A series of essays inspired by books that I own, talking about their history, some reviews and also how they came to be on my shelves. With over 6,500 books here and several more arriving each week I doubt I'll ever be short of a topic.
Rightly regarded as one of the finest writers of prose in crime fiction Raymond Chandler was admired by other writers as diverse as W H Auden and Evelyn Waugh. It is his descriptive passages that mark him out and make reading Chandler’s works so much fun even if sometimes his completion of plot lines just isn’t there. In this, his first novel, we never do find out who killed the chauffeur but it doesn’t really matter as the rest of the story is compelling and there are plenty of other crimes that do get fully sorted out. The Big Sleep is a remarkably accomplished work for a first novel, but by the time he wrote it in 1939 he had had short stories published many times over the previous six years, this is also the first appearance of his most famous character Philip Marlowe who appears in the first person so we see everything from his perspective. An example of Chandler’s descriptive writing is shown below, taken from a paperback copy of the novel I also have as I didn’t want to possibly damage the spine of the lovely leather bound edition I was reading.
Chandler was clearly influenced by Dashiell Hammett and his hard-boiled detectives such as Sam Spade in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ . The ‘hard-boiled’ genre is a very specific category of crime fiction featuring a sole detective fighting organised crime, usually in the US prohibition era and whilst this novel isn’t set in prohibition times, definitely not based on the amount of whiskey Marlowe gets through in this book alone, these is definitely organised crime in the shape of casino owner Eddie Mars and his main hit-man Canino. The plot is complex, so I can forgive Chandler not sorting out the chauffeur’s murder, with lots of characters sometimes working together but often double crossing one another. But we start with the elderly General Sternwood, who appears to have only a short time left to live, setting Marlowe on a case to find out about a blackmailer and stop him. Sternwood has two wayward daughters who keep appearing across Marlowe’s tracks in unexpected ways and the final denouement involving the two women was a complete surprise to me. I’m not going to go into any more of the plot which rapidly heads off in all sorts of directions and makes the book one of the most enjoyable I’ve read for a long time as I simply didn’t know what was going to happen next.
In 2005 ‘The Big Sleep’ was included in Time Magazine’s top 100 novels (the list isn’t ranked) and it also came 96th in Le Monde’s 100 books of the century compiled in 1999.
The edition that I read is from a set of six Penguin Classics designed in 2008 by Bill Amberg, the London based leather work studio, each book comes in a sturdy box with a belly band indicating which book is inside. The book itself is fully bound in a soft brown leather with a hole punched right through the cover and all the pages in the top left corner where a leather book mark is attached with the title and author embossed in it. The only thing marking the cover itself is the Penguin Books logo at the base of the spine. It is also incredibly difficult to photograph accurately. The leather cover overlaps the pages by a significant amount making it a yapp binding where over time and repeated reading the leather will fold over to totally encase the book. Each book was published in a limited edition of 1000 and priced at £50 per volume.
The local sixteen year old’s are sitting their English Literature exams this month and the set text play at least some of them are covering is Romeo and Juliet so I thought I would also give it a go although in a somewhat finer edition than they are using. I even found an appropriate quote by Romeo from Act 2, scene 2.
Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books; But love from love, towards school with heavy looks.
This is going to be a different sort of blog to normal as reviewing Shakespeare feels strange, the Bard rarely puts a foot wrong, it’s quite possible to review a performance but the plays themselves are genuinely some of the finest literature in English. So instead I’m going to treat it a a school exercise and for the first section summarise the play picking up on significant points, before moving on to describe the very special edition I am reading.
Shakespeare sets up the emnity between the two families of Capulet’s and Montague’s right from the first scene where servants from the two houses confront one another in the street, draw weapons and come to blows before being stopped by Benvolio who is part of the Montague family and happens to be passing. However Tybalt (Capulet) then arrives and seeing Benvolio with his sword drawn assumes he is part of the fight and likewise draws his sword to attack Benvolio, various citizens then arrive with clubs and it is only the arrival of Escalus, Prince of Verona, who orders all weapons to be dropped and the fighters disperse that finally brings peace to the streets. So the position of the rival families is well established within the first half dozen pages, a Montague and a Capulet, and even their servants, can barely be allowed in close proximity without trouble starting. Yet by the end of the first act Romeo, son of the head of the Montague family had entered the Capulet household at a masked ball, which means he is initially not recognised, and this leads to the fateful meeting between him and Juliet, daughter of the head of the Capulet family, which will bring such tragedy upon them both.
Act two begins with Romeo deciding to dump his current girlfriend, Rosalind, and giving his friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, the slip to enter the garden of the Capulet home where he spies Juliet high up in the house and this leads to the famous balcony scene, of which more later. During their conversation Juliet agrees to consider marrying Romeo the next day, a headstrong decision partly due to impetuous youth, for she is still two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday and also partly following on from her mothers conversation with her earlier that day encouraging her to look for a husband, although she was thinking of Count Paris, who has already indicated his interest in Juliet to her father. This act concludes with Romeo talking to a friend who is also a friar who agrees to perform a secret ceremony so that they may present their status as a married couple as a fait accompli to the two families and possibly through this heal the rift between them.
