29 March 2012

Spaghetti Harvest Days at Words on Books

Here I was, all ready to do a serious think piece on a new novel starring Achilles and his heel, and Achilles’ boytoy Patroclus, when I looked up at the date and realized this is absolutely the wrong day to attempt any serious thing.

April Fools Day. Why can’t every day be April Fools Day? And does Fools have an apostrophe or does it not?

On the Google there are collections of the best April Fools Day hoaxes of all time. Number One, according to The Museum of Hoaxes, and yes, there is such a thing – or – could it be a hoax? – Number One April Fools Day hoax is the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

Spaghetti does not grow on trees, and Swiss maidens on ladders do not harvest it – or do they? The BBC on the first day of April, 1957, not only reported a bumper spaghetti crop in Switzerland due to mild weather and “virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil” but showed television viewers footage of “Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.”

My favorite in this collection is not the Taco Liberty Bell, the instant color TV set, or the curious case of fastball savant Sidd Finch. No, my favorite is the Guardian’s seven-page special report on the little-known island nation of San Serriffe.

In 1977 the London newspaper reported on “a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands.”

Instantly, readers wanted to go there, despite the cruel dictatorship of General Pica. The Guardian said that “terrorism has been virtually eliminated from the beaches of San Serriffe” so come on down and get your sunburn, English person. 

The newspaper reported ongoing "antagonisms between descendants of the original Spanish and Portuguese colons and those of the later English arrivals, sometimes humorously derided as the semicolons."

The two primary islands of San Serriffe, Upper and Lower Caisse, feature the capital, Bodoni, and the national bird, the Kwote. Readers learned that due to shifting sands, the islands were moving eastward at the rate of 1400 meters a year.

“Due to a constant process of erosion that removed sand from the west coast and deposited it on the east coast... it was anticipated that the islands would collide with Sri Lanka in 2011. To slow down this movement, boats constantly ferried sand from the east coast back to the west.”

The massive one-day success of this hoax led to fan clubs, t-shirts, and one crazy publisher who really exists – or does he?

“Henry Morris, owner of the Bird & Bull Press in Pennsylvania... published a series of books about San Serriffe... His books include Booksellers of San Serriffe (first edition currently available for $300); First Fine Silver Coinage Of The Republic Of San Serriffe; and The World's Worst Marbled Papers: Being a Collection of Ten Contemporary San Serriffean Marbled Papers Showing the Lowest Level of Technique, the Worst Combinations of Colors, and the Most Inferior Execution Known Since the Dawn of the Art of Marbling Collected by the Author During a Five Year Expedition to the Republic of San Serriffe.

So... there I was this past week, reading The Song of Achilles, a first novel by Greek scholar Madeline Miller. It’s a love story, and a war story. It’s more personal and much more emotional than The Iliad but in the end it’s just one more story added to the many that have come down to us from the old Greeks.

There is no definitive history of that time, no single story, so Ms Miller has picked out the parts that make most sense to her and retold them from the point of view of Patroclus, lover of Achilles. The reader hangs on to every gripping paragraph, hoping somehow that the Gods will be deflected from their tragic path – as did the Greeks, no doubt, in their day.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller exists, and I read it, and I’ll review it further one of these days. Really, it does, and I will. You can believe it. Even on April Fools Day.



NOTES


The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. HarperCollins hard cover $24.99. ISBN 9780062060617.


The Trojan war as told in the Iliad

Interesting essays on the Iliad, its meaning, performance, etc.

Bird and Bull Press, a division of Oak Knoll Press

Bird & Bull Press) Bachaus, Theodore The Booksellers of San Serriffe. Port Clarendon San Serriffe Publishing Company 2001 8vo. quarter leather with green leather spine label, slipcase. 89, (10) pages with various leaves with tipped-in plates. First edition, limited to 200 numbered copies. Those of you who were impressed by Dr. Bachaus's earlier book on the Private Presses of San Serriffe will be absolutely shattered by this in-depth survey of the booksellers of San Serriffe. The book has an historical introduction by Dr. Bachaus, which is followed by chapters on Hobart Flock of Hoki-Nol Books (hmm!), Ki-flongian Booksellers, Ltd., Grandiloquent Bookshop, Cloacina Books, St. Luke's Paper Mill and Bookshop, Contre Kook Mail Order Books, and Exterminator Books. Contains tipped-in photographs, a fold-out broadside, and three woodcuts by Wesley Bates (including one showing Robert and Mildred Flederbach in front of Hoki-Nol Press Books). The book is accompanied by a prospectus, and a letter from Dr. Bachaus to the purchaser of the book talking about the book, and enclosing four commemorative stamps from the Republic of San Serriffe inserted in an envelope with a canceled stamp. Price: $ 300.00 other currencies Order nr. 62199

