These are just some of my favourite things...

I have found some wonderful things this week: a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a third edition of Tess of the d'Urbevilles and a sixth printing of On the Origin of Species, but these pale into insignificance compared to the following:

I'll begin with my second favourite type of book - self-published fiction (poetry holds first place in my affections):


I know that you probably can judge a book by its cover, but I want you to enjoy the full majesty of the prose:

"Sarah nodded in a distracted manner and sat back in her chair and clasped both her hands in her lap. She sat kneading them together nervously. What could she tell Charlotte? Would she think she was crazy if she confessed to be a time traveller in search of the truth?"

When I was a bookshop manager I ended up adopting a zero tolerance approach to self-published authors for a number of reasons - mainly because they were a financial drain. I never ceased to be amazed at the way self-published authors could become borderline stalkers for months on end until it was time to return the unsold stock, at which point they suddenly became very elusive.

I found this illustration in a boys' adventure story from the Edardian era:

The caption reads: "That - that thing's loaded!" gasped Flagg. I'm sure that you can can think of other, darker captions...

This bookmark refers to a road expansion scheme in north London. I don't know how many people attended the meeting, but it didn't stop the building going ahead. In Britain, the 1990s saw a number of environmentally disastrous road building programmes that went ahead in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

To continue the road building theme, the remaining images come from two photograph albums that appeared in our warehouse last week. By coincidence, they are both from 1931 and the albums were destined to be pulped and become part of the M6 motorway extension, but I have rescued some of the photos from oblivion. Sadly, there are no names. I wrote about this issue three years ago (scroll down to "Restoration") and I would urge you to follow the advice of a wise, Welsh farmer.

The first album features lots of women in funny hats. However, these hats are comfortingly familiar, as I grew up surrounded by great aunts who had been born in the 1890s and 1900s and, fashionwise, seemed to be stuck in the 1920s.

I really like this photo. A small technological development - the advent of faster shutter speeds and better photographic film - meant that people no longer had to maintain grim, humourless expressions. The older woman looks particularly interesting. Her clothes suggest that she may have been a "bluestocking".

The following photographs are from a holiday album from some English people who went to Biarritz and Lourdes:


A close-up of the next photo reveals that a lot of the figures are nuns:


I love the scene below, with the wet cobbled streets and the vintage car:


And also the next image, with the absurdly French man in the beret and the boy in short trousers.

The final picture looks lie Hogwarts:

I can only assumed that this is a scene from Lourdes, but I don't know. I would love to know more about the people who compiled this photo album, but there isn't a single clue. A sad end to what looked like a rich life. Hoewever although we will never know who took these photographs, I can at least ensure that these images will now be seen be more people than ever.

Driven to Distraction

I never thought I would enjoy commuting, but the quality of the BBC's podcasts has transformed what used to be a very tedious drive through the jerry-built suburbs of Worthing.

Last week I listened In Our Time, with Melvyn Bragg and guests discussing the discovery of calculus and the bitter feud that followed between Newton and Leibnitz. Some of the finer points of calculus went over my head, but I understood far more than I expected and it will augment my fraudulent patina of erudition.

The beauty of In Our Time is that it whilst refuses to dumb down its content, it doesn't presuppose a detailed knowledge of the subjects under discussion, so Melvyn Bragg will blithely ask his guests 'What exactly is calculus?'. If the guests fail to answer in plain English, Bragg makes them answer the question again. Brilliant.

Today I listened to Radio Three's Composer of the Week podcast about the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, who died 50 years ago. I've always liked Martinů's music, but knew next to nothing of his life.

I was fascinated to learn that like Rapunzel, he grew up in a tower and rarely ventured down to ground level.

I have no idea why Martinů's parents lived in the bell tower of the local church (did they have to cover their ears at regular intervals?), but their son was a sickly child and spent the first six years of his childhood looking at his local village from a great height. As an adult, Martinů often expressed a deep nostalgia for his native village, but like many creative artists of the time, prefered to live in Paris.

When the Wehrmacht invaded France, Martinů knew that his days in Paris were numbered (he was on the Gestapo's wanted list) and he fled to the United States. In America, Martinů wrote his first symphony and its success encouraged him to compose five others.

Everything was going well, until one day Martinů fell from a balcony and cracked his skull on concrete (growing up in a tower should surely have made him more aware of heights). From then on, he suffered from poor health and bouts of depression. He eventually went to live in Switzerland where he died, possibly of boredom.

Here is a clip of the Scherzo from the Symphony No.4. It's not a great performance and the conductor's pedestrian tempi detract from the music's jazzy exhuberance, but as this seems to be the only Martinů orchestral clip on YouTube, I'll have to make do.

If you don't want to hear the whole clip, jump to 2:12:

I hope some of the magic still came through this stolid performance from the Berlin Philharmonic. I'd love to hear the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra put some life into the music.

Gorgeous

This duet by Bebel Gilberto and Cazuza sounds as if it's been recorded in someone's kitchen with a cassette recorder, but that's a good thing. Too many beautiful songs are over-produced in the studio and lose their magic. Here, we just have two voices and guitar.

Try not to be distracted by the video:

Jolly Unpleasant...

From a 1930s photographic book about World War One.

What happened to the word frightful? I associate it with the Mitford sisters, Noel Coward and just about anyone in an Evelyn Waugh novel. It doesn't feature heavily (in other words I don't think it appears at all but I can't be bothered to do any research) in Victorian fiction, so where did frightful spring from?

And where did it go?

There is something endearing about the way English people of a certain class used to refer to deeply traumatic events as 'rather unpleasant', whilst an entirely trivial event could be 'frightful'. Behind these phrases lay a tacit acknowledgement that language was inadequate in the face of real tragedy.

Today, the public are 'devastated', 'gobsmacked' or 'gutted' when disaster strikes, but never bereft, distraught, anguished, disconsolate, wretched, racked, hopeless, inconsolable or grief-stricken. Ironically, in an age in which we feel freer than ever to express our emotions, the lexicon of gloom is sadly diminished.