One Man ......Twelve Stories

 

I am currently reading this anthology called "Spear Havoc." It is twelve different stories about William the Conqueror the Norman Bastard who conquered England in 1066.

Each story imagines a different outcome if this or that changed in the history of this notable historical figure. You know the "Great Man" theory of history. I thought this was a great concept. The stories themselves are very well written and interesting. Short enough to hold your interest but long enough to make you think. I highly recommend the book which is free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

It got me thinking of what would happen if you did the same thing to other historical figures. Abe Lincoln. JFK. Nixon. Trump. Biden?

I do find it interesting that in almost every alternative history where JFK doesn't get assassinated, we end up in a nuclear war with Russia and America is destroyed. Every single one! That tells you something.

I do concede it will be very difficult do one about Biden as America is being destroyed piecemeal and we aren't even in a war. How can you improve on history?

Still maybe I might try my hand at this. I just have to come up with the right figure. I was thinking either George Armstrong Custer or Alexander Hamilton.

Who would you pick?

Get your books here.....

I have a bunch of books lying about all over the house. Now that I almost exclusively use Kindle I really don't have room or the inclination to keep a large library. I want to sell most of them if I can.

I tried to do it a couple of years ago with Amazon. I set up an account and actually sold a few. But it was big rip off. They paid very little and always made me wait. Plus, I shipped a bunch of books to them and when they didn't sell in three months, they said they were going to throw them out unless a paid a storage fee. I just lost them

I found a new venue to sell that someone recommended. It is called PangoBooks and it is available at the App store. It is a very easy download and you can set it up to sell your books. It is very user freindly and it has a lot of different collections. 

My collection is very heavy in mystery, sci-fi, historical fiction and alternative history. Check it out if you can and help a fella out. You might see a good book that you can get at a great price. All of them are in great condition and I am sure you will enjoy them.

 

 

Just Another Walk In The Burbs

 

Rusty Old Fence With Day Lilies. I like day lilies because they stay in bloom so long. None of that twee, Japanese-cherry-blossom beauty-is-fleeting-and-gone-oh-so-soon crap. We're gonna be here all summer.

A Little Free Library. Nice to see Beatrix Potter there, and not Harry Potter.

And a nice, uncarved beech tree for Sixty Grit.

Whose that author?

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

RIP Larry McMurtry

 

I knew Larry McMurtry, slightly and briefly. We were both Washington-area booksellers in the 70s--which is much like saying Greg Norman and I were both American golfers in the 80s. Larry was in Georgetown selling first editions and choice Americana; I was out in the burbs, making the rent (or not) on estate-sale books and half-price paperbacks--most of them, it seemed, Harlequin Romances.

Before the internet (back in my day, sonny), you carried your expertise in your head. There were reference books--big, heavy reference books--but you couldn't haul them to a yard sale or a church bazaar. There were "book scouts" who traveled around buying unrecognized rarities cheap, and selling them to established dealers. They were a romantic breed, in a nerdish sort of way, at least to book people. McMurtry was a scout for a couple of years, before opening his store.

One of the best ways to buy stock was at the big annual charity book sales, and the biggest and best was that of the Vassar Alumnae Association. Larry was traditionally first in line at the Vassar Sale. He'd show up before dawn with a sleeping bag, a big East Texas cotton-picking sack, and a couple of minions. As soon as the doors opened, he would dash for the Rare Books section, and his minions would fan out over the floor. Anything that looked at all promising would go in the big sack. After the first rush was over, they would gather in a quiet corner to inspect their books, decide which ones to keep, and pile the rest on the nearest table. A dick move for sure, but he was royalty in that little world, and no one called him on it.

Larry wrote somewhere that the three great loves of his life were women, books and the road. He had plenty of all three. His wives and girlfriends were an A-List of beauty and celebrity; his store in Archer City had, at one time, close to half a million volumes. And he really, really loved to drive. Not quaint back roads either, but the Interstates. Once, when I mentioned to him that my folks had retired to West Texas, he got a dreamy look in his eyes and talked for a while about the long straight highways, the little towns, the empty spaces.

He was, among many other things, an academic's academic, as comfortable discussing Mme DeStael and Pirandello and Russian cinema as the Old West. But he will be remembered for Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, and that's right and proper.