22 March 2012

Put it on the Shelf

Only so many things you can do with a book. Read it. Stack it. Lose it behind the couch. Eat it, if you’ve read it four times and you’re all alone on that desert island.

C’mon... industrial glue and recycled soy inks can’t hurt you. Can they?

But if you’re not ready to eat your books, you are going to have to shelve them. This is not as simple as it may appear. Designers and architects have been working on this. You can see some of their inventive designs to display and hold paper books at the British blog called Bookshelf, “the home of interesting bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them since 2007.”

I get a new design every morning in my email box. Shelves designed to look like other things. Shelves that fill an entire wall, an entire room, an entire house. Shelves made of paper, plastic, fish scales, whatever. Some of these designs are laughable – as in they’ll make you laugh out loud but no one will ever build them – and other designs are purely beautiful and useful. Still other designs fall somewhere between the extremes of beauty and foolishness.

All this design intelligence is being collected in a new book that will appear in May, titled, necessarily but prosaically,Bookshelf. I haven’t seen the finished book, few have so far, but I can review it because I’ve been staring at the designs for a while now.

The book is edited by Alex Johnson who writes for The London Independent, is a webmaster for other design sites, and wrote the book Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution.

A few early reviews are in. Elle Decoration magazine noted "La folle passion du journaliste anglais Alex Johnson." The mad passion of English journalist Alex Johnson. Those mad Englishmen, noonday sun and all.

More recently Bookshelf blog presented The Tree bookcase by Roberto Corazza. His creation resembles a tree in outline form, if you hollowed out an oak and tacked it to the wall. It’s painted bright blue, and might hold a couple dozen books. More likely you’d place a few books in your blue tree, then stare intently at them. It is lovely.

Already this year there have been a great number of designs presented on the Bookshelf blog. The shelves named Juliette, for no clear reason, consist of a free-standing staircase that leans up against the wall, with books on each step. Another design will contain living plants as well as books. Watch out for stains if you over water.

One highly useful construction consists of wooden bookshelves erected at Union Station in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Friends of the Worcester Public Library hope people take advantage of the downtime to read a book from The Give and Take, a bookshelf of free titles for people to peruse and even take with them.”

The very first design on the blog was one of those things that seems to be more design object than practical book holder; more Slinky than shelf. It is a concoction of stainless steel coils that look like letters of the alphabet, corkscrewed in such a way they can be stretched apart and books inserted between the letters. It’s a work of art – it can scrape burnt grease off a fry pan – and, it’s from Milan, Italy!

Oh, it goes on. Stacked tea cups that somehow hold books. White-painted limbs of a tree gracefully supporting a row of books. A bookshelf that spells the word READ. There are designs for virtual, IPhone-style books – you know, the kind of bookshelves made of recycled electrons that exist only in your pocket device. Another set of shelves resemble clouds, and these are tacked over the headboard, apparently, of Alex Johnson’s bed.

The This-is-Not-A-Bookshelf appears to be constructed recycled painted boards nailed together in the form of the letter A. The maker, Lewis Wadsworth, writes “It’s not an oddly painted bookshelf made of scrap lumber. It’s not.” Well, that’s what he says, anyway.

Back in the days of clay tablets, did designers plot ways to keep the things upright and intact? Did the scrolls of ancient Rome reside on prosaic shelves like you see in the movies, or did the Romans invent scrollshelves?

In the Middle Ages, when an individual book might take years to create and illustrate, and with heavy binding, chain and lock weigh quite a few pounds – did these books have special shelving?

The colorful history of tablet, scroll and book shelves. Is there a colorful history? Wouldn’t we like to know!

