“Magnificent Nature Guides”

[Life, September 29, 1952. Click for a much larger view.]

“How can these magnificent Nature Guides be sold at only $1 each?” The advertisement provides the answer:

With a normal first edition of 10,000 copies, these books would retail at from $3 to $5 a copy. But the 75,000–100,000 printing of each book lowered the unit cost to a point at which the publishers were able to employ the highest standards and yet produce these books for as little as $1.

A shorter supplemental answer: Because it’s 1952.

I love Golden Nature Guides, or the idea of Golden Nature Guides. I have the Rocks and Minerals: A Guide to Minerals, Gems, and Rocks (1957) and Trees: A Guide to Familiar American Trees (1987). And from the Golden Science series, Weather: A Guide to Phenomena and Forecasts (1965). From the back covers of the older books:

These 160 page books overflow with accurate full color illustrations and concise, double-checked information which makes identification and understanding the subject easy and enjoyable.

The back cover of Weather might have also mentioned Harry McNaught’s beautifully melancholy illustrations of “phenomena”: rain, more rain, and snow.

Telegraph operators and weather

From Hannah Fry’s review of Andrew Blum’s The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast :

By 1848, more than two thousand miles of telegraph lines had been laid across the United States. They were a technological marvel, but they were prone to problems when it rained. Every morning, telegraph operators checked with their colleagues in the surrounding cities to see what the weather was like. “If I learned from Cincinnati that the wires to St. Louis were interrupted by rain,” one operator was recorded as saying, “I was tolerably sure a ‘northeast’ storm was approaching.”

The effect was to change people’s perception of time and space. Being able to communicate through the telegraph might have made the world seem smaller, but those weather reports also made the world bigger, creating distance between places on a map.

I told my mom — who watches the weather with intense interest — about the role of the telegraph in forecasting. Who knew? Neither of us.

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Our son Ben is hosting WGBH’s online series The Rewind, an exploration of the WGBH archives. First two episodes: “Tchaikovsky Waits for No Man” and “Tailgating with Table Linens.” Go Ben!

Genius at work

I quote:

Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden, or @AlfredENeuman99,..

...or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius! Sorry to say that even Social Media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the Fake News Media!

The “true Stable Genius” tagged a retired teacher and coach whose tweets are decidedly not in favor of the president.

But the Genius has replaced the above tweets with new ones, with the tag omitted and with “Neuman” now misspelled as “Newman.”

Committee life

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Fake rocks

[“Bushmiller in the Side Pocket.” July 10, 2019.]

Zippy tests these wannabes by asking them if his shoes are styrofoam or penny loafers. One responds by asking Zippy if he wants to play pool. And another admits, “You got us, Zippy! We’re just fake news!”

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[You can read Bill Griffith’s Zippy every day at Comics Kingdom or Seattlepi.com. Or read both and compare!]

E.B. Proust

E.B. White’s observations on style in writing are remarkably close to Marcel Proust’s. White, in The Elements of Style (1959):

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.

Not an embellishment, says Proust. Not a garnish, says White.

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

“Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is — like colour with painters — a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.”

“Swann Explained by Proust.” 1913. In Days of Reading, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Patently deficient”

From The Washington Post: “A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a bid from the Justice Department to replace the team of lawyers on the case about the census citizenship question, writing that its request to do so was ‘patently deficient.’”

Patently Deficient : a book title of the future?

Not “home”

It’s startling to see a The New York Times article refer to Jeffrey Epstein’s 71st Street mansion as a “home.” Just one sample:

The townhouse where the financier Jeffrey Epstein is accused of engaging in sex acts with underage girls is one of the largest private homes in Manhattan, a short walk from Central Park.

No, it’s one of the largest private residences in Manhattan. The article I’ve quoted from calls this building a “home” ten times. The article also calls Epstein’s residence in Palm Beach a “home.”

As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, “In the best usage, the structure is always called a house.” And: “The word home connotes familial ties.” To apply the word to a structure is a tacky realtor move. To apply the word to structures given over to sexual exploitation and trafficking is beyond grotesque.

Epstein is now living in a new “home,” larger but also much smaller than 9 E. 71st Street. If he’s denied bail and found guilty, he’ll be in that new “home” (aka “the big house”) for quite some time. Here’s hoping.

Related posts
Houses, homes, legs, limbs : “Nine homes”