Category: Reviews

Longitude – Dava Sobel

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The fourth week of August, and Cook only did three voyages of exploration so what to do here, well as the second voyage carried watches to test new ways of calculating longitude with varying levels of success as I will cover below it only seems fair to delve deeper into just what was being tested and why, fortunately Dava Sobel has written this excellent summary of just what was going on and how a group of astronomers colluded to keep John Harrison and his son William from winning the main prize.

As I said a couple of weeks ago “Cook had a watch made by Larcum Kendall which was a copy of that designed by John Harrison and alongside this a watch made by John Arnold, Ferneaux had two watches made by Arnold,” It may seem odd that the original clock by Harrison didn’t go on the 1772 voyage seeing as he was the one in line for the £20,000 prize (over £2.5 million for the modern equivalent according to the Bank of England inflation calculator) but the Board of Longitude were by then determined that he shouldn’t succeed and insisted that the original was effectively held hostage by them whilst a, hopefully inferior, copy was sent instead. But we are getting ahead of the story, let’s go back a few decades.

Dava Sobel presents the development of H4, the superb watch made by Harrison, by starting at the very beginning with explaining the problem of determining longitude. How far up or down the Earth you are is relatively easy to determine but longitude, how far round the Earth from your start point is a lot more difficult as you either need complex astronomical readings and their subsequent calculations and it could easily take four hours to work out where you roughly are using that method; or an accurate indication of the time in your home port to compare with local time which you could get from when the sun was highest in the sky which would be noon. Local time changes as you go round the world with a full twenty four hours representing a circumnavigation so an hour difference would be equivalent to fifteen degrees of longitude away from home. The problem was that no clock would work accurately on a ship due to temperature and humidity changes along with the movement of the ship and it had to be accurate as just a minute out would drastically alter the determination of longitude.

John Harrison, a self taught clock maker from the north of England starting to construct his first clocks back in 1713, a year before the Longitude Act setting out the prizes for determining longitude was passed. His clocks were, most unusually, mainly made of wood rather than the more common brass and most still exist with his fourth, the clock at Brocklesby Park, built in 1722 still running and telling excellent time today. Harrison’s first encounter with the Board of Longitude would be in 1730 when he went to London to present his early plans but he couldn’t find them as they had yet to meet due to no sensible proposal being sent for them to consider. That it took until 1773 for him to be finally awarded half the money he was fully entitled to and then only following intervention by the King is a scandal that Sobel covers so well in this book. Admittedly Harrison himself was partly to blame for the delay as he kept seeing improvements he could make and wanted but most of the problems were down to astronomers, especially Maskelyne, who were determined that solving longitude via lunar observations was the only way forward and as they were on the Board they kept changing the rules in order to prevent Harrison winning.

The story of the determination of longitude sounds like a fairly dry subject but it is anything but and this is one of the most interesting books I have read this year.

The Third Voyage – Captain James Cook

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Before his third, and final, voyage Cook was formally given the rank of Captain and was officially retired, assigned to Greenwich Hospital at the age of just forty seven. He accepted this transfer off active duty on the basis that he would be allowed to come back and this he duly did, taking command of the apparently refurbished HMS Resolution in 1776. This time he was tasked to head north in search of the fabled North-West Passage which would give a route above the top of Canada between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. This had been sought for many years starting from the north Atlantic, Cook’s instructions was to start off Alaska and see if the route could be discovered coming in the opposite direction. Charts at the time for this part of the world were poor to say the least with one of the maps showing Alaska as a giant island off the coast of Canada although the Danish explorer Vitus Bering had discovered the Strait that bears his name many decades earlier whilst in the employ of the Russian navy.

In the absence of any alternative route Cook headed south to go north as he first had to enter the Pacific. The first thing that strikes the reader as we head back to familiar territory of New Zealand, Tonga and Tahiti is that the book is written in a very different style compared to the first two voyages. Instead of the formal naval journal with each day detailed with position, wind speed, heading etc. we get a manuscript that is far more aimed at the lay reader where a lot of the technical information is dispensed with and it reads much more like a diary. I have checked this with the full 1784 first edition to make sure that this style is not just a creation of the abridgement and that book is also in this more readable style so Cook was clearly aiming at publication from the start. Sadly he was never to see the book come out as he was to die on this voyage and never return to England but the manuscript that was to be published was just 17 days behind when he died so he must have been constantly working on it whilst at sea.