NOTES

Bookshelf by Alex Johnson. Thames & Hudson hard cover $24.95. ISBN 0500516146. Available May, 2012.


Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution by Alex Johnson. Frances Lincoln paperback $29.95. ISBN 071123082X.
 

15 March 2012

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is dead, long live the Encyclopedia!

When I heard that the multi-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica would cease publishing on paper, I knew I’d have to write the inevitable eulogy. Or something approaching it.

Already you can read paeans to the demise on CNN. “It’s like losing a friend,” one librarian said, even though she also admitted “it can’t keep up” with the changing world, since it’s published only biannually.

I knew this day was coming. I haven’t touched my copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia in years. I haven’t spun the one volume Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged on its wooden stand – haven’t spun that baby in I can’t remember how long, except to bump into it or dust it once in a while.

At the moment it’s sitting in the corner, open to pages 1098 and 1099, left stage to Leishmania.

Leishmania: Noun. Any parasitic flagellate protozoan of the genus Leishmania, occurring in vertebrates in an oval or spherical, nonflagellate form, and in invertebrates in an elongated, flagellated form. Neologism, 1903, named after William Boog Leishman, who lived 1865-1926, a Scottish bacteriologist; see leishmanial, leishmanic, leishmanioid.

That’s the kind of life-changing, useless information I’ve always loved in dictionaries and encyclopedias. I grew up leafing through these books, and any number of high school papers came almost word-for-word out of these things, don’t tell the teacher.

As a kid I would browse the Columbia Encyclopedia, following the careers of a multitude of James and Henrys. Prince or scoundrel, the entries connected to other fascinating paragraphs, educating and entertaining me royally. I spent pleasant hours with that book, in the warm sunshine and bright windows of memory, traveling across acres of tiny print.

You can do that today, online. It’s called web surfing, not encyclopedia reading, but it’s very much the same thing. You waste time, you learn a lot, and never know when it may become useful.

So, to confirm how things are now, I looked up Leishmania on www.dictionary.com

To my utter bemusement, in less than a second I was staring at the very same definition, right down to Professor Leishman himself, life dates and flagellates and all.  Would anyone like to buy my dusty dictionary stand along with the dictionary that has rested on it since 1966?

The Britannica-ites themselves are finding it rather easy to say goodbye to 244 years of print. The president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., said in an interview, "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it's much more expansive and it has multimedia."

User-sourced online Wikipedia has replaced much of what the Britannica once provided – an authoritative and constantly revised window into the factual world. Wikipedia is a creature of its times, reflecting the cultural mores and science of our day, changing as fast as we change. The Britannica does this online as well, just a bit more slowly, and perhaps more authoritatively.

The Britannica we’re talking about began in 1768, in Edinburgh, Scotland, when an independent bookseller (the only kind of bookseller that existed in those faraway days) and a copperplate engraver collaborated on the first edition.

It started as a collection of articles, sold by subscription, when bound running to three volumes. Over the years it grew to 32 volumes, requiring ever larger sets of bookshelves. With the 11th edition in 1911 “articles were shortened and simplified” to appeal more to American readers, and make it easier for the encyclopedia salesmen to sell the darn thing.

Interesting fact: The first Encyclopaedia Britannica “also featured 160 beautiful illustrations... shocking to some readers, such as the three pages depicting female pelvises and fetuses in the midwifery article; King George III commanded that these pages be ripped from every copy.”

I garnered all this online. That should tell you all you need to know about the print editions of theEncyclopaedia Britannica.


NOTES

CNN’s excellent article on the subject...  The NY Times...  Wikipedia...

08 March 2012

Happy Birthdays

This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

It’s not my birthday today, not quite yet. It’s too soon to celebrate, but no one says you can’t celebrate past birthdays.

On my birthday in 1708 James Stuart (no, not the actor) entered the Firth of Forth. Say that ten times, fast. Patrick Henry declared “Give Me Liberty” or give me something else. The Russian Tsar was stabbed, strangled and trampled to death in his bedroom on my birthday in 1801.

