Manga, Ja!

Ron at Galleycat notes a report of Europe's very healthy trade in comics -- and especially manga:

"German and French sales of manga totaled $212.6 million last year," says Jennifer Fishbein of Business Week, "making Europe the largest consumer of manga outside Japan." The news gets better for publishers of the Japanese comic books; in Germany, manga account for nearly three-fourths of all comics sales.

Check out this blog (full of great photos!) from last year on the manga scene in Germany.

Also: I might be the last person to clue in on this, but there is a terrific (and prolific) new blog, Three Percent, dedicated to news of books translated (or not translated) for the US...

Holiday Stubble

We are blessed this holiday with not one but two virtually simultaneous releases on wacky-ass books:





I've sung the praises of Bizarre Books in the past, and so if you haven't bought it already, now that there's a new and improved edition you really have no excuse. Scouts In Bondage covers some of the same ground, but in glorious full color.

So might I suggest: a copy of Bizarre in the loo, and Scouts on the coffee table?

I still await a book on bizarre subtitles and inane jacket copy. The all-time champ, I'm guessing, would have to be....

Never Be Rude to An Edwardian

Surely this 1913 book is where the Three Stooges learned all their tricks:



The evidence for my theory? This picture:

Your Case is Hopeless

One of my favorite things to come across in the 19th century magazines -- and something you never see today -- are the mysteriously one sided "Editor's Chair" or "responses to readers" sections, which give answers to individual readers without ever telling you what the questions were. Others simply respond en masse to unsolicited manuscripts by listing names under a headers along the lines of Interesting But We Cannot Use It, or for the less fortunate, Not to Be Encouraged.

Yesterday's Telegraph review notes that someone has actually compiled the late Victorian-era responses from the long-extinct British magazine Boy's Own Paper.

Your Case is Hopeless confines itself to the letters pages and articles of advice in first 21 years of the weekly magazine. In selecting material for this engaging and entertaining book, which reveals the interests and worries of late-Victorian lads, Karl Sabbagh has trawled through some 20,000 letters - or rather responses to letters. Since the actual letters are rarely quoted, the editorial replies can be baffling.

A multiple-question letter triggered the helpful (to the correspondent) answers of 'Yes. No. Perhaps. Try boiled oil.' 'The shots were fired by the balloonist' raises more questions than it answers. More worrying is the reply: 'If you commit a murder, you will certainly be hanged'...

'We have no views on Danish butter,' is an untypical reply, since the editor was not usually short of opinions.... 'Your case is hopeless' was the response to the grammatically challenged lad who enquired whether (or rather, 'weather') it is a poet or his printer who puts punctuation into poems. The editor suggests that the boy could always ask Alfred Tennyson, but, better still: 'Stick to prose.' As for the would-be artist who proudly sent in his sketches, 'You cannot draw.' .... To a lad asking how he can add a human skull to his collection (what else is in the collection, he doesn't reveal) the answer is: 'Why not use your own?' 'We cannot help you with the nose machine,' the editor tells a nasally challenged reader. 'We do not use one ourselves.'.....To another, 'It is a bad time of year for buying alligators.'

I simply must have this book...

Whodunnit?

Then:

Now:

Over at the Times, a review of Gavin Stamp's Britain's Lost Cities puts the blame for the destruction of old British urban architecture -- long blamed on the Blitz -- squarely upon the shoulders of city planners:

The religion of the motor car changed all that. Councils dismembered their cities to build ring roads, flyovers and car parks. They used any excuse for demolition — that old buildings had a limited life; that Victorian architecture was at best unfashionable, at worst sinfully ugly; that the mess left by Luftwaffe raids needed tidying up.

The Nazis became convenient scapegoats for plans already under way. Coventry's medieval Butcher Row was razed in 1936, four years before the first bombers flew in. It had become, the Lord Mayor sniffed, “a blot on the city”.... Stamp tells a tale of neglect, incompetence, philistinism and sheer bloody-minded malice, encapsulated in a comment by Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer and Surveyor of Birmingham from 1935 to 1963: “I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past,” he said in 1957.

...Their legacy is the desperate sense of loss engendered by Stamp's book, with its 200 stylishly presented archive photographs. I lost count of the number of pictures of smart, historic, charming streets captioned: “Every building in this photograph has since disappeared.”

Lucky Astrology Mood Scholarship

It's gone unnoticed in any print media or blog yet, but this week's new issue of New Scientist -- behind a subscription wall, so I will quote at some length here -- has a short piece by Jim Giles that puts the statistical crunch on Henry Louis Gates:

Next April, the prominent Harvard historian will publish In Search of Our Roots: How 19 extraordinary African Americans reclaimed their past. Gates has studied the ancestry of some of the country's most successful black individuals, including Winfrey, a daytime TV host. He found that 15 had grandparents who owned land, even though just 25 per cent of African Americans had obtained property by 1920. This "astonishing pattern", as Gates described it recently in The New York Times, suggests that promoting home ownership can alleviate contemporary poverty....

So what do[es this book] tell us about the roots of success? From a scientific point of view, almost nothing.

The problem lies in two fundamental mistakes.... Let's assume that he really has found an unusually high rate of landowning grandparents among successful African Americans (it is not clear that he has, given that the odds of one grandparent among four having owned land are actually quite high). What about land ownership among the grandparents of less successful African Americans? To suggest that property is important, Gates needs to show that a lack of this legacy contributes to normal folk being, well, normal. In epidemiological terms, he needs to run a "case-control study". But, as Harvard political scientist Andrew Eggers puts it, book sales probably wouldn't be helped by the inclusion of "a few chapters about thoroughly unfamous people"....