Cook had another reason to go to the South Pacific and that was to return Omai, a native of one of the islands with Tahiti who had travelled back on HMS Adventure as part of Cook’s second voyage. Omai was the first Polynesian to visit Europe and had achieved celebrity status whilst he was there and his return was the publicly stated reason for the trip as the search for the North West Passage was kept secret. It took longer to get to the South Pacific than intended so Cook decided that by the time he headed north it would be too late to attempt the search so stayed in the southern summer before heading north the next year and on his way became the first European to encounter Hawaii, or the Sandwich Isles as he named them after the then First Lord of the Navy, Lord Sandwich. Cook’s two ships HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery, commanded by Captain Charles Clarke, arrived at an opportune time as the islanders believed that their god was due to arrive at pretty well the same time as Cook did so they were treated royally and the elaborate ceremonies are described in the journals. When he finally left to continue north he was somewhat later than the predicted date for the god’s departure and the islanders were getting a little annoyed that he had not gone according the the plan.

Cook then headed north sighting Oregon and then following the coast of Canada, all the way to the Bering Strait producing the first accurate maps he then went east across the top of Canada before being stopped by ice bu which time he had gone past 70 degrees north. Turning round he headed west and continued on that heading, mapping the Siberian coast of Russia before again being stopped and having to go back to the Bering Strait. By then it was September and nothing more could be done so far north so he decided to return to Hawaii where they had been so welcome. The ships stayed for a month and were again welcome but soon after leaving a mast broke and knowing nowhere else he could go to effect repairs Cook went back to Hawaii and this time he was definitely not expected, Lomo was supposed to appear then leave and not come back again so soon and relations between the islanders and the ship’s crew rapidly deteriorated leading to the killing of Cook.

Now at this point the two versions of the book I have separate as the first edition is just two volumes in to a three volume set, the third volume being written by Captain King, whilst the Folio edition pretty well stops here presumably as the set is called the Journals of Captain Cook and he is now dead. The three books that make up the Folio set are however an excellent summary of what should in fact be a much larger nine volume set if you had the full version but it is no less good for that. Anyone interested in voyages of exploration should definitely read Cook and this is one of the most approachable editions being beautifully typeset and therefore a pleasure to read. One oddity of the images that I have used from the Folio Society web site is seen below as the picture of the included maps appears to show them in the middle of the book whilst they are in fact at the front of each volume.

The Second Voyage – Captain James Cook

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Continuing with the voyages of Captain James Cook, the second trip had much greater funding than the first and Cook had charge of two vessels, Resolution and Adventure with Cook leading from HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure captained by Tobias Furneaux. They were charged with trying to discover the supposed great southern continent then known as Terra Australis, modern day Antarctica as opposed to Australia which was called New Holland at the time. It was believed by many scientists that such a mass of land must exist, if only as the source of the icebergs. The other thing that Cook and Furneaux were to study was on behalf of the Board of Longitude. Calculating latitude, how far up or down you are in the world was relatively easy however longitude, how far round the world you are, was much more difficult and ideally needed accurate knowledge of the time back where you started and clocks and watches were highly susceptible to temperature and climate variations. Cook therefore had a watch made by Larcum Kendall which was a copy of that designed by John Harrison and alongside this a watch made by John Arnold, Ferneaux had two watches made by Arnold, these were to be tested at sea and their accuracy determined, Cook and Ferneaux duly set off in May 1772. I’ll be reading more about the search for accurate longitude in the fourth book of this months theme ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel.

Cook duly sailed south and spent months skirting ice fields, with the two ships becoming on the 17th January 1773 the first from Europe to cross the Antarctic Circle and the following day getting to seventy five miles from the continent itself but without spotting land due to the amount of ice between them and Antarctica. Cook describes himself as surprised that the ice they recovered from the ocean in order to replenish the ships water stocks was fresh with only a small salty coating which would soon melt off and wonders how sea water freezes without retaining salt without realising that this is proof of fresh water glaciers further south that have broken off and are simply floating past the ships. One interesting quote a few days earlier gives an idea as to how the crew were faring in the extreme cold again featuring Cook’s idiosyncratic approach to spelling.

Monday 4th January 1773: First and middle parts strong gales attended with a thick fogg, sleet and snow, all the rigging covered with ice and the air excessive cold, the crew however stand it tolerably well, each being clothed with a Fearnaught jacket, a pair of trowsers of the same, and a large cap made of canvas and baize, these together with an additional glass of brandy every morning enables them to bear the cold without flinshing.

Cook would make another trip south in December 1773 after spending time in New Zealand along with Tahiti and Tonga amongst others repairing and re-equipping his vessels, and indeed getting back with HMS Adventure as the two ships had lost one another in thick fog in February 1773. Fortunately anticipating such an occurrence there had agreed to meet at New Zealand if they parted in the Antarctic ice. This trip round the South Pacific islands enabled Cook to also reacquaint himself with people he had met on his first voyage and pass on the bad news that the islander who had accompanied Cook on that voyage had sadly died on his way from Indonesia to South Africa and had therefore never seen Europe.

