A Different Stripe

A lesson in British currency from Uncle

The first US edition of Uncle included this handy explanation of British coins. It features such useful information as "a farthing is so small that it's only used nowadays by the dwarfs." We weren't able to insert it into our edition of Uncle, but I thought I'd share it anyway. If you don't know J.P. Martin's stories about a very rich elephant named Uncle, this will give you a small taste. And, if the illustrations look familiar, it's because they're by Quentin Blake, who illustrated most of Roald Dahl's books. Here he's integrated what looks like direct rubbings of the coins into his pen-and-ink art.

You might notice a few out-of-date features to this page. First, this complicated system of dividing up the pound was abandoned in 1971. Secondly, a pound is no longer worth about three dollars. And someone should tell Uncle's bookkeeper, Old Monkey, that one million pounds is sadly no longer the equivalent of "roughly three million dollars" either.

Here's the whole spread. Click for a larger image of it.

Usage lesson: Oh Snap!

Found at MotherSister Brooklyn. The post also informs us that Biz Markie coined this phrase in his song "Just a Friend." But no one compares to Jamey Presley's frequent delivery of it.

Welcome Pennsylvanians!

Frank Wilson at the Philadelphia Inquirer has a blog called Books Inc., and he recently did us the favor of letting his readers know that we're always soliciting suggestions for the series.

I thought I'd greet all the Pennsylvanians now flooding our site with a round-up of state-related books.

We don't have any Philadelphia books that I can think of offhand. But we've got two with Pittsburgh themes, both having to do with the steel industry.

One of the very first classics we published was Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman was imprisoned in Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary for 14 years for his attempting  assassination of Henry Clay Frick—steel magnate and partner of Andrew Carnegie—in his Pittsburgh office. There's evidence that Berkman played down the role of his then-girlfriend Emma Goldman in the assassination attempt. Goldman is charmingly referred to as "the Girl" throughout this memoir. Unsurprisingly, their relationship never quite recovered after Berkman's release.

Next on this short tour of Pittsburgh is Blood on the Forge by William Attaway.

The novel tells of three brothers who, along with many others during the African-American Great Migration, settle in the city to work the steel mills. Ralph Ellison said of the book, "Attaway's characters are caught in the force of a struggle which, like the steel furnace, roars throughout its pages."

And this fall we'll be publishing Philadelphian Robert Montgomery Bird's strange metaphysical picaresque, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself, a book that has been out of print for decades.

Last.fm/nyrb group

A few of us at the office have become obsessed with charting our musical taste via www.last.fm. And now we've taken that obsession one step further by creating a user group for fans of the classics series. Yes, it's corny and there's probably some data mining going on and who knows where all your information might end up? but who cares when it's all so much fun? Plus, if enough people join, we'll be able to generate weekly listening charts.

"The unpleasantness of self-knowledge"

In honor of the 115th annual convention of the American Psychological Association, which begins today in San Francisco:

We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally—and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressure of external events—we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm. There are a few among us—psychoanalysts have encountered them—who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end—human nature being what it is—cause their fallible fellow-men to turn away from them.

—Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives

Cover story: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Recently, someone wrote in asking about the origin of the portrait of Victor Serge on the cover of The Case of Comrade Tulayev. The photo is scratched in  a way that  suggests that some act of erasure was perpetrated on it. Disappointingly, the truth is much more mundane, as Richard Greeman, head of the Victor Serge Foundation explained to us:

Here's the story about the photograph. It belongs to Serge's daughter, Jeannine Vidal-Kibalchich, who was left orphaned in Mexico at the age of eleven when her father died, basically of exhaustion, aged 57. Jeannine told me that one of her children marked it up, but I wonder if she herself might have scribbled on it as a child. The picture itself dates from early 1944. It was taken during one of two expeditions, two pilgrimages really, Serge made with Laurette Séjourné to the tiny village of San Juan de Parangaricutiro where a volcano had erupted. Serge was profoundly affected by this cataclysmic sight as well as by the earthquakes in experienced in Mexico. The original title of TULAYEV was "La Terre commence à trembler."

The same photograph is used to illustrate Eliot Weinberger's review of Susan Sontag's collection of essays At the Same Time. Sontag was a fierce booster of Serge's work; Weinberger calls her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Tulayev, "the finest essay in the book."

