R ANDOM

‘Some things make fun of themselves’, #2:

Old Mortality

Further to this previous post about the Sunlight Soap Year Book, I’ve discovered another publishing curiosity by those social-engineering capitalists, the Lever Brothers: they printed a run of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley Novels’.

I suppose since they were already printing their Year Advertisements Books, a foray into publishing of proper books is not so surprising. I guess it’s just that their whole social engineering enterprise strikes me as odd. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s better than the totally irredeemable sweatshops of their contemporaries, but something in me bristles at the expression of “profit sharing” as “It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation.”

I mean, really. Patronizing much? YES, it’s better than leaving your workers to starve on their tiny wages, but still — the Lever Brothers’ employees were seeing a higher share of the surplus value they created than most of their contemporaries, but they were not allowed to choose for themselves how they might spend it. Why do I even feel the need to justify why that is wrong? (Answer: because we live in a world that thinks it’s okay for the owners of the means of production to make all the decisions about the division of surplus value in the first place. *dramatic sigh*)

Titles From More Innocent Times

I’m sure back in ye olden days these were less rife with innuendo. Although possibly not — one thing I’ve discovered is that the Victorians were pretty damn fond of innuendo, not being allowed to discuss things outright.

(Pro tips for writers! To avoid ambiguity, always make it clear which is your subject and which is your object.)

This book was awarded as a prize for arithmetic in 1900:

Even the chapter headings are a little suspect:

(Larger version here.)

Lost Crops of the Incas

“Little-Known Plants of the Andes With Promise for Worldwide Cultivation”

Notable first of all for having the most ponderous ‘author’ I’ve yet encountered: ‘Report of an Ad Hoc Panel of the Advisory Committee on Technology Innovation Board on Science and Technology for International Development National Research Council’.

More interesting for being an extensive survey of some pretty weird and awesome plants. Giant blackberries (“almost too large to be taken in a single mouthful”)! ‘Ice-cream’ beans! Tomatoes that grow on trees! And a delicate, practically untransportable fruit called the cherimoya, once described by Mark Twain as ‘deliciousness itself’. Among many others. Nerdy botanists, come one, come all!

Indoor Games for Awkward Moments

Collected by Ruth Blakely. Jarrold & Sons, undated but looks to be around 1900.

Though the title of this book really ought to say it all, the preface helpfully tells us that “The object of this volume is to try and [sic]* lessen the number of dreadful pauses which so many hostesses have experienced with their guests when no one had courage enough to propose a new game, or had foresight enough to come prepared with a mental list of games that have a right good swing to them.”

The book itself, of course, is simply a collection of parlour games, which may be interesting or not, depending on your inclination (though it should be noted that most of them sound pretty dull, even as parlour games go). It does have one more curious feature, though, in noting the copyright worries of an earlier era. A notice in the front matter reads: “All rights reserved, including the translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian“.

* ‘Try to,’ Ruth Blakely, one tries to do something. One does not simply generally engage in the act of ‘trying’ and then also do the thing that one is trying to do.

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism: Standard Edition

By [George] Bernard Shaw.

As a modern feminist, the very concept of this book — or its apparent concept — is enough to make me bristle. How dare some man write a ‘women’s guide’, and especially on a subject that really has nothing at all to do with women qua women, but is or ought to be of interest to people in general? But, not (yet?) having read it, I am not quite sure what his meaning and intention were behind writing it, and thus am as unqualified to comment on its contents as the subject of the previous owner’s rather unfortunate gift inscription: “To my dear wife who will never read it.”

It is primarily deserving of this entry, though, for its possession of the most arrogant Author’s Note I have ever seen. The note first appeared on the 1929 popular edition; this copy was printed in 1949 and was originally priced at 7/6, and Shaw devotes the first half of his Author’s Note defending the first edition’s price of 15s, which I suppose is sort of fair enough. An author has to make a living, after all, and I enjoyed his enjoinder to penurious would-be readers that they avail themselves of that “happily available communistic alternative: the public library”.

Which is all very entertaining, but is not, particularly, what makes the note so appallingly/amusingly arrogant. No; what does that is the fact that he devotes the rest of it to complaining that, though he has done his best — his best! — to lay out his argument in plain and simple terms for The People, he has been widely misunderstood! Oh no! Choice whining includes:

“I begin to think that lucidity is self-defeating … I have, at great cost of labor, eliminated from this book all the common adulterations of doctrine by mush, gush, nonsense, hypocrisy and humbug, only, it seems, to make it unfit for human consumption. People cannot take it in until they have reintroduced all the adulterations from their home supplies. Then they expiate, at my expense, on their own adulterations.”

“I took great pains to make it intelligible, clear, lucid, unambiguous, simple and unmistakeable. The result appears to be that only one man in the civilized world has understood it; and that man is Albert Einstein.”

Although perhaps ‘man’ here is meant to be taken in the sense of ‘male’ rather than ‘human’; it is, after all, a book ostensibly written for women. Besides which, Shaw concludes with:

“Well, I take refuge with the intelligent women. As for the front bench of male politicians, I can point out the moon in the heavens to them; but I cannot persuade them that it is anything more than a piece of green cheese.”

My Camera is Broken

Which is why there’s been such a paucity of entries for the last few months, and why those that have been have not included the pretty pretty pictures to which you’ve grown accustomed.

It’s not that books necessarily need pictures to be interesting, but most of the antiquarian ones, especially, are at least as interesting in form as in content — often more. There are, of course, plenty of books worth mentioning for their words alone, and often they just happen to be accompanied by beautiful covers; however, the presence of the beautiful covers makes me reluctant to post about them, in the optimistic hope that one day my camera will be fixed, and so you’ll just have to wait.

In the meantime, look forward to posts about utterly ugly books with interesting and/or hilarious words inside them.