Weekend Stubble

We've Moved!

2010-04-30T14:56:00.004-07:00

Weekend Stubble's finally getting a shave: a new website (including all my radio shows and links to over 100 of my articles) at literarydetective.com ....

...a new blog (complete with all the old Stubble posts) at literarydetective.blogspot.com ...

...and my twitter feed: twitter.com/thelitdetective .

Go forth and click!

The Napoleon of Not a Clue

2010-04-24T12:19:00.006-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most incoherent book title of 1907!

This description certainly sounds promising:

Think they're joking about a detective love-story starring a delusional Napoleon reincarnation? Well, here's the frontispiece:

Come to Think of It, My Scalp IS Tingling...

2010-04-18T23:45:00.001-07:00

From Harper's, 1886:

Tweet, Tweet

2010-04-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm now up on Twitter: twitter.com/thelitdetective

Do We Get Jetpacks This Time?

2010-04-17T12:56:00.001-07:00

A New Scientist Histories column from '05 noted that the last really huge volcanic eruption led to the invention of the bicycle:

ON 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia began to grumble. A week later the volcano blew its top in a spectacular eruption that went on until July. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 92,000 people and ejecting so much ash into the atmosphere that average global temperatures dipped by 3 °C. In the northern hemisphere 1816 became known as the year without a summer. New England had blizzards in July and crops failed. Europe was hit just as badly.

On holiday by Lake Geneva the 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy were trapped in Lord Byron's house by constant rain. To divert his guests Byron suggested a competition to write a ghost story. The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Across the border in the German state of Baden the soaring price of oats prompted the 32-year-old Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse - the first bicycle....

Greetings from 1896

2010-04-04T12:38:00.004-07:00

There's no way to embed it here, alas, but the Times of London has video of the newly discovered 1896 film that appears to be Australia's first movie:

Patineur Grotesque shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera."

How To Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself

2010-04-03T11:58:00.007-07:00

...is the most awesome title ever for a book, and Tin House Books now has Robert Paul Smith's long-lost 1958 masterpiece reissued complete with a blurb from Lemony Snicket and an intro by yours truly.

TH editors got intrigued by it after I wrote a "Lost and Found" piece for them about the book for their "Off The Grid" issue a couple years ago:

I don't know about you, but I wasted all but about fifteen minutes of my childhood. Those fifteen minutes were spent on a beach in Cornwall busting a nodule of quartz out of a fist-sized chunk of flint; thirty years later, I still have it somewhere in my office, in an old coffee can. Everything else I made during those years—the swords nailed together from old pickets, the forest forts that defended nothing from nobody, the poorly assembled Revell model cars with Testor's paint smeared lazily on them, the Sherman tanks drawn in near-medieval 2D perspective—they're all pretty much gone now.

Come to think of it, I haven't used the piece of quartz for much either.

But if I want reminding of where the rest of that time went, I have this book. A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no reason, to turning buttons and string into buzzsaws that won't cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don't come back, How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself is about what you do when you're a kid and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don't ask for help...

The Times calls it "definitely the wildest how-to manual I've seen this year" -- maybe because of, ahem, the sections on how to use a penknife and an icepick -- and Tin House now also has a terrific find up a Youtube: a ten minute interview with Robert and Elinor Smith by Edward R. Murrow.

Chess for the Insane

2010-03-28T11:39:00.009-07:00

What got me started this week on my whole Victorian board game kick -- or, I should say, my latest one -- was a passing mention in this ad of Hexagonia, put out by Jaques & Son of London:

(Jaques is still very much around, by the way.)

Hexagonia was, apparently, the first commercially manufactured hexagonal chess game. (At left is a modern hex set from chessvariants.com.)

I haven't been able to find a picture of one of these Hexagonia sets yet, but there's an intriguing description of the game from Routledge's Every Boy's Annual for 1866:

And, of course, if you really want all-out polygonic war, there's always... three-player chess.

(via Mastersgames.com)

War Without Tears

2010-03-27T10:59:00.004-07:00

From Peter Parley's Annual for 1865: "peaceful combat, without the horrors of actual warfare." It's...

Also: Carpet Croquet!

(From the Boston Almanac for the Year 1871)

The Return of Dr. Viper and Reverend Bruiser

2010-03-21T22:28:00.005-07:00

Robert Darnton has a great post over at NYRB on precursors to blogging:

Blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet. Here, for example, is a recent post on The Superficial:
RadarOnline reports “traditional marriage” crusader and former Miss California Carrie Prejean is living in sin with her fiancé Kyle Boller of the St. Louis Rams where they’re no doubt eating shellfish. BURN THEM!
And here is a typical entry from Le Gazetier cuirassé ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France (1771):
Mlle. Romans is soon to marry M. de Croismare, Governor of the Ecole Militaire, who will use six aides de camp to take his place in performing the conjugal service.
...To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Postand the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as “the Reverend Bruiser”) and the Reverend William Jackson (known as “Dr. Viper”) packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes. Much of it came from a bountiful source: the coffee house.

Without some good eye-straining time at a monitor or a microform reader, it's hard to appreciate just how different newspapers once were. Even for many years after Viper and Bruiser, front pages remained a wilderness of indistinguishable shipping news, assorted and sundry royal doings, notices that fine bolts of linen were to be had at so-and-so's shop, and the occasional really excellent carriage wreck. Feature writing and star reporters had their rise with the New York Sun and the Herald, while the look of modern papers came from Pulitzer's New York World: illustrations, human interest, compelling stories with big heds on page 1. And tabloids and Fox-mongering more or less evolved -- or devolved, I guess -- from Hearst's Journal and the National Police Gazette.

So maybe the comparison is not entirely a fanciful one:

(Via Gawker)

The Underground Scene

2010-03-14T11:58:00.010-07:00

(Thames Tunnel as it appeared on Friday, via Flickr.)

Oh, how I wish I was in London this weekend...

From the Times Archive Blog:

I've been fantastically lucky today to be able to go on a walk through the Brunels' tunnel under the Thames, from Rotherhithe to Wapping and back, under the expert guidance of Robert Hulse, director of the Brunel Museum. The tunnel has been carrying trains under the Thames since 1869, but was closed three years ago during extension work on the East London line. This weekend they've taken a break to allow the public in as pedestrians for the first time in 145 years.... This Times report from just after it opened records the first sub-terranean, or sub-Thamesian mugging, and finishes, charmingly, with the news that

We are given to understand, that after a certain hour of the night the tunnel is infested with loose women.

From their blog, here's how a "grand fancy fair" there was announced on March 27, 1850:

Presumably this weekend's event was rather heavier on the anorak and lighter on the crinoline, but no less amazing. Here are the first pedestrians entering the Thames Tunnel in 145 years:

(via Londonist)

Lip Oulipo

2010-03-07T11:43:00.005-08:00

For those who haven't checked out BBC Radio 4, here's a particularly peculiar pleasure: Just a Minute, which is constrained writing brought to life. Contestants are given a subject which they must discuss for a full minute without repeating a single word that has been previously used. Some of the segments have been turned into film shorts, including the one above...

Victorian Photoshop

2010-03-06T11:14:00.001-08:00

Check out the slideshow of Victorian photo-collage over at Slate....

Amazon Gets Up A Creek

2010-02-21T12:36:00.002-08:00

Last year I noted in Slate that Amazon's been having it both ways for a while on state sales taxes -- not paying any where they were not due, and not paying any even where they were due:

Amazon.com has spent a decade opposing the enforcement of online taxes so that its noncollection of sales tax creates a powerful pricing incentive over bricks-and-mortar competitors. Why buy a MacBook Air in Boston, after all, when online you'll save nearly 90 bucks in Massachusetts sales tax? But there have long been warnings that consumers just might get ruinously addicted to the tax-free ride Amazon and others appeared to be giving them—and that states might just get, well, ruined.
I say the ride appeared tax-free: In fact, there is tax due on some online sales. Amazon and other online retailers have benefited from the lack of an enforcement mechanism. States have started taking notice, and when New York state recently attempted to fix this situation, Amazon.com took them to court—and got shellacked. The company, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Eileen Branstein ruled last month, did "not come close" to showing that the state was wrong to demand that these taxes be collected. With millions in desperately needed uncollected revenue from online retailers at stake for the state, Amazon.com hasn't said yet whether it will appeal.