The second trip in search of Antarctica was no more successful than the first and Cook became convinced that there was no great southern continent, what he did however prove was that none of the lands known and partly mapped reached down through the ice to the far south. Indeed there would be no confirmed landing on Antarctica until the Norwegians got there in 1895 but to my surprise Cook is definitely a pioneer of Antarctic exploration getting far further south than anyone else in his time, something I hadn’t realised until I read this book. I had always though of Cook sailing in warmer climes so to read the battles with ice in this volume was fascinating but by February 1774 he finally turned north again eventually arriving at Easter Island in the hope of trading for more supplies. However Easter Island was to be a disappointment, the rich fertile land described by the first European visitors, the Dutch, in 1720 had gone and the people were reduced to a subsistence existence, the population also appeared to be greatly reduced, clearly something had happened here but Cook didn’t have the time, or the inclination, to find out what as he needed supplies so headed back to Tahiti.

Cook would make a further attempt to head south in 1775, this time in the South Atlantic having passed the southern tip of South America and would briefly visit South Georgia. By this time although he still hadn’t seen land to the far south he was convinced there was something as he had realised that it was needed to be a source of the ice. He wrote on 6th February 1775:

We continued to steer to the south and SE till noon at which time we were at the Latitude of 58 degrees, 15 minutes South, Longitude 21 degrees 34 minutes West and seeing neither land nor signs of any. I concluded that what we had seen. which I named Sandwich Land was either a group of islands or else a point of the continent, for I firmly believe that there is a tract of land near the Pole, which is a source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean.

From the South Atlantic Cook finally turned north and sailed back to England, arriving in July 1775. The illustrations shown above are from Tanna, in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu including a portrait of a native islander whilst below is the map that comes with this set which folds out to quite a good size.

The First Voyage – Captain James Cook

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August is the month I read a theme and this year I have decided to tackle the journals written by James Cook describing his various voyages round the world. To do this I am starting off with the excellent abridged collection published by The Folio Society which is based on the JC Beaglehole version first published by The Hakluyt Society between 1955 and 1967. Beaglehole went back to Cook’s original manuscripts and ships logs and especially for the first voyage removed a lot of the extraneous material added by the Admiralty’s appointed editor which so annoyed Cook when he first saw the published work when he returned from his second voyage.

The barque HMS Endeavour set sail in August 1768 with 94 people aboard on what would be an almost three year voyage of exploration, both geographic and scientific as amongst the ships passengers were the eminent naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, and astronomer Charles Green specifically there to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti. There were also other scientists to assist in the collection of specimens and a couple of artists, Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan, sadly neither of which survived the trip. First port of call after leaving England was the island of Madeira for further provisions and where amongst other things they took on 3,032 gallons of wine (presumably the local fortified variety), twenty pounds of onions per man, 270 pounds of beef and amazingly a live bullock. I dread to think how killing the beast and its subsequent butchery were accomplished whilst crossing the Atlantic to Brazil on a crowded ship which was less than 100 feet (30 metres) long.

The first target destination was Tahiti for the observation of the transit of Venus due on Saturday 3rd June 1769 this was, as far as the Royal Society was concerned, the primary reason for the voyage because from this observation along with ones made in England and seven other locations around the Earth, it would be possible to accurately calculate for the first time the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Tahiti was chosen as one of the main points due to its distance from Europe, being the other side of the world therefore improved the accuracy of the calculation. By the time all the calculations were done the value was 93,726,900 miles, the modern value is 92,955,000 miles so remarkably close and within the variation of distance due to the fact the Earth does not orbit the Sun in a circle. Cook and his crew spent three months in Tahiti establishing a fortified base to make the observations from, this was necessary due to large amount of thefts that occurred from the natives who seemed to take things regardless of whether they were any use to them.

Leaving Tahiti the expedition was to search for the the legendary southern continent, but what they instead encountered was New Zealand, which had already been discovered by Abel Tasman the Dutch explorer. However over the next six months Cook would circumnavigate both the North and South Islands establishing that they were islands and mapping the coasts of them for the first time. Cook’s encounters with the Maori were fraught with disaster from the start with numerous native people being killed as they were deemed to pose a threat to either the ship or crew that landed in search of water, wood and fresh food. It is worth saying at this point that the quite small ship had by this time also taken on board some sheep as there are numerous mentions of grass being cut to feed them so it was not just the crew that needed sustenance. Cook’s interactions with the Maori people also seem to improve over the months there and there are far fewer documented fatal encounters beyond the initial landings.

