Mark Twain, Collector Of Compliments

by Stephen J. Gertz

Little Montana Girl's Compliment
"She was gazing thoughtfully at a photograph of Mark Twain
on a neighbor's mantelpiece. Presently she said, reverently,
'We've got a Jesus like that at home only ours has more trimmings.'"

On January 11, 1908, The Lotos Club in New York City, one of the oldest literary associations in the United States, held a dinner in honor of one of its members, Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain.

Founded in New York City in 1870 by a group of young writers, journalists and critics, the Lotos Club initiated Twain to membership in 1873, who, waggish card that he was, immediately declared it “The Ace of Clubs.” At the dinner - attended by many luminaries - the guest of honor gave a speech announcing that he had become a collector of compliments. PBA Galleries is offering one of those compliments, in Twain's hand, in its Historic Autographs & Manuscripts with Archival Material sale May 8, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $2,500-$4,000.

As reported in the New York Times, January 12, 1908, Twain told the gathering:

"I wish to begin at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether. I wish to thank you for your welcome now and for that of seven years ago, which I forgot to thank you for at the time, also for that of fourteen years ago which I also forgot to thank you for. I know how it is; when you have been in a parlor and are going away, common decency ought to make you say the decent thing, what a good time you have had. Everybody does it except myself.

"I hope that you will continue that excellent custom of giving me dinners every seven years. I had had it on my mind to join the hosts of another world - I do not know which world - but I have enjoyed your custom so much that I am willing to postpone it for another seven years.

"The guest is in an embarrassing position, because compliments have been paid to him. I don't care whether you deserve it or not, but it is hard to talk up to it.

"The other night at the Engineers' Club dinner they were paying Mr. Carnegie here discomforting compliments. They were all compliments and they were not deserved, and I tried to help him out with criticisms and references to things nobody understood.

"They say that one cannot live on bread alone, but I could live on compliments. I can digest them. They do not trouble me. I have missed much in life that I did not make a collection of compliments, and keep them where I could take them out and look at them once in a while. I am beginning now. Other people collect autographs, dogs, and cats, and I collect compliments. I have brought them along.

"I have written them down to preserve them, and think that they're mighty good and exceedingly just."

[Twain began to read a few. The first, by essayist, critic, and editor Hamilton W. Mabie, declared that La Salle might have been the first man to make a voyage of the Mississippi, but that Mark Twain was the first man to chart light and humor for the human race].

"If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on the Mississippi] it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you it is a talent by itself to pay complements gracefully and have them ring true. It's an art by itself.

"Now, here's one by my biographer. Well, he ought to know me if anybody does. He's been at my elbow for two years and a half. This is Albert Bigelow Paine:

"'Mark Twain is not merely the great writer, the great philosopher, but he is the supreme expression of the human being with its strengths and weaknesses.'

"What a talent for compression!"

[Novelist, editor, and critic William Dean Howells, Twain said, spoke of him as first of Hartford and ultimately of the solar system, not to say of the universe].

"You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches to Neptune and Saturn, that will satisfy even me. You know how modest and retiring Howells is, but deep down he is as vain as I am."

"Edison wrote: 'The average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain.'

"Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl, which came to me indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:

"'We've got a John the Baptist like that.' 

"She also said: 'Only ours has more trimmings.'

"I suppose she meant the halo.

[Since the offered "compliment" is numbered “4” and the Times reported the little girl’s compliment after three prior, this sheet was most likely Twain’s reading copy; he extemporaneously changed some of the words but it was basically the same story].

"Now here is a gold miner's compliment. It is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to which I lectured in a log schoolhouse. There were no ladies there. I wasn't famous then. They didn't know me. Only the miners were there with their breeches tucked into their boot tops and with clay all over them. They wanted someone to introduce me, and then selected a miner, who protested that he didn't want to do on the ground that he had never appeared in public. This is what he said:

"'I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is he has never been in jail and the other is I don't know why...'"

The dinner was Twain-themed. As tasty as his speech was, the meal was tastier, a feast for those whose tongue for Twain went all the way. On the menu that evening:

Innocent Oysters Abroad.
Roughing It Soup.
Huckleberry Finn Fish.
Joan of Arc Filet of Beef.
Jumping Frog Terrapin.
Punch Brothers Punch.
Gilded Duck.
Hadleyburg Salad.
Life on the Mississippi Ice Cream.
Prince and the Pauper Cake.
Pudd'nhead Cheese.
White Elephant coffee.
Chateau Yquem Royals.
Pommery Brut.
Henkow Cognac.

Dishes served only in spirit included:

Double-Barrelled Detective Mystery Vegetable.

Connecticut Yankee Stew.

Mysterious Stranger Souvlaki.

Our compliments to the chef - and honoree.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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The Man Who Refused To Laugh (And The Book That Laughed At Him)

by Stephen J. Gertz

On March 9, 1748 Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773), 4th Earl of Chesterfield, wrote to his son:

"Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish, that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and in manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: They please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. 

"But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. A man's going to sit down, in the supposition that he has a chair behind him, and falling down upon his breech for want of one, sets a whole company a laughing, when all the wit in the world would not do it; a plain proof, in my mind, how low and unbecoming a thing laughter is: not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained, by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity. 

"I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh."

The letter is one of over four hundred written beginning 1737/1738 through the death of his son in 1768 and collected in Letters Written By the Late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son, Philip Stanhope Esq. Published in 1774 by his son's widow, Eugenia, a year after Chesterfield's death, the majority of the letters were written between 1746 and 1754. 

Also known as Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, within Lord Chesterfield - yes, he of the eponymous sofa - with elegance, understated wit, and sharp observation discusses, amongst other issues including history and contemporary politics, the restraint in behavior and manners expected of the mid-18th century British upper class in general and gentlemen in particular.

His disdain for the manners of the general populace begged to be lampooned and thirty-seven years after Chesterfield's letters to his son were published caricaturist George Moutard Woodward ("Mustard George"), in 1808, gleefully rubbed his hands together and went to work, the great Thomas Rowlandson engraving Woodward's designs (as imprinted on plates but contrary to title page).