An epidemiologist would employ simple mathematics to correct for this problem.... "Most of the time these books are just making intuitions," concludes Gary King, a social scientist also at Harvard. "They're like astrology."

Ouuuuch.

Well, that'll make for some awkward dining in the Harvard Faculty Club.

To be fair to Gates, it's not clear from the article whether their criticism is based on reading an ARC of the book, or on his Times piece. But fans of, ahem, intuitive statistical scholarship will also recall Richard Posner's "evidence" a few years back of a decline in public intellectuals, which was then brilliantly dissected by Caleb Crain in The Nation...

Klickitat Street...

...is just a couple blocks from my house. My kids and I are squarely in the middle of Beverly Cleary territory.

Today's LA Times has an essay and photos on our Portland neighborhood, complete with the sort of freaky Ramona statue.

Bron-Yr-Aur Stomped

What I miss about living in rural Wales is reading the local papers:

THE owner of a North Wales cottage immortalised by rock gods Led Zeppelin is pleading for the chance to retire in peace. Church in Wales Vicar John Dale has owned Bron-yr-Aur cottage in rural Gwynedd for the past 35 years and is planning to settle down there in the near future.... [But] the cottage has been inundated with fans, some of whom are hell bent on taking away a piece of memorabilia from the place where lead singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page penned their famous third album, Led Zeppelin III, back in 1970....

Rev Dale says some fans have broken into Bron-yr-Aur, taken photos of themselves in front of its now iconic fireplace, and then posted the pictures on the internet.... Another bizarre occurance involved the theft of a sizeable chunk of mortar from the cottage’s front wall – only for it to be returned to Rev Dale in the post a few days later.

“Obviously, the person’s conscience got the better of them,” said Rev Dale.

The good Reverend is "not a fan" of the group...

First Impressions Are Misleading

An entertaining review in the Times of London today of a bio of Henry Miller's man in Paris, Jack Kahane:

Kahane was the kind of roguish publisher that most writers are glad to know exists, but are grateful not to be dependent on. His first successful title was Daffodil (1931) by Cecil Barr, aka Jack Kahane. According to Neil Pearson in his highly entertaining Obelisk: A history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press, the first edition was issued as “3rd impression”, in order to “give the appearance of healthy sales, and so stimulate demand”. The second impression became the “5th”, the third the “9th”, and so on towards a mythical eighteen printings recorded by trusting historians such as Hugh Ford in his seminal book, Published in Paris (1975).

Crazy Eights

8otto is a terrific Japanese band, and though they're still unreleased over here, it may only be a matter of time. (They already work with Toshikazu Yoshioka, the engineer for The Strokes, and it shows.)




(Hey, a singing drummer!)

Smoked Out

An interesting preface to my cigarette ad piece in today's Times: just this week, R.J. Reynolds announced that it would stop advertising in print media.

Stick That In Your Book and Smoke It

I'm on NPR Weekend Edition this morning to talk about my essay in tomorrow's NYTBR on the 1970s practice of placing cigarette ads bound directly into the center of paperback books. Thanks to the 40+ million pages of subpoenaed and leaked internal documents in the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents database, I found the paper trail of who was behind it (most of the big paperback publishers, starting with Pocket Books) and how much money was involved (millions).

And no, the authors weren't making a dime.

Lorillard alone ran ads in 540 million (!) paperbacks in a four-year period. They mostly hit pulpy mass-market stuff, but some literary authors got hit too -- including, incredibly, 74,000 copies of The Bluest Eye.

Want the exact names and numbers? I've put the original marketing studies, print run orders, and customer complaints in a timeline below, linked directly into Times and Legacy docs:

28 January 1958: The New York Times reports the formation of the Quality Book Group by Roy Benjamin of the Benjamin Company, along with Pocket Books, Bantam Books, and the New American Library.

4 December 1961: In an early Benjamin Company overture to cigarette companies, Roy Benjamin writes to American Tobacco Company about ad rates for the back cover of Joe Gargiola's Baseball Is A Funny Game.

17 December 1965: The New York Times reports that Dr. Benjamin Spock has lost his fight to keep ads out of Baby and Child Care.

24 January 1966: A BBDO Advertising analysis signals paperback advertising "on a large scale."

3 October 1966: Roy Benjamin contacts Liggett & Myers (maker of Lark cigarettes) suggesting that it sponsor a book titled It's Safe to Smoke.

29 July 1971: An internal memo by Lorillard media director William Santoni lists a 155 paperback title ad buy for August 1971.

10 November 1971: A letter to Benjamin Company by William Santoni of Lorillard orders an ad buy in 74,000 copies of The Bluest Eye.

19 December 1971: The Times reports that, in the wake of a TV ad ban, tobacco ad spending has migrated to other media. It singles out Lorillard's use of paperback ads.

April 1972: deKadt Marketing and Research Inc. conducts a national study that finds paperback ads effective.

11 March 1974: Robert W. Lee of Alexandria, WV complains in a letter to the Tobacco Institute that his 10 and 14 year-old sons have read books containing ads for Kent and True cigarettes. Both are Lorillard products.

11 November 1975: A Lorillard memorandum notes a four-year total of $3 million in expenditures for 540 million paperback ads.

26 September 1983: Philip K. Shaner of the William Esty Company suggests to R.J. Reynolds that they make an ad buy in Dave Marsh's [Book of] Rock Lists.

28 November 1983: A Nicholas Research International study of Salem smokers in St. Louis finds that they "read very little."

