Compulsively Aimless

(Updated from 2013 Post) The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground.      --Frank Zappa So every generation has got to tear down t he old and rebel with the new--creative destruction to borrow a term from the economists.  I'm especially fascinated by the art and music scene of Greenwich Village in the 1950s. He re's a s hort li st of some books on my shelf on the l ife of the cultural underground with a heavy slant on New York. 1.  Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (1933).  Before his success as a writer, Orwell lived in near-poverty working as dishwasher and other menial jobs.  This Mostly autobiographical, part novel, Orwell's life among the bottom rung of Bohemians in the early 1930s.  Bought new.       2.  Down and In: Life in the Underground, Ronald Sukenick (1987).    Sukenick tells the history of Greenwich Village and how this small part of Man...

Earlier I looked at vintage tour guides. Today, it's vintage textbooks. The small sample I have, I treasure. They're an example of newer isn't always better. Comparing these books of the late 1890s and early 1900s to my textbooks of the 70s and 80s I would take these. They've not only stood the test of time as well-organized, written in concise, plain English, and they even look good on your bookshelves. What stands out is that these books were also sturdy--hard covers and bindings that still hold together and must have been made for durability knowing the treatment they'd be getting from student wear and tear. Of the six examples from my library, two were published by The American Book Company ( ABC), an educational book publisher that specialized in elementary school, secondary school, and collegiate-level textbooks. They were best known for publishing the McGuffey Readers, which sold 120 million copies between 1836 and 1960.  Two other two books were published...

If you cart your books around long enough they turn into a library but also a snapshot of your brain. I have carted some of my childhood books around long enough to see those snapshots. When I was in 11 and 12 years old I went through a World War II phase and especially a tank phase. For that couple of years, I asked for books on tanks for my birthday and Christmas. I've carted them around and pulled them out. Here’s my collection from years back plus one recent book.   1. The Tank Story: Purnell‘s History of the World Wars Special Edition (1972). More of a magazine than a book, this was part of a series printed in the U.K. One of my first purchases during a family trip to England for Christmas when I was 11. It was perfect for me because it had a lot pictures. Price "45p".                      2. Tanks: An Illustrated History of Fighting Vehicles, Armin Halle/Carlo Demand (1971).  It starts with antiquity  includ...

Four hundred years ago, religious pilgrims left England for a journey that landed on the shores of what is now Massachusetts.  I have a handful of books on the Pilgrims from the Mayflower. 1. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620 to 1647 William Bradford edited by SE Morrison (1952).  Considered the most authoritative account about Plymouth and written by the settlement's governor and driving spiritual force, William Bradford. Bradford tells the story of the Pilgrims' first stop in Holland, their harrowing transatlantic crossing, the first harsh winter in the new land, and the help from Native Americans that saved their lives. The text was lost for a couple of centuries when it was rediscovered and published in the U.S. shortly before the Civil War. Its discovery and return can be credited with Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of a national day of thanksgiving. Editor and eminent historian, Samuel Elliot Morrison described the return to the U.S. as a "literary sensation."...

With the little mars of ownership and inscriptions, books can be transformed into something more than their content. They can symbolize a moment in time for the family member and the book. Here are a few examples from my library:  1. A Wonder-Book Tanglewood Tails and Grandfathers Chair by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1883).   The inscription in this book marks a moment in time for my grandmother then Dorothy Haynes, who received it as a Christmas gift in 1907 from her aunt Loucella. My grandmother would have been 12 years old at the time living in Sandusky, Ohio at the Ohio veterans home where her father was the chief surgeon. I try to imagine her Christmas morning where she opens the book around a Christmas tree with her for brothers and parents. This was part of a Riverside set of books that was popular at the time one of 13 volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s work.  2.  Napoleon,  Emil Ludwig 1926. The inscription on this book shows it it was given to my gra...

I’ve been lucky to inherit a handful of books that have come down through the generations on my mother’s side of the family. I think of these books as extensions of family members I never knew but can still understand their thoughts and interests. I try to imagine the life of the ancestor with the book. One day, the book was deliberately selected, or given as a gift, and then read by its owner. Their owners died and the books were taken down from shelves packed up and taken to a new home where they may have been read by the descendant of the owner. They are particularly special because they show the owners added their name to the book. This is to share what I have in two parts: books of the times and books as artifacts of a life. Part One: Spiritualism at the End of the 19th Century Spiritualism flourished in England and America in the 1840s to the 1920s. By the end of the 1800s, spiritualism was said to have more than eight million followers mostly from the middle and upper classe...

As I buy more books, I'm updating some past lists. Here's one from 2012 with a few additions. Thought this one timely since every presidential election year, Ohio gets some time to be the big man on the Electoral College Campus. And remember, lists are random and incomplete samples of what's on my shelf at a moment in time. I learned the hard way moving to the east coast that Ohio was the Rodney Dangerfield of states. Telling an east or west coaster you’re from Ohio was a guaranteed death-knell to any conversation. The usual response is "oh" followed by an excuse to find the bar for a refill. You may even feel you are suddenly invisible. This is because we lack distinctive identities. There’s no aura of New York sophistication or the hipness of California or Seattle or intellectual superiority of Cambridge. We can’t charm folks with lilting accents, distinctive hats and boots or entice pastoral romantics with our picturesque fall calendars (even though ou...

  For a couple of semesters in college I worked at the on-campus student coffee shop, The Bandersnatch, named after the creature in Lewis Carroll's famous nonsensical poem, Jabberwocky . When you work inside a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, you start to take nonsense seriously. While I was toasting bagels and brewing coffee, I thought about it enough to create my own incomplete, nonsense hierarchy. (The lists here reflect my myopia with modern pop culture.) 1. Understandable Nonsense. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously ," is a sentence composed by the MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, and the best example I can think of as nonsense where the words are all understandable but whose meaning is nonsensical. This category is not a lot of fun, mostly because it seems to be the playground for academics to make linguistic arguments.    2. Mixed-Up Nonsense. Second degree of nonsense would be a mix of the understandable and made up. Carroll's 1855 Jabborwocky i...