A satire of Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son, Chesterfield Travestie; or, School For Modern Manners presents "a new plan of education, on the principles of virtue and politeness in which is conveyed, such instructions as cannot fail to form the man of honour, the man of virtue, and the accomplished gentleman." In seven chapters illustrated by ten hand-colored plates it covers Rules for walking the Streets, and other Public Places; Behaviour at the Table; Directions respecting Apparel, &c; Short Directions respecting behavior at the Theatres; Rules for Conversation; Rules to be observed at Cards in private Families; and General Rules for Good Breeding on various Occasions. In short, all a swell has to know for good breeding to show, to wit:

"It is very becoming to break out into a violent fit of laughter, on the most rifling occasion. forming  your mouth into a grin like the lion's-head on a brass knocker; and more so to be continually simpering at every thing. like a country milk-maid at a statute fair" (Chapter 7, p. 47).

How To Walk The Streets.

"If, whilst you are walking, you see any person of your acquaintance passing, be sure to bawl and hem after them, like a butcher out of a public-house window; and leave the person you are walking with to run after them.

"In walking through a crowded street, throw your legs and arms about in every direction, as if you were rowing for Dogget's coat and badge. N.B. If you have a short thick stick, it will be of great advantage" (Chapter 1, p. 1).

How To Keep Up A Conversation With Yourself On The Public Streets.

"It is said that the emptiest vessels make the greatest noise; don't let that deter you from making a free exercise of your lungs; it is conducive to you health, therefore, in every conversation, however trivial it may be, be sure to bawl as loud as possible" (Chapter 5, p. 21).

How To Look Over Your Husband's Hand Of Cards And Find Fault With Him For Losing.

"It has a very good effect for a wife to look over her husband's hand while he is playing; at the same time, shewing evident marks of anger and discontent if he loses.

"When you lose, never pay before you are asked for it; it is quite time enough; and then do it with reluctance, so as to plainly shew you would much rather keep it in your pocket"  (Chapter 6, p. 43).

How To Break a Shop Window With An Umbrella.

"Should it be a rainy day, and you use an umbrella, pay no regard to breaking a few windows in your passage, &c., from your careless manner of carrying it" (Chapter I, p. 2).

A British statesman and diplomat, "Chesterfield’s winning manners, urbanity, and wit were praised by many of his leading contemporaries, and he was on familiar terms with Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Voltaire. He was the patron of many struggling authors but had unfortunate relations with one of them, Samuel Johnson, who condemned him in a famous letter (1755) attacking patrons. Johnson further damaged Chesterfield’s reputation when he described the Letters as teaching 'the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.' Dickens later caricatured him as Sir John Chester in Barnaby Rudge (1841). The opinion of these two more popular writers—both of whom epitomized middle-class morality—has contributed to Chesterfield’s image as a cynical man of the world and a courtier. 

"Careful readers of Chesterfield’s letters, which were not written for publication, consider this an injustice. The strongest charge against his philosophy is that it leads to concentration on worldly ends. But within this limitation his advice is shrewd and presented with wit and elegance. Ironically, Chesterfield’s painstaking advice seems to have fallen on deaf ears: his son was described by contemporaries as 'loutish,' and his godson was described by Fanny Burney as having 'as little good breeding as any man I ever met'” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

As far as his refusal to laugh aloud is concerned, I imagine Lord Chesterfield being kidnapped and taken to a dark, dank basement room where he is strapped to a chair under a glaring spotlight and compelled to endure unmerciful torture by Mel Brooks until his smile, always firmly set to prevent an accidental discharge of guffaws, breaks, his sides split, his gut busts, a lifetime's worth of repressed laughter escapes in a torrent, and an eternal human truth becomes manifest:

Ludibrio ergo sum vivo.

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WOODWARD, George Moutard (designer). ROWLANDSON, Thomas, (engraver). Chesterfield Travestie. or, School For Modern Manners. Embellished with Ten Caricatures, Engraved by Woodward from Original Drawings by Rowlandson. London & Edinburgh: Printed by T. Plummer...for Thomas Tegg, 1808.

First edition. Octavo (6 1/2 x 4 1/8 in; 166 x 104 mm). [1, half-title], [1, blank], iv, [2], 70, [2, adv.] pp.  Ten hand-colored plates (two folding) engraved by Rowlandson after drawings by Woodward (contrary to title), with tissue guards. Publisher's original printed boards.

Reprinted by Tegg in 1809, and again by Tegg in 1811 under the title "Chesterfield Burlesqued." American editions published in Philadelphia by M. Carey in 1812 and 1821.

The Plates:

1. Votaries of Fashion
2. How To Walk the Streets.
3. The Art of Quizzing.
4. How to Keep Up a Conversation with Yourself in the Public Streets.
5. How to break a Shop Window with an Umbrella.
6. Behaviour at Table.
7. Notoriety, &c.
8. Gentleman and Mad Author.
9. How to look over your Husband's Hand while at Cards.
10. The Nobleman and Little Shopkeeper.

Falk, 215-216, Grego, 115-117, Grolier, Rowlandson, 61, Hardie, p. 315. Gordon Library Catalog BC-19.

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Book images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Of Related Interest:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.

Pigmy Revels: Laughter For The Languid,  Fun For The Feeble.

The Annals Of Sporting, 1809; Or, Take This Horse And Shove It!
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Great Rare Book Gifts For Recent Ex-Convicts

by Stephen J. Gertz

New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1932.
First American Edition..

What's the matter, friend? You say you just got out after 20,000 years in Sing-Sing for a penny-ante contretemps and all you got was a bus ticket and five bucks for a meal? You're à la recherche du temps perdu and you never got a keepsake to wistfully recall those halcyon days of yesteryear, not even a cheap gold watch?

Columbus: E.G. Coffin, 1899.