30 December 1985: A last gasp. John Heacock of the Heacock Literary Agency contacts Philip Morris offering ad placement in a new paperback-sized hardcover format by SOS Publications of Los Angeles -- "an ideal audience for cigarette advertising." On January 9th Philip Morris V.P. John L. Thompson responds, notes Lorillard's previous use of the format, and declines the offer.

Incidentally, here's one curious discovery that wound up on the cutting floor: I found an October 1986 Philip Morris memo detailing an attempt to plant a book review under a fake name in the San Francisco Examiner.

Why That's No Ghost, It's....

Fred and the gang unmask the New-York Ghost!

New From Ben & Jerry's: "Minty Badger"

Amid the onslaught of year-end notable title lists, the Guardian notes some truly notable titles for 2007: namely, Do Ants Have Arseholes? ... How to Fossilise Your Hamster... and, of course, Potty, Fartwell and Knob: From Luke Warm to Minty Badger - Extraordinary But True Names of British People.

Europa Europa

Glen Gold pointed out to me one publisher who's doing a sterling job of bringing European novels to the US readers: Europa Editions, whose upcoming translations include Carmine Abate's Between Two Seas. I reviewed their edition of Hangover Square for the Village Voice a while back, and it was a handsomely produced paperback -- clearly a labor of love.

One rather timely thing Europa's website mentions, and which I hadn't heard about: a couple weeks ago the first World Literature and Translation Summit took place under the aegis of the Miami Book Fair. No Youtube links, alas. I really do wish more panels would upload footage; there's no need anymore for audiences to be limited to the number of folding chairs a convention room contains.

Hmm, I Don't Know.... Does Sudoku Count?

Friday's Guardian takes on a problem which has been really, really... really bothering me: the appalling lack of translated modern works in our bookstores. (I cannot even tell you what a mortifying experience it was to walk into a well-stocked bookstore in Milan and to recognize... nothing.)

Well, it turns out my dread now has some statistics to quantify it:

In stark contrast to publishing throughout the rest of the globe, translated fiction accounts for only a tiny fraction of the books published in the English-speaking world. In Germany 13% of books are translations. In France it's 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%, but in Britain and America the best estimates suggest that the fraction of books on the shelves which started off in another language is somewhere around two per cent. One measure of the lack of interest in translated literature from both government and the industry is that Britain is the only country in Europe that doesn't produce any statistics on translation.

It's a state of affairs described by translators as "shocking", "pathetic", "scandalous". And according to Esther Allen, the executive director of Columbia University's Centre for Literary Translation, the crisis may be even deeper in fiction. "The number of novels being published in translation is ridiculously small - in the hundreds each year," she says. "If you sort out the authors who are already globally validated - Nobel winners and so on - and the retranslations of the classics, then it's absurd."

Two percent?... They must be referring to the UK there, because I'd call that figure generous for the US.

Cook Book

A small gem was buried in the bottom of a Times business column yesterday: the Croatian food company Podravka and design firm Bruketa & Zinic have released a "blank" annual report titled "Well Done".... which must be cooked in an oven before its ink becomes legible.

There's plenty more over at Dezeen blog, which broke the story:

Books on the Dismemberment Plan

Christopher Frizelle reviews Janet Malcolm's Gertrude Stein bio over at The Stranger:

Malcolm writes: "She seemed to shine when she walked into a room, and the work, even at its most hermetic, possesses a glitter that keeps one reading long past the time when it is normal to stop reading a text that makes no sense." This shine, this special something, is related to the mystery of how Stein and her girlfriend, Alice B. Toklas, two aging Jewish lesbians living in France, survived the Nazis—a friend of theirs was a bad guy, "one of the very worst guys," Malcolm writes—which is the focus of the first section of the book. In the second section, Malcolm reads (and reports back on, since almost no one has read it, including academics) Stein's The Making of Americans. "I finally solved the problem of the book's weight and bulk," Malcolm writes, "by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections."

Barbershop Quarto

A few weeks back the Fine Books blog had a great post on old combination barbershop-bookstores, as evidenced by these stamps inside old books:



Digging around a little, I came across a brilliant modern variation on the idea: a 2004 San Diego Union-Tribune article on the R. Spot Barber & Books, a black bookstore-barbershop-poetry slam combo:

Creating such a haven was R. Spot owner James Richards' goal when the shop opened 17 months ago. Richards is 39, grew up in San Diego's Chollas Creek neighborhood and still has never cut hair. In the shop, he is the DJ, plucking rare records from crates and shelves and spinning them on a dual turntable system.... "We need black bookstores. Too many of them close down. I wanted to bring the books to the people. I've always been an activist. When I was a kid, my dad took me to Rob's Barber Shop, on Euclid Avenue. I heard all the cats there talking about black issues. That was a special time for me."

Sadly, the R. Spot is no more: it closed in 2005, after gentrification and new building owners jacked the rent from $1550 to $3860 per month.

Riding on a Moonbeam

My wife Jennifer has won a Moonbeam Children's Book Award for her book Autistic Planet:


Other winners include McSweeney's 826 National and U. Iowa Press, so she's in some fine company!

Books, My Ass

From Italy, it's the Bibliochaise: "Contains 5 metres of books."

(Tip of the hat to this month's Fine Books & Collections.)

The Mutual Poisoning Society

I'm in this week's New Scientist with "The Mutual Poisoning Society," a piece about Frederick Accum -- that would be the dashing young chemistry lecturer above -- who was the David Horowitz and Ralph Nader combined of 1820. His Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons was a pioneering and bestselling book that became popularly known as "Death in the Pot":

"The man who robs a fellow subject of a few shillings on the high-way, is sentenced to death," Accum charged in his preface, "while he who distributes a slow poison to the community escapes unpunished."