Also on my birthday Mr Lewis & Mr Clarke took the first short steps on the long slog home; the first Otis elevator was installed; UC Berkeley was founded in Oakland, not Berkeley; Teddy Roosevelt left (again) for an African Safari. On my birthday more recently a refinery in Texas exploded, the Mir satellite fell into the Pacific Ocean, Taiwan held its first direct elections and cold fusion was either invented or discovered, or both.

Birthdays bring to mind children. A good friend of mine complained I don’t write Words on Books about books for children. At least I haven’t done so for a long time. There is a reason for this. I know very little about books for children.

For a couple of years my 3rd grade teacher-wife invited me into her classroom to read books to 8 year-olds. Several girls would cozy up in front of me, position themsevles so I had to catch their eyes over the top of Harry Potter, and eventually they got me – I would break up into laughter. This only encouraged them, of course.

When I worked in the bookstore what I did know I learned from sales reps, and various book expositions, mothers and grandmothers, and the children themselves.

I could tell from the questions parents asked what kind of books they were seeking. And by watching which books their children chewed, tore or otherwise destroyed I could see what appealed to them, too.

Last August my granddaughter Nora was born, creating a whole new set of birthdays. She is, of course, the most intelligent, beautiful and culturally advanced child ever born, pretty much like every other granddaughter in the world.

Long before she could speak let alone focus, I pulled together a starter set of wonderful books, knowing some had pleased me as a child, and others had delighted a great number of small children. A starter set for a new reader, in other words.

Here’s what I sent to Nora: 

First of all, and for all time, The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Garth Williams. You can’t do better than getting lost in the woods, being found by your father, and coming home to a warm tree and hot food. Plus, most editions of this book have bear fur on the outside you can touch while listening to your mother read the story to you.

It’s synthetic fur these days, of course. The original book, which I still have, sadly but beautifully featured a super smooth hank of light brown rabbit fur.

Margaret Wise Brown was in her prime when I was a young child, and I obsessed on her books. I also chose her iconic classics Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny for Nora.

Hug, written and illustrated by Jez Alborough, is an all-time lap warmer. It’s even more special and to the point – Hug? Hug?? HUG??? – in board-book format. Easy to read, easy to chew. You can’t chew an E book now, can you?

Finally, the oversized picture book Ten Little Caterpillars written by Bill Martin, Jr. with bright new illustrations by Lois Ehlert called out to me with its cheerful and life-accurate drawings. This book not only is fun, it LOOKS like fun when you pick it up.

Please share with me your own children’s books thoughts and recommendations. You could leave a comment on my blog: wordsonbooks.blogspot.com

And Happy Birthday to You!

NOTES

The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Garth Williams. HarperFestival board book version $6.99. ISBN 0060759607. “There was a little fur family, warm as toast, smaller than most, in little fur coats, and they lived in a warm wooden tree.”

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Clement Hurd. HarperFestival board book version $8.99. ISBN  0694003611.

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Clement Hurd. HarperFestival board book $8.99. ISBN 0061074292.

The first three books are available in numerous alternative formats.

Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin, Jr., illustrations by Lois Ehlert. Beach Lane Books hard cover $17.99. ISBN 144243385X. Originally published in 1967, republished with bright new illustrations. Hard cover only.

Hug written and illustrated by Jez Alborough. Candlewick Press board book $6.99. ISBN 0763615765.
Also available in paperback and a Chinese-language hard cover version.

01 March 2012

and another thing...

As Leonardo used to do, I wanted to record the following passage in my "notebook" aka blog for future reference. This is from pp.35-36 in the book Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester, in the chapter Body of Empire. For the review, look one blog entry behind this one.

"If the peoples of the world were to become members of a healthy and whole body of empire, Vitruvius argued, their natural excesses needed balancing out. And the gods had placed the Romans in Italy, halfway between the north pole and the equator, for just that reason.