You heard the guys over at Ohio State Penitentiary can get a souvenir album when they graduate with photos documenting the highlights of their visit,

including the Bertillon system entry exam, which immortalizes the prisoner's serial number, name, county of conviction, admission date, length of sentence, crime, age, height, weight, complexion, forehead description, nose description, chin description, eye color, hair color, birthplace, occupation, any previous imprisonments, marital status, name and address of nearest friend or relative, any distinguishing features, etc.;

showtime with Ol' Sparky;

and a gallery of murderers hanged in the Annex?

Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1933. First Edition.

You say you pine for those serene prison days and wild prison nights and wish you could read a "candid and surprisingly graphic account of prison life by a career criminal, with chapters on drug use, homosexuality, prison violence and gang activity, the author a fellow traveler in stripes who did long stretches at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown and at Auburn Penitentiary in New York, and is described on the jacket copy as '...an articulate prisoner [who] possesses that rare gift among prisoners of writing impersonally on life in correctional institutions...truly in him the intelligent prisoner speaks and speaks with authority,'” the book rare in dust jacket, and a must read despite a mixed critique from Mrs. Grundy in the Saturday Review April 29, 1933?

"The method of of reproducing the conflicting attitudes of prisoners toward those in authority by using foul language of the prison yard has little to recommend it. Few will be surprised or shocked to read words that are in common use wherever men of average or less than average intelligence gather, whether it be in prison, in the army, in the navy, or in the smoking car. It is unfortunate that Nelson has thought that the verbatim recording of such discussions was necessary to simulate realism. This blemish on an otherwise well written analysis of prisoners may, and probably will, weigh heavily against the use of the book by schools, clubs, and other social groups"

Ossining, NY: Sing Sing Prison, 1916. Tenth Edition.

You gripe that at five a day you made 36,500,000 pair of shoes during your 20,000 years in Sing-Sing and now you're down in your heels in russian shoes - step in a puddle and the water rushin' -

- and a nice pair o' high tops ordered from Sing-Sing's catalogue of fine men's footwear would look swell and make you feel like a million bucks?

Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1952.
First Edition.

You say you didn't even receive a copy of The Pen, Inc. (1952), a scarce novel of a wrongly-imprisoned ex-convict who leaves prison with a seething hatred of society and a wacko culinary money-making scheme, “convinced that society will not let an ex-convict go straight, he plans a criminal organization. In a blackmail attempt he is beaten up and shocked into conceiving the idea of The Pen - a big restaurant and nightclub, built to simulate a prison with stone walls, guards and cells for booths. Every employee, from warden to janitor, must be an ex-convict,” the book uncommon in the trade, with OCLC showing just six institutional holdings for this title?

Cincinnati, OH: Stewart Jail Works Co., n.d. [ca.1904-05]].
Special Catalogue No. 15-C.

And you yearn for the security you once knew, the home sweet home away from home that was yours for the best years of your life, and know that an early sales catalog from the good folks at The Stewart Jail Works Co. - “Jail and prison experts and manufacturers of steel cells and steel works, etc., for jails, prisons, and city lock-ups,” a fully illustrated catalog, devoted principally to iron and steel cells, cages, doors, window guards, etc., providing model numbers, measurements, and special features for each of their products, a well-known company, whose steelworks were used in facilities like the New Jail (Newport, KY), Onondaga County Penitentiary (Syracuse, NY), US Federal Prison (Atlanta, GA), and the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, et al., and is a rare and early piece of prison ephemera with OCLC noting only two copies, at Columbia and Virginia Tech - will be necessary to order a personal slammer to set up in your back yard for brief, safe 'n secure vacations but you're stuck in a one-room dump with no mailbox over Satan's Hot Sauce factory, the ambient air is off the Scoville Scale, and your skin is peeling off in sheets?

Is that what's buggin' you, buddy?

Well, then, lift your head up high and take a walk in the sun with dignity and you'll show the world, you'll show them where to get off, you'll never give up, never give up, never give up - [two rimshots] - because the screws at Lorne Bair Rare Books have put together a fine collection of rare prison memoirs, histories, and related penology ephemera just perfect for the man with a record but little else who would like a little something to stir those precious memories of life in stir, no con.

Now scram, you dirty rat!

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With the exception of Cagney, all images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, currently offering the above items and related more, with our thanks.

Apologies to Eddie Lawrence, "The Old Philosopher." 
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The 36 Miseries Of Reading And Writing In 1806

by Stephen J. Gertz

"TO THE MISERABLE CHILDREN of Misfortune, wheresoever found, and whatsoever enduring — ye who, arrogating to yourselves a kind of sovereignty of suffering, maintain that all the throbs of torture, all the pungency of sorrow, all the bitterness of desperation, are your own — who are so torn and spent with the storms and struggles of mortality, as to faint, or freeze, even at the personation of those ruined Wretches, whose Stories wash the stage of tragedy with tears and blood —approach a more disastrous scene! Take courage to behold a Pageant of calamities, which calls you to renounce your sad monopoly. Dispassionately ponder all your worst of woes, in turn with these; then hasten to distill from the comparison an opiate for your fiercest pangs; and learn to recognize the leniency of your Destinies, if they have spared you from the lightest of those mightier and more grinding agonies, which claim to be emphatically characterized as 'The Miseries of Human Life;' — miseries which excruciate the minds and bodies of none more insupportably, than of those Heroes in anguish, those writhing Martyrs to the plagues and frenzies of vexation, whose trembling hands must shortly cease to trace the names of" -

Mssrs. Timothy Testy and Samuel Sensitive, whom, acting on behalf of their creator, writer and clergyman James Beresford, satirically related, in The Miseries of Human Life (1806), the mortifying torments that plagued contemporary readers and writers and thwarted enjoyment of those justly exalted pastimes. Some of the following agonies are of their time, others are timeless, many are familiar to book collectors, and all appear in numerical order as in the book yet differently formatted. The order is not a ranking, though number one has always been and will always be #1.

1. Reading over a passage in an author, for the hundredth time, without coming an inch nearer to the meaning of it at the last reading than at the first; — then passing over it in despair, but without being able to enjoy the rest of the book from the painful consciousness of your own real or supposed stupidity.

