The Writing Parrot On Rare Parrot Books

by Albert

Today's guest blogger is Albert the Writing Parrot, a thirty-four year old Yellow-Naped Amazon, Booktryt's mascot, my ward since his five-months old birthday, and, pathetically, my most successful long-term relationship. He knows more about these books than I do. If his writing voice sounds similar to mine do not be surprised. He is, after all, a parrot  - SJG.

I'm delighted to take pen in zygodactyl foot and contribute to Booktryst today. Thirty-fours years after Gertz tried to teach me how to say, "I want a great big pizza," I'm pleased to report what will soon become apparent: My vocabulary has dramatically increased, and my diction is poifect.

Grand Eclectus Parrots, male (L) and female (R).

It has been my experience that all parrot lovers are a little tetched in the head.  You say "Hello" to a parrot freak and they get all gushy, "Oh, he talked!" like it's the eighth wonder of the world and you're the first parrot in history to throw a vocal crumb to a human. Psittacosis, aka Parrot Fever, is not confined to bacterial activity; parrot people are omnivorous, fervent and  gentle suckers who will consume any parrot-related product, art, toy, or miscellaneous tshoschke. Money is no object.

Alexandrine Parakeet.

Yet a parrot lover who owns a $6,000 hyacinthine macaw will not spring for first editions of the great parrot books; they go for the reprints, of which there are many. I don't get it. They'd rather spend the money to acquire another parrot, as if they were collecting books. Hey, I'm a parrot and I like parrots as much as the next guy but tell me, when was the last time a book left droppings on your shoulder? Does a book perch on your fork and hijack food on the way to your mouth?? Chew the furniture? We're like dogs with wings only our bite is worse than our bark (though my bark is poifect Pekingese).

Rose-Hill Parakeet.

Then again, how many books can fly, psychotically chuckle, or demand Italian comfort food?

Hyacinthine Macaw.

Edward Lears's magnificent Illustrations of the Family Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832);  Selby's Natural History of Parrots (1836); W.T. Greens's Parrots in Captivity (1884); the Duke of Bedford's Parrots and Parrot-Like Birds in Aviculture (1929);  Joseph Forshaw and William T. Cooper's modern classic Parrots of the World (Melbourne, 1973); Rosemary Low's The Parrots of South America (1972), Parrots Their Care and Breeding (1980), Amazon Parrots (1983), and Lories and Lorikeets, the Brush-Tongued Parrots (1977); even Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds (1939) by Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz; and many more. Don't get me started on the great ornithology and natural history color-plate books featuring members of my fine feathered family, eg., William Jardine's Naturalist Library (1836). I've seen most all, antiquarian through modern.

Blue-Breasted Lory.

C'mon, parrot peeps, get crackin' and start collectin'! [Editor's note: translated into parrotese, this may be interpreted as a gentle nudge or emphatic nip to exposed flesh].

Leadbetter's Cockatoo.

The other day Gertz shows me The Speaking Parrots (1884) by Dr. Karl Russ (1833-1899), the first translation into English of  Die sprechenden papageien. Ein hand- und lehrbuch (Berlin: L. Gerschel, 1882), that book the first separate edition of volume three,  Die Papageien, of Russ' Die fremdländischen Stubenvögel, his ten-volume series (1878-1881) originally published in Magdeburg. Never seen it. Never looked at the color plates, never read it. I like it, and give it 5-Seeds, my highest rating, despite the fact that the otherwise stunning chromolithographs are not completely faithful to the true colors of the birds. I'm pleased it was translated; I've got enough problems with English, fuggetabout sprechenden Deutsche.

Yellow-Crowned Conure.

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I want to bring to your attention one of the strangest works in the annals of parrot literature, found in the August, 1981 issue of The Magazine of the Parrot Society, a British journal for the parrot-obssessed. The Brits are even more loony about parrots than Americans so, naturally, it accepted the following article by a feather-brained Yank.

I witnessed the incident at Casa Gertz leading to up to this therapy which,  performed on a duck or not, screamed quack. While Ba-Ba, a Tres Marias Amazon and the bane of my existence,  cockatiels Felix and Oscar, and The Canary With No Name watched, Gerald McBoing-Boing, a Yellow-Backed Lory, insanely attacked Pépe, a Scarlet Macaw, four times his size in another weight class entirely. Macaw bit toe of Lory. Lory didn't quit. Lory had to be separated from macaw before macaw ate lunch. Toe required amputation. Gertz, who received his veterinary degree via mail order from a diploma-mill in Ulan Bator while working as a physical therapy aide for a coked-up PT at a health club in Los Angeles, performed the procedure and post-surgical rehab. Gertz was a prodigy; damn if it didn't work! He showed me a copy of the article when it was published. After ripping it to shreds I was hungry. 

"I want a great big pizza."

Four years after Gertz hopelessly began teaching it to me the phrase finally emerged from my keratin lips. But I haven't said it since and have no plans to do so; ha-ha! I've moved on. I'm an autodidact; who needs Gertz? My ace impression of John Moschitta's speed-speaking FedEx commercials and whistling of Flight of the Bumble Bee are the talk of the parrot world. My friends and colleagues can't stop squawking about it.