After New Zealand Cook held a meeting to determine where they should go next and it was decided to sail west still looking for the southern continent. After sixteen days at sea they arrived at Australia, then called New Holland, and sailed up the north east coast of New South Wales and it is from Botany Bay that the animals shown in the plates above were seen. However whilst travelling up the coast disaster struck when on the 11th June 1770 the ship struck the Great Barrier Reef, which in this part of Australia comes very close to the shore, and was holed. After a few days they managed to get loose from the coral by dumping 40 or 50 tonnes of stores and the larger guns overboard. There then follows an interesting passage of around a month where Cook managed to beach the ship so that repairs could be undertaken and at least the large hole was repaired but the sheathing to protect the timbers was irreparable they also had considerable difficulty refloating the ship and getting back out of the trap they had found themselves in as the winds were against attempts to sail back south. Whilst trying to free themselves from a stretch of water deemed ‘The Labyrinth’ by Cook they finally managed, on 14th July 1770, to shoot one of the strange creatures spotted several times at a distance and therefore unidentifiable to find a odd animal.

The head, neck and shoulders was very small in proportion to the other parts; the tail was nearly as long as the body, thick near the rump and tapering towards the end; the fore legs were 8 inch long and the hind 22, its progression is by hopping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only, for in this it makes no use of the fore, which seem to be only design’d for scratching in the ground etc. Its skin is cover’d with a short hairy fur of a dark mouse or grey colour. Excepting the head and ears which I thought was something like a hare’s it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.

The entry for the 15th July includes the following observation “Today we din’d of the animal shott yesterday & thought it was excellent food”. So ended the first kangaroo examined by Europeans. The odd spelling is by the way directly from Cook’s journal, although a great seaman he was not highly educated and the spelling throughout the books is eccentric to say the least.

Above can be seen the Folio Society boxed set of the three voyages I am reading this month, I have the second printing from 2002.

Songs to an African Sunset – Sekai Nzenza-Shand

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A fascinating journal of the time in the mid 1990’s when Nzemza-Shand returned to Zimbabwe with her Australian husband Adam Shand. She is a qualified nurse and gained a PhD in International relations whilst living in Melbourne which makes her almost effortless transition back to part time rural Zimbabwean village life all the more interesting. I say part time as Adam lived in the capital, Harare, working as a freelance journalist covering African affairs and obviously she spent time with him in the capital but she appears to have also spent a lot of time apart in the village where she was born and grew up. She only mentions Adam as being in the village during specific events and they clearly spend a lot of time living apart whilst she gets more involved in village life and it is those periods which are the most interesting in this book.

The tale starts with the impact of the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the loss of so many people including family friends and ultimately her brother Charles, indeed it was to attend funerals that first brought her back to Zimbabwe from a comfortable life in Australia. Her descriptions of the simple village life in a part of Africa largely denuded of its forests and wildlife even during her lifetime, of the coexistence of Christianity and ancestor worship, and the poverty of the villages especially compared to the greater affluence in the capital is powerful reading. Polygamy is also normal in rural Zimbabwe with men having many wives and lots of children with each of them which of course adds to the scarcity of food for such large families and the resultant hand to mouth existence for so many she describes.

AIDS rears its ugly head later in the book as well when she is travelling to Omay in the north west of the country to visit the Tonga people who had been displaced from their lands by the creation of Lake Kariba in a hydroelectric scheme. Whilst they had been promised support in transitioning to a new life as farmers as opposed to a semi-nomadic existence alongside the Zambezi River this had barely materialised so they relied on international support including the Australian aid corporation that paid her to go there to evaluate what they most needed. During an evening meal stop she started talking to some local prostitutes who assume that she is also there to work in that trade and they told her that the going rate was $30 for a night at a man’s house, $40 if they went to the woman’s place but they explain that if the man wants sex without a condom then she should insist on $60 because less than that “it’s not worth getting AIDS for”.

I was particularly interested in the rituals described such as the second funeral for her brother at which his wandering spirit is finally at peace and the description of the process surrounding the death of a local chief. There is also a chapter dealing with local law and another chief’s court with justice meted out far swifter than a formal court of law and in the presence of the local people so they could see that all was fair and just. There is so much that is done because it has always been done that way without involving the formal authorities and everything is accepted by the people as right and proper. Anyone who is interested in just how rural Africa continues to operate much as it always has done should read this book and by way of contrast there is a chapter dealing with Nzenza going to a baby shower in Harare, mainly because she had never been to one.

Nzenza left Zimbabwe for a career with an international development organisation based in the USA before returning to Zimbabwe in 2011 and later starting a weekly newspaper column for The Herald, a paper based in Harare, largely continuing her theme of rural life that she started with this book. That column ended in 2018 when she was elected as the Member of Parliament for Chikomba East although she no longer holds a parliamentary seat.