You wouldn't expect a financially ruined state like California to leave that kind of money laying on the table -- and now they're not. From Friday's Tech Flash:

Things are heating up for Amazon.com on the sales tax front again. The California Senate just passed a bill that would require online retailers like Amazon to collect sales tax on web purchases. According to reports, the measure was part of a $5 billion budget package making its way through the California legislature. Virginia, Colorado and Illinois are also considering sales tax bills targeting online retailers.

Amazon's been able to fight this off for years, but the stakes -- and the state budget gaps -- are getting much higher now.

Twitter Finds Its Destiny

2010-02-21T12:25:00.002-08:00

Tweets of... lines from Harry Stephen Keeler!

A recent sample:

Till, of course, Old Man Death accepts him--in the magazine called "The Grave."

(Hat tip to Ed!)

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!

2010-02-21T12:16:00.004-08:00

The Austin bookstore BookPeople has been hosting "literary day camps" for kids....

Bad Luck

2010-02-14T12:06:00.006-08:00

I find this Wikipedia category weirdly fascinating: List of Las Vegas Casinos That Never Opened.

A sample:

Titanic
Themed after the doomed luxury liner RMS Titanic, this resort was to have been modeled after the ship and would have been 400 feet (120 m) long with 1,200 rooms, standing across the street from the Sahara Hotel and Casino. The project was rejected by the Las Vegas City Council.
World Trade Center
To have been located at 925 East Desert Inn Road, Las Vegas.

Leonard Shoen, co-founder of U-Haul truck rental, purchased the property of what had been the Chaparral Hotel & Casino in 1996, renovating it into the World Trade Center Hotel. A gaming license was applied for, but when it was discovered that two of Mr. Shoen's closest partners were convicted felons, the application was denied in 1998. He withdrew his application, and later died in a car crash in 1999 that was ruled a suicide. Cards and gaming chips were produced for the World Trade Center Casino, but were never used.^[3] The property has since been demolished and is now vacant. The old World Trade Center Casino site is now a parking lot, part of the Sands convention center annex.

World Wrestling Federation
A casino resort themed after the World Wrestling Federation was proposed for a property near Interstate Highway 15 across from Mandalay Bay. The project never went past the proposal stage. WWE also proposed to open on the property best known as the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, but now known as the Royal Resort Hotel and Casino.

Free Dreadfuls

2010-02-14T11:48:00.005-08:00

Terrific news in last Sunday's Times of London:

MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring....Many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer. Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books — now all digitised — are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.

Penny dreadfuls and dime novels verged were basically disposable literature, so they can be absurdly difficult and sometimes outright impossible to track down -- this is a wonderful development.

Run Faster For the Exits

2010-01-31T23:51:00.004-08:00

Hard on the heels of last week's ominous report by the Financial Times, more at Borders: their CEO bolted on Tuesday, corporate HQ announced layoffs on Thursday.

Oh, and in between those two events... the iPad announcement.

I'd say the $499 base model pretty well (and pretty deliberately) plunges a dagger into the heart of Amazon's $489 Kindle DX, whose monochrome screen and DRM now make it look like the worst deal since... well, since whatever e-reader Borders was working on.

And now that has knocked Amazon off balance enough that it almost immediately capitulated today to a pushback on pricing by Macmillan -- though not before reminding Kindle owners once again that their Seattle overlords can peevishly yank content off their devices.

Interesting times, etc.

It Cannot Grow Old!

2010-01-31T00:55:00.006-08:00

A great find over at Boing Boing, with a writeup on the history of this infinitely expandable project ...

Ah, where's Hari Seldon when you need him?

Run for the Exits

2010-01-23T12:45:00.008-08:00

Also not getting much press yet: Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders.

Four years ago in the Village Voice -- pause for irony -- I noted that musclebound chains could be in deep trouble if they didn't get on board with electronic and on-demand technologies that would slowly render their credit-on-return Xanadus into a massive liability.

Guess what?:

The average time it took for Borders to pay back suppliers spiked over 40% to 97.9 days in the year ended 31 October, from 69.4 days in the prior year period... As of 31 October, the company had USD 215m available under its USD 1.125bn revolver, based on inventory and credit card receivables. According to the credit agreement backing the Bank of America-led loan due 2011, a 1.1x fixed charge ratio kicks in if the retailer’s borrowings exceed 90% of the maximum amount permitted. Borders would not currently be in compliance with the fixed charge ratio if it were tested, SEC filings show...

Battle of the e-readers aside, Border’s faces an even greater threat from loss of in-store shoppers to internet retailers, particularly Amazon, and was forced to shut its 200-store Waldenbooks chain last year. For 3Q09 ended 31 October, Border’s revenues were USD 602.5m versus USD 693m in the comparable period.

Bear in mind, by the way, that the comparable period in '08 was when the economy was already in an absolute pants-wetting freefall.

Alt Weakly (Pt 2)

2010-01-23T12:18:00.004-08:00

Still weirdly overlooked by most of the press, Business Week is now headlining this: Village Voice Affiliate May Face Forced Bankruptcy in Ad Fight.

VVM's executive ed, not surprisingly, denounces it all as a "false, inaccurate smear" -- namely, by pointing out that while New Times and SF Weekly are affiliated entities to VVM, they are not the same. And -- wouldn't you know -- it appears there's nothing in the pockets of New Times and the Weekly but lint and Chuck E Cheese tokens.

Got no money -- see!

As long as SFBG's lawyers slept through all their law school lectures on Vicarious Liability, I'm sure this strategy will work just great.

Alt Weakly

2010-01-10T18:42:00.004-08:00

For some reason this hasn't attracted much notice nationally, but this last week the San Francisco Bay Guardian won a whopping $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices by VVM-owned SF Weekly. But because VVM was apparently too cocky to post bond before the case, now the Bay Guardian can start seizing VVM assets from pretty much anywhere it likes in the 16-paper chain.

It's already grabbed SF Weekly's delivery vehicles...

Zut alors!

2010-01-10T18:25:00.004-08:00

Another week, another headache for the Chunnel. It's amusing to recall that at one time, proposals for a Channel Tunnel were attacked by British nationalists as inviting certain destruction by a French invasion.

Check out this rabble-rousing novel from 1882 that I once came across:

Behold the horrors of the invasion!:

John Smith's first experience of an invader was not a pleasant one. Accustomed to live quietly in a little street just running off the Strand, and there to sell butter and bacon and eggs in sufficient quantity to maintain himself and small family, he had certainly never looked forward to a time when a French sergeant and four infantry privates would be billetted upon him, and would choose his upstairs parlour as their sleeping and living room.... he saw their filthy mess utensils on his light Brussels carpet, and his piano turned into a sort of cupboard for preserved soups, while a silk-covered couch that had been his pride was made into a bed for the sergeant, and some of his chimney ornaments were flung out of the window as being in the way... Screamed at by the sergeant because the domino-box, which he had produced to order, was a small one, and wholly beneath the dignity of a French soldier, and ordered to fetch wine instead of stout, and to put a good dinner on the table, he hastened to obey...

It is true he saw his plate and knives go to fill the haversacks of his invaders, and was obliged to let them take the contents of his till. But after all his was not a specially hard case; it must be confessed he deserved more. For John Smith had contributed as much as anybody, or more than some people, to the very state of things which he now deplored.

He it was who had seconded a resolution at Exeter Hall against a proposed large increase of the English navy.

He it was who had taken shares in the Anglo-French Channel Tunnel...

If It's Too Loud...

2010-01-03T12:22:00.003-08:00

NPR has a terrific piece this week on the Loudness War -- as mourned/explained by this YouTube video:

As a drummer, hearing every part of the kit and every single beat rammed to the front of mixes is as depressing as... I don't know, probably as depressing as Auto-Tune abuse is to singers. Anyway, NPR has Bob Ludwig on hand to explain -- he's mastered pretty much every classic album you've heard of, ever -- and the historical context of 45s makes this an especially fascinating look at the phenomenon.