We Didn't Have Doctor Seuss Books

 . . . "we" being my one-year-older brother and I. We grew up in the prime of their popularity, but we never owned or read one; so this latest book-banning nonsense doesn't hit me viscerally (at least, no more viscerally than any book-banning does). I've looked at a few since, and I can't say I'm impressed. Silliness is fine, but it's not enough, even for toddlers.

What we had was Uncle Wiggily:

(. . . and for my entire life, up until yesterday, I didn't realize that it was spelled "Wiggily," not "Wiggly.")

These stories were from an older generation --  Howard Garis started writing them for newspapers in 1910. Perhaps our parents remembered them fondly, bought them for our older sister, and then recycled them for us. And I bet they sometimes regretted it. Boy, did we love Uncle Wiggily. We demanded an Uncle Wiggily story be read to us every night. Every night. Again and again.

The part we liked most was the very end, which always took the form: "and next, if [something surreal and improbable] doesn't happen, I'll tell you the story of . . ." Here's a couple:

"So if the doorknob doesn't try to crawl through the keyhole to play bean bag with the rice pudding in the gas stove oven, I'll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the elephant."

"So if the pussy cat doesn't claw the tail off the letter Q and make it look like a big, round O, I'll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the little boy's skates."

Books Cannot Be Killed By Fire

 

We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory...

So said Franklin Roosevelt in his address to the American Booksellers Association in 1942, back when progressives didn't like book-burners.

Via Graveyard Masonry.

Book People Are The Worst

Back when I was a bookseller I knew an old couple -- I'll call them John and Jane Doe -- who were collectors. John and Jane were genuine "Cave Dwellers," members of Washington's old white aristocracy: Cosmos Club, patrons of the arts, friends in high places and all that. Also they were very nice, friendly and interesting people. Their home is the only place I ever saw a "Franklin Imprint" -- a book made at Ben Franklin's print shop -- that I could pick up and leaf through.

One day, probably at a book fair, a friend and I were chatting with John and Jane. Jane mentioned a disturbing dream she'd had: she had died, and was lying on her bed, surrounded by friends and family. "They were all talking to one another," she said sadly, "but I couldn't hear what they were saying." After an awkward pause, my friend said, "They were arguing over who gets your books."

More Bathroom Books

This is from a gallery of bathroom bookshelves at the decoist website. It makes me want to yell, "Get those damn books away from all that steam and humidity!"

In the same gallery is this hidden secret-door bathroom in a library:

This one annoys me for a different reason: the "library" is fake. It's just a random collection of trash books. Two old encyclopedias, a calculus textbook, a lot of book-club fiction and biography (at least a couple of volumes shelved upside-down), and a whole shelf of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Nice wallpaper in the bathroom, though.

The Ultimate Bathroom Book

I found this oddity while sightseeing in Andrew Rickard's old blog. It's a fold-out wooden portable toilet stool disguised as a large (18.5 x 13 x 3 inches), nicely bound book. I've seen books hollowed out to conceal valuables or flasks of liquor, but nothing like this.

The blog post suggests the user might have put a chamber pot underneath it, but I suspect it was strictly for travel. Travelling by carriage looks pleasant and civilized in a Jane Austen movie, but I guess in an emergency you had to tell the driver to stop, and scurry behind the nearest tree or hedgerow; it would be good to have something sturdy and elevated to sit on.

It was sold by a Paris auction house in 2012. Following back the links, I see it was expected to go for 200 to 400 Euros, but actually went for 2,000.

The fake book's title is Voyage aux Pays-Bas, "A Journey to the Netherlands." Is there a sly joke there, referring to the "nether regions?"

Witches and Portents

"There was a witch and soothsayer in England. After she died, when the priests were singing Psalms, devils violently snatched her up and bore her away through the air on the back of a terrible horse. Their awful cries could be heard for almost four miles."

The Nuremberg Chronicle (Nuremberg, 1493) is an ambitious history of the world from Adam and Eve on. It is one of the first illustrated books, and certainly the first lavishly-illustrated one; it contains more than 1,800 woodcuts (including, possibly, some by Albrecht Durer, who was a young apprentice at the shop which produced the book).

