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Category Archives: Literature

When design was soft and kind

Sunday, March 26, 2023

My IBM Selectric I, made in 1974, restored by a former IBM field engineer. The Selectric I typewriters were introduced in 1961. Click here for high resolution version. I have written in the past about how today’s taste in automobile design is for aggressive-looking, mean-looking, vehicles. Even Volkswagen, whose designs used to charm people, now […]

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Euell Gibbons, 1974

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Euell Gibbons, near High Point, North Carolina, February 1974 I came across this photo today while going through an old box of photos. I have sometimes mentioned to people that I once went foraging with Euell Gibbons and took a nice picture of him, but I had never scanned the picture, and I had forgotten […]

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WorldCon will be in Glasgow in 2024

Sunday, March 19, 2023

I have never been to a World Science Fiction Convention, but I hope do that in August 2024, when it will be in Glasgow. The annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy are given at WorldCon. Hugos are voted on by the fans who attend the convention (unlike the Nebula Awards, which are given […]

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A seriously good novel, now 85 years old

Monday, March 6, 2023

The Hopkins Manuscript. R.C. Sherriff, Macmillan, 1939. This book got to me. I finished it just before sunset, and all evening, as a nearly full moon rose, I was spooked by a sense of unreality as I worked my way out of the world of the novel and back to the real world. I considered […]

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Yesterday’s fiction

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Robert Cedric Sherriff, circa 1928. Source: Hear the Boat Sing. Unless a novel becomes a classic, it will become obscure. It may or may not show up on book lists. There probably won’t ever be a Gutenberg edition. The review industry, of course, is concerned with what’s new. How might we discover now-obscure books that […]

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Don’t we have heretics anymore?

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 2022. 546 pages. I almost never read bestsellers, and this book reminded me why. This book makes me want to go read some Jordan Peterson or something to wash the politically correct taste out of my mouth. […]

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Now fully in the public domain: Sherlock Holmes

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Illustration from the December 1892 issue of Strand Magazine Each year on January 1, copyrights that are 95 years old expire. It was 95 years ago, in 1927, when the last Sherlock Holmes stories were published. (Copyright laws vary by country. In the U.S., copyrights expire after 95 years.) Those who profit from copyrights will […]

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My last Walter Scott post for a while, I promise

Thursday, December 15, 2022

I had high hopes for The Bride of Lammermoor, the sixth novel by Sir Walter Scott that I have read. But it let me down. Though there was some fine Scottish gothic atmosphere — seaside castles, witches, and violent storms — the story really came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty […]

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Scott-Land

Monday, November 21, 2022

Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. Stuart Kelly, Polygon (Edinburgh), 2010. 328 pages. First, a disclaimer. I did not read the entire book. By the time I was halfway through, so much of the book seemed only obliquely relevant to the subject of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that I scanned the remainder of the […]

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No more chaos on the book shelves

Monday, October 17, 2022

What do two nerds do on a rainy day? They empty all the bookshelves, stack the books on the floor, scan all the titles into a database, and put the books back onto the shelves, in alphabetical order by category. Including the scanning that I had done before Ken’s visit, this was a total of […]

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