Omniscience

2010-01-02T11:54:00.009-08:00

I'm in Slate this week with an article and slide show remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine:

The piece began after I found a stash at a junk store, and was hit by a shock of recognition of a 1979 cover -- I actually remembered getting that issue as a kid. And inside the issues, the ads of long-lost firms -- DAK, Fidelity Chess, Infocom games, Commodore 64! -- were as weirdly evocative as the articles. Leafing through pages I last read 25 to 30 years ago, I found myself remembering them. A lot of them, in fact. I've become so used to the ephemeral nature of magazines that I've forgotten how some reading experiences -- especially at the age of 10 -- can still deeply, subtly imprint themselves.

Among the many riches I found in a junk-shop stash of Omnis -- (Yonkers spaceport! A 1984 account of telecommuting! An Italian atomic bomb!) -- I also came across this astounding ad from the final days in 1995, long after I and just about everyone else had stopped reading. No matter how hard up times may be for science magazines today, just remember: nobody's asking their editorial assistants to staff a 900-number.

My Chinese Character

2009-12-20T11:21:00.006-08:00

Not Even Wrong just ran in Hong Kong in a Cantonese stage version -- ! -- here's actor KC Li as "Paul Collins."

Madmen Across the Water

2009-12-19T12:00:00.010-08:00

(Hildebrand chocolate card, c. 1900)

I'm in this week's New Scientist with a brief history of aquatic pedestrianism:

The first well-documented walk on water came in 1844, when Robert Kjellberg and Tonnes Balcken glided through Hanover on pontoon shoes made of thinly beaten metal. They showed that it was possible to carry a heavy knapsack and fire a rifle without sinking and taught the local army garrison how to use their invention. While no water-walking army materialised, Kjellberg was soon touring England as the "Water King". His exhibitions captured the Victorian imagination, and imitators around the world followed in his sloshing footsteps.
"Anybody can do it. It may be, that before long... the shining path marked out upon the waters by the silvery beams of the moon will become a fashionable promenade," declared the Toronto Globe after witnessing a local water-walker striding the Don River in 1854. "No stones will be there to vex those troubled with tender feet, no bruises can result from a fall, no danger is to be apprehended from carelessly driven cabs, or viciously given dogs."

Yet the idea of waterborne warfare was never far away. The same account foresaw "the crossing of armies over rivers", and in 1910 inventor Luigi Rissi taught an Italian soldier to fire a rifle from "hydro skis". Oldrieve's contribution was perhaps more fanciful than practical: during his [1898] walk in New York harbour he calmly lit sticks of dynamite with his cigar and tossed them into the East river, where they sent spectacular fountains shooting 20 metres into the air.

"Professor" Charles W. Oldreive was one of the most popular water-walkers, and eventually capped off his exploits by winning a $5000 bet in 1907 to walk down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, from Cincinatti to New Orleans.

From the New York Journal of 16 January 1898, here's Oldrieve engaged in the highly professorial act of blowing shit up in New York Harbor:

The Road to Cell

2009-12-06T22:23:00.007-08:00

I wrote a New Scientist piece earlier this year on the nearly criminal foot-dragging by Detroit over safety advances made by pioneering engineers in the 1950s and 60s, and that sad pattern seems to have been repeated... with cell phone companies.

An excellent piece of historical digging by Matt Richtel in today's Times:

Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving. Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.
Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones. “There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”
It was the early 1960s.

(On a rather happier automotive note, the Times also has a fascinating article on Invacars -- the cleverly designed pale blue cars distributed in postwar Britain to the disabled...)

Into the Vault!

2009-11-29T11:55:00.006-08:00

I'm on a NPR Weekend Edition segment about Shakespeare's First Folio this weekend; Scott Simon and I ventured into the vault of the Folger with library director Gail Paster. It's very rare that they let anyone into the underground vault -- it literally has a giant time-lock door -- so we were lucky indeed to have a look at such treasures as this Folio cheerily defaced by a girl in the 1720s.

This was still before critics like Theobald and Johnson had made it clear why perhaps you might not want to use old Folios as scratch-pads for your kids.

One neat detail that didn't make it into the finished piece: Scott asking Gail if it wasn't perilous to have all these valuable books in one place, because what if there was a fire?

"Well," Gail smiled, "in a fire the oxygen is evacuated from the room and replaced with halocarbon gas. We'd have about five minutes to get out."

Which, I suppose, is why you don't want to fall asleep in the vault. Oh, and also because you could end up like this guy:

Paper Castles

2009-11-22T12:39:00.006-08:00

I love that a book like this needed to exist in the first place -- an 1859 guide to creating architect's models out of paper:

There's a full text at Google Books...

Bear vs. Thief

2009-11-22T12:10:00.005-08:00

Last year I noted the UK publication of Madeleine Goold's Mr Langshaw's Square Piano, which follows the social history of a single Broadwood square piano -- and I lamented at the time that there was no sign of a US publisher. Well, now it has one!

Friday's Wall Street Journal lauds the book:

The author has a gift for gathering charming and peculiar historical details, from the niceties of producing ornate copperplate handwriting to the trained bear who guarded Broadwood's premises... Ms. Goold's researches take her from graveyards in Lancashire to archives at Emory University in Atlanta, and her narrative touches on the American and French revolutions, the British diaspora in India and Australia, and the Victorian-era Age of Mahogany. But no matter how far afield the author's interests take her, she maintains her focus on one culture-changing development that has only in recent decades lost is force: the piano in the parlor.

Here's an 1822 Bradshaw square piano at work:

DC Reading

2009-11-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading this Monday night at the Folger!

1927 London in Color... (Colour?)

2009-11-14T11:41:00.005-08:00

Via Boing Boing, footage taken with the early color process of Claude Friese-Greene...

Another Victim of the Recession: Player Piano Rolls

2009-11-08T13:17:00.002-08:00

After last week's post, I belatedly came across this extraordinary story: player piano rolls were still being manufactured in Buffalo, NY for the old instruments, right up until last year. (!)

Until Thursday, QRS was the only continuously operating mass producer of piano rolls in the world. The only other company, in Australia, stopped earlier this decade. Sales dropped about 80 percent from 15 years ago to around 50,000 annually, Berkman estimated...
Berkman said reassembling the piano roll factory elsewhere will be difficult.
One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano. There are also aging machines to perforate and punch the holes, to cut the stencils to print the lyrics, to spool the rolls and to glue the roll boxes together.
“There are so many facets of it. The perforating machines are old and cantankerous, and they’re one star in a constellation of machines that all have to be functioning,” Berkman said.

Sinclair Lewis's Other Racket

2009-11-07T13:57:00.004-08:00

For Halloween, Abebooks had up a "Top Ten Ghostwritten Books" list. My favorite: a tennis guide ghosted by Sinclair Lewis.

Playing, Sir!

2009-11-01T23:38:00.003-08:00

Lately my son Morgan has become fixated on Youtube videos of old player pianos in use. He loves the whole thing, from feeding the cylinder into the machine to final flap-flap-click-click of the rewinding piano roll: he's particularly fond of this 1927 foxtrot "Changes."

This is sometimes the first thing I hear in the morning, which makes me feel like I'm waking up in the middle of a Wodehouse story.

So I'm Guessing There's No Second Edition...

2009-10-31T14:07:00.008-07:00

A charming find on eBay: a 1927 guide on How to Play the Cinema Organ published at the exact moment that talkies were about to rub out the profession. The Jazz Singer came out in October of that very year.

Making Out in the Back of Horseless Carriages!

2009-10-24T11:21:00.003-07:00

Teen hysteria, courtesy of the February 14, 1925 issue of the New York Evening Journal:

Whatever Entrepreneurs Can Dream Up...

2009-10-18T12:45:00.012-07:00

...con-men have thought of first.