Going Postal – Terry Pratchett

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The 9th July 2004 saw the first appearance of stamps purportedly from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and as I posted an entry on my Instagram account to mark the 20th anniversary of this and the book ‘Going Postal’ which had inspired them I got out my copies of the book of which I have three, the uncorrected book proof, and the first hardback and paperback editions. The cover of the book proof was designed by Bernard Pearson and made to look like a brown paper parcel tied up with string, just 727 copies were printed and sent to book reviewers on the 28th June 2004 with the instruction that they were not to be distributed or sold, the hardback was released on 1st October 2004 and the paperback followed on the 26th September 2005. I’ve never untied the string around my proof copy so had to read the first commercially available edition, see cover further down the blog. As you can see the front cover of the proof includes ‘stamps’ clearly based on the worlds first stamp, the penny black from 1840, but with Queen Victoria’s head replaced by that of Stephen Briggs in his guise as Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh Morpork, the largest city on the Disc. As I had got them off the shelves, probably for the first time in almost twenty years it seemed logical to read the book again.

Going Postal is the first appearance of a character who would play a major role in most of the remaining Discworld books , well those set in Ankh Morpork anyway, that Pratchett would write before his untimely death in 2015, i.e. Moist von Lipwig, who at the start is facing being hanged for forgery and embezzlement amongst other crimes. To his surprise, and undoubted relief, after being hanged he comes round in the office of Lord Vetinari who reveals that the hangman is an expert in almost hanging somebody such that those observing the event would believe that the prisoner had indeed been executed and instead his lordship wants to offer him a job. Recognising von Lipwig’s abilities and importantly expendability if it doesn’t work out, he wants him to resurrect the moribund Post Office, a branch of government which had failed and no longer delivered anything. The populace instead relying on ‘the clacks’, a primitive form of telegraph system in a world yet to discover electricity, which is increasingly expensive and prone to failure as the new money men who had taken it over fail to understand the importance of daily maintenance to fix small problems before they become much bigger ones.

Without giving the plot away von Lipwig succeeds in re-invigorating the Post Office but in the meantime what initially reads as a comedy fantasy also dissects the world of crooked finance where men just interested in making more money for themselves fiddle the books to project a business doing much better than it really is. The company is therefore able to take on large loans at preferential rates which will be used to enrich the directors whilst loading the company with debts they have no intention of paying back, simply waiting for it to collapse at which point they will buy what is left at a knockdown rate and do it all over again. Pratchett would have another go at the murky world of finance in the next Moist von Lipwig book ‘Making Money’ in 2007.

‘Going Postal’ is a highly entertaining book both for the ruses Moist von Lipwig makes use of in reinventing the Post Office and making it work again, demonstrating time and again the wisdom of Lord Vetinari in putting a conman and most significantly a showman in charge who along the way invents stamps as a means of getting money further up front for delivery of letters and parcels even though he doesn’t understand people who collect them and therefore simply hand over the money for a service they are never going to use. The climactic way he ultimately destroys the money men running the clacks is beautifully written and I highly recommend both this book and ‘Making Money’, something I probably wouldn’t have said at the time they were written when Moist von Lipwig simply didn’t appeal to me as a character but I have to say he has grown on me over the years as I better understood what Pratchett was trying to do with the books.

The sheet of stamps shown above replicates the original sheet described as being printed in the book by Teemer & Spools and just 250 sheets were produced by letterpress to be sold to lucky collectors who managed to get one in the couple of days before they sold out. Mine is number 128 as can be seen in the left hand margin. Discworld stamps have become a highly collectable product over the couple of decades they have existed and numerous examples have been produced with new designs coming out every year. For a brief history of the stamps and other postal artefacts see here.

Below is the cover of the first hardback edition this time designed by Paul Kidby.

Love Triangle – Matt Parker

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Yes this is a book about trigonometry, well actually it’s more about triangles and how important they are as we don’t get sines, cosines and tangents properly introduced until chapter seven entitled ‘Getting triggy with it’ which tells you all you need to know regarding the wordplay dotted throughout the book. I’ve covered one of Matt Parker’s maths books before, ‘Humble Pi‘ which deals with mathematical errors and like this book I bought it direct from Matt via his website which is full of things that no maths nerd should be without. The extra bonus of being one of the early orders is detailed below but of course the first extra you gain is that books ordered from the site are signed.

The first maths joke you encounter is the price which is £24.85 rather than the expected, and far more normal, £24.99 this is because 2485 is a triangular number of pennies, in this case a triangle with seventy coins on each side. If you’re not familiar with triangular numbers think of the snooker, or pool if you prefer, original setup with fifteen balls in a 5 x 5 x 5 triangle so fifteen is a triangular number with five on each side.