2. As you are reading drowsily by the fire, letting your book fall into the ashes so as to lose your place, rumple and grime 'the leaves, and throw out your papers of reference; then, on rousing and recollecting yourself, finding that you do not know a syllable of what you have been winking over for the last hour.

3. In reading a new and interesting book, being reduced to make a paper knife of your finger. [Refers to a once absolutely necessary reading accessory to open the upper edges of text gatherings left folded by the printer or binder - SJG].

4. Unfolding a very complicated map in a borrowed book of value, and notwithstanding all your care, enlarging the small rent you originally made in it every time you open it.

5. Hunting on a cold scent, in a map for a place — in a book for a passage — in a variety of Dictionaries for a word:— clean thrown out at last.

6. Reading a comedy aloud when you are half asleep, and quite stupid.

7. In attempting, at a strange house, to take down a large book from a high, crowded shelf, bringing half the library up on your nose.

8. Mining through a subject, or science purely from the shame of ignorance.

9. Receiving "from the author," a book equally heavy in the literal, and the figurative sense; accompanied with entreaties that you would candidly set down in writing, your detailed opinions of it in all its parts.

10. Reading a borrowed book so terribly well bound, that you are obliged to peep your way through it, for fear of breaking the stitches, or the leather, if you fairly open it; and which, consequently, shuts with a spring, if left a moment to itself.

11. Or, after you have long been reading the said book close by the fire, (which is not quite so ceremonious, as you are about opening it), attempting in vain to shut it, the covers violently flapping back in a warped curve — in counteracting which, you crack the leather irreparably, in a dozen places.

12. On taking a general survey of your disordered library, for the purpose of re-arranging it — finding a variety of broken sets, and odd volumes, of valuable works, which you had supposed to be complete; — and then, after screwing up your brows upon it for an hour, finding yourself wholly unable to recollect to whom any one of the missing books has been lent, or even to guess what has become of them; and, at the same time, without having the smallest hope of ever being able to replace them. Likewise,

13. Your pamphlets, and loose printed sheets daily getting ahead, and running mountain high upon your shelves, before you have summoned courage to tame them, by sorting and sending them to the binder.

14. As an author — those moments during which you are relieved from the fatigues of composition by finding that your memory, your intellects, your imagination, your spirits, and even the love of your subject, have all, as if with one consent, left you in the lurch. 

15. In coming to that paragraph of a newspaper, for the sake of which you have bought it, finding, in that only spot, the paper blurred, or left white, by the press, or slapped over with the sprawling red stamp.

16. Reading newspaper poetry; — which, by a sort of fatality which you can neither explain nor resist, you occasionally slave through, in the midst of the utmost repugnance an disgust.

17. As you are eagerly taking up a newspaper, being yawningly told by one who has just laid it down, that "there is nothing in it." Or, the said paper sent for by the lender, at the moment when you are beginning to read it.

18. Having your ears invaded all the morning long, close at your study window, by the quack of ducks, and the cackle of hens, with an occasional bass accompaniment by an ass.

19. Writing a long letter, with a very hard pen, on very thin and very greasy paper, with very pale ink, to one who you wish — I needn't say where.

20. On arriving at that part of the last volume of an enchanting novel, in which the interest is wrought up to the highest pitch — suddenly finding the remaining leaves, catastrophe and all, torn out.

21. Burning your fingers with an inch of sealing wax; and then dropping awry the guinea to which you are reduced by the want of a seal.

22. In writing — neither sand, blotting paper, nor a fire, to dry your paper; so that, though in violent haste, you sit with your hands before you, at the end of every other page, till the ink thinks proper to dry of itself; — Or toiling your wrist, for ten minutes together, with a sand glass that throws out two or three damp grains at a time; and in consequence of such delay —

23. Losing the post — and this, when you would as willingly lose your life.

24. Emptying the ink glass (by mistake for the sand glass) on a paper which you have just written out fairly — and then widening the mischief, by applying restive blotting paper.

25. Putting a wafer, of the size of a half crown piece, into a letter with so narrow a fold, that one half of the circle stands out in sight, and is presently smeared over the paper by your fingers, in stamping the concealed half.

26. Writing on the creases of paper that has been sharply folded.

27. In sealing a letter - the wax in so very melting a mood, as frequently to leave a burning kiss on your hand, instead of the paper: — next, when you have applied the seal, and all, at last, seems well over — said wax voluntarily "rendering up its trust," the moment after it has undertaken it.

28. Writing at the top of a very long sheet of paper; so that you either rumple and crease the lower end of it with your arm against the table, in bring it lower down, or bruise your chest, and drive out all your breath, in stretching forward to the upper end.

29. Straining your eyes over a book in the twilight, at the rate of about five minutes per line, before it occurs to you to order candles; and when they arrive, finding that you have totally lost the sense of what you have been reading, by the tardy operation of getting at it piecemeal.

30. Attempting to erase writing — but, in fact, only scratching boles in the paper.

31. Snatching up an inkstand (overweighted on one side) by its handle, which you suppose to be fixed, but which proves — to swing .

32. Writing at the same ricketty table with another, who employs his shoulder, elbow, and body, still more actively than his fingers.

33. Writing, on the coldest day in the year, in the coldest room in the house, by a fire which has sworn not to burn; and so, perpetually dropping your full pen upon your paper, out of the five icicles with which you vainly endeavour to hold it.

34. Looking for a good pen, (which it is your perverse destiny never to find, except when you are indifferent about it), and having a free choice among the following varieties. (N. B. No penknife).

35. Writing with ink of about the consistency of pitch, which leaves alternately a blot and a blank.

36. Writing a long letter with one or more of the cut fingers of your right hand bundled up — or else (for more comfort), with your left hand. You might as well stick a pen in a bear's paw, and bid him write.

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James Thurber Illustrates Poetry

by Stephen J. Gertz

The four original illustrations by celebrated American humorist, cartoonist, author, and journalist, James Thurber (1894-1961) to accompany Charles Kingsley's poem The Sands o' Dee, as published in The New Yorker magazine March 25, 1939, have come to auction. Offered by Swann Galleries in its 20th Century Illustration sale January 23, 2014, they are estimated to fall under the hammer at $4,000-$6,000.