Wandering through Old Bailey records, I found an 1889 investor scam worthy of a dot-com:

BONIFACE KNAPP:
I live at 3, Maidment Road, Burdett Road, Bow—four years ago Krantz called on my father, a schoolmaster, and stayed to tea—that was the first introduction—he was not a man of means then—on 7th September this year I went with my father to an office in Leaden hall Buildings, where I saw him—he took us into a private office, and explained a scheme he had for buying a building near the Mansion House for the purpose of displaying advertisements, which were to continually revolve on a sheet inside the building; as I understood—by the side of it was to be a free correspondence company, where anybody could write a letter free—there were also to be tables for eating purposes, with an invention by Krantz by which you touched a knob, and a dinner would appear under a desk—you touched different knobs for different dishes—this was all under Bogaerts Free Correspondence Company—I went to Leadenhall Buildings every morning—I saw Bogaerts there—he and Krantz had meetings and conferences there, sometimes for many hours, in another room—he mentioned to me the Bogaerts Reunited Developing Company, to assist other people in bringing forward their patents—he said the capital was £3,000, which was subscribed abroad, and that the company was very vast in its extent...

For anticipating ad-supported e-mail by over a century, Mssrs. Henri Boegaerts and Bruno Krantz were made guests of Her Majesty and awarded twelve months hard labor.

"Two A.M. in the Subway"

2009-10-10T11:25:00.004-07:00

An 1905 Edison short I stumbled across on Youtube:

Also, via Daily Dish, an amazing hand-tinted 1899 Lumiere film of a Serpentine dance:

In Tomorrow's NYTBR...

2009-10-03T10:04:00.004-07:00

...The Book of William gets some love!

And next Sunday, I'll be reading at the Wordstock festival here in Portland -- 5pm at the Powell's Books Stage....

Stop Making Sense

2009-09-19T12:51:00.002-07:00

An odd 'un in the Guardian about a new study in this month's Psychological Science:

Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale... A second group were shown the same story, but rewritten so the plot made more sense. Both groups were then asked to complete an artificial grammar learning task which saw them exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings, and then asked to copy the strings and mark those which followed a similar pattern.
"People who read the nonsensical story... were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did. Proulx said that the thinking behind the research was that when we are exposed to something which "fundamentally does not make sense", our brains will respond by "looking for some other kind of structure" within our environment.

Wiley's got the article behind a subscription wall, but happily, one of the study's researchers put up a pdf download of the article. So brace yourself for a chart:

Skinner's Quiz Box

2009-09-05T10:10:00.008-07:00

With Labor Day coming up, I've had to think about how to keep the kids occupied on some long trips -- which why I'm on NPR Weekend Edition today to talk about Yes & Know invisible ink books...

They still look and work the same today as when I was a kid, and I became intrigued: where did these books come from, anyway? I tracked them down to a 1974 patent by Leon Lenkoff of Louisville, Kentucky. (His company, Lee Publications, continues making Yes & Know to this day.) But what struck me was that he cited a 1968 patent by a "Burrhus Frederic Skinner."

B... F... Skinner?

Yep!

Skinner's invention was part of his interest in automating learning; a handwriting worksheet that turned red when drew outside the dotted lines would save teacher labor for more personalized tasks. It was Lenkoff's bright idea to take this idea of defined areas of invisible ink and apply them to tic-tac-toe, 20 Questions, and a Battleship knockoff called "Fleet."

Skinner himself notes an older patent by an Antioch College chemistry instructor for a self-correcting quiz (e.g. fill in the wrong bubble and it turns red, while the correct answer bubble turns green). Skinner was so fond of that idea that he patented an anti-cheating version.

It's a charmingly retro technology. But it turns out that cheatproof decoder pen idea is making a comeback in polling booths this year with a vote confirmation system called Scantegrity.

So all those games of Decoder Pen Baseball on the airplane and in the car? Training for secure voting...

The Blooburds uv my Hart

2009-08-31T00:12:00.003-07:00

The Times carries an obituary to spelling reformer Ed Rondthaler, who passed away at age 104. He's the man I described in a Believer piece last year as the last living link to the movement's Edwardian zenith.

From his obituary:

Such [orthographic] anarchy, Mr. Rondthaler came to believe, helped cause illiteracy and with it, a web of social ills. Among them, as he wrote in the 1977 profile in The Times, were “jooveniel delinquensy, criem-in-th-streets, hard cor unemploiment and poverty.”

...He wrote a song honoring the 100th anniversary of the Croton Dam. He invented things, including a slide rule that calculated currency-exchange rates and another slide rule that computed cooking times of foods based on weight...
In 1920, at 15, young Mr. Rondthaler bought a 2-cent card and addressed it to a classmate. Inside, he wrote, “The bluebirds are flying from my heart to you.” His message was written in standard orthography.
Reader, she married him.

(Hat tip to Ed!)

In Search of the World's Most Boring Book Title

2009-08-23T12:07:00.005-07:00

Round 2

VS.

(Round 1)

Big in Dubai

2009-08-15T12:24:00.004-07:00

(From Time Out Dubai)

The first Arabic manga, The Gold Ring, is a tale involving falconry -- and a quote by author Qais Sedkis in the UAE National notes that it's not as odd a fit as one might think:

“I grew up watching a lot of Arabic-dubbed Japanese animation,” Sedki says. “At the time I just assumed they were all Arabic cartoons. I think it was actually a Jordanian company that did a lot of the dubbing and made [the programmes] available to other TV stations.

“When I learnt the truth, it sparked an interest in all things Japanese for me,” he says.... Certain practicalities have also helped. “As far as the literature goes,” Sedki says. “We both turn pages in the same direction, right to left.” This has meant that Gold Ring could be presented in the traditional tankobon format.

The Wooden Serpent

2009-08-08T11:54:00.009-07:00

1900 postcard of Paris's moving sidewalk

I'm in the latest New Scientist (full text!) with the Victorian equivalent of the jetpack: the trottoir roulant of the 1900 Paris Exposition, a 3 km moving sidewalk for crosstown mass-transit, which one enraptured reporter described as "gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth."

Here's a haunting silent film taken from atop it:

It was such a success that one was proposed to run across the Brooklyn Bridge...

The first moving walkway had been unveiled eight years earlier at the Chicago World's Fair and had proved a huge success at subsequent expositions in Berlin and Paris. Chicago's walkway, the brainchild of engineer Max Schmidt, consisted of three rings, the first stationary, the second moving at 4 kilometres per hour and the third at 8 km/h, an arrangement that allowed walkers to adjust to each speed before moving to the next. With the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, Schmidt upped the ante. This time he envisaged a loop system at each end of the bridge, with a series of four ever-faster walkways. Passengers moved from one to another until finally taking a seat on the benches aboard the fastest, which whisked them across the bridge at 16 km/h...

One newspaper suggested that getting trapped with interminable bores would be a thing of the past: one "has only to suddenly step on the passing sidewalk to be carried rapidly beyond sight or hearing of his tormentor"... The New York Tribune called for "a moving sidewalk from Texas to New York to bring up cotton and those cheap winter strawberries", while another newspaper jokingly suggested that city buildings be placed on moving walkways so that people could simply stand around and wait for the right one to arrive.

There was an even earlier proposal for a 17 km-long system in Paris, and more calls right up through the 1930s for installing huge systems everywhere from LA to Detroit-- as well as along Wall Street, Grand Central Station, and Times Square.

Check out this amazing 1924 proposal for a "ring" system underneath downtown Atlanta:

One detail that wound up on the cutting-room floor: on November 7 1925 -- a year later, and well after the initial hubbub over this idea had died down -- the Atlanta Constitution reported the arrival of curious letter at City Hall:

City Clerk Walter C. Taylor received a letter Friday, written in French, and after vainly endeavoring to find some person at city hall to translate it, at last found a high school girl in the department of education who translated it. The letter offered to submit a bid on the construction of "moving sidewalks" in Atlanta.

The city, alas, never got its own trottoir roulant.

Best blog idea ever

2009-08-01T23:54:00.008-07:00

"Awful Library Books."

To wit:

And finally: Awful, or just awesome?...

"One Hundred Years Hence"

2009-07-27T00:03:00.007-07:00

A neat find: some trade cards cerca 1900 of what the world will look like today -- though, charmingly, clothing does not appear to be subject to change:

The prospect of futuristic weather control seems to have particularly cheered our ancestors:

And, of course, alien invasions:

Oops -- sorry, that last one's from a gallery of Aliens Invading Vintage Postcards....

Good night, Seattle!

2009-07-19T22:01:00.002-07:00

I'll be reading and signing The Book of William tomorrow, Monday July 20th, at the University Bookstore at 7 pm....