Amazingly for a Shakespeare tragedy we are now roughly half way through the text and nobody has died yet, most unusual, but all that is about to change. Everyone knows that “the star-cross’d lovers” (yes this is where that phrase comes from) don’t make it to the end of the play but the body count starts in act three of the five. Romeo and Juliet are now married, but nobody knows yet, and Tybalt is hunting for Romeo to avenge the dishonour of him appearing at the Capulet masked ball. When he finds him in the company of Benvolio and Mercutio he challenges him, but Romeo will not fight a man who has within the hour become his cousin, even if he isn’t aware of the relationship. Mercutio draws on Romeo’s behalf and is mortally wounded by Tybalt who then runs away but soon returns whereupon Romeo kills him in revenge. So before the end of scene one of the third act we have two dead and Romeo exiled from Verona by the Prince for the death of Tybalt. Delaying his exit from Verona Romeo manages to spend the night with Juliet and consummate the marriage but in the morning leaves quickly before her father arrives and tells Juliet that she is to marry Paris in this very week, she refuses but does not dare explain why however her father is insistent and says he will drag her to the church if necessary. The act ends with Juliet going to Friar Laurence to consult him on the way forward.
Act four sees Juliet coming home and as agreed with Friar Laurence submits to her father and declares she will go go through with tomorrow’s marriage, however he has also provided her with a drug that will simulate death for forty two hours which she is to take when she goes to bed. This she duly does and is discovered the next day apparently a corpse which is believed by all. We have amazingly for Shakespeare got through another act without anyone actually dying but that is all going to change in act five, the final part of the play.
Act five is where all the action occurs however it starts in Mantua with Romeo seeing the arrival of his manservant and asking him news of Verona. Balthazar tells Romeo that Juliet is dead and distraught Romeo decides to buy poison so that he can also die. Meanwhile Friar Laurence receives his messenger who should have given Romeo a letter explaining what was really going on but has failed to deliver it. Friar Laurence decides to head for the vault where Juliet is lying to see what is going on. Romeo has meanwhile arrived at the vault and is seen by Paris who has also gone there to lay flowers by Juliet, thinking Romeo means to disturb the corpse he attacks him and is in turn killed by Romeo. Romeo breaks into the vault and takes Paris’s body in there, seeing Juliet apparently lifeless he drinks the poison to join her in death. Friar Laurence then arrives and finds the two men dead but Juliet coming round, she then sees the bodies and before Laurence can take her out of the vault grabs Romeo’s dagger and stabs herself. Making a total of five dead in the play, but no when the lords Montague and Capulet arrive Montague reveals that his wife had died that night of a broken heart due to Romeo’s banishment. Friar Laurence reveals to all that Rome and Juliet were actually married and the two families resolve to end their rivalry in memory of those they have lost. The play ends:
Prince. A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished; For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Now let’s compare the two copies of the play provided in the box, The smaller version bound in buckram with the paper label is actually a good size (8¾˝ x 5¾˝) hardback edition of the relevant volume of The Oxford Shakespeare series of all the plays bound to complement the much larger Folio edition. This is the copy you turn to if you want the academic learning around the play. It is 450 pages long of which the first 134 pages are the introduction. The play itself is broken up with a huge number of notes explaining the text and reading it feels very much like being at school and analysing a play to within an inch of its life. I studied ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ like this at school and whilst I’m sure it’s an excellent read I’ve never been able to bring myself to pick up a copy since. See below where you can see that Juliet barely gets going before being interrupted by half a page of double column notes.
In complete contrast the much larger Folio limited edition is in a very clear large font (16-point Baskerville with Caslon display) letterpress printed on over-size pages (14˝ x 10¾˝) on beautiful paper and with a complete absence of notes, which to quote The Folio Society at the time “Allows to text room to breathe”. This makes reading the play much more pleasurable, as not only looking gorgeous the book feels fantastic as well with the fine leather and hand marbled paper binding. Removing all the notes and introduction takes this edition down to 113 pages. Here is the same section in this version, it is of course part of the famous ‘balcony scene’.
I have sixteen of the plays in this format, the tragedies are bound in red, the comedies in green and the history plays are blue. I was tempted to get more but at £295 per play it was turning into a major investment so I just got a selection of my favourite works by Shakespeare. Even so with each box measuring 15˝ x 11˝ x 2¾˝ (38cm x 28cm x 7cm) the sixteen buckram bound boxes take up a lot of shelf space. If you are interested in the production process used to print this book have a look at these Folio Society videos on the production of the Letterpress Shakespeare firstly the printing process itself and this one on how the marbled papers were made.