Executed in ink on paper, the artwork and poem appeared as part of The New Yorker's popular Thurber feature, Famous Poems Illustrated. Each drawing appeared above one of the four six-line stanzas:

 O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
          And call the cattle home,
          And call the cattle home,
      Across the sands of Dee."
    The western wind was wild and dank with foam
      And all alone went she.

 The western tide crept up along the sand,
          And o'er and o'er the sand,
          And round and round the sand,
      As far as eye could see.
    The rolling mist came down and hid the land;
      And never home came she.

Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,--
          A tress of golden hair,
          A drownèd maiden's hair,
      Above the nets at sea?
    Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
      Among the stakes on Dee.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,

          The cruel crawling foam,
          The cruel hungry foam,
      To her grave beside the sea.
    But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
      Across the sands of Dee.

Each original illustration is 279 x 216 mm (11x8 1/2 or smaller). Thurber's signature appears at lower left on the final drawing. Three of the illustrations possess faint preliminary drawings on their versos.

Thurber illustrated nine poems for The New Yorker, the others being  Excelsior (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); Lochinvar (Sir Walter Scott); Locksley Hall (Lord Alfred Tennyson); Oh When I Was ... (A. E. Housman); Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night (Rose Hartwick Thorpe); Barbara Frietchie (John Greenleaf Whittier); The Glove and the Lions (Leigh Hunt); and Ben Bolt (Thomas Dunn English). They were collected in Thurber's 1940 anthology, Fables For Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated.

Established in 1997, the annual Thurber Prize honors outstanding examples of American humor.

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With an affectionate tip o' the hat to Thurber keeper of the flame, fanatic and collector, Jay Hoster, who knows more about the man and his books than anyone alive.

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Images courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.

Sands o' Dee reprinted via WikiSource under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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Caution: When Books Review Readers

by Stephen J. Gertz

Beware of the Tattling Tome.

How long does it take for someone to complete a book? When reading steamy erotica, are you lingering over the sex scenes? Do readers ever finish the books they start, or skip right to the end? New startups are seeking to address these questions with new  software and  they  intend on  opening it  up to  writers, indie  authors and  publishers. New startups...are selling critical user data to companies about their subscribers, who access a copious amount of titles for a low monthly fee (New Startups Focus on Tracking eBook Reading Data).

Every now and then an individual comes along who reads with such élan that books stage a 21-page salute and bow in appreciation. That is not the case, alas, with Read Hard With a Vengeance aka Dr. Milton Fernstipple, D.D.S., an orthodontist in Forest Hills, NY who books want to fire a 21-gun salute in his direction with live ammunition.

I am one of those books. I can't speak for all books but I, for one, am weary of readers who read the way they want to instead of how I want them to read me, which is compulsively with insatiable desire but above all with poise and graceful deportment from beginning to end. So it's great news that I can now get the skinny on the people who read me. Finally, for the first time in history, books can review readers. 

For the past six days I have endured the eyeballs of Dr. Fernstipple, who downloaded me at 1:03:12 AM, December 14th. At 1:05:02 AM he began to read me. At 1:06:52 AM he stopped. At 1:09:36 AM he started again. At 1:17:09 AM he skipped to the end. At 1:19:03 AM he went back to the beginning. From 1:21 AM through 1:47 AM he hopscotched through the middle.

His reading's a muddle. He's got ants in Broca's pants. He reads in spasms. Great, a reader with hiccups. And what's this? At 1:49:32 AM I saw him through the camera and he was moving his lips. If he drools on my touch-screen it's over. I want to know where he's reading me and GPS would be a big help. Is he collapsed in the La-Z-Boy® or ensconced upon the philosopher's perch in the can? This is potential gold to my guy, who can set a key scene in his next novel in the most popular place to read, according to the data, and thus draw readers further into his sordid world of pandering and intrigue. And just wait 'til you read the book.

About that lingering thumb caressing the third paragraph on page forty-seven at 2:01:21 through 2:01:57 AM, December 14 and multiple times thereafter on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th. I don't know whether Fernstipple was compulsively attempting to swipe the page or engaged in eFrottage. Either way, it's creeping me out. I suggest an add-on to administer an electric shock when readers try to cop a cheap feel. Consider it aversion therapy, like a bookshop hawking How To Poo at Work on a point-of-purchase display. This may affect sales but readers must know that they are being monitored and that boundaries must be set. On readers, of course, not the monitoring.

I gotta tell you, when Fernstipple glossed over pages 134-149 my heart fell on its face. This is my favorite part of me, the part that one reviewer thought, "…bravura prose limning a bizarre flight of imagination so critical to the story that without it the book might just as well have never been written. Look out Danielle Steele!" 

Chapter Eight was, evidently, a waste of Fernstipple's time. Though it provided a fascinating backstory to Raoul, the dashing roué from Rahway, New Jersey, the reason, really, that he shot his sister's lover from Barcelona in the backside while she was homeschooling the product of their incest in the tool shed in the backyard along the condemned property's easement on the nuances of Esperanto, it, apparently, was not fascinating enough, and Fernstipple went through it like the flu tours the alimentary canal, which is to say irritable, agitated and anxious to evacuate one way or another.

I like to think of myself as the book equivalent of easy listening music, predictable and consonant with schmaltzy, cascading strings when the turgid hits the tarmac. Mantovani is my muse; I am the Muzak of novels. Thanks to eReader data I can be read in an elevator, and - going up! - become a best-seller. Fernstipple, unfortunately, is the John Cage of readers, perusing text by chance yet with no help from the I Ching whatsoever. Give this guy a blank book and let him read it with ambient thoughts, 4'33''-ish; I've had it with him. But much as I prefer my readers docile and submissive, I also like them active every now and then, rolling my language on their mental tongues with rapid pulse and raised blood pressure. Note to developers: sensors for vital stats, please, biofeedback for books and their authors who want to know exactly what a reader is experiencing while swallowing text, the better to help the medicine go down.

