Second-hand Bookshops Research Articles

In Memoriam

Throughout the long nineteenth century, individuals engaged in rituals of mourning to help deal with loss and grief. Objects were vitally important to Victorians and Edwardians as commemorative artefacts that clearly embodied the deceased and acted as a stand-in for their lived presence. For many people, books served as secular relics, with the safe confounds of the endpapers used to document the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, express feelings of anguish, or pass down books informally to other family members. Despite the high cultural value of these inscriptive marks, they have been surprisingly overlooked by researchers. Thus, this article is the first to shed light on these types of inscriptions in Britain (1870–1914), using a small dataset collected from a secondhand bookshop. Applying a combination of archival research and textual/multimodal analysis, I discuss the ways in which inscriptions helped individuals to manage loss, provided protection and therapy, and enabled relationships between the deceased and the bereaved to be maintained. I also draw attention to an inscriptive practice — the in memoriam inscription — that appears to have been predominantly used by the working and lower-middle classes. Overall, I argue that book inscriptions should be given equal importance to other relics of death, such as hair jewelry and memorial cards, as they were heavily embedded in broader rituals of mourning and served as aids in the process of grieving.

The Dilemma of Teaching in the Digital Era: Artificial Intelligence. Risks And Challenges for Education

In the digital era, a new dilemma is beginning to take shape in the mind of every teacher: Is teaching still necessary? The question has been a concern since 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at the Centre Européen de Rechérches Nucleaires in Geneva, laid the foundations for the World Wide Web (www). Shortly after the emergence of the World Wide Web, desired information could be accessed with a click, which contributed to a rapid decline in the frequency of visits to libraries, second-hand bookshops, or reading clubs. The issue of AI is viewed here from the perspective of the dangers observed, including addiction, the impact on personal data security, the increase in the digital divide, and the loss of various abilities or competencies. It can be seen that "This generation will no longer have their heads filled, they will navigate the net, cheerful and inventive, sheltered from wars and poverty" (Blais, Gauchet, and Ottavi, 2019). From a pedagogical perspective, our concern is to outline possible directions of action that can help us effectively cope with the challenges posed by the use of AI in teaching-learning activities.

The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas

Reviewed by: The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas Gill Ballinger The Lost Books of Jane Austen. By Janine Barchas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2019. xvi+284 pp. $35. ISBN 978–1–4214–3159–8. It is not unusual for Jane Austen scholars to own multiple editions of her novels—six Oxford World’s Classics, a nearly thirty-year-old birthday present, sit alongside [End Page 116] many other versions of her fiction on my bookshelves—but Janine Barchas possesses an unusually large number. She has found a remarkable number of cheap Austen paperbacks by scouring second-hand bookshops, eBay, and other places. These texts, alongside those of other collectors, have inspired her to rethink common assumptions about Austen, and form the basis of her fine new monograph, The Lost Books of Jane Austen. The book is her second on Austen; her first, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), asserts that the writer used real-life surnames and places in her fiction in culturally specific ways. This second monograph on Austen is another ground-breaking work: by proving that ‘before [Austen] was great, she was popular’ (p. xv), Barchas encourages readers to rethink the writer’s reception history in her revisionist argument that cheap versions of the fiction made Austen a popular novelist, not the exclusive writer the expensive editions might suggest. The Lost Books of Jane Austen provides an exhaustive history of inexpensive nineteenth- and twentieth-century reprints of Austen’s novels in Britain and beyond, showing how the writer’s popularity with ordinary readers led to her canonicity. The book is beautifully illustrated with many reproductions from the cheap works Barchas discusses. The Introduction suggests that the standard bibliographers have told only a partial version of the published works, since they do not include the cheap reprints that Barchas is interested in. Each chapter considers a different aspect of these lost books, and they are interspersed with vignettes detailing individual editions and owners. The first chapter examines the existence of paperback Austens in Britain and America from the 1840s to the 1940s. Barchas demonstrates that in Britain, from 1847 onwards, Austen’s novels appeared very cheaply, selling at railway stations from one to two shillings; by the end of the Victorian period, they were published for as little as a penny, making her ‘the People’s Jane’ (p. 44). In the second chapter, Barchas reveals that a Lever Brothers version of Sense and Sensibility was one of several prizes given to working- and middle-class consumers in the 1890s for collecting soap wrappers. This and subsequent chapters disclose that stereotype plates were passed between publishers to create different, cheap versions of essentially the same editions. In the third chapter, Barchas examines how reprints of Austen’s work have been associated with religion in Britain in the nineteenth century and America in the early twentieth: for example, her novels were given as prizes in Sunday schools. Chapter 4 considers the cover illustrations of cheap Austens in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from fine art to stills from film adaptations. The final chapter, on pink Austen, proves how she becomes increasingly marketed for women in Europe and America from the 1940s onwards. The vignettes give a personal dimension to these lost books: owners are predominantly British, and the final one detailing twelve-year-old Annie Munro’s school attendance prize of Northanger Abbey is particularly touching: this working-class girl died of diphtheria, most likely after giving the book to her sister Florence and inscribing her name on the beloved copy before her death. This is the only record of truly working-class owners; the other vignettes detail more genteel readers, for [End Page 117] example the rich Charlotte Mills and titled Lady Isabella St John. Given that the book argues forcefully for Austen’s democratic reach, it might have been beneficial if Barchas had been able to find a larger number of working-class owners for these vignettes. Overall, this is an excellent, pioneering book that offers irrefutable evidence that the Victorian public read Austen, contrary to the claim of...