Bring Me The Bill

2009-07-12T14:41:00.002-07:00

I'm reading and signing The Book of William this Wednesday at...

Powell's Books
10th & Burnside
Portland, OR
7:30 p.m.

Sobbing Children and Singing Shillings

2009-07-12T13:37:00.005-07:00

I'm in the new music issue of The Believer with a piece on William Gardiner's obscure 1832 treatise The Music of Nature. The book was a great favorite of Emerson and Margaret Fuller, not least because Gardiner attempt to render ordinary sounds in musical notation:

Gardiner was fascinated with the sound of ordinary objects, like ringing true and counterfeit coins against a tabletop: "Half crowns having the sound of--

--bankers quickly discover the least deviation from the proper tone, by which they readily detect the counterfeits," he wrote....

The Music of Nature is about music in the way that Anatomy of Melancholy or Religio Medici are about medicine: it is an extraordinary digressive meditation. His music scholarship is no more reliable today than Burton's medical advice is, and yet how can one not be charmed by a text that observes that a glass of flat champagne rings with a purer tone than a bubbly glass does? What parent has not suspected that "Providence has bestowed upon children a power of voice, in proportion to their size, ten times greater than that of an adult"? Who would not want to believe his wonderful claim that "In a watchmaker's shop the timepieces or clocks, connected with same wall or shelf, have such a sympathetic effect... that they stop those which beat in irregular time"?

Gentlemen, My Work Here Is Done

2009-07-11T11:39:00.002-07:00

My latest Slate piece features a robot, a serial killer, and Cecil B. DeMille.

Everybody Loves Slush!

2009-07-05T22:27:00.002-07:00

On a weekend like this, you need...

(More) Fun with Library Microforms

2009-07-05T11:35:00.003-07:00

A headline I found this week in a 1907 New York Evening Mail:

Happy July 4th from Fry & Laurie

2009-07-04T09:48:00.002-07:00

(Hat tip: The Stranger)

Borrowing a Cup of Sugar

2009-07-04T08:33:00.010-07:00

Found in an 1897 New York Herald:

How Ralph Lost His Groove

2009-06-14T12:35:00.003-07:00

I'm in New Scientist this week with a piece on Ralph Guldahl, who in 1939 was the world's top golfer. But then something happened:

Along with the usual product endorsements and talk of film cameos, a more unusual offer came Guldahl's way: a book contract for a guide to golfing. He took two months out from his game to write the extensive accompanying text to Groove Your Golf, an innovative "Ciné-Sports" book that used high-speed photography of Guldahl in action on each page to create flip-book "movies". After explaining the use of each club, Guldahl left readers with the admission that even experts had to think carefully about their game; that nobody "is so good he never has to consciously be aware of a number of things to keep his swing in the groove". He then put down his pen and returned to the PGA Tour. He never won another championship.

After a few losing seasons, Guldahl left the circuit. What had happened to golf's greatest star? It was the book that did it, said some, and over the years that suggestion hardened into received wisdom. "When he sat down to write that book," Guldahl's wife Laverne asserted in 1972, "that's when he lost his game."

The real story, I found, turns out to be a little more complicated...

First the Bad News

2009-06-14T12:31:00.003-07:00

Via Boing Boing, a blog of bad news from the past...

(Vampire autos?)

Back to work!

2009-06-07T10:43:00.004-07:00

From Publishers Weekly:

John Glusman, at Harmony, acquired world rights to Paul Collins's Murder of the Century, about a Gilded Age homicide that sparked a tabloid war and led to the beginnings of modern forensics. Collins is a founding editor of the Collins Library imprint at McSweeney's Books and also teaches in the M.F.A. program at Portland State University; Michelle Tessler brokered the deal, and the book is slated for 2011.

(Also in PW -- another starred review for The Book of William!)

Dogfishing

2009-06-06T22:39:00.010-07:00

Those of you with long memories may recall the Monkeyfishing hoax of 2001 in Slate. This was a piece by Jay Forman which revealed the existence of a illicit sport on an island of former medical research monkeys in the Florida Keys, where locals went... well, Monkeyfishing:

Once we found a nice spot, we prepared to fish. Sturdy deep-sea poles were the preferred tackle. I've never heard of anyone landing a monkey on lightweight fly rods, but I suppose it is possible. I have friends who have landed tarpon on them, and tarpon are much bigger than monkeys. A fully-grown rhesus monkey tips the scale at around 30 pounds, while a tarpon can easily break 200.... Fruits were the bait of choice. Apples were good because they stayed on the hook well. Red Delicious were chosen over Granny Smith for the advantage in contrast.

Other journalists called bullshit on the piece, and it quickly fell apart. (A couple years ago, Forman finally confessed the whole thing to Jack Shafer.)

But while perusing the October 1897 issue of Recreation magazine today, I found -- wait for it -- "The New Sport: Bait-Casting For Fox Terriers"...

Coffee and Cigarettes

2009-05-31T22:32:00.006-07:00

One unexpected Wayback Machine trip produced by Google Books: it appears that all of New York magazine is available in full text, something that produces such charming finds as this pre-Starbucks cover story from June 27, 1977:

The results? Well, back in those days, you had to go to Zabar's or Macy's for good coffee:

Which you'd presumably follow up -- it being 1977 -- with a cigarette:

..."Decade"....?

Little House on the Amazon

2009-05-31T11:21:00.009-07:00

Galley Cat notes speculation on a patent filed by Amazon for a small building design. (The patent's here...) The Street weighs in with that claim that "If, indeed, Amazon were to embark on retail locations, analysts think it would only spell disaster. "

Well, maybe it depends on what you mean by a "retail location." It's true that you'd have to be bonkers to build a bricks and mortar bookstore these days. That means that either Amazon is bonkers, or... It's not a bricks and mortar bookstore.

Along with some good guesses at TechFlash (including a reprise/hangover of Amazon Fresh), I'll venture one that hasn't been raised yet: that this is not an outdoors structure at all, but rather a kiosk for rail stations and airport concourses. Specifically, it's for renting out Kindles.

Right now Amazon's the only place to get a Kindle, meaning that there's no in-store way to "try before you buy." Once Amazon's pretty well scooped up early adopters from their own customer base, they've got to start hitting John Q Public. The easiest place to do that is in railways and airports filled with travelers ready to spend on books and magazines for their trip. Why not spend the same money, plus a modest deposit off the credit card, on a preloaded rental Kindle?

And, of course, if you get hooked on the Kindle during your flight... why, they'd also be happy to sell you one as well. It's a way for Amazon to expand their reach into a natural market, all while keeping a tight rein on overhead by keeping clear of big-box retailers and other middlemen.

While Amazon's Terms of Service prevents owners from renting out Kindles, it doesn't prevent the company from doing it. (In fact, digging around reveals that they did indeed try a Kindle student rental pilot program last year.) And if they're doing a fresh load-up of the books and mags with each rental, the publishers won't care either.

We'll see. But if you notice a bunch of workers building stuff by that transfixingly awful magician mural in SeaTac, don't say you weren't warned...

Science Coverage Explained

2009-05-30T11:55:00.003-07:00

From PhD Comics, via The Stranger:

"Not Even Wrong" Hits the Stage

2009-05-24T11:47:00.007-07:00

S'true! "Wild Boy" is debuting this week at the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California -- it's a stage adaptation of "Not Even Wrong" by Ugly Betty and Lipstick Jungle executive producer Oliver Goldstick.

There are now stage versions of a "Paul," "Jennifer," "Morgan" and "Uncle Marc" ... something I find both flattering and totally surreal.

Oliver first encountered the book during some down time on the Ugly Betty set, and actually flew up to meet us -- in fact, I took him to the house in the Hawthorne where the events of the book took place, and then headed over to the Pied Cow, where he laid out a series of index cards wrestling with a plot -- and I realized just how extraordinary it was that he was taking an absurdly discursive memoir with a nonverbal lead and actually turning it into a recognizable story.

Shows start this Friday, and run through July...

Flying Purple People Tweaker

2009-05-24T09:04:00.003-07:00

In the Guardian coverage of the Hay Festival, nature author and forager John Lewis Stemper warns from experience that if you eat the wrong mushrooms from the English countryside, you become simultaneously heavy and light, and then everything turns purple.