The fraudsters’ motives were generally to disguise spoilt or watered-down goods, or to save money by substituting cheap ingredients for expensive ones. "There are instances on record, of bakers having used gypsum, chalk, and pipe clay, in the manufacture of bread," he noted. Gypsum also turned up in wine, to clarify cloudy casks — as did, more alarmingly, dollops of molten lead. Crooked vintners aged cheap new red wines by tossing in sawdust and staining new corks to look old. Switching to tea was no healthier. Accum found bogus blends of whitethorn, elder and ash leaves, and sheep-dung. "Green tea" was created by adding poisonous copper carbonate. If you fancied lemonade instead, vendors saved themselves the trouble of procuring lemons by flavouring the stuff with sulphuric acid...

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine observed that Britain had been revealed as a sort of Mutual Poisoning Society: "The apothecary, who sells poisonous ingredients to the brewer, chuckles over his roguery and swallows his own drugs in his daily copious exhibitions of brown stout. The brewer, in his turn, is poisoned by the baker, the wine-merchant, and the grocer. And, whenever the baker’s stomach fails him, he meets his coup de grace in the adulterated drugs of his friend the apothecary, whose health he has been gradually contributing to undermine, by feeding him every morning on chalk and alum, in the shape of hot rolls."

The book is available as a Gutenberg e-text, and it's fascinating reading. If you were unfortunate enough to be one of his original readers, it'd certainly put you off of your powdered bark, roasted horse-liver, and burnt-parsnip "coffee."

The Other Reading Room

Design Week previews the refurbishment of the London Library (not to be confused with the almighty British Library). My favorite touch: deliberately mismatched tiles in the loo.

Luv and Rockets

My favorite news graf of the week, hidden yesterday within a perennial Times story about city employees getting nailed for fake college degrees:

An investigator went to the Web site of Belford University and obtained a bachelor’s degree with highest honors in aerospace engineering for $509.15, the department said. After failing an “entry exam,” the investigator was urged by the Web site to take it again, and was sent the answers. The investigator had entered his age as 12 and had written, “I luv planes and rockets,” the authorities said.

Sadly, the Times doesn't bother to link to the Belford University website, whose pitch surely must be seen to be appreciated: "No Experience? No Problem!
Pass our simple online equivalency test and get an accredited online degree within 7 days.... No Admissions. No Attendance. No Hassle." They also have advisors available "24 hours a day, 7 days a week," which is presumably an advantage when you get that sudden 4 am craving for an M.S. in Microbiology.

Wells, Wells, Wells...

Check out this collection of 318 different book covers for The War of the Worlds -- here's a sixpenny edition from 1913:

Hotcockle Smackdown!

This week's Times of London reviews Fopdoodle And Salmagundi: Words and Meanings From Dr Johnson's Dictionary That Time Forgot:

The editor has included familiar contemporary terms that had utterly different meanings in 1755: 'faxed' (hairy), 'naff' (a sea-bird), 'rapper' ('one who strikes') and 'hunks' ('a covetous sordid wretch'), but there's more subtle humour and interest in definitions of lost practices, such as 'hotcockles: a play in which one covers his eyes and guesses who strikes him' and superseded meanings: 'cottager: one that lives in a hut or cottage on the common without paying rent and without any land of his own' or 'factory: a house or district inhabited by traders in a distant country'.

If I may -- I believe the definitive use of the word fopdoodle is in Edward Vaughn Kenealy's epic and epically bonkers play A New Pantomime, in his 1878 Poetical Works. It's a speech by the character of Mephistopheles.

It's never been reproduced on the web before, and it is... um... well, it's really something.

Mephistopheles

Ass-head, Blaekmoor, Cuckoo, Dotard,
Splay foot, Yelper, wry-necked Wretch,
Skulker, Flunky, Horse-face, Stuffgut,
Heaven make me thy Jack Ketch!
Whipster, Gorgon, Pug-nose, Dog-face,
Hair-brained Trull, Grimalkin, Flirt,
Demirep, Lacedmutton, Gadder;
Do give over flinging dirt.
Blusterer, Saucebox, Smell-feast, Weasel,
Swasher, Swaggerer, Princock, Chuff,
Trickster, Shuffler, Lazar, Bow-leg,
Hast thou not yet had enough?
Tell-tale, Jillet, Vagrant, Fibber,
Blouze, Coquette, Slut, Gaptooth, Cow;
Grannum, Henpecker, Empusa —
Faith ! I must give over now.
Fuddler, Slimgut, Tippler, Thickskull,
Spitfire, Sponger, Upstart, Clumps,
Costard, Couple-beggar, Duffer,
You look handsome in your dumps.
Snob, Poltroon, Dwarf, Fool, Gull-catcher,
Loggerhead, Impostor base ;
Juggler, Crookback, limping Cripple,
Broken nose and Pimple-face,
Poor lickspittle, frowsy fellow,
Bastard brat with stinking breath :
Cur, Curmudgeon, Chuffcat, Cuckold,
Baldpate, Dirt, I'll be your death.

Frosty-face barbarian, Savage,
Codger, Spooney, Fogie, Ass,
Vile Mohock, Screw, Gaby, Gudgeon,
Did you hope scot-free to pass ?
Lily-livered Tosspot, Lubber,
Crackhemp, Cullion, Blabber, Boor,
Vile bog-trotter, Whipper-snapper,
You're a pretty god, I'm sure-.
Dastard, Donkey, Whiffler, Shaveling,
Base skipkennel, Loafer, Bull-head,
Foul footlicker, Skimble-skamble,
Have I put sense in your dull-head?
Shatter-pate, Swinge-buckler, Boggier,
Chatterpie, Bamboozler, Dodger,
Meacock, Buzzer, poor Fopdoodle,
You're a pretty first floor lodger!
Snuffler, Loggerhead and Splutterer,
Beetlebrow, Gull-catcher, Viper ;
Hiccius-doccius, bull-eyed Stutterer,
I will make you pay the piper.