I recently watched the 1974 film Akenfield directed by Peter Hall which is based on Ronald Blythe’s best seller ‘Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village’, a book that has remained in print ever sine it was first published in 1969. The film covers three generations of people from the fictitious village of Akenfield in Suffolk including its most famous bucolic scenes of farming life that has long since disappeared and the horrors of losing so many men to the World Wars. It is particularly unusual in that there are no professional actors and no script just an eighteen page synopsis by Blythe with the people in the film making their own lines up as appropriate for the scene. The film was made at the weekends so as not to impinge on the actual working week of the people taking part and Blythe himself appears in it, playing the part of the vicar of Akenfeld, you can see the trailer here.
I loved the film and was sure that somewhere on the shelves was the book which was memorably reviewed by Jan Morris for the New York Times:
“Ronald Blythe lovingly draws apart the curtains of legend and landscape, revealing the inner, almost clandestine, spirit of the village behind. His book consists of a series of direct-speech monologues, delivered by forty-nine Suffolk residents, and interpretatively linked by the author. The effect is one of astonishing immediacy: it is as if those country people have looked up for a moment from their plow, lawnmower or kitchen sink, and are talking directly (and disturbingly frankly) to the reader. This is a brilliant and extraordinary book which raises disquieting second thoughts when the poetry has faded—as Mr. Blythe says, it is like a ‘strange journey through a familiar land.”
Sadly I couldn’t find it but I did locate the next best thing, a 126 page shortened version of the original 288 page Penguin Modern Classic from the set English Journeys which came out in 2009. This only has twenty one of the original forty nine interviews and the linking passages are largely missing but in the absence of the complete work it is an excellent substitute. The variety of people interviewed by Blythe is a cross-section of village life from a thatcher, blacksmiths and a wheelwright, a nurse, a couple of orchard workers and even one of the gardeners from the big house who describes the problems of working for the old couple that owned it and the professional pride that he got from a job well done. In fact there was a lot of pride in what people were doing right up until the younger generation and a tractor driver who no longer cared about straight furrows just how much land he could cover in a day, in total contrast to the horse ploughman who wanted everything just so.
The saddest, and most difficult to read, interview was the first one in the book, Leonard Thompson age seventy one and listed as a farm worker but most of his narrative covers being called up in the First World War and having to go to The Dardanelles to fight the Turks before ending up on the Somme in the thick of the fighting. He describes first arriving in Turkey and asking about friends from the village who had gone before only to be told that they had all died in combat and then moving on to a trench which was full of corpses and stinking from the decomposition.
One of the more interesting interviews was with a saddler who admits “Our harness lasted forever, as you might say. It was our downfall, wasn’t it! We made these things so well that after a while they did us out of a living.” But even the wheelwright says that there were wagons around the village that were over a century old they were made that well that they never needed replacing. So different from modern products which have built in obsolescence, it was only the coming of tractors that would gradually drive those fine wooden wagons off the farm and into the history books. The retired district nurse describes arriving in Akenfield in 1925 and being the first medical professional that would actually turn out at a house as the local doctors weren’t interested in house calls, you had to go to them and be ready to pay or they wouldn’t see you at all. She saw it all from births to sitting up by a death bed as the person in it took their final breaths and had to work hard to gain the confidence of the people. She eventually covered nine villages and because of this was one of the few people with a car so she could get round but she was very struck by the poverty of the general population with large families in tiny properties so there would be five or six children sharing one bedroom with the latest baby in the other room with the parents.
The final person is appropriately William Russ, aged sixty one and the gravedigger. He started digging graves when he was just twelve years old, “People would look down into the hole and see a child”. One of the problems with his job was one I had never thought about and that was the high water table in Suffolk which meant that the graves would start filling up with water almost as soon a they were dug and coffins had to be held down with poles to stop them floating away until enough heavy soil was on top of them to force them down to the bottom of the grave.
All in all it’s a fascinating document of social history and I just need to keep hunting the shelves to find the full work although I have a feeling that I lent it to someone and never got it back. But I recommend either edition of Akenfield, or even the film, if you want a glimpse of a rural life that wasn’t that long ago but has now completely vanished.
A book about science written by a non scientist, but somebody who has proved over many years his determination to try to get his head round complex scientific concepts after being completely turned off science at school. This is the second book by Robin Ince I have reviewed, the first being a joint venture with his friend Professor Brian Cox ‘How to Build a Universe‘ which I covered almost a year ago now and which promised a review of this book as I already owned it “in a couple of months or so”. Oh well it sadly got buried in the To Be Read pile but has now resurfaced and I’m so glad it has as it was a joy to read. Unlike the first book which appears to be mainly written by Brian Cox with interjections from Ince this, far longer, book at 390 pages excluding Cox’s introduction, is entirely the work of Robin Ince and as he explains at the start it was largely written during the first covid lock down in the UK in 2020. The book is based around over a hundred interviews he conducted during lock down with scientists in many fields who like him were pretty bored being stuck at home so were quite happy to talk about their various specialisms. His contacts with them grew out of not only The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show he does with Brian Cox (see review on How to Build a Universe) but also ‘The Cosmic Shambles Network‘ a largely science based website co-founded by Ince and Trent Burton which helped me through lock down with Ince’s regular videos from his book filled attic study providing much needed mental stimulation.