Tape Oddity

2009-05-17T15:06:00.004-07:00

After my Believer piece a couple years ago on the Birotron -- a 1970s analog sampling keyboard constructed from 8-track tapes (!) -- I heard from a documentary maker who wanted to find inventor Dave Biro for the documentary she was making about the Mellotron.

The Mellotron, for non-gearheads, is basically what the Birotron was meant to replace -- check out the awesomely L7 demo video above. It was analog sampler intended for home cocktail parties. But the instrument was instantly hijacked by rock musicians -- check out the strings in "Space Oddity" -- or Paul McCartney in Abbey Road Studio 2 demonstrating "Strawberry Fields" on his:

Anyway, now the Mellodrama documentary is making the festival rounds. Check it out!:

Recreated Victorian Village for Sale

2009-05-16T11:20:00.002-07:00

From the Guardian:

The entire collection of the Shambles, a museum of Victorian life recreated as a small town on an acre of land, has been split into 2,300 lots and is up for grabs.... From the taxidermist's shop, a pair of stuffed guinea pigs (guide price £10-£15) has piqued the interest of collectors, and a very battered, stringless double bass that Jenner-Fust had wanted thrown away has attracted a surprising number of inquiries. Very collectible items that are bound to do well include a vast array of stoneware, enamel signs and metal tractor seats, which turn out to be surprisingly desirable.

Inexplicably, they don't link to the auction itself -- it's here.

We Inspire Complete Coincidences

2009-05-10T20:56:00.008-07:00

Amazon, last seen on Slate not answering questions about corporate philanthropy, now has a new web page up -- complete with an application form for "nonprofit author and publisher groups that share our obsession with fostering the creation, discussion, publication, and dissemination of books."

(Hat tip to Dizzyhead Ed!)

Penguin Geeks Are Go!

2009-05-09T13:38:00.003-07:00

The Guardian's books blog finds a wonderful website on old Penguin sci-fi covers.

Headline of the Week goes to...

2009-05-09T11:23:00.004-07:00

"Hat for Hitting People."

Though I think Malcolm McDowell established the correct hat for hitting people as the bowler.

Scanners

2009-05-03T22:22:00.004-07:00

New Scientist turns up a new patent for rapid infrared scanning over at Google Books:

...Bindings cause pages to arch up either side of the spine - bending text and making it hard to interpret. However, last week Google was granted a patent (US 7508978) on an answer to this problem. Its trick is to project an infrared pattern onto the open page spread. This lets a pair of infrared cameras map the three-dimensional shape of the pages by detecting distortion to the pattern. This in turn allows the distortion of the text to be determined - and therefore the degree of correction needed to read it accurately.

Meanwhile, the patent for the infrared Flashing Earring Heartbeat Monitor goes tragically unused:

Somewhere There's a Town with More Rain Than Portland...

2009-05-03T00:17:00.003-07:00

...and that town's name is Carrbridge:

The sun may be out, but storm clouds are gathering over the tiny Highland community of Carrbridge. For come rain or shine, the BBC's weather forecast invariably predicts showers, infuriating the village's 700 residents.

Now they have declared war on the corporation...

Action!

2009-05-02T23:55:00.006-07:00

Len Deighton's Action Cook Book -- the long-lost 1965 gem by (yes) the airport-novel writer, which I pressed upon the public a few years ago in the Village Voice and on NPR -- has been reissued!

Well, reissued in Britain, but still. Pay airmail and make yourself a terrine:

First one out of the gate...

2009-04-26T23:43:00.004-07:00

...a starred review in Kirkus!

The Hottest Book in Charing Cross

2009-04-26T12:11:00.007-07:00

I've long been convinced -- see my Village Voice piece from a few years back -- that the eventual maturing of in-store Print on Demand technology could spell the end for chain stores in their current form. Chains rely on an insane system of return credits to wallpaper their stores on everyone else's nickel; take away the need for returns or for massive retail spaces with huge physical inventories, and you pretty much take away the chain's reason to exist.

Although it hasn't been covered nearly as much as the new Kindle, the unveiling of the Espresso 2.0 Book Machine at the London Book Fair sounds like a big step. The bugs haven't been worked out, but an account in the Times of London this weekend sounds intriguing:

Yesterday The Times was offered a special preview at Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road, in which we were allowed to print the book of our choice and take it away, literally hot off the presses. How hot? Well, the glue used to bind the book is heated to 350F, that's how hot. It has cooled down by the time it pops out at the end, though.
Our first attempt to print a book was not entirely successful. The Times's choice - from a rather limited list, the full catalogue not being available until next week - was a 1919 volume called Heroes of Aviation.... Thor Sigvaldason, co-founder of On Demand Books, the people behind the machine, clicked a mouse and it started making whirry, photocopier-like noises. Laser-printed pages started flying out from the first half of the machine into the second, where the book is made. It was clamped, glued, stuck to the cover, cut to size and spewed out of a letterbox-sized slot in the side of the machine - where it promptly fell apart.
“Things do happen,” said Mr Sigvaldason, phlegmatically. “It is actually perfectly bound. It just doesn't have a cover.”
Another attempt and, after 13 minutes - rather slow, but then there was a pause to empty the wastepaper box - a perfect, warm and rather industrial-smelling copy of Heroes of Aviation was in my hands, mint-fresh and looking just like a real book. Which it was.

Bull Market

2009-04-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

The banjo music is a nice touch:

The DJ of 1830

2009-04-25T12:18:00.005-07:00

Today's Guardian reports a pretty nifty find at the Bodleian: the first known dust jacket.

A librarian at Oxford's Bodleian Library has unearthed the earliest-known book dust jacket. Dating from 1830, the jacket wrapped a silk-covered gift book, Friendship's Offering. Unlike today's dust jackets, wrappers of the early 19th century were used to enfold the book completely, like a parcel. Traces of sealing wax where the paper was secured can still be seen on the Bodleian's discovery...

"These books were like gift books, often bound very nicely and probably in silk," said Clive Hurst, the Bodleian's head of rare books and printed ephemera. "Silk bindings are very vulnerable to wear and tear and handling so bookselllers would keep them in these wrappers to protect the silk binding underneath. When you bought the book you would take the wrapper off and put it on your shelves, which is presumably why so few of these covers have survived."

Taking a quick trawl through reviews and ads for Friendship's Offering reveals something curious: none mention the wrapper, including this one from New Monthly Magazine that does make a point of praising other "novelties" in its binding and contents. If the wrapper was not considered a novelty even in 1830, I can only wonder whether there may be an even older one out there, still waiting to found...

Party of One

2009-04-25T11:59:00.001-07:00

I'm in Cookie magazine with an article on hosting autistic kids at birthday parties.

Speaking of such things, Science Daily and Time magazine (of all people) seem to be among the few media outlets covering a fascinating development: a theory about why fever seems to temporarily lessen autism's symptoms.

Like other parents with autistic kids, I've noticed this effect for years -- even before I knew Morgan had autism. (There's a scene in Sixpence House where an 18-month old Morgan suddenly becomes uncharacteristically pliant and demonstrative. Turns out it's a fever.) I wouldn't say that Morgan stops being autistic when he gets a fever, but he's noticeably more engaged. The most startling thing is that he makes far more eye contact, something so out of character for him that in at least one case, it alerted me to his fever before a hand to his forehead did.

Here's why, according to this new study:

The brain region that drew the attention of the authors is known as the locus coeruleus, a small knot of neurons located in the brain stem. Not a lot of high-order processing goes on so deep in the brain's basement, but the locus coeruleus does govern the release of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline, which is critical in triggering arousal or alarm, as in the famed fight-or-flight response. Arousal also plays a role in our ability to pay attention — you can't deal with the lion trying to eat you, after all, if you don't focus on it first. And attention, in turn, plays a critical role in such complex functions as responding to environmental cues and smoothly switching your concentration from one task to another. Those are abilities kids with autism lack...
The locus coeruleus does one other thing too: it regulates fever.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2009-04-19T12:28:00.006-07:00

I'm giving three talks this week, all open to the public:

University of Washington (Bothell)
"Writing For Their Lives"
Thursday April 23th @ 3:30 pm
Library room 205

University of Washington (Seattle)
"Writing Technology: Uncommon Histories"
with Erik Davis & Joe Milutis
Thursday April 23th @ 7 pm
Communications 226

Pacific University (Forest Grove, OR)
"From Sherlock to Sheldon: Explaining Autism in Movies and TV"
Saturday April 25th @ 5 pm
Taylor Meade Performing Arts Center

Victorian Gamers Get Wired

2009-04-18T12:20:00.006-07:00

The Illustrated London News for 12 April 1845 depicts the first online match in Britain

I'm in this week's New Scientist to talk about the Victorian fad for chess by telegraph... and just about everything else by telegraph...