Below you can see the index and immediately you will spot something a little odd because, as he did in ‘Humble Pi’, the page numbering is a somewhat strange. In that book we start at page 314 and count down before hitting an overflow error and leaping up to a huge value, with this book the page numbers are the sine of the angle represented by the page number expressed to six decimal places so they start at zero range up to one and then slowly fall to minus one before rising again to -0.390731 (page 337 in a ‘normal’ book) and yes that does mean that most page numbers occur twice so finding things in the index is a little more tricky than you might expect, more on that later. I knew most of the maths covered in the book although I haven’t used trigonometry seriously for over forty years so a refresher course was interesting. I last had a practical use for trig about ten years ago when I was trying to hang sixteen pictures on a wall in a pleasing display of five on the top and bottom with six evenly spaced across the middle and needed to work out where all the nails should go, preferably before knocking holes in the wall.

The one ‘new’ formula that I hadn’t seen before, even though it is two millennia old was the truly ridiculous Heron’s formula, which gives the area of a triangle, normally expressed as ½ x base x height, but using only the lengths of the three sides a, b, and c without having to calculate the height. Instead you add the three values together, then add any two and subtract the third (for all 3 combinations) then multiply these four values together, extract the square root and divide by four.

Matt actually says “You might need to take a moment to sit down upon hearing that for the first time, I know I did”. Personally I was so confused by what appears to be a series of arbitrary calculations that I sat down and worked out some areas of triangles using ½ x b x h alongside Heron’s formula just to convince myself that it really worked.

And now we come to the index and here Matt has gone a little mad, in ‘Humble Pi’ the index gave the decimal position of the word you are trying to look up, so something given an index value of 23.5 would be half way down page 23. In this book Matt has gone for polar coordinates which is explained at the top of the index. This means that to use it properly you really need a protractor to determine the angle from the bottom left corner of the page. It would also help if he had somehow indicated which of the two possible pages had the page number referred to, for example the first entry ‘A Problem Squared’ is on the second occurrence of page 0.669131. Maybe a suffix r or f for rising or falling as you move along the sine wave of page numbers would work, in this case changing the page number, at least in the index, to 0.669131f

One fun section deals with British road signs that indicate the gradient of an approaching slope in the road. These are normally given as a percentage such as 20% for a 1 in 5 incline however apparently there are still signs which express the value as a ratio and Matt has deliberately left a gap in the text to insert a photo of him pointing at the sign as he fully expects readers who know where one of these is to tell him so he can go there.

Now onto the other reason for buying the book direct from Matt and that is the limited edition alternate covers available. Each of the first 8020 books bought from Maths Gear come with an extra cover with a special design and are all of these are initialled and numbered by Matt, see below.

To explain the extra cover I can do no better than to quote Matt’s website.

As a bonus for anyone who orders direct from me on Maths Gear, I have commissioned three (special, limited) × edition book covers as a collaboration between me and print-artist Paul Catherall. They’re pretty special. You’ll get one free while stocks last.

All books will be signed by me. All book covers will be signed and numbered by me. The first 1,001 orders will get a free “simplex edition” cover, the next 2,024 covers will be “tetrahedron edition” and the remaining 5,995 covers are the “triangle edition”. They will be assigned to orders in that order, so earlier pre-orders get the more-limited cover. Once the covers run out, people will have to be satisfied with just a signed first edition of the book.

I was early enough to get number 219 of the simplex edition, a simplex is the expression of a triangle in n-dimensions, in two dimensions you get a triangle, in three a tetrahedron, in four dimensions it’s a pentachoron etc. At the point of writing this there are still limited edition covers available but you would have to make do with the triangle design. Sadly 219 is not a triangular number, coming between 210 and 231 however there had to be something special about the value and a bit of digging revealed that 219 is the smallest number that is the sum of four positive cube numbers in two different ways i.e. 1 + 1 + 1 + 216 = 219 and 27 + 64 + 64 + 64 = 219. Thanks to the On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

If all of this mathematics has potentially put you off, don’t be. Matt is an excellent presenter of mathematical examples and you really don’t need much grasp of mathematics to follow the majority of the book and you may well learn something, even if it is the crazy formula first written down by Heron of Alexandria over two thousand years ago and which apparently is used today when doing the conversion of file format from a digital image on a phone or digital camera to something that can be printed. So something that ridiculous turns out to have a modern practical application, and yes it surprised Matt as well.

Dear reader, I need you to believe me that I had already written the chapter about triangle laws where I called Heron’s Formula stupid (because it is) when I read the official HP documentation for this technique, and came across the sentence ‘The area of a triangle is given by Heron’s formula’. I honestly just pushed back my chair, stood up and silently left the room, for a walk outside.