And for you Serge fans out there, we'll be publishing the first-ever English-language translation of his Unforgiving Years (Les annés sans pardon) this fall.

Song most likely to be on a copyeditor's playlist:

"Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekend

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado in Q&A tonight

If you're in the LA area tonight, I highly recommend you stop by Book Soup in West Hollywood. Elaine Dundy, of Dud Avocado fame, will be appearing there in conversation with film critic Kevin Thomas. Ms. Dundy is at her best in conversation, and she's sure to be entertaining in person—you might even get to hear some high-class celebrity gossip!

Visit Book Soup's event page.

Related:
Genuine Nerd
Book Lists: Geographically Speaking
Terry Teachout's Contentions
Paris Was Boiling Hot

Playing in Peoria: The Invention of Morel

Numéro, which bills itself as "the FREE Peoria area complete entertainment guide," is featuring Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel as its August book club selection.

This little book—written by Jorge Louis Borges's some-time collaborator—takes its inspiration from H.G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau, mixes it with the author's adoration of the silent-movie star Louise Brooks, and went on to inspire Robbe-Grillet and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (and probably countless film-theorists). It should be of interest to anyone fascinated by the ubiquity of media and mediated images in modern daily life, or anyone who likes an impossible love story.

An escapee is marooned on a formerly inhabited island. He believes he's alone until he spots the presence of a group of vacationers, dressed in resort clothing from another time. But try as he might, they just won't take notice of him. Here is his first description of "the intruders":

From the marshlands with their churning waters I can see the top of the hill, and the people who have taken up residence in the museum. I suppose someone might attribute their mysterious appearance to the effect of last night’s heat on my brain. But there are no hallucinations or imaginings here: I know these people are real—at least as real as I am.

The fact that their clothes are from another era indicates that they are a group of eccentrics; but I have known many people who use such devices to capture the magic of the past.

I watch them unwaveringly, constantly, with the eyes of a man who has been condemned to death. They are dancing on the grassy hillside as I write, unmindful of the snakes at their feet. They are my unconscious enemies who, as they corner me against the sea in the disease-infested marshes, deprive me of everything I need, everything I must have if I am to go on living. The sound of their very loud phonograph—“Tea for Two” and “Valencia” are their favorite records—seems now to be permanently superimposed on the wind and the sea.

Perhaps watching them is a dangerous pastime: like every group of civilized men they no doubt have a network of consular establishments and a file of fingerprints that can send me, after the necessary ceremonies or conferences have been held, to jail.

The Invention of Morel was Marina Warner's recommendation for the program A Good Read on BBC Radio 4, and Alberto Manguel discusses it in his Reading Diary.

You can download the Reading Group Guide here and read Suzanne Jill Levine's introduction to the book here.
 

A "quirky little book" by Félix Fénéon

The following mash-note to Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines is from our fabulous New England indie bookstore sales rep, Michael Kindness (and is that your real name Mr. Kindness?), who gave us permission to reproduce it.

You might recognize M. Fénéon from Paul Signac's famous portrait of him. At one time it hung in the entryway of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Novels in Three Lines goes on sale on August 21st. New Englanders, if you can't find it in your local bookstore, don't blame Michael Kindness!

 

..............................................................................................................................

I just received my finished copy of NOVELS IN THREE LINES by Félix Fénéon, and I can’t seem to put it down.

Fénéon was an interesting guy: anarchist, art critic, champion of Seurat and French translator of Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen. In the early part of the 20th Century, Fénéon’s job was to write filler stories for a Paris newspaper.  These true short-short stories dealt with everyday life: murder, adultery, revenge, taxes and traffic accidents. It’s no wonder this book has an introduction from Luc Sante (who also translated the book from the French).

This is just the kind of weird little book that's perfect for indie bookstores.

In closing, here are a few of the favorite pieces I’ve come upon thus far:

Since the church in Mielin, Haure-Saone, has been barricaded, the faithful have been climbing in through the windows for services.

The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Menard, snail collector.

An unidentified maker of paste jewels from the third arrondissement was fishing in a boat with his wife at Mezy. She fell. He dived. Both gone.

Women suckling their infants argued the workers’ cause to the director of the streetcar lines in Toulon. He was unmoved.