Vladimir Alexi‐Meskishvili (1941–2021)

Vladimir Alexi‐Meskishvili (1941–2021)

Was It for This the Clay Grew Tall?

Irresolute Clay: Shaping the Foundations of Modern Environmental Law. By RICHARD MACRORY [Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020, ISBN 9781509928118, hardback, 189 pp, £25] When I was a law student at Cambridge in the 1970s, I developed the habit of browsing second-hand bookshops, of which there was then no shortage in Cambridge, for legal biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. This pastime continued through to my early years as a Cambridge lecturer. I amassed quite a collection, almost all of which have over the years found their way back into the charity shops which had become the successors to the second-hand book shops. In truth, their value was pretty limited. They were often rather sycophantic portraits of legal luminaries or judicial monsters such as Norman Birkett, Marshall Hall, Lord Goddard, etc, depicting a legal landscape that had already largely passed into history by the time I acquired them. The least valuable by far tended to be the autobiographies or memoirs, which were generally of much less interest to the reader than to the author. I recall one rather dire read entitled Jottings of an Old Solicitor, which was essentially a catalogue of less than interesting cases and anecdotes.1 A much more engaging biography was that of Sir George Lewis, the Victorian and Edwardian celebrity solicitor who practiced from Ely Place in Holborn and numbered royalty among his clients.2 There, however, more of the interest lay in his extra-legal life. At Ely Place, Sir George and Lady Lewis met ‘tout le monde’ as described by his biographer, his house thronged with painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, writers, lawyers, politicians, where the establishment and Bohemia were thrown together. Lewis was depicted in a fine portrait of 1892 by John Singer Sargent, one of his regular guests.

S.I. Vavilov — Reader of Soviet Literature

The article analyzes the diary records of the outstanding Soviet physicist, Academician and President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov (1891—1951), dedicated to his reader’s perception of contemporary Soviet literature. Widely-read S.I. Vavilov collected his private library of 37 thousand volumes; he regularly visited bookstores, mainly antiquarian and second-hand bookshops. Despite the prevailing interest to the old books, S.I. Vavilov knew Soviet literature, used its images in his popular science works (S.A. Yesenin) and diary characteristics (I. Ilf and E. Petrov). The few diary entries with the assessments of the works of Soviet writers (A.N. Tolstoy, A.E. Korneychuk, K.I. Chukovsky, A. Bely, A.K. Vinogradov, V.V. Veresaev, M.A. Bulgakov, etc.) most commonly demonstrate critical attitude to them. It was defined by both his classical aesthetic preferences, formed in his youth on the material of Russian literature of the 19th century, and by his unflattering attitude to the Soviet reality, which Academician did not show publicly, allowing just certain statements in his private diaries. The generally negative perception of Soviet literature indicates that, contrary to the claims of some researchers, S.I. Vavilov was not a Stalinist and was quite sceptical of the socialist reality.