Publisher – Tom Maschler

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For those not familiar with the name, Tom Maschler was the managing director and later chairman of the publishing firm Jonathan Cape for many decades. He died in 2020 aged 87 and this is the first and apparently only edition of his book published in 2005, interestingly by Picador which is a division of Pan Macmillan rather than Jonathan Cape which by 2005 was part of the Penguin Random House group. I can’t even find a paperback edition, suggesting the book rightly disappeared without trace. Having read it I doubt whether anyone from Cape, or indeed Penguin, would have been interested in this terrible example of vanity publishing so it’s hardly a revelation that it turned up under a different publishing house, the only surprise was that Picador actually picked it up. Oddly the photographer of the portrait on the front cover isn’t credited in the book.

I had hoped for some sort of insight into the world of publishing but all you get is an insight into an apparent egomaniac who considered that he knew best even when starting as a junior at the publishing house André Deutsch where he lasted a few months and by his own admission started selling ski tours whilst working for them, even running his operation from his office at André Deutsch. From there he moved to MacGibbon & Kee where he lasted somewhat longer but was reprimanded by the firms owner because even then he liked to give the impression that he ran the business and was not so lowly as to just be an employee. This two and a half years employment is dismissed in three pages of the book and is followed with the a year and a half at Penguin which is similarly summarily dealt with, this time with 4½ pages most of which is moaning that he is not treated as more senior than he actually was. This is all to get to his next job, this time at Jonathan Cape where he could let his ego fly.

There are some interesting short sections covering authors he dealt with but the overwhelming impression is that none of them could have succeeded without him, even the already famous ones before he published them. I really cannot recommend this book, even assuming you could find a copy to read and fortunately they are in short supply even on the secondary market which says a lot about how many were sold.. If ever a book was about me, me, me this is it, the only vaguely comparable experience would be Englebert Humperdink on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs where the the guest is supposed to choose eight records that would give them pleasure to listen to if stranded on a desert island and uniquely Humperdink chose eight records all sung by himself.

I’ll finish with an extract from his obituary in The Guardian newspaper which deals with the book and sums up my reaction to the overblown, self-aggrandising text I have just read, indeed I wish I had read this before wasting my time on this book. The obituary had just covered his first assignment for Cape, which was to help Mary Hemingway go through the trunk full of papers left by her husband Ernest after his suicide.

The episode provided Maschler with the opening line for Publisher (2005): “I was 27 when Hemingway killed himself, and I had just joined Cape.” It set the tone for a much-parodied memoir, in which his guiding mantra appeared to be “when in doubt claim credit”. Which he did, for books and authors with which he had little or nothing to do: Midnight’s Children, for example, even though Salman Rushdie had followed his editor, Liz Calder, from Gollancz. Calder was also responsible for acquiring the debuts of Julian Barnes (and his alter ego Dan Kavanagh), and Anita Brookner. In the London Review of Books, John Sutherland declared that Publisher was “dead on arrival”, but acknowledged Maschler’s effectiveness and the loyalty his authors had for him, as well as more widely held reservations.

As for the reference to ‘much parodied’ I refer you to a brilliant review of the book also in The Guardian from 21st March 2005. Read it here.

Until August – Gabriel García Márquez

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In December 2019 I reviewed Gabriel García Márquez’s last collection of short stories ‘Strange Pilgrims‘. I love his work so was pleased to see that in March this year, on the 97th anniversary of his birth, his last novel was finally published in English, ten years after his death. According to the preface written by his children Márquez was not happy with what he had written and wanted it destroyed. Instead they simply put the manuscript on one side and almost ten years later read it again and decided that it was probable that the dementia he was suffering from, and which undoubtedly prevented him completing the novel, clouded his judgement as to the quality of the work.

At just 110 pages it is really more of a novella rather than a novel, especially when compared to his other far more weighty works, however I do agree with Rodrigo and Gonzalo that the book is definitely worth publishing even in this unfinished state. Originally planned as a set of five short (roughly 150 pages each) novels all of which would tell the story of Ana Magdalene Bach’s experiences during her annual visit to an unnamed island where her mother is buried. Instead we get six linked short stories all set around the 16th August, the anniversary of her mother’s death, where she travels to the island without her husband or children to tidy up and lay flowers on the grave.

We join Ana, at the start of the book, on her way to the grave having just got off the ferry, and this is clearly not the first time she has made the pilgrimage as she heads straight for a familiar taxi driver who by routine takes her to the flower stall where there is a pre-prepared bouquet of gladioli ready to be collected and then straight on to the cemetery returning later to the somewhat dilapidated hotel where she regularly stays the night before returning to the mainland the next day. But this is not to be the usual routine as she sips her gin in the bar after her evening meal she spots an intriguing stranger and invites him to join her. After a few more drinks she invites him to join her in her room and they make love. The next year on the ferry over to the island she is already looking forward to her night of passion with a stranger and by the time she is again sipping her gin is searching for the man she will choose, for this has already been added to her routine. The six visits detailed in the six chapters are sometimes successful in her hunt and sometimes not but the development of Ana and her relationship with her husband on her return to the mainland are fascinating as she becomes more and more convinced that he also has lovers and despite her own infidelity gets increasingly angry about it each year.