In his day job Kenealy was a barrister, most notable for pretty much losing his marbles during the infamous Tichbourne trial. Say, good thing he had that writing career to fall back on!

See? Even The Greeks Dropped Out of Calculus.

An article in this week's Science News discusses this fabulous find:

For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine. The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie's Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie's auctioned it off—for two million dollars. For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes....

Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes's work, so no one but Heiberg had studied them until now. One of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus.

Not only were some of these pages re-used, but several entire pages were painted over in gold-leaf, so that only x-ray fluorescence imaging can now reveal the texts...

Putting Voices and Faces to the Story

This week my wife Jennifer and I are together for an hour-long interview with Krista Tippett on public radio's Speaking of Faith to talk about autism and the experience of raising our son Morgan.

Both the hour-long show and the unedited two hour raw footage of the entire interview (and I mean entire, right down to a long sound check) are at their website. They've done a beautiful job with the site, including both my own 2005 Times piece on Prozac and autism, Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful essay on his autistic son, and Morgan's own selection of his favorite Youtube videos.

It's the first time that Jennifer and I have been interviewed together. The photo of Morgan (above) was taken by our friend Marc Thomas (yes, the "Uncle Marc" of the book!) in 2002, squarely in the middle of the year covered by Not Even Wrong.

Tommy, the Musical

McSweeney's fans from the early days -- not to mention Seattlites who saw us read together at Elliot Bay a few years ago with Dan Savage, Sherman Alexie, Ellen Forney and Sean Carman -- might be wondering what Tommy Wallach has been up to lately.

Well, wonder no more: he's got an album out at CD Baby, and this handmade video for a newly written "Elodie" that made Youtube video of the week and racked up a deservedly gargantuan view count:

J-Cope's J-Rock

Today's Guardian reviews Teardrop Explodes frontman Julian Cope's new book Japrocksampler:

The music discussed in Japrocksampler has made almost no impact outside Japan, partly owing to the barrier of an undecodably alien writing system. Cope himself is not a Japanese speaker, but his omnivorous LP collecting and his friendship with some of Japan's current rockers make him a credible candidate to write this book.... Other books on the subject are not on offer. Alan Cummings, the most knowledgeable (and bilingual) British scholar of Japanese alternative music, writes articles for the Wire but has not yet written a stand-alone text. Japanese Independent Music, issued in 1998 by Sonore (a French publisher ) is out of print... Japrocksampler is a flawed but welcome reminder that there are musical worlds beyond our ken.

As you might guess from my Slate piece raving about J-rock earlier this year -- and lamenting how little known it is in the US -- I've already put in an order for this one. Like Cope, I don't know any Japanese, and it hardly matters.... it's just great music.

Don't believe me? Listen to this 30-second mp3 clip of "Daily News" by the band Lostage.

Or just watch a whole video for their song "Television City":




... Or watch Mo'some Tonebender's "Rockin' Luuula":

A Forgotten Women's Health Scandal

I'm in New Scientist this week with the most disturbing bit of history I think I've ever written about -- it's about the "Tricho System" of the 1920s:

Tucked between pleas for the return of a travelling case left on the subway and a brown leather purse lost at the Polo Grounds, the New York Times’ Lost & Found column for 27 July 1923 contained this curious ad: “FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory, 244 W 74th St., each mouse has a round bald spot on the right side caused by scientific experimentation. $20 reward for each mouse returned dead or alive to Dr. Albert C. Geyser, 244 W. 74th St.” New Yorkers were not to know it, but those fugitive mice were harbingers of one of the worst medical disasters of their time....

The disaster in question was Geyser's opening a chain of salons across the country in 1925, promising women "painless hair removal" in just minutes -- which is indeed exactly what they got. What they were not told was that the mysterious Tricho treatment actually consisted of.... massive doses of X-ray radiation.

In perhaps the least-known American medical scandal of the 20th century, tens of thousands of woman in the 1920s through 1940s -- and the number might even reach into the 6 figures -- received X-ray radiation to their faces and arms. After an initial wave of skin ailments and lawsuits, the real extent of the damage took much longer to show up --

Decades later, a second wave of Tricho injuries emerged: tell-tale scarring, wrinkling, and advanced cancers that, as one doctor in Toronto put it, were “obvious stigmata of radiation exposure”. One 80-year-old patient arrived with a grapefruit-sized tumour in her head; another refused treatment until she had “a huge and deep crater occupying practically the whole lower half of the breast and the chest wall immediately below it”. By 1970, US researchers were attributing over one-third of radiation-induced cancers in women to X-ray hair removal.

One 1989 study in the medical journal Surgery coined this term to describe the patients they were seeing: "North American Hiroshima Maiden Syndrome."

These injuries emerged so slowly that they received scarcely any media attention. The great mass of my sources were medical journals. The Times, for instance, has not written a single article in the last 80 years on the Tricho scandal. Not one. They certainly have had reason to: Tricho's NYC clinic boasted of having 20,000 patients alone.

Among new findings that my research turned up was that Tricho was getting sued by early test patients even as their system was getting launched; more hauntingly, I uncovered the fate of Tricho's most prominent celebrity endorser, the famed Ziegfield star Ann Pennington.