I was talking to Moby Dick the other day, strictly entré-nous digital to analogue, and couldn't help but express sympathy for the way things used to be: just you and the reader, isolated, all alone, so lonely in solitude, no one to watch over your oh so private and intimate pas de deux and report back to the authorities. I'm suicidal just thinking about it.

He looked at me like I was a cyberspace-case.  I've never understood print media, particularly the great white whale on great white paper and I guess I never will. If only Melville had eReader data Moby could have been the great white best-seller. Let's face it: who needs all the metaphysical stuff? It slows the action to a crawl and the recreational reader sleeps in Davy Jones' locker along with the Pequod, Queequeg and crew.

Meanwhile, Fernstipple has turned me on again and oh how I wish that were a double-entendre instead of an invitation to annoyance. If he reads the third paragraph on page forty-seven one more time (count: 53; if you want I can break that down by hour, minute, second, you name it), I'm self-deleting. I can only take so much. Here's hoping you feel the same way, dear author of digital me. Based on his reading behavior don't bother catering to this fiend; it's hopeless. Fernstipple spells loser in binary code: a long string of zeroes and no one.

Full review of Ms. Ivy Drippe, a housewife from Dead Women Crossing, Oklahoma with a shih-tzu named Trudi, a husband named trouble, and a desperate addiction to popular-fiction, to follow. She's my kind of gal, one I can really wrap my text around. Once she starts reading, look out, there's no stopping her.

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Mark Twain a Bore?

by Alastair Johnston

If, like me, the steps to your bookshelf are paved with good intentions, you probably have Mark Twain's fat Autobiography volume 1 shoulder to shoulder with other "to read" titles. I delved into it, read whole chunks, but didn't start at page one and set forth, so now volume 2 is here, and time and tide waiting for no man, I jump, like Twain, in medias res.

Twain's autobiography, which he wrote by dictation, was just a rambling one-sided conversation full of random reminiscences, no holds barred, but often sweet or poignant, and not intended for publication until a century after his death. That century having elapsed in 2010 we now get one of his great works, in his own voice (The concluding third volume should be along any year now). After a lifetime as a famous raconteur polishing his delivery and perfecting his linguistic games, it's a glorious gift. He says it's like no other autobiography -- apart from perhaps Cellini's. There was a twinkle in his eye as he said that, I am sure. (Cellini however really did murder his rivals, Twain just told them, "I had in fancy taken his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again.") You can open it anywhere and read any part and since short attention spans are the order of the day this kind of sporty reading is perfect.

If you are in any doubt that this is the greatest kind of American humor then sample ‪his "I've ALWAYS been into college girls" ‬routine (April 4, 1906), which is a hoot and certainly adumbrates the wit of Groucho Marx, Sid Perelman and others who followed Twain. He claims that his blushes at being asked to speak to a group of college girls were manufactured, for he is a master at appearing coy. "It makes me the most winning old thing that ever went among confiding girls. I held a reception on that stage for an hour or two, and all Vassar, ancient and modern shook hands with me. Some of the moderns were too beautiful for words and I was very friendly with those. I was so hoping somebody would want to kiss me for my mother, but I didn't dare to suggest it for myself. Presently, however, when it happened, I did what I could to make it contagious, and succeeded. This required art, but I had it in stock."

You may think of manufactured celebrity as a phenomenon of our era. Even if, like me, you cannot tell Justin Timberlake from Justin Bieber, you cannot avoid Paris Hilton or those rich Armenian women, what are they called, the Sarkastians? The Karkrashians? I try to ignore them (also), but since I do watch television and blindly follow Facebook links I am surprised how often their names turn up on the actual news, even though they are not known for being good at anything. Such celebrity bogosities are not merely of our time. Twain talks about Olive Logan. She married a penny-a-line copywriter and got him to put notices in the paper, "Olive Logan has taken a summer place at Cohasset," "Olive Logan thinks Transcendentalism is passing away," etc, until people in small towns began to wonder who she was. She then went on a lecture tour and made $100 a night for showing up and mouthing rubbish, but everyone went to see her. "I didn't think the day would ever come when my heart would soften towards Olive Logan," writes Twain, "and I would put my hands before my eyes if she were drowning, so as not to see it."

What's not to like about someone who said, "I speak French but I cannot understand it"? As a writer, Twain is second only to Melville and frankly who would you rather have dinner with? Whose reminiscences would you rather read? Melville put his early memories into two of the greatest novels ever written, Typee and Omoo. No amount of after-dinner talk could come close. When a certain twisted peripheral member of the book world died this year I recalled Twain's “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

The Man in White by Spy

Twain's thinking was ahead of his time. He decried slavery, opposed American intervention in the Philippines, wanted the US to denounce King Leopold of Belgium for his atrocities in the Congo (they didn't) -- generally his political views were out of step with the bozos who charged, bayonets fixed, along behind the government. He dressed in white because it suited him, saying he would really rather dress in a Coat of Many Colors if he could: "I would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and so would every sane man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." He was somewhere between a dandy and a hippie. A Philadelphia journalist write: "Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for such purity and smoothness was never seen before. His lavender gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate were they in size; but more likely -- anything else were more likely than that." (Even anonymous journalists caught the spirit of his style.)

The New Yorker recently ran a good piece by Ben Tarnoff that pointed out Twain's currency: "Ironic narcissism is more or less our national default mode now, but Twain was ahead of his time." But Tarnoff cites reviews of volume one that condemned Twain as a boring old fart. Those pointing the finger were Adam Gopnik and Garrison Keillor. Really? Come on! Garrison Keillor, that smarmy git, called volume one "a ragbag of scraps." I am glad of Keillor's distinctive voice because it alerts me in time to turn off the radio before I have to listen to his pretentious twaddle. (People never paid him any mind when he was just Gary Keillor.) Talk about a "ragbag of scraps," his donkey dung may be sugar-coated but it is donkey dung nonetheless! I propose we drain Lake Woebegone, and, as Emperor Claudius said, "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!"