One of my prized possessions is a page from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Page CLXXXIX, in fact. At the top of the verso is the above woodcut and text. The rest of the page is all emperors and bishops and scholar-monks.

On the recto, amid a whole bunch of stuff about Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, is a little woodcut of a burning two-by-four in the sky, with a matter-of-fact line of text:

"A flaming wooden beam of remarkable size was seen in the sky, flying in the region between south and east above the setting sun, and falling to the earth."

No doubt the fireball from a large meteor.

I was surprised at how cheap the page was; I paid more to have it framed than I did to buy it. As a book-lover and former bookseller, I cringe at the thought of someone tearing up a perfectly good book to sell it page-by-page. I prefer to believe that some kindly soul disassembled the fragments of a damaged copy and offered the pages for sale, so that people like me could own at least a piece of a famous incunable. This is much like trying to convince not only your children, but yourself, that Bingo has gone to live at a nice farm upstate, and is very happy.

Buy My Friend's Book

. . . or I'll kill this dog. (No I won't. Please don't cancel me, PETA.)

The book is Huckleberry Finn In Love And War: The Lost Journals. (You have to admit, that's a lot of title for the money.) The author is an old friend of mine.

If you happen to have Kindle Unlimited, you can download the e-book for free; if not, the download will cost $9.95 (which strikes me as steep, but blame the publisher, not the author). The dead-tree paperback is $14.95, which is closer to reasonable.

If you're into Mark Twain and/or the Civil War, I think there's a good chance you'll like it. If not, probably not. It took some chutzpah for the author to get in the ring with Sam Clemens. If you want to judge whether he's got the chops, there are a couple of excerpts below the "Read more." Also, you can read the first seven chapters at the Amazon link; they mostly take place during the Mexican-American War.

Fore-edge Paintings

Sometimes a video is worth a couple of hundred words. Click the YouTube above to see what a fore-edge painting is. It's only 33 seconds.

Neat, huh? Here's a longer video (4:19), showing ten very nice examples, including one with both the fore- and bottom-edge painted:

These books are not common, of course, but they're not as rare as you might think. Artists are still creating them today. Prices at ebay and Abebooks are typically in the hundreds of dollars.

More:

Codex and Scroll

"A few other trends actually seem to be moving backward in the new millennium. For instance, audiobooks are a return to the oral tradition, and podcasts—talks, interviews, radio series—dispense with the written record completely. The codex—the book with turnable pages sewn between covers—was a great improvement over the scroll, but now, with publication online, we are back to scrolling again, which makes it hard to refer back to things."
--Mary Norris, Greek to Me (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019)
via Laudator Temporis Acti

The above is excerpted from this article, which is excerpted from this book. The article is fun and worth a read, if you're interested in language.

One of my pet grumps is links that look like they might be interesting, but go to podcasts or talking-head videos (which I ignore). Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams used to have a blog I enjoyed; now it's no longer a blog, just links to podcasts. There are plenty of reasons why I prefer text, whether on scroll, codex or monitor, to audio files.

• Most important, I can read much faster than I can listen to someone talk.
• I can skim over or skip material that I'm not interested in, or that I already know.
• I can easily re-read something, or check it against something elsewhere in the piece.
• I can easily reference footnotes, maps, indices etc.

But, you say, what about the personal intangibles -- emotion, expression, tone of voice, nuance? Well, you've got a point. But I don't think it outweighs all the disadvantages.

And anyway, good writing can supply some of that tone and nuance, he said with a winning smile.

Rules for Readers: The Steel Bonnets

To recap: Rule #1 is

If you like what an author writes for money, seek out what he writes for love.

George MacDonald Fraser was well-known for his Flashman series of historical adventure novels. I read a couple, and enjoyed them, but didn't feel compelled to binge them all. Then a friend recommended his McAuslan stories, which I liked a lot, and I started picking up more of his non-Flashman books, like his WW2 memoir Quartered Safe Out Here. (More on these, maybe, in a later post.)

And this, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers:

Most Americans, even history buffs, know little about The Borders and their wars, except as the source of some fine ballads. Fraser addresses the history with easy, colorful narrative, with obvious love for the land and its people, and with love, too, of telling a good story.