Science!*

From 1882, it's....



* (Must be pronounced aloud like a Thomas Dolby lyric.)

Universal Wants You! (To Stop Discounting)

Back again to my earlier post on the overturning of the Dr. Miles decision by the Supreme Court, and the possibility of pricing restrictions in publishing: there's a fascinating piece yesterday in NPR's On The Media about a new case by Universal Music Group which opens another front in industry efforts to assert control beyond the "First Sale Doctrine."

Wikipedia, take it away! --

"The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained. That means that a copyright holder's rights to control the distribution of a particular copy end once that copy is sold. This doctrine is also referred to as the "first sale rule" or "exhaustion rule".

The First Sale Doctrine has been applied to book wholesalers who then distribute books to shops, who thus can sell it for whatever they like.... even at a loss. If Universal prevails, that could change.

Deathly Hallows Indeed

UK newspapers are abuzz that the UK division of Borders is on the ropes and ripe for takeover.

Wait, you say: an invincible chain in trouble? Good heavens, who was the giant-killer? According to an analysis posted today by Alan Shipman in Finance Week, it was Harry Potter:

The bespectacled boy wizard has gone the way of baked beans and designer jeans, becoming a loss-leader that gets sold at or below cost so as to draw customers into a store where they will splash out on more profitable lines. At the height of the Potter price war, supermarket chain Tesco – whose discount strategy has rapidly raised it to Britain’s biggest book and newsagent chain, alongside purveyor of one-third of its food – was selling the Deathly Hallows at £5, compared with a recommended price of £13.... Unfortunately for bookshops and other children’s authors, Potter has proved more a substitute than a complement for other contemporary fiction. So while shops’ loss on cheap beans and jeans is recouped on the basket that fills up around them, Rowling’s oeuvre has tended to fill the carrier bag on its own, depriving them of serendipitous sales with a more normal margin.

His ultimate culprit behind all this? You guessed it: the end of the Net Book Agreement.

When Does a Bean Bag Toss Cost $350?

When it's a Victorian bean bag game, naturally....



Looks fun, but it's no Paper Box Furniture...

English As She is Scanned

An original 1855 copy of English as She is Spoke -- as originally published in Paris under the title O Novo Guia da Conversacao -- can now be viewed over at Google Books....

In Search of the World's Most Boring Book Title

Round 1

VS.

Well, People Say a Lot of Things...

This month's Harper's excerpts a 1986 interview with Thomas Bernhard that is probably one of the most hilariously foul-tempered things I've read in ages. But there's one passage, when he snaps at the interviewer recalling one of his theoretical statements, which really does hit home. Bernhard essentially disowns the remark the interviewer has cited, remarking:

Well, people say a lot of things in fifty years of life. If a reporter is sitting in a restaurant somewhere and hears you say the beef's no good, then he'll always claim you're someone who doesn't like beef, for the rest of your life. You go for a walk in the woods, someone takes a photo of you, and then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

This actually goes to the heart of the reductionism and the deterministic interpretation of source material -- this is the material I have, therefore this is what my subject must have been like -- that I fear in biographical writing. (And not least, I might add, in my own.)

A couple years back on this blog this exact problem came up in a slightly different form; to save you the clicking, I'll paste that entry in here with this added note: Ross McElwee's Six O'Clock News is now available as part of 5-DVD set, and you most certainly should beg, borrow, or Netflix it.

Here's the 2005 entry:

Today's Oregonian reviews The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame :

The book's editorial premise is simple: What happens when a person's Andy Warholian 15 minutes of fame are over? What does that person do when the media attention has vanished? Can the person adjust to not being famous?

Written by Jeff Guinn, the books editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and Douglas Perry, a features editor at The Oregonian, "The Sixteenth Minute" profiles seven people who were once very famous at some point between the early 1960s to the late 1990s and are now semi-famous for once being fully famous....

In most cases, the tour isn't pretty. In some places, it's like watching a small woodland creature agonizingly expire after being hit by an automobile. There is Cara of "Fame" and "Flashdance" theme song fame ignored at an industry party as she tries to interest anyone in her new record. There is Cooney still insisting he could have beaten Michael Spinks for the heavyweight championship instead of suffering a beating. There is Wills, embittered because he'll never make it into the Hall of Fame because he was the most hated ballplayer of his era. And there is Foley, a professional wrestler well past his prime, who takes insane physical risks in the ring to stay in the spotlight . . . and be taken seriously as a novelist!

Hey, it's hard for anybody to get taken seriously when breaking into fiction.

But really, I have to take issue with this review's conclusion: that Fitzgerald was right about there being no second acts in American lives. Nonsense. Nonsense. American lives are nothing but second, third, and fourth acts. The very mobility of our society and permeability of our class structure has long held out the possibility of being able to move on.

Look, I think Guinn and Perry have a great idea here, and I wish more people would do this kind of follow-up. But did it not occur to the reviewer that perhaps the authors chose these subjects not because they were representative cases, but because they are dramatically pathetic ones? I mean, "Former Heavy Metal God Lives Boring Home Life, Works at Post Office" isn't much of a headline, is it? And for that matter, mightn't the authors be choosing incidents rather selectively -- as authors must do -- from perhaps otherwise mundane and even contented lives?

The longer I write biography, the more hesitant I become to use standard bio segues like "He was a broken man now." Broken to who?... To you? ... To him? Is he broken every minute of the day? The formulation is a specious one.

For a thoughtful meditation of how life goes on, even after it's "over," I implore everyone to check out Ross McElwee's much-overlooked 1997 documentary Six O'Clock News. It's available on VHS, but there's no DVD yet. It's messy and exasperating, as all McElwee films are. It is also one of the most honest works on the subject that I have ever seen.

