"He is na dog, he is a lam"

1. A house made entirely of vintage books (appropriately I got this from Random House's twitter feed):

2. From Sally Mapstone's LRB review of an edition of William Dunbar's poems:

Scots were not popular in late medieval Oxford. Two fellows of Merton came up before the college authorities in 1497 after a fracas in which one had accused the other of being a Scot. The perpetrator, William Ireland, was warned not to issue such an infamy against anyone else.

This stereotype was new to me:

The first of a pair of punning poems on James Dog, an officer in the Queen’s wardrobe, persistently declares, ‘Madame, ye heff a dangerous dog,’ and the second then just as assiduously corrects that statement: ‘He is na dog, he is a lam.’ [...] Unravelling the nature of Dunbar’s relationship with the Queen is even trickier because of Margaret’s appalling posthumous reputation among Scottish historians, in which the familiar stereotypes of the unstable, sexually malleable, meddling English female have played far too straightforward a part.

(The reviewed edition -- which I had checked out for much of college -- is notable partly for ordering the poems alphabetically by first line. This is actually what led me to the review: I was reminded by the abstract of Jenny Davidson's ABCs of the novel event (which I would definitely attend if I were in NYC) of alphabetical order as one obvious alternative to chronological order...)

3. Courtesy of Calista, a magnificent bit of scatological verse (John Oldham, "Upon the author of a play call'd Sodom"):

Vile Sot! who clapt with Poetry art sick,
And void'st Corruption, like a Shanker'd Prick.
Like Ulcers, thy impostum'd Addle Brains,
Drop out in Matter, which thy Paper stains:
Whence nauseous Rhymes, by filthy Births proceed,
As Maggots, in some T---rd, ingendring breed.
Thy Muse has got the Flow'rs, and they ascend,
As in some Green-sick Girl, at upper end.
Sure Nature made, or meant at least t'have don't,
Thy Tongue a Clytoris, thy Mouth a C---t:
How well a Dildoe, wou'd that place become,
To gag it up, and make't for ever dumb? 
[...]
Or (if I may ordain a Fate more fit)
For such foul, nasty, Excrements of Wit,
May they condemn'd to th'publick Jakes, be lent,
For me I'd fear the Piles, in vengeance sent
Shou'd I with them prophane my Fundament)
There bugger wiping Porters, when they shite,
And so thy Book it self, turn Sodomite.

See also: Language Log on excrement as metaphor; it is only a minor stretch to read LL's name in a scatological sense.

"Not rare, but uncommon"

 "Five second-rate 18th century poets," bound in human skin:

The book, part of the National Library's collection, is one of only two known examples in Australia of anthropodermic binding, a practice that is described in book collecting circles as not rare, but uncommon.

Binding books in human skin dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and is usually seen on the odd medical textbook in the libraries of eminent universities, although there are examples throughout history of books bound in the skin of criminals or dead lovers.

The National Library's version, with its macabre handwritten inscription, bellies the rather mundane contents pastoral poems by five second-rate 18th century poets. ... The library has no shortage of exotically bound books - rare books reference librarian Andrew Sergeant has handled volumes bound in stingray, emu, snake and mother-of-pearl, to name a few.

Definitely file under "had no idea this was a Thing." (Link via UffishL on twitter.)

Kindle: first and second impressions

I finally got around to ordering a Kindle last weekend; it arrived yesterday and I've been playing with it compulsively, mostly downloading free stuff (the most awesome thing about the kindle is all the free pre-1900 ebooks). Today my inbox looks like this:

I had resisted the idea of getting a Kindle because: (1) I'm by nature a late adopter, I like letting other people find the bugs. (2) Anything sufficiently technical or obscure (including all physics monographs and most contemporary poetry, even Heaney) is unavailable on the Kindle; the Kindle store is in some ways more like Borders than like Amazon. (3) Most of my reading comes from the university library anyway. (4) There is something unappealing [straight face] about taking electrical appliances to bed.[/straight face] However, (a) the Kindle is really cheap now and I had some gift certificate money just sitting in my Amazon account; (b) I travel a fair bit and always pick the most inappropriate in-flight reading, and besides my laptop has terrible battery life and is worthless as a portable pdf reader; (c) one sometimes needs instant gratification!

A few impressions:

1. The size of the thing is a little odd, too large for one's pockets but it feels a little daft to use one's backpack to cart it around. It is probably just the right size for a certain species of women's handbag but there is no unisex/male equivalent. (Maybe the Paris Review stoat bag?) So far I have been using a plastic bag from the college bookstore. Perhaps the larger-screen v. is more sensible, though as I said on twitter, buyer's remorse is the most enduring human emotion after Schadenfreude.

2. Screen size aside, the display is great. To test this I read an entire book -- Bertrand Russell's account of his visit to the USSR ca. 1920 -- in one go; it was pretty gentle on the eyes. The device -- at least the small v. -- is light enough to be comfortable to read in bed, and is perhaps easier to read one-handed than a book.