Rules for Readers, and The Fall of Rome

I read a tip once, I can't remember where: if you're traveling somewhere new to you, and you go to a restaurant and order x, and they ask you "do you want the y with that" (or something similar), just say yes. You'll be getting it the way the locals like it. Maybe you'll like it too, and at the least, you'll learn something.

If I were trying to collect useful tips for readers, and it looks like I am, my Rule #1 would be:

If you like what an author writes for money, seek out what he writes for love.

Or, less pithily but more accurately, if you like reading what an author is best known for, try to find things he's written out of love for the subject, or curiosity, or just for the hell of it. It doesn't always work, but sometimes you strike gold.

Like this nugget, with its dry title and dull dust jacket:

I recognized the author's name -- RA Lafferty, an idiosyncratic, not to say loopy, science fiction writer of the 60s and 70s, now mostly forgotten, whom I liked a lot. So I bought it (for $2.95 according to the bookseller's price penciled on the flyleaf) and read it.

Gifted Knowledge...

click to enlarge

...where knowledge seeps in:

Sarradon's Pendulous Breasts by Trooper York

"Or this apparatus for the study of the fermentation of milk. A maze of crystal arches leading from the lips to the hips due to the pendulous nature of the teat. Those little nipples, the hourglass where the sand has shifted, the electrolysis of the mustache, the swollen labia. Or the laboratory knife that looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the release lever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter clay crucible for making a gnome-sized homunculus--infinitesimal womb for the most minuscule clonings. Or the wrinkled distended box filled with little white packets like a village apothecary's cachets, wrapped in parchment, covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineral specimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud of Basilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of Hermes Trismegistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer's hammer, a gavel for opening a brief judgement day, an object of quintessences to be held among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatus for analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayed like quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by golden tubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leading first to a copper cylinder below it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages, testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? For this the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing is created or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraud revealed?"

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

"Or this apparatus for the study of the fermentation of wine. A maze of crystal arches leading from athanor to athanor, from alembic to alembic. Those little spectacles, the tiny hourglass, the electroscope, the lens. Or the laboratory knife that looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the release lever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter clay crucible for making a gnome-sized homunculus--infinitesimal womb for the most minuscule clonings. Or the acajou boxes filled with little white packets like a village apothecary's cachets, wrapped in parchment, covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineral specimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud of Basilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of Hermes Trismegistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer's hammer, a gavel for opening a brief judgement day, an object of quintessences to be held among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatus for analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayed like quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by golden tubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leading first to a copper cylinder below it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages, testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? For this the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing is created or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraud revealed?

The Salle Lavoisier in the Conservatoire is actually a confession, a confession in code, and an emblem of the whole museum, for it mocks the arrogance of the Age of Reason and murmurs of other mysteries. Jacopo Belbo was reasonably right; Reason was wrong.

I had to hurry; time was pressing now. I walked past the meter, the kilogram, the other measures, all false guarantees. I had learned from Agliè that the secret of the pyramids is revealed if you don't calculate in meters, but in ancient cubits. Then, the counting machines that proclaimed the triumph of the quantitative but in truth pointed to the occult qualities of numbers, a return to the roots of the notarikon the rabbis carried with them as they fled through the plains of Europe. Astronomy and clocks and robots. Dangerous to linger among these new revelations. I was penetrating to the heart of  a secret message in the form of a rationalist theatrum. But I had to hurry. Later, between closing time and midnight, I could explore them, objects that in the slanted light of sunset assumed their true aspect--symbols, not instruments."

https://books.google.com/books/about/Foucault_s_Pendulum.html?id=jbpsQD0khY0C

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyALEomuk9k

"Spanish publisher clones world's most mysterious book"

Yahoo News:  It's one of the world's most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one -- not even the best cryptographers -- has cracked.

Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich Manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers...

"Touching the Voynich is an experience," says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe's office is, a few paved streets away from the city's famed Gothic cathedral.

"It's a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe."...

The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it around 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.

Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means...

Its content is even more mysterious...

 

The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don't reveal much and neither do the women.

Does the book hold the key to eternal youth? Or is it a mere collection of herbal medicine and recipes?

Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan's "Purple" cipher during World War II. (read the whole thing)