The book has twelve chapters all of which have an individual theme, although like his radio show with Brian Cox staying entirely on topic is not something that really happens. There is also an afterword as Ince didn’t want to finish with a chapter on the heat death of the universe, although quite appropriate for a finale it is rather depressing Having recently lost my father, something that has also recently happened to Ince, the chapter on death was probably the most difficult to read although ultimately as it provided food for thought it was also somewhat uplifting. Scientifically the most difficult and yet also possibly the most interesting, at least for me, was the chapter on the brain. My background is physics not neuroscience so this was well off my topic knowledge. But the important thing is that at all times I was interested in what Ince had to say, there isn’t a single formula in the book but that is sort of the point, you don’t have to be able to understand the formulas to get a reasonable overview of the topic being covered and its importance in a general understanding of ideas in physics, biology, cosmology, chemistry, neuroscience or whatever and it is all beautifully written.
What Ince also provides, although indirectly, is a reading list of works that will take you further or just sound interesting. For example I’ve never read anything by Bertrand Russell but now need to get hold of a copy of ‘Sceptical Essays’ as featured in the first chapter which covers doubt and uncertainty and also the spread of conspiracy theories. I have read works by physicist Carlo Rovelli but not ‘The Order of Time’ so that also makes it to the list. At the other end of the scale when Ince asked physicist Jon Butterworth about time he responded by quoting an author whose work I do own but have not yet read i.e. The Venerable Bede, an English monk who lived around 1300 years ago and wrote ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’. After saying a couple of months and then taking eleven months to get round to reading this book I’m making no promises regarding Bede, whose great work has been sitting on my shelves for something like twenty years but I do keep spotting it and thinking I must get round to reading that sometime.
Ince has had plenty of interactions with astronauts both in the infinite Monkey Cage and Cosmic Shambles so the chapter on space exploration is packed with interesting anecdotes from people who have actually been into space including Helen Sharman, Chris Hadfield and one of the few Apollo astronauts still alive Rusty Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9 in 1969. Ince has always been interested in space and as he says in this book he had always wanted to be an astronaut but as he says “The only things in the way of pursuing such an ambition have been an uneven temperament, a fear of small spaces, a fear of heights, a lack of dexterity, my total lack of any necessary qualifications, frequent fits of existential anxiety, general non specific anxiety and a deep existential worry about ever being too far from an effective flushing toilet.”
As a professional stand up comedian Robin Ince has had years of experience in organising his thoughts to communicate an idea although he self-deferentially claims several times in the book that his performance style is more a stream of consciousness rather than a well planned set piece. Read this book and discover the importance of being interested in just about everything, it’s good for the brain.
This volume consists of two of Plato’s dialogues, or reported conversations, featuring one of the leading sophists Protagoras and Meno, who was primarily a military leader although had also studied under several Sophists. The Sophists were a loose group of teachers on a wide range of moralistic as well as some practical subjects during the fifth century BC, teaching such things as philosophy, rhetoric and virtue along with mathematics and music. It is the teaching of virtue and whether this is even possible to be taught that most concerns these two dialogues and why they are commonly found together. Indeed Meno cuts straight to the question in the opening line of that dialogue.
Can you tell me Socrates – is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?
As can be seen from the above questions the other main character is Plato’s favourite subject, Socrates. In Protagoras the dialogue is reported by Socrates, whilst in Meno we are more directly involved as it is more like being there and listening in on the conversation. This is the second volume of Plato’s dialogues I have reviewed on this blog beginning about a year and a half ago with the most famous example The Symposium which also features Socrates. Socrates himself didn’t produce any writings so most of what we know of his teachings comes from two of his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, and it is believed that Plato didn’t start his works until after the death of Socrates even though they are all written as though contemporaneous with events although no dates are mentioned.