"The people of Italy are the most balanced with respect to both north and south, in terms of bodily form and the spiritual rigor required for decisive action. For exactly as the planet Jupiter is temperate, running in the middle between the sweltering planet Mars and the freezing planet Saturn, so, for the same reason, Italy has the unbeatable advantage of being balanced between the southern and northern regions, but with admixtures from both. And so she shatters the courage of (northern) barbarians by intelligent planning , and foils the plots of southerners by force of arms. Thus the divine mind allocated to the city of the Roman people a superb, temperate region in order that it could acquire governance of the whole world." (Vitruvius, 1st Century BC)
"This is a remarkable passage. In effect, it provides the blueprint for a race-based ideology of empire that for two millennia would hold sway in Europe, and has yet to fully disappear. Geography and biology, Vitruvius was suggesting, are destiny. Placed at the center of the world by the gods, the Romans would rule the world forever as part of the natural order -- if, that is, they could assemble a coherent world body of empire. Which is exactly what Vitruvius set out to explain how to do in his Ten Books."

Da Vinci's Ghost

We will never be done reading about Leonardo Da Vinci, protean genius of the Italian renaissance. We have his rich body of paintings and drawings and sketches, and his sometimes ambiguous writings.

Like some of us, Leonardo was left-handed. Like few of us, he wrote backward, right to left, perhaps to avoid smudging his ink; perhaps because he liked looking at his work in mirrors; most likely because he was never in school and thus had no schoolmaster to correct his habits.

Leonardo moved from one interest to another, restless, questing, raising more questions than he could possibly address in one long lifetime. As a young man he was popular, successful and happy, and he had a “lifelong taste for jokes, light verse, ribald banter, riddles and fables, even party tricks. In his notebooks he recorded scores of jokes and anecdotes. “It was asked of a painter why,” one of them went, “since he made such beautiful figures which were but dead things, his children were so ugly. To which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day and his children by night.”

These insights into Leonardo come from the highly readable new book Da Vinci’s Ghost by Toby Lester.

His new work is breezily written and easy to read. It is based on deep research, vetted by an array of experts. Lester centers on one drawing – the most famous drawing in recent history, which depicts a man – perhaps Leonardo himself – placed inside a circle and a square. You’ve seen this four-armed four-legged ideal human in dozens of places. It is one of the most iconic images in our culture.

What is it really about, what does it mean? Where did it come from in the first place? What did it signify in Leonardo’s day, and what might it mean to us? These are some of the questions that Lester confronts in Da Vinci’s Ghost.

The image of man inside circle and square is now referred to as Vitruvian Man. The idea was first described by the 1st Century BC Roman engineer Vitruvius in his Ten Books on Architecture, but not drawn by him nor by the medieval scribes who transcribed his work.

It was an Italian theorist and builder, Franceso di Giorgio Martini of Siena, who “sketched...” in the margins of his own Treatise on Architecture “the first known picture that can legitimately be called Vitruvian Man,” Lester writes. The sketch was no idle fancy but “an attempt to sum up the essence of the human analogy, the idea... that “all the arts and all rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body.”

Francesco and Leonardo knew each other, traveled together, questioned and learned from each other, even competed on the design of the Milan cathedral.

Da Vinci and others came to believe that by deeply understanding the universal proportions of humankind – down to the distance between elbow and shoulder, upper lip and nose, the ratio of the distance between thumb and palm and so forth – one could come to understand God. Since God had created the world and mankind, by understanding ourselves we would understand the universe.

Done right, every drawing, painting and building would be in harmony with the divine, clearly an exciting and worthy goal if it could possibly be achieved. Lester speculates because Leonardo “had observed and studied the natural world more thoroughly than anybody before him... perhaps he felt he was on the verge of attaining what had eluded others for so long: the godlike ability to see and understand the nature of the world as a whole.”

The figure of man inside circle and square can be understood as “a hinge moment in the history of ideas,” Lester writes, “the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science, and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of ... everything.”

This is what you get with Leonardo, a seeker who flourished in exciting times, an artist and philosopher who sought the inexpressible. “Everything proceeds from everything,” he wrote in a notebook, “everything becomes everything, and everything can be turned into everything else... The earth is moved from its position,” he wrote, “by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.”

In Da Vinci’s Ghost Toby Lester conjures a living, breathing Leonardo. Meeting him here is unforgettable.

NOTES

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester. Free Press hard cover $26.99. ISBN 9781439189238. Also available in audio versions.

Another excellent book on Leonardo, used by Lester as one of many sources is Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl. Penguin paperback $18. ISBN 0143036122.