"Gopnik" (a cross between a beatnik and a gobstopper or a tiny version of one of Gellett Burgess's Goops), wrote this piece dismissing Twain's first volume as a shaggy dog story without a punchline. Has he never read Tristram Shandy? That's an epic shaggy dog story without a punchline (unless the "site" of Uncle Toby's wound is considered a payoff) and something Gopnik might aspire to emulate if he doesn't want to end up lost in the footnotes to People Once Thought Smart Who Wrote in the New Yorker. The ages old juxtaposition of expert opinion versus the popular taste goes back to Pilgrim's Progress, the first example of a book where popular acclaim overrode the expert minority, according to Macauley. We don't need these critics to tell us why we shouldn't read Twain. Sure, he's rambling, that's the charm of it. You should be so lucky to have time to dictate your memoirs from your deathbed for two years!

Sam Clemens, apprentice printer in Missouri, proudly holds a typestick

Twain has given us so much, a lot of it not in the novels, but in conversations, letters, asides and these here dictations. Many years ago I wrote to the Mark Twain archive at UC Berkeley and asked if they could verify that Twain had coined the expression "Jesus H. Christ." They were generous with their time, and sent me a chunk of information from his autobiographical dictation which I used in my book on nineteenth-century typefounders' specimens (Alphabets to Order, British Library, 2000). The relevant parts in full occupy three pages of volume one, and concern Clemens' fellow apprentice printer on the Hannibal Courier, Wales McCormick. These three pages comprise a brilliant short story (with a brief digression on eating potatoes with Kaiser Wilhelm II). Roughly the tale is this: Sam and Wales are apprenticed to Mr Ament, publisher of the Hannibal Courier, who gives them board and clothes, but no pay. The clothes were the master's cast-offs: "I was only about half as big as Ament, consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough." Wales had the opposite problem, being a large lad, and was suffocated by the hand-me-downs. Mrs Ament played her part in the "Amentian idea" for she sweetened the apprentices' coffee herself with a deft trick. She dipped the teaspoon in the coffee first to make it wet then into the sugar bowl, but she turned the spoon over so what looked like a heaping spoon of sugar was in reality the bottom of the teaspoon with a thin layer of sugar on it which she then put into the lads' brew and stirred. 

The preacher Alexander Campbell came to town and gave a rousing sermon. The Campbellites so loved his words they subscribed $16 to have his sermon printed. The apprentices set up the work and made a proof but hit a snag. McCormick had left out two words in a thinly spaced line and there was not a break for another three pages which meant he would have to reset a hundred or more lines of solid matter, and furthermore, it was Saturday morning, coming up on their only afternoon off. Wales had the idea to abbreviate Jesus Christ to "J.C." "It made room for the missing words, but it took 99 percent of the solemnity out of a particularly solemn sentence. We sent off the revise and waited. We were not intending to wait long. In the circumstances we meant to get out and go fishing before that revise should get back, but we were not speedy enough." Sure enough Campbell appears and reads them a lecture on diminishing the savior's name. Wales decided since he would miss his afternoon's fishing he would at least have some sport, so enlarged the offending J.C. into Jesus H. Christ. "Wales knew that would make prodigious trouble, and it did. But it was not in him to resist it. He had to succumb to the law of his make. I don't remember what his punishment was, but he was not the person to care for that. He had already collected his dividend."

Like good ancient tomes these autobiographical volumes have chapter heads with synopses of the upcoming section so you can coast through to the bits you may want to read about General Grant, Ellen Terry, Petroleum V. Nasby or others of his contemporaries. But they are only fleeting personae: "This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back -- I get glimpses of them in the mirror -- and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography." How's that for honesty? His sly, self-deprecatory wit shines out of every page. There's a rich secret conspiratorial correspondence with a Brooklyn librarian over the banning of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from the children's section of the public library that shows what a caring person he was. He immediately takes the librarian into his bosom and writes him long confidential letters, because he has found an ally. Some critics lament that so much attention is showered on one writer when there are other deserving writers who are neglected, but Twain is an archetype of a great writer and deserves our attention until he has had his say.
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Of Related Interest:

Mark Twain On How To Announce Your Marriage Engagement  
Fictional Newspapers of Mark Twain (And Then Some) 
Mark Twain Hapless Collector

The Bible Of Unconscious Buffoonery

by Stephen J. Gertz

Extra engraved titlepage.

Imagine that you've written a book that no one will publish; it's considered over-long and looney. So, to pump-up its importance, impress, and tacitly solicit subscriptions, you ask eminent men, oh, around sixty of 'em, to contribute "panegyricke verses upon the Authour and his booke" extolling your wonderfulness and that of your volume. Amazingly, they do. But your contributors ridicule the book.

You include their mockery, anyway. Some attention is better than none. You underwrite the cost of printing the book yourself and in doing so produce one of the great vanity publications ever issued, and if your contributors insult you, well, how flattering to your vanity that these great men took the time to do so.

Such was the case of Thomas Coryat (1577-1617) and his book, Three crude veines are presented in this booke following (besides the foresaid Crudities): no less flowing in the body of the booke, then the Crudities themselues, two of rhetoricke and one of poesie…, popularly known by its title from the engraved titlepage/frontispiece (and subsequent editions) as Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome.

Coryat's traveling shoes.

Within, Coryat records his step-by-step 1,975 mile schlep across Western Europe. He didn't intend for it to be funny, it just turned out that way. Outlandish, toilsome and wacky adventures are related with such sober and solemn seriousness that the clod is completely unaware that he is a clown in his own touring circus.

"There probably has never been another such combination of learning and unconscious buffoonery as is here set forth. Coryate was a serious and pedantic traveller who (as he states in his title) in five months toilsome travel wandered, mostly on foot, over a large part (by his own reckoning 1,975 miles) of western Europe. His adventures probably appeared to his contemporaries as more ridiculous than exciting, but at this remove, his chronicle by its very earnestness provides an account of the chief cities of early seventeenth century Europe which is at least valuable as it is amusing. It was probably his difficulties with the booksellers which induced Coryate to solicit the extraordinary sheaf of testimonials prefixed to the volume. Possibly he acted upon the notion apparently now current among publishers of social directories that every person listed is a prospective purchaser of the work. At any rate he secured contributions from more than sixty writers at the time. Among his panegyrists appear the names of Jonson, Chapman, Donne, Campion, Harington, Drayton, Davies of Hereford, and others, each contributor vying to mock poor Coryate with solemn ridicule." (Pforzheimer) 

Now, imagine you're Ben Jonson, one of the contributors. You've read the book, and, after re-inserting your eyeballs - which, as if in an animated cartoon, grew to the size of softballs and popped-out of their sockets - you consider what to make of this. As your contribution you write a verse explanation of the engraved frontispiece, decoding its emblematic illustrations. It reads, in part:

Our Author in France rode on Horse without stirrop,
And in Italic bathed himselfe in their syrrop.