Protagoras
This meeting between Protagoras and Socrates covered by this piece can be fairly accurately dated to around 433 to 430BC when Protagoras would have been in his late fifties and very much the grand old statesman of the Sophists, highly respected and wealthy from his many years of speaking and lecturing whilst travelling round Greece. Socrates at this time would have been in his late thirties, The dating can be reasonably precise because Paralus and Xanthippus, the sons of Pericles are listed as present and they died of the plague in 429BC and Agathon (born around 448BC) is described as a youth. Whatever the precise date, it is before the birth of Plato (between 428 and 423BC)
The dialogue starts with Socrates visiting a friend and telling the story of the previous day when Hippocrates had called on him early in the morning very excited because he had found out that Protagoras was in Athens and demanding to go with him to hear him speak. Socrates, as ever, is doubtful of the wisdom of this and anyway it is far too early to go to the house where he knows Protagoras is staying. Instead he questions Hippocrates as to what he hopes to learn from the visit and discovers that he has no clear idea as to what would be gained, nevertheless he agrees to go. On seeing Protagoras with numerous people following him around the courtyard listening to his every word Socrates introduced himself and Hippocrates and asks Protagoras what Hippocrates could expect to learn if he became his pupil. At this Protagoras launches into a long speech broadly covering what he teaches, which is basically how to be a good and virtuous citizen. This speech is probably adapted by Plato from one of Protagoras’ books, now sadly lost apart from this fragment. Socrates then attempts to get Protagoras to define virtue, stating that he at least does not know what it is, this is typical Socrates where the admission of complete ignorance of a subject is key to the development of some sort of understanding through discussion.
Unfortunately this is where the dialogue largely runs out of steam as Socrates makes several attempts to get Protagoras to agree with a particular definition and when he cannot get him to the point he is aiming for drops that argument and picks up a different line of questioning. This makes for quite a ragged text which at times is difficult to follow as the reader cannot easily see what point Socrates is trying to make when he changes tack comparing one aspect of virtue with another such as wisdom and temperance or after that justice and temperance. The main sticking points between the two men seems to be the virtues of knowledge and courage. At the start of the dialogue Protagoras states that virtue can be taught and Socrates says it cannot at the end Socrates has come round to the idea that virtue is defined by knowledge, as after all it is in knowing the difference between good and bad that the virtuous can be determined and knowledge can definitely be taught. Protagoras however is unconvinced by this so the men seem to have swapped position during the discourse.
Meno
This occurs several decades after Protagoras in around 402BC. Again the people present allow for a pretty accurate date, Anytus is there and is described as having an important state position so it must be after 403BC and the restitution of the democracy, whilst Meno went to war in 401BC and never returned. Socrates is therefore in his late sixties and this time he is the respected thinker being consulted.
This is a much more satisfying dialogue as it is largely a discussion between the two men Socrates and Meno with Anytus only appearing near the end. Again the subject is the teaching of virtue and again Socrates starts by saying that unless virtue can be precisely defined then it cannot be taught whilst declaring himself ignorant as to what virtue may be. There is also an interesting discussion as to whether teaching is what it appears to be or rather it is the pupil being assisted to remember things that they were not aware that they already knew. This follows the concept that the soul is immortal and whilst between bodies it can explore and discover all things so it is merely a case of helping the soul within the body recover memories. This Socrates attempts to demonstrate using a slave of Meno’s who has had no mathematical training but who is brought to understand what happens to the length of each side of a square when doubling its area. Initially the slave says the side must also double but then realises that is a mistake. I think the argument that Socrates is not teaching as we understand the term during this exercise is highly debatable but Meno and by association Plato seem to agree with Socrates that the slave is simply being helped to remember.
The argument that virtue is knowledge is again raised and this time Socrates is not so sure although he goes back over some of the points in the previous dialogue. At this point Socrates and Meno are joined by the general Anytus and when he is asked his opinion of Sophists as teachers of virtue he professes considerable animosity towards the whole movement and the stupidity of the various people who had enriched Protagoras during his lifetime. During the brief time that he is with them Anytus gets angrier with Socrates in his apparent defence of the Sophists and perceived denigration of leading Athenians whom they agree were highly virtuous but which had according to Socrates distinctly opposite sons. Anytus would be one of the accusers of Socrates in the famous trial a few years later which led to his death by poison.
Ultimately Meno and Socrates agree that knowledge is not enough to be virtue and that virtue cannot be taught but is instead received via divine intervention and they separate with Socrates urging Meno to find Anytus and calm him down.
W K C Guthrie who translated the book was Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1952 to 1973 and master of Downing College, Cambridge from 1957 to 1972. He is best known for his six volume ‘History of Greek Philosophy’ the first volume of which was published in 1962. This Penguin Classics translation was first published in 1956.
A 100-page manuscript by Mr. Lipsky was the basis of the 1947 film “Kiss of Death,” starring Richard Widmark, and the full novel was published by Penguin that same year.
New York Times obituary – Eleazar Lipsky – February 15, 1993
This is that first edition, published by the USA division of Penguin in August 1947, I also have the first UK Penguin edition, with a significantly less garish cover, from December 1949. see image at the end of this blog. Lipsky was by trade a lawyer and served as an assistant district attorney for Manhattan in the 1940’s, he later had a law practice in Manhattan and amongst other jobs served as legal counsel to the Mystery Writers of America. He was still practising law up to three weeks before his death at the age of eighty one from leukaemia. This solid background in law shows itself in his writing and you can be certain that the trial scenes and interactions with the Manhattan assistant district attorney in the book are procedurally accurate.