Mirrors, Sickrooms, and Dead Letters: Wharton’s Thwarted Gothic Love Plots

I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London.—Virginia Woolf (74)Recently, a book missing from Wha...

The secondary book market in Poland

The text is a concise outline of the functioning of the secondary book market in Poland, which was shaped on the basis of the network of public and private secondhand bookshops, which operated before 1989. This market includes the institutions and processes that are linked to turnover of already produced and introduced at least once in trade assortment of antiquarian bookshop, or otherwise – any library materials that have been previously sold or issued by the widely understood manufacturer. Although most of the objects that are the subject of this trade are books, but next to them the same product range includes all library materials, also manuscripts, official documents etc. Today, the market is developing in three areas – stationary institutions (antiquarian bookshops), extramural (booksellers and other forms of occasional trade) and the Internet. The analysis of those phenomena was based on press reports and the Internet, broadly defined market offer observations, and interviews with the participants, carried out through several years, especially in the period of 2012–2015, when I made a research program NCN no. 2011/03/B/HS2/03908.

A hazai műkereskedelem tipológiája és térbeli jellegzetességei Budapest példáján

A műkereskedelem hazánkban mindmáig a kiskereskedelem kevésbé feltárt szegmensei közé tartozik. Ugyanakkor a téma aktualitását igazolja, hogy bizonyos társadalmi rétegek jelentős összegeket fordítanak műtárgyak vásárlására és fektetik be felhalmozott jövedelmük egy részét antik és kortárs vagyontárgyakba. A műtárgypiacon számos galéria, aukciósház és régiségbolt jelenik meg, és az antikváriumok is fontos résztvevőknek tekinthetők.Jelen tanulmány célja a budapesti műkereskedelem klasszifikációja és térbeli sajátosságainak bemutatása. A primer adatgyűjtésre épülő kutatás a fővárosi műkereskedéseket vizsgálja, saját terepi megfigyelésekkel és félig strukturált interjúk elkészítésével. Az üzletek és kereskedőházak elhelyezkedésének megjelenítése és elemzése térinformatikai szoftver alkalmazásával történt.A műtárgypiac szereplői különböző típusokba sorolhatóak a profil, az értékesítés helye, az árpolitika és a kínálat alapján. Megfigyelhető, hogy a galériák és aukciósházak Budapest legelegánsabb hagyományos bevásárlónegyedében helyezkednek el, a másodlagos bevásárlózóna jellemzően az antikváriumoknak és a régiségboltoknak ad otthont. Az egyes típusok térbeli elkülönülése számos tényezővel magyarázható: a bérleti díjak nagyságával, történeti előzményekkel, agglomerációs előnyökkel.