After the first Newnes [transatlantic chess] match, the British humorous magazine Punch published what it claimed was an interview with a London telegraph office's new "sport by wire" manager: "We cable over to the Associated Press full particulars of our imaginary [soccer] kickoff... [they] wire back their return kick with name, age, weight and address of the kicker... There's our Ladies' Inter-Varsity Stay-at-Home Hockey Contest... That's the river editor, hard at work in that armchair, rowing against Yale by cable... But I must ask you to excuse me now, as I have a billiard tournament, a yacht race and a cricket match with all Australia to manage simultaneously."

Punch's satire wasn't so wide of the mark. A number of North American cities began to stage telegraphed intercity bowling tournaments, with one in 1911 pitting New York, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Seattle against each other simultaneously. The telegraph was rather less practical for other games. Telegraphed billiards matches used a gridded table that enabled players to cable the positions of the balls, but the system proved frustratingly slow - though not as slow as previous attempts at billiards by mail.

Mr. J.D.

2009-04-05T13:10:00.006-07:00

Once again a journalist turns up at J.D. Salinger's house, and once again gets turned away.

In Japan -- not being in easy driving distance of Cornish, NH -- they must turn to Blankey Jet City's song "Salinger," with its chorus: "Mister J.D. Salinger / Tell me why / Tell me why / Tell me why, Salinger..."

Not All Newspapers Are Hurting for Money

2009-04-04T11:55:00.004-07:00

...especially when it's worthless.

(via Daily Dish)

Rock-Arrrrs!

2009-03-29T12:49:00.007-07:00

From the Times (London) archive blog, this 1967 delight on offshore pirate rock stations:

...And as always, the opposition is the most entertaining reading:

Headline of the Week

2009-03-29T12:29:00.003-07:00

French Protest By Reading Nicholas Sarkozy's Least Favorite Book

(From The Telegraph)

Secondhand Bookiestore

2009-03-21T12:31:00.008-07:00

A neat find on eBay: someone's in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol' Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes one of the more unusual uses for a bookstore that I've heard of: he found one of his own books (X Jones of Scotland Yard) in a second hand Chicago bookstore... "which was a front for an elaborate bookie joint!"

Look Out, New Yorkers...

2009-03-15T11:59:00.008-07:00

Black Hand Has An Auto.

Maintaining the American spirit of up-to-dateness, which is said to attain its most perfect flower in New York, the Black Hand has now added the automobile to its working machinery.... Gus Marino, who has a prosperous junk business at 2045 First Avenue, between 107th and 108th Streets, has been receiving Black Hand letters for two months, demanding all the way from $5000 to $5. He did not honor even the lowest demands.

... Marino stepped out of his store to get a cigar at the corner of 108th Street, [when] the machine came racing up to him. It swerved to the curb. One of the three men jumped out, yelled, "Hurrah for the Black Hand," or words that effect, and shot three bullets at Gus Marino.

NY Times, 2/13/1909

No word on whether they then yelled "23 Skidoo!" as they sped off...

Cobblers and Coverless Books

2009-03-08T22:22:00.003-07:00

Doing well: shoe repair shops and, according to the Telegraph of London, used bookstores:

At Scarthin Books, a rambling independent shop with new and second-hand books in Cromford, Derbyshire, Dave Mitchell has grown used to things running against him. He says business was expanding nicely until about 1999. After that, with great effort, it has been steady. But this year his January sale brought its best results since 2003; “not back to the glory days before Amazon and Tesco started eating into sales, but certainly no 'downturn’ on the last few years”.
Mitchell does not separate his second-hand and new sales, but he sees two divergent trends in the second-hand trade as a whole. “For the traditional antiquarian shops, business is appalling,” he says. “But the big browsing shops are booming.” Other reports seem to bear him out. Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, and Richard Booth’s Books in Hay-on-Wye – heavyweight “big browsing” bookshops – each reported a strong 2008.

Not doing so well: Stacey's Bookstore in San Francisco. Here's its closing night this last Wednesday.

Let Them Eat Clicks

2009-03-07T14:37:00.003-08:00

I have a piece in Friday's Slate about Amazon.com's seemingly nonexistent corporate philanthropy -- and more importantly, whether that should matter.

But I hid the real barb in the tail of the piece:

Amazon.com and its shareholders can claim a philosophical purity of purpose and not spend a penny on charity so long they play by the rules. There's just one problem: Amazon.com doesn't much like the rules.
Amazon.com has spent a decade opposing the enforcement of online taxes so that its noncollection of sales tax creates a powerful pricing incentive over bricks-and-mortar competitors. Why buy a MacBook Air in Boston, after all, when online you'll save nearly 90 bucks in Massachusetts sales tax? But there have long been warnings that consumers just might get ruinously addicted to the tax-free ride Amazon and others appeared to be giving them—and that states might just get, well, ruined.
I say the ride appeared tax-free: In fact, there is tax due on some online sales. Amazon and other online retailers have benefited from the lack of an enforcement mechanism.

It's Amazon Marketplace sales -- which were launched in November 2000 -- that actually make the retailer a deadbeat dotcom. And their entry into that market explains this amusing and long-forgotten detail about Amazon's stance on sales taxes: it was for them before it was against them.

Coppola Directs my Father-in-Law

2009-03-01T22:10:00.008-08:00

For reasons known only to themselves, both of my sons have demanded constant rotation of the 1970 novelty hit "Mill Valley," performed by Miss Abrams and The Strawberry Point 4th Grade Class. (Apparently everyone's already heard of this paean to Marin County except me.)

Anyway, after my wife mentioned this to her Dad -- a period instrument artisan -- he said, "Oh yeah, I knew Rita Abrams." He did live in Mill Valley back in the day, but we didn't think much about it until we stumbled upon this:

He's the beardy guy playing recorder in the first seconds of the video -- which was filmed by Francis Ford Coppola (?!).

What's Good For General Motors Was...

2009-02-28T11:08:00.008-08:00

...maybe not so great for you.

I'm in this week's New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s:

"The level of safety [in cars] which we accept for ourselves, our wives, and our children is... on a par with shipping fragile, valuable objects loose inside a container," warned Hugh DeHaven, a crash investigator at Cornell University's aeronautical laboratory in New York. As part of its pioneering Automotive Crash Injury Research Project, and with the help of two crash test dummies dubbed Thin Man and Half Pint, DeHaven and his colleagues vividly demonstrated how unbelted car drivers could be thrown into angular metal dashboards and unpadded steering wheels that concentrated the force of the impact like a meat cleaver. More often, the dummies were ejected through windscreens and doors, or propelled into rigid steering columns that snapped their necks or impaled their chests....

To show that a safe car could be made cheaply and appealingly from existing models, they produced Survival Car II: a 1960 Chevrolet Bel Air retrofitted for safety at minimal cost.... Crandell logged 240,000 kilometres driving one around the country to exhibitions.... American car firms were still not interested. A safe vehicle like the Survival Car was "completely unrealistic", proclaimed John Gordon, president of General Motors. "This company is run by salesmen not engineers," an engineer at Ford observed later. "The priority is styling, not safety."

The results of those rigid steering columns, by the way, are visible in photographs made public as early as 1961 from this UCLA crash test. These two dummies -- impaled on the spear-like column, and neck snapped and staring skywards -- is mute testimony to the near-criminal callousness of Detroit during those years:

The Mendacity Society

2009-02-22T11:34:00.003-08:00

A piece in TLS reviews Jenny Hartley's new study of a little-known casebook kept by Charles Dickens:

He catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more.