It’s an unusual crime novel as it is less concerned with the crime undertaken by Vanni Bianco and his mob then the repercussions of the act. Vanni is quickly captured and in the lead up to his trial D’Angelo, the assistant D.A. tries to persuade him to turn in the other members of his gang to avoid the mandatory thirty year jail sentence he faces for a fourth offence and this time involving a gun although it wasn’t fired during the robbery. Bianco refuses due to a code of honour and determines to do his time leaving his wife and children to be looked after by his gang. This however they fail to do and four years into his sentence word reached Bianco that his wife has died of tuberculosis brought on by cash shortages so she was looking after their daughters as well as she could to the detriment of her own health. The children were admitted into a home. This terrible situation strikes home at Bianco who determines to testify against his fellow criminals in an act of recrimination.
This is where the story totally changes tack as we follow Bianco into a new ‘career’ of stool pigeon being placed in prison cells with criminals where the D.A.’s office had insufficient evidence to see if he could get them to talk to him, an extremely dangerous role which could easily have got Bianco killed if he was suspected. It’s a very interesting aspect to the way of working of the District Attorney’s office and presumably is based on real life examples that Lipsky had during his professional career. I don’t remember reading a book dealing so specifically with the way the District Attorney would handle an informant of the type of Vanni Bianco. However I certainly didn’t see the final twist in the plot coming and it transforms the whole story in a completely believable but totally unexpected way.
As for the film mentioned in the obituary, it doesn’t really star Richard Widmark as claimed, as it was actually his debut. The film actually stars Victor Mature as Bianco and Brian Donlevy as D’Angelo with Widmark playing one of the criminals D’Angelo hopes Bianco will manage to get some more information on. I tried watching some of the movie and frankly wasn’t particularly impressed, unlike the book which was fast moving and a delight to read. It is nowadays sadly out of print but is pretty easy to track down on the second-hand market in either the USA or UK Penguin editions.
At 474 pages this is an excellent selection of the short stories and three of the short novels from the pen of H G Wells, a man most people think of as a Victorian science fiction writer but who was much more than that not only in output but also his timeline as he survived until after WWII, dying in 1946 at the age of seventy nine. So why is Wells so popularly thought of as being earlier than he truly was, well his best known works were certainly written during the Victorian era, such as ‘The Time Machine’ (1895), ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (1896), ‘The Invisible Man’ (1897), and ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1898) however at the turn of the century he largely moved away from science fiction towards more contemporary novels such as ‘Kipps’ and ‘Tono-Bungay’ and later almost abandoned fiction altogether and produced his ‘A Short History of the World’ which attempted to summarise all of history into a single volume, I also have the earlier ‘The Outline of History’ in two illustrated volumes and the odd ‘Crux Ansata’ from 1943 which is basically a polemic against the Catholic Church.
This book was published by Flame Tree Publishing in 2017 and was the first of their Gothic and Fantasy series of books to be dedicated to just one author, closely followed by H P Lovecraft. Along with what would normally be regarded as short stories the collection includes three short novels, or novellas, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Story of the Days to Come’. I have previously reviewed The Invisible Man as part of the August 2018 review of the first set of ten Penguin crime novels, and it was the inclusion of The Time Machine that prompted me to pick up this collection after last weeks ‘The H-Bomb Girl’ including as that does a time travelling character called Miss Wells which is clearly a reference to H G Wells. Along with these three novellas are thirty three short stories which vary from a simple crime caper ‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ through murder ‘The Cone’ amongst others and but the majority fall into the loose category of intriguing fantasy but I wouldn’t describe many of them as Gothic in the way that Lovecraft is definitely Gothic Fantasy, the one significant exception is ‘The Red Room’ which reads like a ghost story with a great twist at the end. I also have The Folio Society collection published in 1990 and which is based on the selection published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1927 although that only has twenty two stories But even that shorter collection has seven stories not included in the Flame Tree edition and that still leaves over fifty short stories that I don’t have. as Wikipedia lists 94 short stories and the same number of novels or novellas.
That Wells was a prolific author is not in doubt and the quality of his writing can also not be underestimated, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times although never won it, frankly I suspect the judges regarded him as insufficiently high brow to be properly considered. But he was undoubtedly a popular writer from his earliest works and still sells well. I’ve really enjoyed reading some of the stories that I didn’t know and revisiting the ones I read many years ago. If you haven’t read Wells’ short stories then I heartily recommend them, no matter which collection, and there are many, that you manage to pick up.