Browse: The World in Bookshops

standing behind him, tried to calm him down, but Thomas was yelling as loudly as he could. A vein on his temple appeared and started throbbing. “You pigs!” he yelled. “I saw it first! Find your own house! Piss off!” His tirade of insults became increasingly incomprehensible , and the dog’s barking drowned some of it out. But afterward, Wenzel and I swore on our lives that he had called us “a couple of queer wankers” and that we should be put against a wall. Admittedly, Johnny and Nele were skeptical: they didn’t think that he could be that stupid, as such insults would mean immediate exclusion from the East Berlin squatter scene. Only later, when the story ended so sadly, did everyone, including those who weren’t even present, reaffirm that back then at the Plenary Assembly at No. 6 Mainzer Straße Thomas had threatened to kill us, some even said he threatened to gas us, and that he had hurled all kinds of homophobic and misogynistic insults. His yelling attracted a whole crowd of onlookers, and after a few minutes, the plenum was in session with over twenty members. Thomas calmed down and breathed more slowly; Georg rubbed his neck with his massive paw while his other hand held the dog’s mouth shut. We were now sitting on wooden chairs around the big blackboard, and the only thing that calmed me was that Thomas and Georg, in their badly fitting designer jeans and ridiculous leather slippers (unwittingly financed by large department stores), looked even more out of place than we did. Thomas appeared to suspect that after his raging a further defeat was awaiting him, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He pulled himself together while Georg massaged his back and Thomas told the story as it was from his point of view. Months ago, he explained, he had got together a group of youths from around the Memorial Church, who skateboarded on the World Fountain and tapped tourists for money there. Very few of them had a real home, and they were prepared to go east with him. Pickings from begging were slim in the mornings, so they’d taken the train to Friedrichstraße, crossed the border next to the Palace of Tears, and searched the whole quarter for a home. Until one day, when they were just about to give up and return to their shelter in West Berlin with their heads hanging, they were finally saved. That day was one afternoon last week when they saw a courtyard that they had often just walked past without paying it any attention. A paradise of empty houses opened up in front of them. Even the first, somewhat musty left wing opposite the empty Browse: The World in Bookshops Ed. Henry Hitchings Pushkin Press, 2016 Don’t mistake Browse for a collection of breezy tributes to writers’ favorite bookshops. The essays in this little red book are glimpses into the lives of fifteen international writers. Ali Smith opens the collection going through second-hand books in an Amnesty International shop where she volunteers . Postcards, photographs, receipts: “this seeming detritus” we leave behind in our books becomes part of the story in Smith’s hands. As the essay continues, Smith goes deeper, revealing her mother’s influence on her developing appreciation for books. That going deeper occurs throughout, as writers witness the beginning of a revolution (Alaa Al Aswany), recount “how the bookshops of the former Soviet Union became European-style secondhand bookshops and Ukraine itself became a second-hand country” (Andrey Kurkov; trans. Amanda Love Darragh), and take refuge from an India “whose priority of economic growth and individual aggrandizement did not include, and possibly deliberately excluded, an intellectual and literary culture” (Pankaj Mishra). Dorthe Nors ends her essay rescuing Kristin Lavrandsdatter from a box where she’d “buried it alive,” finally reading the book that a bookseller who “understood that he served as literature’s outstretched hand” placed in her grandmother’s hands decades earlier (trans. Misha Hoekstra). In other essays, booksellers are a dealer providing a fix (Saša Stanišić) and the poet Roberto Roversi, who...

Polish Literature in Israel. A Reconnaissance

The article Polish literature in Israel. A reconnaissance is based on archival materials collected during the preliminary research for the book Polish literature in Israel. A lexicon (Karolina Famulska-Ciesielska, Slawomir Jacek Zurek, Krakow-Budapeszt 2012) and is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the history of this literature. The view of it takes into consideration the works of Polish-Jewish writers coming to Palestine before the outbreak of World War II (1939 – emigration of Polish Zionists), during it (1939-1945 – refugees and soldiers who came there with General Wladyslaw Anders’s army), and also after the end of it (1945-1948 – Jews who survived the Holocaust). The article discusses the literary and cultural work of Polish Jews in Israel who came there in three waves (1948-1953, 1957-1959, and 1968-1970) with the emphasis on the role of Polish language periodicals whose editorial staff for several dozen years animated Polish cultural and literary life in that country ( Kronika Tygodniowa , Kronika Izraelska , Kronika , Przekroj , Kurier Powszechny , Iskry , Echo Tygodnia , Przekroj Izraelski , Po Prostu w Izraelu , Od Nowa , and especially Nowiny-Kurier ), and also on libraries, bookshops and second-hand bookshops (“Hasefer”, “Gloria”, “Ksiegarnia Polska” – run by Edmund and Ada Neusteins) as institutions that were significant for promoting Polish literature and culture. Among all the authors who published their works in Polish (there were more than a hundred of them) first of all the names of the most distinguished ones are taken into consideration: Irit Amiel, Eli Barbur, Ruth Baum, Anna Cwiakowska, Henryk Dankowicz, Ida Fink, Anna Garncarska-Kadary, Ignacy Iserleas, Filip Istner, Renata Jablonska, Aleksander Klugman, Kalman Segal, Arnold Slucki, Viola Wein, Stanislaw Wygodzki.