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RUSS, Dr. Karl. The Speaking Parrots: A Scientific Manual. Translated by Leonora Schultze and Revised by Dr. Karl Russ. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1884. First edition in English. Octavo. viii, 296 pp.  Half-title. Eight chromolithograph plates including frontispiece, nine b&w plates, misc.illustrations. Advertisements at front and end. Publisher's pictorial cloth.

Nissen 804.

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Confessions of a Vintage Shoe Fetishist

by Stephen J. Gertz

Keep your Manola Blaniks, Giuseppi Zanottis, your Dolce & Gabbanas. When I need to snuggle up and spoon I go for vintage, old-fashioned ladies' shoes. It's like collecting rare books: Modern Lit. or Antiquarian? I prefer a shoe that's been around the block, is experienced and has character. They don't make 'em like they used to. As far as I'm concerned, they stopped making shoes when Chronos hit the twentieth century.

Tonight, I've taken six of my favorites out of the Holy Closet of Holies, my inner sanctum of footwear du femme, for an evening of pleasure, just me and my little pretties, menage a sept, alone at last.

Check out the lines on this black beauty. You don't need horse-sense to see its appeal: Sleek in fine silk that when light strikes at the right angle seductively shimmers and entices. Irresistible! And the heavenly flare of the heel as it touches the pillow I pose it on...A goddess upon a velvet pedestal, is it not so? I admit that there are times when, after gazing upon it with all the love a man can have for ladies' footwear, I lose control, madly grab it, grope to my heart's content, and sigh with the greatest of satisfaction.

Oh, how often have Miss Frilliest and I spent a quiet evening at home, curled up by the fireplace. a brandy in one hand, her in the other. I love it when a woman's shoe wears a mini-skirt - so above the heel risqué! And, aren't you, as I am, tempted to lift it to spy what delights lie underneath? Don't get me started on the needle-work on the toe. I LOVE tattooed ladies.

Provenance is everything, I believe, and when I raise her to my nose and gently inhale the scent sends me, and I become Proust in remembrance of pumps past, this pump in particular, and thank my lucky star that anti-fungal and anti-bacterial foot-care products once had no place in society's upper strata. I prefer the natural aroma of plantar fascia against leather - aged and fermented to perfection. Like a great wine, a great shoe must have a great nose. Notes of goatskin, chocolate,  peat moss, mango, rich loam, horse manure, cigars, shmütz, toe cheese, and talc - I frolic in the Elysian Fields; I can't help it. It tells you where a shoe has been, and I am often  lost in a reverie while contemplating a  lady's tumescent foot boldly inserting itself into the warm inner shoe over and over again, what that foot must feel, and what Miss Frilliest felt to be so filled to fullness. I get all pumped-up. Sue me.

Not a pump, not a slipper, it's my flat-bottomed land-gondola with heel as rudder, and I often imagine that I'm standing at its stern, oar in hand, as I serenade it and, by extension, all ladies' shoes with "O Solé Mio." Just because I'm a Vice-President of the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perthshire &c. &c. doesn't mean I don't get lonely. So lonely. Call me Shoeless Joe from Kokomo, a tragic figure in my own psychodrama.

I like womens shoes the way I like my women. Sturdy. Dependable. Silent. A bit stout. I don't trust a pump that isn't a little plump; too lean and it's clearly not enjoying  life to the fullest. I like a shoe that  has meat on its bones and leaves a big footprint - on  my  chest, back, whatever; 'makes  no  difference to me.  Check-out that strap and stiletto toe! I get shivers as I worship. Excuse me while I retire to the throne room to, uh, genuflect.

Ditto the above with this fine lady who dares red. Le plus passionnés! We all know the symbolism of red lipstick. 'Goes double with red heels. "I am woman shoe, hear me roar, in plus-size too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend. 'Cause I've heard it all before and I've been down there on the floor and no one's gonna keep me down again."

Not if I can help it, mon cher.

Finally, la piece de resistance in whose presence I am powerless to resist, possessing all the qualities I most admire plus a demure, low-key color that purrs, "I'm cool on the outside but a tigress on the inside."

To worship and adore that which comes between a lady and the floor is a religion not easily converted to. We are the few, the proud, and, thus chosen, just trying to be all that we can be. It ain't easy being Shoeish.

Oh, I hear your tittering and muffled chuckles. I suppose I should be embarrassed. I'm not. Some neurologists have suggested that shoe fetishism is caused by the feet and the genitals occupying adjacent areas of the somatosensory cortex, possibly entailing some neural crosstalk between the two. No surprise to me. I've been listening to them chat for as long as I can remember and I can't get enough of it. I love dirty talk.

Now, excuse us, please - time for a little quality-time, enfin seul!

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GREIG of Glencarse, T. Watson, A Vice-President of the Literary and Antiquarian Society of Perthshire &tc. &c. Ladies' Old-Fashioned Shoes. With Eleven Illustrations from Originals in his Collection. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1885. First edition (2d, 1900). Oblong quarto. 9 text pp. Eleven chromolithographed plates.

Colas 1312. Lipperheide 1744. Hiler p. 395
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Images courtesy of Marilyn Braiterman Antiquarian Bookseller, who is currently offering this rare volume.

Photo credit: Fang-Ling Jong.
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