First up, the quote by Paul Cornell on the cover gives away a lot of the plot, immediately you are on the look out for a time travel angle in a book ostensibly about a fourteen year old girl moving to Liverpool after the collapse of her parent’s marriage and having to start again making new friends at a time of international tension, for it is October 1962 and Russia is moving nuclear missiles to Cuba in order to be able to have a shorter strike time against the USA and match the American missiles based in Turkey. Therefore when the somewhat creepy Miss Wells at Laura’s new school appears to know more than she should and also has a resemblance to what an older Laura might look like and Agatha at the cafe the school friends go to also looks similar and furthermore has what appears to be a tattier version of Laura’s diary in one pocket the reader is considerably less surprised than they probably should have been.
Laura is given the nickname of The H-Bomb Girl after the very unusual item she has hanging round her neck is spotted by her school friends. Not many teenage girls walk round with the priming key for a Vulcan bomber hanging on a chain. Her father is a senior RAF officer in charge of the UK nuclear warheads, and in a slightly convoluted plot line has decided that a good way to keep his daughter safe in the event of a nuclear war is to give her the key and get her to memorise a phone number to ring and the arming codes so that if things go badly, which he suspects may well be the case, she can call and be whisked away to a safe place. I’m more inclined to believe that both father and daughter would be more likely to be taken to prison than to a place of safety but a certain amount of leeway has to be given here as the plot has more holes than a colander and the more you think about it the less believable it becomes. After all Miss Wells and Agatha must have been hanging around for some time waiting for Laura to move to Liverpool as Miss Wells at least appears to have a senior role in the school and is not mentioned as a new arrival.
It’s a pity that Baxter didn’t do more research into the period, if he had then the three anachronisms that I spotted immediately, there may well be others, wouldn’t have appeared. The first is minor in that in the introduction by way of explaining pre-decimal currency to modern readers he mentions the farthing which had ceased to be legal currency in January 1961 almost two years before the book is set. The second is more significant as during one of the versions of the post missile crisis where the world descends into nuclear war he refers to the first strike on Liverpool which led to the melting of the glass crown on Paddy’s Wigwam aka the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool. Unfortunately this building only started construction in October 1962, the same month as the crisis occurred, it wasn’t completed until 1967 and gained it’s nickname soon afterwards, so it wasn’t there to be destroyed in October 1962. If you don’t know why it got the nickname see here. Finally in a book about time travel which also has a character mention Doctor Who starting soon he got the year wrong as it was the 23rd November 1963 when the show was first broadcast, nobody would have known about the show in 1962 as the BBC didn’t even start referring to Doctor Who internally until the summer of 1963. Finally as somebody who studied nuclear engineering the positioning of the open nuclear pool in the main control room hall, whilst needed for the plot, is simply ridiculous. These obvious errors, especially to someone born in 1962, as I was, were mildly annoying but apart from them and the dubious plot holes the story was a fun read.
This fascinating book delves into the almost six hundred years of typesetting from Gutenberg with his introduction and popularisation of movable type on the printing press that he invented in the late 1440’s to the modern computer generated pages; whilst discussing the history and development of typefaces and fonts which have grown to well over 100,000 different styles over the centuries. One particular feature of the book is the use of the font referred to for most occasions that a specific font is discussed. This has led to almost two hundred different fonts being used in the book from the black lettering used by Gutenberg and Caxton which looks like the letters produced by monks in handwritten documents and books from the previous centuries to surprisingly recent classic examples which have become ubiquitous such as Helvetica (1957) which has become the font of choice for American transport systems, to its near copy Arial (1982). Arial was deliberately created by the Monotype Corporation to be very similar to Helvetica owned by their rival Linotype and owes its spread to being bundled by Microsoft from Windows 3.1 because the license was cheaper than Helvetica. There is also a chapter on the font developed by Herbert Spenser and Margaret Calvert for British road signs in the 1960’s and which has now spread across Europe, the name of the font is appropriately Transport.
I think anyone with an interest in books develops a parallel interest in fonts especially when the publisher, such as The Folio Society, always includes a reference to the chosen font at the start of the book. We don’t always notice when the choice is done well but certainly do when it is done badly. This is sadly the case with a book I am struggling with currently despite the contents being really interesting the poor paper quality, which is a little grey, along with the faint small thin font utilised makes reading more than a dozen or so pages in one go impossible due to the eye strain resulting from the attempt, Papyrus by Irene Vallejo published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton is going to have to wait for it’s time on this blog, the subject is great but the reading experience is painful.
Garfield refers to many books about printing in this volume, several of which are now on my wants list including an interesting double book by Paul Felton which started from one direction is called ‘The Ten Commandments of Typography’ but turn it round and start from the other end it becomes ‘Type Heresy’. Amongst the commandments is “Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document” something that ‘Just My Type’ breaks for excellent reasons. But in ‘Type Heresy’ there is a full page rebuttal to this argument.
Oddly Profile Books who published this volume categorise it as ‘Reference/Humour’ which I think is simply down to the inclusion of this cartoon.