THE LAST FIGHTING TOMMY: THE LIFE OF HARRY PATCH

Possessing a good book, given the increasing costs of books, is becoming more and more challenging. And I am not only talking about the absurd high import taxes levied in South Africa. Hitting a button on Google will get you the relevant title more or less immediately and very virtual (“the age of the brutality of global plastic” [i] ). For some exorbitant fee, you may offload the work. Using one of the digitally available points of global offset, you may order the relevant work at four or five times (or somewhat more than that) its original price via the internet. In countries that for reasons of exploitation or domination of others adhere to the copyright mentality, you may find the work in the original edition at about 10 to 15 times its original price. Being aware and with eyes wide open underpinned with a lot of human energy and the advice of valued friends, you will find a copy of the same work, frequently in a splendid condition, in a second-hand bookshop, the latter usually outside the parameters of city centres. [i] With apology and acknowledgment tendered to Petrus de Kock, friend, colleague, author, philosopher and academic. This book review also greatly benefitted from discussions with another friend and peer, Gert van der Westhuizen (Media 24), journalist and historian.

The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch

Possessing a good book, given the increasing costs of books, is becoming more and more challenging. And I am not only talking about the absurd high import taxes levied in South Africa. Hitting a button on Google will get you the relevant title more or less immediately and very virtual (the age of the brutality of global plastic). For some exorbitant fee, you may offload the work. Using one of the digitally available points of global offset, you may order the relevant work at four or five times (or somewhat more than that) its original price via the internet. In countries that for reasons of exploitation or domination of others adhere to the copyright mentality, you may find the work in the original edition at about 10 to 15 times its original price. Being aware and with eyes wide open underpinned with a lot of human energy and the advice of valued friends, you will find a copy of the same work, frequently in a splendid condition, in a second-hand bookshop, the latter usually outside the parameters of city centres.

Tasting the Ethical: Vegetarianism as Modern Re-Enchantment

There is, as Andrew Rowan dubs it, a "constant paradox" in the way we treat, relate to, and consume animals in our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 4). This paper examines this paradox in relation to the rise of vegetarianism as a new taste and consumer culture in the West. The first part of the paper, drawing upon Bourdieu, argues that vegetarian "taste" is fundamentally a social practice linked to class and gender. It then offers a preliminary theoretical sketch of the sociological drivers and consequences of vegetarianism in latemodernity, drawing on social theory. Having established the theoretical framework, the second part of the paper turns to an empirical analysis of the moral motivations and experiences of a selection of Australian bloggers. The key argument is that the bloggers narrate vegetarianism as a taste practice that entangles self-care with a larger assemblage of non-human responsibility that works to re-enchant a demoralised consumer modernity.

Thomas LaVeist: framing the debate on health disparities

Thomas LaVeist: framing the debate on health disparities

Is cellulose degradation due to β-elimination processes a threat in mass deacidification of library books?

As papers become acidic and brittle over time, libraries apply mass deacidification processes to their collections in order to neutralize acids and deposit an alkaline reserve in the paper. Books commonly treated by mass deacidification have undergone natural aging of up to 150 years. The risk of alkali-induced degradation of cellulosic material upon mass deacidification remains uncertain. In the present study, the extent of β-elimination-type degradation reactions was investigated by comparing deacidified and non-deacidified counterparts, using deacidified library materials and identical issues of non-deacidified books from second-hand book shops. The study dealt with only naturally-aged papers focusing on investigation of immediate effects of mass deacidification rather than a long-term impact. Gel permeation chromatography coupled with carbonyl group labeling gave insight into cellulose chain cleavage as well as into the behavior of oxidized functionalities. Processes occurring under natural aging conditions were compared to those upon artificial oxidation of model pulps. Library books did not show a significant reduction in molecular weight after mass deacidification compared to the non-deacidified controls, which stands in contrast to oxidized model pulps. The models showed a more pronounced loss of molecular weight upon deacidification treatments. A decrease in carbonyl groups other than reducing ends was found to occur. Thus, oxidized functionalities were found to be reactive in mass-deacidification reactions; the different behavior was traced down to particular regions of oxidative damage along the cellulose chains. In general, β-elimination processes did not pose a large risk factor upon mass deacidification treatments of the naturally-aged library material tested.