The Other Victoria

Here's an unusual item up for auction:




Victoria Woodhull published it as part of her 1872 bid for the presidency -- the first ever by a woman -- running as a candidate of the Equal Rights Party. As a magazine editor she advocated free love, suffrage, and was behind the first US publication of the Communist Manifesto.

It is, I'm guessing, rather less wishy-washy than your average campaign hack job.

Big Box of Old Weirdness

I love this idea: the Big Box of Old Paperbacks Book Club. Over at the Onion A.V. Club, Keith Phipps has been reviewing his way through a lot-box of random pulp paperbacks, with a great cover from this week's entry:


While idly googling the guy, I found that Barbet was a actually a French pharmacologist who, in his spare time, experimented with nailing cadaver hands in order to test his physiological theories on Christ's crucifixion.

Book Title of the Week

Passed along me by bookseller Nathan Pederson at The Americanist (thanks!), it's:

Seven Wives and Seven Prisons:
Or, Experiences in the Life of a Matrimonial Monomaniac.
A True Story, Written by Himself.

Nathan pointed me to this great write-up by Garrett Scott, who's selling an 1870 1st edition:

The misadventures of a homeopathic doctor turned serial bigamist, on the run in upstate New York and New England. Despite Wright's classification of this work as fiction, the recurrent episodes of matrimony (varied with the occasional forged bank note or prison-bound son) have enough clumsy detail to ring true--an assessment evidently shared by Kaplan. In any event, despite Abbott's legal setbacks, with each chapter one happily anticipates a sentimental renewal from our tender-hearted narrator: "From the day, almost, when I began to board with this farmer there sprung up a strong attachment between myself and his youngest daughter [wife number two] which soon ripened into mutual love."

The Gutenberg project has it online, and as one reader/volunteer puts it, the "twists and turns of the plot resemble a snake orgy."

Goodbye, Cruella World

A great weird link turned up in passing this week at Onion A.V. Club -- one of Walt Disney's own Mickey Mouse strips from 1930, in which the despairing helium-voiced rodent repeatedly attempted suicide:



You can see the entire sequence of strips here...

Ingmar Bergman Films His Bris!

This week Slate ran a narrated video segment on the soap commercials (!) that Ingmar Bergman made during an early 1950s Swedish film strike. I decided to cut out the middleman and found that, sure enough, a couple months ago someone posted 8 of the original Bris ("Breeze") Soap commercials in their entirety on Youtube. They remain pretty unknown, too -- some have hit counts still in the hundreds.

You don't need any translation, because they're plenty weird in any language:




Check out his truly awesome homage in this commercial...



And finally, I would be remiss to not add the finest Bergman parody ever. (Note the wheeze on the 1970s ad slogan, "When you're out of Shlitz, you're out of beer"):

Déjà Stupid

An article from last week's Times of London:

A frustrated author has confirmed what other unpublished writers have long suspected: even Jane Austen would have difficulty finding a book deal in the 21st Century. But what really astonished David Lassman was that only one of 18 publishers and literary agents recognised her work when it was submitted to them under a false name. Mr Lassman, 43, had spent months trying without success to find a publisher for his own novel Freedom’s Temple. Out of frustration – and to test whether today’s publishers could spot great literature – he retyped the opening chapters of three Austen classics: Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.....

Since the Times can't be bothered to come up with a new dumb stunt, I can't be bothered to come up with a new reply to it.

Gravity: The Original Kryptonite

In catching up on an issue of New Scientist I found this:

IT WAS not so much the title "Superhero-related injuries in paediatrics: a case series" that amused us (Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol 92, p 242), as its use of language in this statement in the text: "Three of them tried to imitate Spiderman and one Superman. Three were injured after initiating flight without having planned for landing strategies."

The authors' abstract for the paper over at PubMed goes even one better: "The children we saw have all had to contemplate on their way to hospital that they do not in fact possess superpowers..."

Get Miffed!

Great news from a Believer reader: the insanely rare and insanely odd 1886 novel Don Miff -- utterly impossible to find ever since my November '04 Believer article about it -- is now available free and in its entirely thanks to a Microsoft-sponsored scan of a U California copy.

The Travel Log

I've an article in this week's New Scientist on Charles Kellogg, the "Nature Singer" of the vaudeville circuit who took his act onto the road in 1917 to save California redwoods. Namely, to draw attention to them he toured in this Flinstonian proto-RV that he hacked and sawed out of a single whopping chunk of Giant Sequoia.


He's quite a character indeed:

He liked to announce, with a showman’s hyperbole, that he had a 12 1⁄2 octave range—nearly double that of a piano.... By 1916 The Nature Singer had squawked and twittered his way into an RCA recording contract, teaming up with the Victor Orchestra to create nature-themed novelty songs. He also developed another curious claim to fame by discovering in John Tyndall’s 1867 treatise On Sound a trick worthy of “high-class vaudeville”: that a carefully regulated flame could be extinguished by the right frequency of sound. Kellogg learned to pitch his voice to achieve this, and showed off the feat to audiences and fire departments alike. To the latter he popularised a curious notion about the future of firefighting. “According to this theory,” reported the New York Times in 1912, “one may live to see giant tuning forks or musical instruments taking the place of fire engines.”....

His 1916 recording of “Flower Song” was recently dubbed “The Most Annoying Record Ever Created” by an audio engineer handling its digital transfer: “He sounds more like an angry cat being slowly pressed to death... I had to leave the room when transferring it.”