Vincent Connare who created Comic Sans whilst working for Microsoft as a font designer in 1994 is used to the criticism of his best known font design, but all he was trying to do was come up with an approachable design which resembled simple handwriting and was based on the handwritten lettering used in comic books by Marvel and DC at the time hence the name. It is worth noting that Comic Sans, the Sans indicating that it doesn’t have serifs (a small addition to the lines making up the character) on the letters, is particularly popular with teachers of dyslexic children due to its simple nonthreatening style.
The book covers a wide spectrum of fonts and typographical examples from histories of specific fonts in short chapters interleaved within the main text and each entitled Fontbreak, which starts with Eric Gill’s best known font Gill Sans (1928). Through to The John Bull Printing Outfit which I’m pretty certain I never owned although I do remember using something similar as a child to typeset short documents and print my own items. There is also a chapter on the worst fonts in the world which includes the truly awful font designed for the 2012 London Olympics.
So what font am I using for this blog? Well it’s the now somewhat unfashionable Times New Roman, chosen for the same reason that it was developed, to be clear and easy to read even down to small sizes, after all you may well be reading this on your phone. Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morrison in the early 1930’s to improve the legibility of The Times newspaper in Britain which up until then had used the somewhat spindly letters standard across most newspapers since the 19th century. The thickening of the very narrow letters also improved the robustness off the cast metal type, particularly useful given the high speed rotary presses in use.
This collection of Yeats’ early works is split roughly 50/50 between his poems and other works including the play ‘The Land of Hearts Desire’ and selections from ‘Irish Folk Tales’, ‘The Celtic Twilight’, John Sherman and Dhota’ and ‘Stories of Red Hanrahan’. There are eighty eight poems split into four categories by subject including the work that gives this collection its title, ‘When You are Old’.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Yeats would come to look back on his early works with distaste as he regarded his more mature works as far superior and in the original preface of this collection he made clear that he thought the works that were cut were not worth retaining.
The first poem mentioned above ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, more commonly titled ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is the longest poem included in the collection and takes up 35 of the 158 pages dedicated to poetry. I love the rhythm of this poem and despite its length it is actually quite an easy read and takes the form of a conversation between the legendary hero Usheen/Oisin and Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, although it is somewhat one sided with Saint Patrick barely managing to get a word in. It tells the story of Oisin’s journey into the land of Faerie and his wanderings with the fairy princess Niamh there for the last three hundred years. A small extract from the first section of the poem will give some idea of the work.
But now the moon like a white rose shone In the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank, And clouds arrayed their rank on rank About his fading crimson ball: The floor of Emen’s hosting hall Was not more level than the sea, As full of loving phantasy, And with low murmurs we rode on, Where many a trumpet-twisted shell That in immortal silence sleeps Dreaming of her own melting hues, Her golds, her ambers, and her blues, Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps. But now a wandering land breeze came And a far sound of feathery quires; It seemed to blow from the dying flame, They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.
One thing I didn’t realise until I read this collection and recognised the words, is that one of my favourite tracks by Irish band The Chieftains uses one of Yeats’ poems for the lyrics, beautifully read by Brenda Fricker, ‘Never give all the heart‘.
Leaving the poetry behind and delving into the second half of the book took me to totally unfamiliar territory as I had only read Yeats’ poetic works before. The one play included here has us yet again dealing with a character from the land of Faerie, this time the fairy is tempting a newly married woman to join her and leave the mortal realm. Following that is a very short and disappointing because of that, extract from the 1891 ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ which seems to just consist of an introduction and the enjoyable ‘Appendix: Classification of Irish Fairies’ this starts off with the largely friendly Sociable Fairies and then goes deeper into the mainly disagreeable Solitary Fairies. The brevity of this section makes me want to hunt out the complete book and read the actual folk tales told within it.
The next extract from a book, this time ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is at over forty pages quite a bit more representative than the handful of pages given to ‘Irish Fairy Tales’, it consists of a series of essays dealing with fairies, ghosts and other such supernatural characters and their encounters with humans. These essays are quite short, often just a single page but explore the myths of the Irish people with tales either told to Yeats or experienced by him. The selection from ‘John Sherman and Dhoya’ is again very short being just concerned with the story of Dhoya a giant mortal living alone who attracts the attention of a fairy lady who decides to become his companion until she is taken away by a male of her own folk leaving him alone again and inconsolable. Like ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ I’d like to read more of these stories as the taster is too brief. The final selection is actually complete and includes the six short stories concerning Red Hanrahan that were published together in 1897. These tell tales of Hanrahan’s, often ill-fated, encounters with women and supernatural beings.
If you want to get a representative overview of early works by William Butler Yeats then this collection would be a great place to start and like myself you will probably end up wanting more, especially of the prose works. This is the fourth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck and Xinran.
Ramblings on my bookshelves 