Presentation of the 2010 Harrell L. Strimple Award of the Paleontological Society to J. S. H. “Joe” Collins

This evening, it is an honor and delight to present to you Mr. J. S. H. Collins, known universally as Joe, who is the 2010 recipient of the Harrell L. Strimple Award. Joe was born within the sound of Bow Bells and brought up in London, and a worse place to develop an interest in field paleontology is hard to imagine. Favorite trips into town as a schoolboy included visits to the British Museum (Natural History) and Geological Museum in South Kensington. When he was ten years old, Joe was presented with his first book on paleontology, Webster Smith's ‘The World in its Past’ (1931). Finally, a school trip to Lyme Regis in 1939 gave young naturalist Joe his first taste of collecting fossils, one he enjoyed. Meanwhile, across the North Sea, Adolf Hitler was (inadvertently) doing what he could to encourage Joe's collecting. Evacuation to a small village near Liphook in Hampshire on the outbreak of war allowed Joe to further pursue his interests in natural history, mainly in entomology. After the war, Joe was in the Royal Navy for 16 days before being discharged ‘visually unfit for naval service’, a strange pronouncement for a man whose descriptions of fossil crustaceans abound with minute observations. Joe then worked for the Wellcome Foundation as an animal technologist in the Immunology and Histopathological departments for 21 years. From 1967 he owned a secondhand bookshop, specializing in natural history, from which he retired in 1989. All the while he was developing his interest in paleontology, and particularly decapod and cirripede crustaceans, the first specimens of which he collected from the Cretaceous Gault Clay in 1947. S.K.D. has been corresponding and working with the awardee since the late 1980s, so he reckons to know Joe's abilities and achievements well. Joe Collins has made an …

Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda Sverker Finnström Neil Kodesh , Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. In 1996, when I was accepted for the Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology at Uppsala University, my intention was to go to the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria and the Kampala area in central Uganda, to study the complex interplay between the cultural and political leadership as it played out in the famous Buganda kingdom. I eventually ended up in war-torn northern Uganda instead, but back in 1996, as I was trying to figure out a more specific research agenda, I found myself scanning the secondhand bookshops of Uppsala, in search for anything that I could find on Uganda. Among other books, I came across a torn first-edition copy of James Frederick Cunningham's Uganda and its Peoples (1905). It cost me some twelve US dollars. This coffee-table-kind-of-book covers most of the then British protectorate, although it focuses, as has been the historical and academic bias ever since, on central Uganda and the indigenous kingdoms under British rule. The so-called tribes of Uganda and their racial characteristics are listed in pseudo-anthropological chapters that turn [End Page 941] sketchier the more geographically peripheral to the capital Kampala they are. In a parallel development, the more geopolitically peripheral, the more primitive the people described are alleged to be. So when John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant famously crossed the Nile on their journey from Buganda to Khartoum, the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead (1960:68) proposes in The White Nile, one of his acclaimed books, " the tribes grew increasingly more primitive; they were back in a region of naked, painted men who carried bows and arrows and who knew nothing of the arts and crafts of Buganda." As I embarked on the reading of Kodesh's book, I was given the opportunity to return to Cunningham's old text. For the dust jacket to Beyond the Royal Gaze, Kodesh borrows a spellbinding photo from Cunningham's book, which turns out to be a beautiful and very smart illustration of his project to reanalyze the historiography of the precolonial Buganda kingdom. His ambition is to investigate healing and the creativity of power, to be able to understand clanship as an organizing tool for community building and collective health. More particularly, Kodesh wants to recognize "the importance of historical visions that lie outside official, courtly histories" (5). Indeed there is a long-lasting bias in the scholarship on what we today call Uganda, where the norm and starting point in the analysis is the royalist and courtly imagination of the politically centralized Buganda kingdom, in Kodesh's terms encapsulated as a " triumphant narrative of centralization and modernization" (5). This scholarly imagination—built on indigenous Ganda mythology, as well as colonial and racist imaginations such as the infamous Hamitic hypothesis—was integral to the creation of the Uganda protectorate. According to the Hamitic hypothesis, anything that resembled civilization in Africa must have been the result of ancient influence from Egypt, and in the prolongation, from Europe. The Buganda kingdom was an example of this. As Kodesh shows, the writing of the history of Buganda was a joint project that brought together in strange unity European missionaries, colonial administrators-cum-ethnographers, and indigenous Ganda intellectuals. The more of a periphery to this project, like the Acholi of northern Uganda where I have worked, the more primitive people were concluded to be. Pioneer colonial administrators of northern Uganda have described the effort to include the Acholi into the protectorate of Uganda as greatly discouraging, because the Acholi seemed to have nothing compared with the political sophistication of the Baganda. In leaving Kampala (and thus Buganda) for the provinces, to [End Page 942] their frustration the administrators found themselves dealing with people who seemed to have nothing that answered to the civilization they had encountered in Buganda. The conclusion was that these primitives in the north of the protectorate urgently needed leadership guidance not only from the British, but also from the protectorate's...

