Samuel Taylor Caleridge

[Click for larger mistakes.]

I make typos. You make typos. We all make typos. However.

This volume, no. 35 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series, joins no. 30 in misspelling a writer’s name on a cover. Penguin attributes no. 30, Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions, to Thomas Nasha. I’ve checked the remaining volumes in the box set, and all names are spelled correctly on the covers.

I’ve written to Penguin Random House requesting two Coleridges to replace our Caleridges. No reply, of course, about either Caleridge or Nasha. But I will report back if I hear back.

“etc etc.”

After “conquering every Heart at Bath,” Lucy receives an offer of marriage from the Duke of ⸺. She writes to Lady Williams seeking her advice:

Jane Austen, “Jack and Alice,” The Beautifull Cassandara (Penguin, 2015).

The Beautifull Cassandra, a selection from Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings, ed. Christine Alexander, is no. 33 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series. All spelling and punctuation as in the original.

Also from this volume
Introducing Charles Adams

Clickety-clack

The current occupant speaks:

“We have noticed that there are no ships in the ocean anymore. We’re seeing that there’s like no ships, no, you know, when the first one we went, there were hundreds of boats. Now there are no boats. I wonder why? Meaning no drugs are coming across. Probably stopping some fishermen too. I mean, to be honest, if I were a fisherman I wouldn’t want to go fishing in, just a nice, let’s take a little trip, because I’d say, man, if they, maybe they think I have drugs downstairs, I don’t want that. I think the fishing business has probably been hurt, but no, there are literally no boats. This was a boat, and we were surprised to see it.”

My transcription. Video via Aaron Rupar.

[Rahsaan Roland Kirk: “Clickety clack, clickety clack, / Somebody’s mind done gone off the goddam track.”]

“It’s a free country”

Will Creeley of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, on the PBS NewsHour tonight:

”There’s no official party line, as an American, about what we think of Charlie Kirk or anybody else in this country. That’s the beauty of American pluralism. Like we used to say as kids on the playground, it’s a free country.”

[My transcription. Will Creeley is the son of Robert and Penelope Creeley. “Like they say” is a well-known Robert Creeleyism. I wonder if it lies behind “like we used to say.”]

Jim Edgar (1946–2025)

Jim Edgar was the thirty-eighth governor of Illinois, from 1991 to 1999. The Chicago Tribune has an obituary. (The New York Times ? Not yet.)

JB Pritzker has been the best Illinois governor in my forty years in the state. But Jim Edgar comes in second.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 15, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

I have no idea what’s going in today’s Hi and Lois :

~ They’re at home, of course. There’d be no element of surprise if they were in a restaurant. But where did that little table for two come from? Not to mention the picture window and heavy orange drapes, which look like something out of a restaurant.

~ Do Hi’s whiskers, along with his loosened tie, suggest the end of a hard day’s work? Or is Hi growing a beard? And is Lois going to ask that he shave it off?

~ Has Hi come home late? Did Lois know he’d be home late? Is that why he’s the only one eating? Or about to eat? And will he be able to manage that steak without a knife?

~ That changing wall color? No worries: readers of Hi and Lois know that anything can happen in the interstice. But still.

And if the wall can change color in the interstice, I think it’d be nice if Hi were to go take a shave there. After all, Lois has made him that cliché of high-class dining, the steak dinner (because — another cliché — she wants something from him). Maybe Lois could get a knife for Hi in the interstice. A napkin might help too.

[Hi and Lois revised, September 15, 2025. Click for a larger view. A knife and napkin are beyond my editing skills.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Glenmorangie 10

Orange Crate Art will toast its twenty-first birthday tonight with two ounces of Glenmorangie 10. Given this blog’s name, no Scotch could be more appropriate. Glenmorangie, it’s orangey!

When talk of tariffs began, I had no idea how the price of this affordable whisky might change. So I bought a dozen of the Glenmorangie Discovery Set: a 750ml bottle of ten-year-old Scotch and 50ml miniatures of twelve-year-old La Santa and fourteen-year-old Quinta Ruban (all with the old, less flashy labels). And now it turns out that production of ten-year-old Glenmorangie has ended. The line now begins with a new Glenmorangie 12 (not La Santa). But Orange Crate Art, ever orangey, goes on. And I have enough Glenmorangie 10 to last for several years.

Related posts
Glenmorangie redesign : Spelling Glenmorangie with Slide to Type

Happy birthday, OCA

Orange Crate Art turns twenty-one today. Here’s what I wrote in a first nervous post after dinner on September 15, 2004:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Good advice.

This is my new blog. Thanks to Rachel and Ben for getting me started (and to Rachel for telling me what to say).

“Orange Crate Art,” by the way, is the title song of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. The song was my introduction to each man’s music and is, to my mind, one of the great American songs.

It still is.

Writing here gives me great pleasure, and it’s led to all sorts of unforeseen goodness in my life. Thanks to everyone who reads.

Malaphors

[Dustin, September 14, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Dustin, Kevin Fitch confuses his idioms, and Dustin Kudlick offers a gloss on malaphor, which he defines as “a combination of a metaphor and a malapropism.”

And now I have a word for the manglings of idiom and metaphor that I post when I notice them: going back to the well and getting the rug pulled out, the fabric of civilization at a precipice, a supply-chain bottleneck, toeing a mantra, eating humble crow, and cutting loose a hot potato, and the many flubs of Ford.

Here, from ThoughtCo., is a small collection of malaphors.

Nick’s Kozy Korner Spaghetti House

[208 Pearl Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

So many oddities in this photograph: the fire escape — or is it a staircase? — that looks like an invitation to burglars, the second-story door (or is it a window?), the curtained windows below it (which match the curtains in the restaurant windows), the lonely advertising placards, the small sign for A.B. Tipler Press, 10 Beekman Street, an address half a mile away. I like the idea of Nick’s Kozy Korner Spaghetti House standing on a literal corner. If you squint, at least two menu items become readable: liver and bacon, and a western omelet, 25¢ each.

If you squint again, you can see the words “Bigger Better” on the Pepsi-Cola signage. The twelve-ounce bottle was a selling point in the brand’s rivalry with Coca-Cola. The advertising jingle (1939) ran like so:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

Followed by a crazed chant: “Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, trickle, trickle,” and so on.

Pete Seeger quoted the melody’s nineteenth-century source and sang a kids’ parody of the jingle:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Ties your belly in a knot,
Tastes like vinegar, looks like ink,
Pepsi-Cola is a stinky drink.

The name Pepsi-Cola disappeared in 1961, replaced by Pepsi. The Third Avenue El disappeared in the 1950s. So too this building. A 1906 publication, Historical Guide to the City of New York, directs its reader to “go east on Platt Street to see an old house at 208 Pearl Street.” How old? William Durrell, a printer and bookseller occupied no. 208 in the late eighteenth century. He was out of business by 1802. Whatever structure stood there in 1906, a reader might not have had much time to see it: in 1907 a five-story building stood at nos. 208 and 206. That must be this one. Later development included a “one-story store structure” that made way for an office building. Suffice it to say that this corner in the financial district is unrecognizable today.

Nos. 206 and 208 appear to have taken up a city block. And across the street, its fraternal twin, no. 212. Notice the Kozy Korner sign to get oriented.

[Click for a larger view.]

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)