As well as the novella we get a translation of the original editor’s note from the Spanish edition written by Cristóbal Pera who had also edited Márquez’s autobiography. This is fascinating as it goes into the development of the novel, through the five main drafts along with a digital version maintained by his personal secretary Mónica Alonso and gives a glimpse as to how Márquez worked. The final published version is an amalgam of the fifth draft, heavily pen amended by Márquez, and the digital version which retained some of the earlier variants of the text, There are also four pages of the fifth draft manuscript showing hand written alterations both by Márquez and Alonso as she would read the pages to him and he would suggest changes as she read.

I’ll guarantee you won’t expect the highly original ending, I certainly didn’t, yet it perfectly rounded out Ana’s story. A final note of brilliance from the man described as “the greatest Colombian of all time” at the time of his death by the then president of Columbia, Juan Manuel Santos.

Full Circle – Luis Sepúlveda

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Part biography part travelogue this is an interesting book in that it consists of notes that were taken at various times but which didn’t make it into a book, and Sepúlveda didn’t really know what to do with for a long time.

These notes, which I can’t think what to call, lay about on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. From time to time, looking for old photos or documents, I would come across them, and I confess that I read them with a mixture of tenderness and pride, because in these scribbled, or clumsily typed pages I had made an attempt to come to terms with two themes of capital importance, aptly defined by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar: understanding what it means to be human what it means to be an artist.

The book starts with memories of being a boy being taken round town by his grandfather, Sepúlveda was born in 1949 so this would be the mid to late 1950’s in Chile, being loaded up with soft drinks and ice-cream until he was desperate to empty his bladder and then taken to whatever church his grandfather had picked as that weeks target and made to urinate on the church door. This would of course be met with approbation by the priest of the church but his grandfather would defend his right to pee where he needed to and would get satisfaction from the insult to the church thus engendered. Eventually at the age of eleven he simply refused to do his grandfathers bidding and insisted on going to a proper toilet. Expecting to be punished for refusing to so his grandfathers bidding he is relieved, in more ways than one, to simply be taken to a bar and after finishing is given a book to read (one of the classics of social realism – Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered) and made to promise to go on a journey inspired by the book and also to his grandfather’s birthplace of Martos in Spain.

After the comic start it was quite a shock to read the next chapter which deals with his time as a political prisoner in Chile as inspired by Ostrovsky he had joined the Young Communists so under the right wing dictatorship of General Pinochet he was regarded as a dangerous radical. The descriptions of the appalling conditions and the allusions to the electrical torture endured including the doctor who could tell how much electricity had been imposed when the victims were returned to the prison and could therefore judge what treatment each prisoner needed to recover are graphic yet needed to be told and I can see why Sepúlveda couldn’t think of what to do with his notes about these three years of his life.

After this the book becomes more of the travel book implied by it’s title with trips out of Chile and into various other South American countries with greater or lesser success in getting to his aimed for destination and the people he met on the way. Including a trip to Patagonia when he was finally allowed back into his home country after years of exile which was originally intended to have been with the British writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, who had sadly died young and before Sepúlveda could go to Patagonia. This is one of the times the notes had actually been the basis of a book ‘Patagonia Express’ first published in 1995 in Spanish and then in 2004 in English translation. After reading this book I feel the need to get hold of this work and see what it ultimately became. There is a lot more travel writing beyond this trip in the book and I greatly enjoyed following Sepúlveda around the continent.

The penultimate chapter takes Sepúlveda to Spain and a fulfilment of a promise to his grandfather right at the start to visit Martos where he starts searching for anything his grandfather had told him about the place especially a drinking establishment called Hunter’s Bar. He goes to the pub in the central square to make enquiries but the landlord doesn’t recognise the name however older patrons point out that the bar he is in was known decades ago as Hunter’s Bar so he had inadvertently discovered where he was looking for within minutes of arrival. This then leads to him telling the tales as to why he was there only for the patrons to take him en masse to the local church to consult the priest for birth records. There they find not only his grandfather but also his grandfather’s brother who is still alive in the town. Taken to the man’s house he eventually overcomes his nervousness and we go full circle as he introduces himself to his great uncle, Don Angel.

It’s a good read, difficult at times with the description of his time in prison but uplifting so many times after this dark period and I’m glad I’ve read it. It is another of the short lived Lonely Planet Journeys series which as I’ve explained before I bought a lot of when it was clear the series was being discontinued and am only now sitting down to read.