Calling Cards

Calling Cards Thomas F. Dillingham (bio) A Brahms Card Ballad: Poems Selected for Hungarians. John Ridland. Dowitcher Press. http://dowitcherdesigns.com/dowitcherpress. 64 pages; paper, $13.95. The best ballads give us stories of quests. The adventurous youth sets out to find or win a treasure, whether a person (the ideal loved one) or a valued object, sacred or profane. The quest requires journeys through time and space, overcoming obstacles and, most important, providing proof of the hero's worthiness. The title poem of John Ridland's new volume provides a curious modern instance; subtitled "From, for, and to Tibor Frank," the poem retells the quest of the dedicatee to add to his collection of calling cards of famous people, a card from the composer, Johannes Brahms. As a boy, the seeker finds a Brahms calling card in a bookstore, But its price—400 Schillings— Would barely buy enoughFor his mother to sew a dress from Of ruffley Austrian stuff And so, he refrains from satisfying his quest. With a graceful leap, the ballad takes us forty years later to a repeat performance—the same or a similar card would cost as much as his "monthly stipend," and so he looks again and again, choosing self-denial, fails to realize his quest, but plans to continue, at appropriate intervals, visiting "secondhand bookshops / To check the Brahms card prices." As does this pleasing example of a literary ballad, many of John Ridland's poems show the rich interaction of traditional forms with characteristic modern themes and situations. The splendid and wrenching psalmody of "Elegy for My Aunt," the Herrick-like lilt of the ten-line stanzas in "Life With Unkie," the deft control of "My First Villanelle," the clever sestina of "Explosion in the Slat Factory" (about Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 [1912]) all testify to Ridland's commitment to the discipline of the poetic art. They also show the added intensity of emotion or thought subjected to the discipline of strict form. In 1999, John Ridland published his English translation of a greatly revered Hungarian poem, John the Valiant (revised, Hesperus Press, 2004); Sándor Petőfi's nineteenth-century "folk epic," a poem alternating between fanciful adventure and buffoonish comedy, is described as the best-known of all Hungarian poems. Ridland's translation was a result of several visits to Hungary and a testament to his fondness for the nation and its culture. In appreciative, even grateful response, his "selected poems" translated into Hungarian was published in Budapest in 2004. This volume included works selected from nearly fifty years of Ridland's career; the opening poem, "New Zealander," is dated 1956, and the rest of the poems, chosen by Gyula Kodolányi, translated by Kodolányi and five other Hungarian poets, extend into the twenty-first century. The volume contains a variety of poems, but leans heavily toward the elegiac and the literary or artistic. In addition to Ridland's elegy for his aunt and reminiscences of life with Unkie, we find "Last Poem for My Father," the brilliant "The Poet Who Didn't Smoke" (in memory of Hungarian poets Ernő Szép and Miklós Radnóti), and the deeply affecting sequence, "The Little John Poems," in memory of "John Forbes Ridland, 1963-1969"; its conclusion, "Anniversary Elegy," will stand with the very finest short poems about loss of a loved one. (I think of Ben Jonson, of Thomas Hardy, of James Wright.) Along with the elegies are the low-keyed and witty poems of commentary—the tight couplets of "Letter to Huck Finn" (telling him that contrary to rumor and hope, Pap is not dead, and never will be), the self-effacing "On Translating Janos Vitez," a fine example of the authorial trope of modesty, or the clever "Dear Absolute," a missive with dismissive reply. There are also several ekphrastic poems, including the fine evocation of Johannes Vermeer's "The Little Street": Where all is labor, labor may turn art,And through an art like his draw up to love,Straighten bent spines and the bruised knees that jutAgainst the beauty they are remnants of,Before the creaking winter slams them...

Research Trip to North Island in New Zealand : Search for Secondhand book shops with car drive of 2000km

Research Trip to North Island in New Zealand : Search for Secondhand book shops with car drive of 2000km