3. Elif Batuman's article on buying books drunk is an excellent user's guide to the Kindle. (See also here; the link is to Grobstein's new tumblr.) I did in fact end up downloading The Anatomy of Melancholy and Fanny Hill and a myriad free samples. The Kindle is basically worth the price as a delivery mechanism for Project Gutenberg texts, if one is into that kind of thing.

4. The poetry selection is dismal, and a lot of the free poetry e-texts are missing linebreaks. It is perhaps worthwhile to pony up the 99 cents for a cleaned-up text should one exist... For instance, I found a nice text of Pound that has the Sextus Propertius versions -- really my favorite thing of his -- formatted as in print versions. (I also downloaded a Latin text of Propertius, which was of course without linebreaks. Which is fitting as so were the Latin texts.)

5. It is much better to shop on one's laptop than on the Kindle.

6. As a pdf reader the Kindle leaves much to be desired. The basic problem is that the screen is too small for letter-sized documents and scrolling is primitive, you seem to only be able to move one entire screen in any direction, which is exasperating. For all-text pdfs I believe the "convert to Kindle" feature works OK but for the physics literature it emphatically does not. It is unfortunate that you can't zoom except in 50% increments, so there's no obvious way to optimize the magnification and you always have to reckon with unnecessary whitespace or a truncated page. For Phys. Rev. or Nature a tolerable solution is to turn the page sideways and increase the contrast.

6'. Another thing to note is that the Kindle is slow qua computer, and has a lot of trouble w/ pdfs w/ large images.

7. Some things I've been meaning to read for a while and that I downloaded last night (all free): Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, Daniel Deronda, Nicholas Nickleby, Education Sentimentale, Tacitus's Histories, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Addendum 8. The Kindle now has an experimental web browser; it is really about as good as one can expect of what is a Firefox clone, given that the Kindle technology doesn't allow rapid page refreshing.

"A Wail from the Drunkard's Hovel"

Friend and sometime Beowulf classmate Calista was kind enough to provide

a few titles from the twenty or thirty feet of late-19th-c prohibitionist books. I capitalize because they all do, though in gilt.

ILLUSTRIOUS ABSTAINERS
DRUNKEN COMPORTMENT
BACCHUS DETHRONED
KING ALCOHOL DETHRONED
BIBLE TEMPERANCE IS NOT TOTAL ABSTINENCE
SUBSTITUTES FOR THE SALON (I suppose this isn't a reverse of the standard saloon/salon mistake)
SIX NIGHTS WITH THE WASHINGTONIANS, AND OTHER TEMPERANCE TALES
THE MEANING OF THE TERM "WHISKY" (it's >1000 pages long)
THE COLD-WATER-MAN; or, a Pocket Companion for the Temperate (by Doctor Springwater of North America)
GRAPPLING WITH THE MONSTER: The Curse and the Cure of Strong Drink
FINAL DRIVE ON BOOZE
IF NOT THE SALOON, WHAT?
A FRIENDLY ADMONITION TO THE DRINKERS OF BRANDY
THE FOUNDATION OF DEATH
THE ENFORCEMENT OF LIQUOR LAWS: A Necessary Protection to the Indians.
A DISCOURSE ON THE BOTTLE
The WAR OF FOUR THOUSAND YEARS; being a connected history of the various efforts made to suppress the vice of intemperance in all ages of the world; from the foundation of the class of Nazarites, by Moses, to the institution of the order of the Sons of temperance, inclusive; with a full account of the origin, progress, and present prospects of the latter institution.
A SOBER ACT OF PARLIAMENT
STRONG DRINK (I can't describe how wonderfully decadent the cover for this is: a very deep sapphire with the sexiest and most gilted typeface to come out of 1900
THE TRUE PATH;  OR GOSPEL OF TEMPERANCE
PUBLIC HOUSES; OR, THE MISERIES OF INTEMPERANCE
TALKS ON TEMPERANCE, THE FOUNTAIN OF TEMPERANCE, A TEXT BOOK OF TRUE TEMPERANCE etc
a whole bunch of "Anti-Bacchus" prize-winning essays
The Life and Times of THE LATE DEMON RUM (I'm fairly sure this was mis-shelved and is actually a boozy retrospective; but wish it were straightforward)
WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST DRINK
INTEMPERANCE: THE IDOLATRY OF BRITAIN
SHALL I DRINK?

"A Discourse on the Bottle" is a pleasantly ambiguous title. And as she points out, "there is an essay to be written, some time, about the beards of these men."

Books, beds, and bedbugs

Via twistedlilkitty on twitter, optimal living conditions:

I wouldn't describe myself as a book groupie in the Maud Newton/Book Bench sense, but do in fact have a regrettably large collection of books, many of which I intermittently reread. One could imagine groping for books on sleepless nights...

In other bed-related news, Alex Balk at the Awl points out that we're due for a "bedbug infestation explosion" this summer. (This is esp. regrettable as this summer's going to be a fairly travel-heavy one for me.) NB:

"Check your laptop. The bedbugs are attracted to the heat and body oils on the computer."