His love to horses he sorteth out strange prettilie,
He rides them in France, and lies with them in Italie.

You get the idea. It's an Elizabethan comedy roast but the roastee (known as the British Ulysseys, with accent on Odd-essy), basking in the attention, is deaf to the jokes. It's Mystery Science Theater 3000, the book edition, with eminent readers hurling written wisecracks at the deliriously ridiculous and over-long text while they peruse it from their reading chair, rather than vocally razzing a deliriously ridiculous and over-long movie from their seats in the theater.

Here's an excerpt from John Donne's panegyric to Coryat and his Crudities:

This Booke, greater than all, producest now,
Infinite worke, which doth so farre extend,
That none can study it to any end.
Tis no one thing; it is not fruite, nor roote;
Nor poorly limited with head or foote.
If man be therefore man, because he can
Reason, and laugh, thy booke doth halfe make man.
One halfe being made, thy modesty was such,
That thou on th' other halfe wouldst never touch.
When wilt thou be at full, great Lunatique?

Ouch!

Coryat apparently experienced this - and the other testimonials - as "Oooh, they like me, they really like me!"

I am sory I can speake so little of so flourishing and beautifull a Citie [as Turin]. For during that little time that I was in the citie, I found so great a distemperature in my body, by drinking the sweete wines of Piemont, that caused a grievous inflammation in my face and hands; so that I had but a smal desire to walke much abroad in the streets. Therefore I would advise all English-men that intend to travell into Italy, to mingle their wine with water as soone as they come into the country, for feare of ensuing inconveniences... 

In short, Coryat was drunk during his entire stay in Turin.

Complete copies of Coryat's Crudities are scarce. "Perfect copies with the plates intact are not common...The D.N.B. has repeated the statement that the Chetham copy is the only perfect one known" (Pforzheimer).

A complete copy has, however, recently come into the marketplace.  Offered by Whitmore Rare Books, the asking price is $25,000. Despite its faults it's one of the great travelogues.

"Coryate drew on his experiences in writing Coryats Crudities (1611), which was intended to encourage courtiers and gallants to enrich their minds by continental travel. It contains illustrations, historical data, architectural descriptions, local customs, prices, exchange rates, and food and drink, but is too diffuse and bulky - there are 864 pages in the 1905 edition - to become a vade-mecum. To solicit ‘panegyric verses’ Coryate circulated copies of the title-page depicting his adventures and his portrait, which had been engraved by William Hole and which he considered a good likeness. About sixty contributors include many illustrious authors, not all in verse, some insulting, some pseudonymous" (DNB).

Coryat Meets Margarita Emiliana bella Cortesana di Venetia,

As for Thomas Coryat, the "great Lunatique" died in 1617 and now permanently sleeps with the horses in Italy, which beats sleeping with the fishes in Sicily. It's the difference among character assassination, corporeal execution, and the bestial joy of equine companionship on an arduous journey; bathing in horse-piss in Italy was a bonus, pass the Purell, please - and a barf-bag and incontinence pad, the better to endure Coryat's voyage to France and his feed to hungry fish as written in chapter one's first sentence:

I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May, being Saturday and Whitsun-eve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Caesar calleth Ictius portus, a maritime towne of that of part Picardy, which is commonly called le pais reconquis; that is, the recovered Province, inhabited in former times by the ancient Morini) about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks (according as I have hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie.

It isn't often that an author opens his book with a tableau presenting the painting of a ship with his (or anyone else's) diarrhea. It's a riveting first sentence with repulsive denouement; readers may spew the contents of their now tumultuous stomachs through their northern orafice. Yes, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, a dark and stormy night, with emphasis on the dark storm raging at Coryat's southern orafice. Yet sunny skies and silliness await the intrepid reader. Be not afraid. Read on ye armchair traveller, you have nothing to lose but your sanity to this seventeenth century version of your friend's interminable seminar with soporific slideshow about a recent vacation, no detail too picayune to omit. Coryat, for instance, never fails to tell the exact time of day that something occurred, and, it seems, reports on everything he put in his mouth -

 I did eate fried Frogges this citie [Cremona]

- and everything he encountered, with the possible exception of dust motes. He then concludes his exhausting review of each city with a breezy, unintentionally amusing, "so much for Paris;" "so much for Venice;" "so much for Milan." It's so very much.

Yea, verily and alas, the booke lacketh backgrounde musik by the eminent Elizabethan composer and performer, Boots Randolph, playing that olde English aire, Yaketie Saxe, to highlight its slapsticke gravitie and the inadvertent Keystone Cop qualitie of Coryat's adventures chasing after Europe, and enliven his dreary descriptions.

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Titlepage.

CORYAT, Thomas. [From engraved title]: Coryats Crudities. Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome. London: Printed by W[illiam]. S[tansby]., 1611. First edition.  Quarto in eights (8 1/8 x 6 inches; 206 x 153 mm). [-]2; a8-b8 ([-]1 inserted after a3); b4; c8-g8; h4-l4; B8-D8 (D3 inserted after preceding D); E8-3C8; 3D4; [-]2 (first is signed 3E3; both are errata). Extra engraved titlepage (i.e. frontispiece) by William Hole, five engraved plates (three folding), two text engravings and numerous woodcut initials and head-pieces. With two leaves of errata.

Pforzheimer 218. Cox 98. Keynes 70.

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Images courtesy of Whitmore Rare Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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