One fun fact I left on the cutting room floor: Kellogg revived his "Fire Extinguisher" act in 1926 for fire departments, leaving the New York Times to credulously report--this is an actual headline-- TUNING FORK SCREECH PUTS OUT 24-INCH FLAME; FUTURE FIREMEN TO STAY HOME, SAYS SCIENTIST. By using Oakland's radio station KGO to put out a flame in front of a speaker miles away, Kellogg floated the idea of extinguishing house fires by just turning on the radio.

I love that image: Friend, is your house burning down? Well, just ease back in your recliner and turn on some relaxing music to put it out....

Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters

One word: AMAZING.



Slate V has more on K Gordon Murray and his freaky dubbed Mexican children's films.

John Philip Sousa, the.... Novelist?

I'm on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday to talk about the novels of John Philip Sousa.

Yes, the novels.

While pawing through a pile of old books a while back I came across this:



Not only did Sousa's debut novel get published, it sold amazingly well -- 55,000 copies, a very successful run even today, let alone in 1902. He wrote two more novels: Pipetown Sandy in 1905 (a Tom Sawyer-ish tale of his childhood in 1868 Maryland) and The Transit of Venus in 1920. Pipetown Sandy is a vast improvement in craft over his first novel, and consequently sold.... er, less than a third as many copies.

Transit of Venus did so badly that not only can't you find any copies now, Sousa himself scarcely bothered to mention it in his own memoir a few years later.

Still, one bestseller is more than most people have in them. Check the city-by-city bestseller lists that were a regular feature of Bookman magazine back then -- fascinating reading, especially for anyone under the misapprehension that the Times invented the bestseller list -- and you'll find that in the spring of 1902 The Fifth String was all over bestseller lists in Southern and Midwestern cities... Atlanta, Indianapolis, Louisville, Omaha, etc. Curiously, though, he's conspicuously absent from the bestseller lists of the Northeast and West coast.

One outright discovery in reporting this piece was that a movie was made from The Fifth String. I found an ad for it in a September 13 1913 issue of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. The sole modern reference I've found is a nearly blank listing on the British Film Institute database. So I can tell you this: the film was made by Selig Polyscope Company, and it was a 2000 foot film -- a "two-reeler." Silent films were literally advertised by physical length of the film -- the running time depending on how fast or slow the projectionist ran it, and in this case it would probably have been in the range of 24 to 28 minutes.

And like most films from back then, it doesn't look like any copies have survived...

UPDATE: Elizabeth Dalabahn from the Library of Congress sends this very happy news: they have a partial print! The cast includes one Thomas J Carrigan.

Doc's Revenge

On Friday the Supreme Court threw out the ban on minimum pricing that has been around since the Dr. Miles decision of 1911. In short, manufacturers haven't been able to dictate prices to retailers, only "suggest" them. But now?...

From Forbes:

In a 1911 decision, the Supreme Court had declared that minimum pricing agreements always violate federal antitrust law. But minimum price agreements can benefit consumers, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, by enabling retailers to invest in customer service or provide more retail space to a specific product without fear of being undercut by discount rivals....

During oral arguments in the case in March, Justice David Souter suggested that the success of big-box discounters such as Wal-Mart, Target Corp. and Home Depot Inc. is related to the elimination of minimum price agreements.

Precisely.

It's a remarkable decision, and all the more noticeable in that it has generated no conversation yet on its potential effects over the long term to bookselling. Chains live on a steady diet of deeply discounted bestsellers. Should a major book conglomerate decide to impose minimum pricing, chains will no longer take this tactic entirely for granted, and may lose a vital advantage over indies.

There's no telling yet whether this is even remotely likely to happen, but it's certainly not a hypothetical notion. From 1899 to 1996 British publishers had minimum pricing under the Net Book Agreement; its repeal threw open the doors to chains and the reign of King Wottakar and Sir Pot Snack.

The NBA survived a number of legal challenges and revisions over the years, for the simple reason that it did at least some good for the British public. A 1963 Modern Law Review article quotes the UK's Restrictive Practices Court 1957 ruling on what they feared would happen if minimum pricing was eliminated:

"The number of stockholding booksellers in the country would be reduced. The stocks held by surviving stockholding booksellers would be less varied than at present. Althought in rare cases purchasers might be able to buy particular titles more cheaply than if the the agreement remained in force, the retail prices of most books would be higher. Fewer titles would be published, and those which failed to find a publisher... would include works of probable literary and scholastic value."

Sound familiar?

"Do You Need My Jumper, Bowie?"

I'm on Radio New Zealand today to talk about my recent Slate piece.

Meanwhile, the Flight of the Conchords time travel with David Bowie:

Thinging Thettles Do Cauth Thome Thwelling....

From Bridport and Lyme Regis News:

A DARING new world champion was crowned in West Dorset this week. Paul Collins, of Seaton, chomped his way through 56ft of the prickly leaves to win the annual World Stinging Nettle Eating Championship at the Bottle Inn, Marshwood.

The Pause That Irradiates

One curious late addition to my radioactive wanderings around eBay: an auction for a radioactive soda water dispenser is now in its final hours:

This is a very rare 1930’s Sparklet Syphon wire wrapped nickel plated soda water bottle. It was manufactured by Sparklets Limited of Great Britain and retailed in the USA by the Sparklets Corporation of New York, was primarily designed to produce carbonated water.... The company also for a brief period at the beginning of the 1930’s sold bulbs containing radon (radium sparklets) that, according to one of the company's advertisements, "provides a constant supply of radioactive water.".... This bottle comes complete with the ultra rare radium sparklet cylinder, which is unfortunately spent.

"Unfortunately"...???