What's remarkable to me is how ready Dickens was to help people that he hadn't even interviewed. Years ago -- as part of the old Collins Almanac site -- I jotted down this (truncated) transcription of an Illustrated London News article from May 25, 1844:

On Wednesday John Walker, a man of about forty-five years of age, was brought up in custody, and placed at the bar before Mr. Rawlinson, charged with having attempted to obtain from Mr. Charles Dickens (Boz), of No. 1, Devonshire-street, New-road, by means of false and fraudulent representations. The prisoners seemed in great distress of mind, and in the course of the inquiry frequently shed tears. It appeared Mr. Dickens had frequently relieved the prisoner in his distress, although he knew nothing of him whatever, until at last, after the most importunate solicitations, he instituted an inquiry, and found that, although the tale of distress was true enough, that many of his representations, such as the death of his wife etc., were fabricated for the purpose of stimulating the generosity of his benefactor. He considered he had no alternative.

Mr. Sturgen, the chief clerk of the Mendacity Society, proved that on the previous evening, between seven and eight o'clock, he went to 5 Mitre-Street, and the door was opened by a child. The prisoner, who came down, led him into a back kitchen, and, in answer to questions, he said he was in very great distress, so much so, as to be totally unable to procure even a very scanty meal. Witness told him that he thought it was great pity his wife didn't take in needle work to help support her family, when he said she had been ill, but was now much better, and that she would soon get into employ.

Upon prisoner's admission that his wife was living, he (prisoner) was given into custody, and after he was locked up, witness went back to the house, where he saw the wife and four children, who were evidently onto very great distress; he gave the poor woman a trifle, and afterwards sent to the station-house, and afforded relief to the prisoner; he had previously ascertained that the wife had recently been very ill.

[Judge] Mr. Rawlinson (to Mr. Knyvett): The prisoner, no doubt, has done wrong; but here is a case of great distress, and that distress is proved out of the mouth of the of your own officer; after that, do you really wish me to commit this man?

Mr. Knynett: No sir, I do not.

Mr. Rawlinson (to the prisoner): What have you to say?

Prisoner (after some hesitation, and in a faint tone of voice): I wrote that last letter at the eleventh hour, when we were so badly off, that we knew not what to do. I am sorry I overstepped the truth in saying that my wife was dead, but my motive was good, as we had not a bit of bread to eat. I have been a clerk and accountant, and from the period of losing my last situation, I have not been able to support myself or my family.

Mr. Rawlinson: You are evidently a man of good education, but it cannot be denied, and even you admit it yourself, that you put a falsehood in your last letter to Mr. Dickens. Under all the circumstances, you are discharged, and I am very sorry that you have all been brought here.

The man burst into tears, and before he quitted the court several persons relieved him.

Hometown Papers on the Ropes

2009-02-22T11:09:00.005-08:00

When I was growing up, the local papers in my part of Pennsylvania ranged from the mighty Pottstown Mercury (circulation 27,500) to the Kutztown Patriot, published by Berks-Mont Newspapers:

Berks-Mont Newspapers can trace its history back to the beginnings of The Boyertown Area Times. The Times was founded on June 15, 1857. It was first published as a German weekly paper, Der Bauer, by G. H. Sassaman, who continued the publication until March of 1870. The owner sold the business to an employee, Augustus Moyer, and left Boyertown owing creditors between $3,000 and $4,000.

History repeats itself: the Journal Register Company, a chain that owns the Mercury and Berks-Mont and innumerable other little papers (as well as the New Haven Register), filed for bankruptcy yesterday.

Postscript: While I was posting this today, both of Philadelphia's dailies also went bankrupt.

Noted Without Comment

2009-02-21T19:22:00.003-08:00

(Found in St. Nicholas magazine, December 1917)

The Future!

2009-02-21T08:30:00.002-08:00

Brought to you by Peter Ustinov after a couple pints:

(Omni: The New Frontier TV series, 1981)

Must-Geek TV

2009-02-14T11:22:00.003-08:00

I'm over in Slate with a piece on whether the sitcom The Big Bang Theory is built around a character with Asperger's.

TBBT took a while for me to warm up to -- to even consider watching, actually -- because it's hidden beneath conventional production, the kind of multi-camera configuration and laugh-trackish studio audience that usually warns you that spherical cow jokes need not apply. In other words, TBBT exists in Sitcom World: a place where all events take place indoors at an elevation of four to seven feet in a left-to-right band across a soundstage. (Think I Love Lucy and its many descendants, versus roving single-camera shows like 30 Rock.)

But the writing is what caught me, because -- as Discover columnist Phil Plait told me -- "Whoever wrote The Big Bang Theory understand geeks."

And when I called series co-creator and head writer Bill Prady -- guess what?.....

"I had a short-lived career as a computer programmer," admits co-creator Bill Prady on the phone from Warner Bros. Television. "I was a college dropout in New York City, working at a RadioShack, and I got involved creating the FilePro software for the TRS-80 at my friend Howie's place in Brooklyn." That would be Howard Wolowitz—whose name is now immortalized as one of the show's main characters...
"I just think of his actions as 'Sheldony.' Some things feel instinctively correct for his character," says Prady, who recalls one software colleague who couldn't go anywhere alone that he hadn't been to before. "He'd say, 'I can't go to 47^th Street Photo by myself.' And it was maybe three blocks away. It was never questioned. Quirks were never challenged—they were simply accepted as a quality of the person."
"Are these things Asperger's?" he asks. "I don't know."

One interesting thing from talking with Prady that didn't make it into the piece was that originally he and producer Chuck Lorre were developing two separate shows -- one about Sheldon and Leonard, and another about an aspiring actress named Penny moving to the big city -- and both ideas seemed to be missing something, until one afternoon they went... "Say, what if...?"

Catalogs as Fiction

2009-02-08T21:45:00.005-08:00

From the Times earlier this week: the fictitious auction catalogue.

That a work of fiction has now assumed the form of an auction catalog could be seen as a sign of the times — deeply materialistic and, with a big recession on, increasingly for sale. But the artist and writer Leanne Shapton said that the idea for her novel, being published this week by Farrar Straus & Giroux under the unwieldy title “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry,” came to her because she noticed how the lot descriptions in some estate catalogs added up to elliptical plots about the lives of the former possessors.

Curiously enough, a quick search turned up a 1790 "satire, in the form of an auction catalogue":

(The Fortsas hoax catalogue of 1840, incidentally, now appears to have a "1st person" account from none other than, ahem, Mssr. Fortsas himself...)

Bloody Foreigners

2009-02-08T21:16:00.005-08:00

The latest Rolling Stone has a fun piece by David Browne on a 2,200 LP album library hidden in the White House:

During the waning days of the Nixon administration, the RIAA, the record companies' trade group, decided the library should include sound recordings as well as books. In 1973, the organization donated close to 2,000 LPs. The bad news: The selection was dominated by the likes of Pat Boone, the Carpenters and John Denver. In 1979, legendary producer John Hammond convened a new commission to update the list for the hipper Carter administration. "They felt they needed to redress some of the oversights that might have taken place the first time around," says Boston music critic and author Bob Blumenthal, who was put in charge of adding 200 rock records to the library.... They picked the Kinks' Arthur for its "theme of empire," and Blumenthal snuck in favorites like David Bowie's Hunky Dory.

On January 13th, 1981, the LPs — each in a sleeve with a presidential seal — were presented to Jimmy Carter at a White House ceremony. But the collection — placed in a hallway near the third-floor listening room, complete with a sound system — didn't remain upstairs long. When Ronald Reagan took office that year, the LPs were moved to the basement.

When I talked with Browne a few days ago, he had a neat tidbit that got cut for space from the piece: one of the great committee battles was whether to include an album by Foreigner. One "sorta more mainstream" member really liked "Double Vision," David explained, but the New York music critics on the panel clutched their heads in agony.

I don't know why, but I just find this an amusing scene to imagine.

Sugar and Spice and Hops and Malt

2009-02-07T13:29:00.005-08:00

A 1906 ad for Rainier Beer -- aka "Vitamin R" -- targets a wide demographic:

(Hat tip: The Stranger)