl Knott Malone, an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, School of Information Resources and Library Studies. Most of what I found is from her exhaustive research and writing here and here.

The Colored Branch has its roots in the Houston Carnegie Library, completed in 1904 with a $50,000 grant from Andrew Carnegie. African American citizens were denied access to the new library, so in 1909 they organized their own under very modest circumstances in a local high school and later secured a Carnegie grant for construction of a new building. By 1913, the Colored Carnegie Library opened its doors and operated independently of its whites-only counterpart. That changed in 1921 when the Houston Public Library system was formed and brought the Colored Carnegie Library into their system as the Colored Branch.

That is the branch that had the booklet with the faded Colored Branch stamp, which I bought at the sale last year. That segregation would begin to unravel in 1953 with a shift in city policy, but it was a slow development. The Colored Branch continued operating through desegregation and finally, in 1961, the plug was unceremoniously pulled on that branch, closing that chapter of the city's segregated library history.