In praise of the printed book

In praise of the printed book:

 

 

 

 

I was James Bond´s neighbour - almost

There have been many James Bonds, but for me there is only one:

This is my personal favourite Bond music:

PS

As a matter of fact, I have a tiny personal "connection" to Bond. According to Ian Fleming, Bond´s flat was on a little plain-tree´d square off of King´s Road in the Chelsea area of London. John Pearson has placed the flat at 30 Wellington Square.

In the late 80´s and early 90´s I had the privilege to live in one of the Wellington Square Regency terraces, built by Francis Edward in 1830-1832, although it was not number 30. At the time I did not know about the Bond connection. Maybe my neighbour, the German assistant military attaché was then the closest to Bond´s world - if one does not count former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont (Now Baron Lamont of Lerwick) who also lived in one of the houses for some time.

For all James Bond fans - and others as well - a visit to this, the most beautiful of all Chelsea squares is highly recommended!

Wellington Square 30 was the literary home of James Bond

The splendid Belton House - "Rosings" in Pride and Prejudice

Mr. Collins: "Mark the windows. There are 64 in all. 64! And I have it on good authority that the glazings alone originally cost in excess of 600 pounds".

The best ever dramatisation of a Jane Austen novel, the BBC 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice was filmed in many beautiful locations, but the most splendid of them all is Belton House - Rosings Park in the BBC series - in Lincolnshire. The 17th century country house is now a National Trust Property, and open to the public. A must for all friends of Austen and the BBC mini-series.

The National Trust´s concise description of Belton House:

"The perfect English country house, set in its own extensive deer park, Belton was designed to impress.
Built in the late 17th century for 'Young' Sir John Brownlow, with family fortunes founded in law, it is one of the finest examples of Restoration architecture. It was, for centuries, the scene of lavish hospitality.
Opulent décor, stunning silverware, imposing paintings and personal mementos convey wealth while retaining a family atmosphere. Delightful gardens, a luxuriantly planted orangery and lakeside walks ensure Belton is a pleasure to explore all year round".

There is no absolute certainty about the architect of Belton House, but John F. Pile makes this interesting point in his " A History of Interior Design":

"There is no house that can be proved to be by (Sir Christopher) Wren, although tradition suggests that he may have been the architect of Belton house, a handsome mansion near Lincoln".

More information about Belton House:
National Trust
Wikipedia (excellent page!)
Pictures of Belton house

PS

The series is now available on superb blu-ray discs. Highly recommended!





Antique maps

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Nova Delineatto Totius Orbis Terrarum Per Petrum Vander Aa. (18th century)

'Journey all over the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.'
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote (1605-15).

I have always been fascinated by old maps. Their beautifully drawn, hand coloroured details are pleasing to the eye. At the same time antique maps illustrate bygone times in a stimulating way. One also must admire the skill of the famous mapmakers who were able to produce quite accurate maps at a time when there were no GPS or other advanced technical instruments at their disposal. Of course, even the best mapmakers - like Gerard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius - tooks certain liberties, as Mathew Lyons points out in his very readable little book "Impossible Journeys":

"Not content to rely on gossip they picked upon quaysides, or scraps of third-hand information allegedly culled from antique texts, the mapmakers had no ethical problems when it came to inking in areas on their maps that they thought ought to exist. While our understanding of mapmaking would usually be confined to the careful marking of the known, medieval and Renaissance cartographers had a rather more generous conception of their role.They were philosophical geographers. Worse, perhaps, they were theoretical philosophical geographers. They liked to extrapolate, on the basis of fashionable theory, what might be out there, still undiscovered. While some were happy to let unknown coasts stay unmarked - the unbroken lines of peninsulas, points and coves tailing off, like loose threads or trains of thought, in open space - others had no apparent qualms about setting down their ideas and sending them out into the world, as if to say `This is so.´

Lyons goes on to name some interesting examples of early  "creative" mapmaking,  like e.g. Terra Australis Incognita (corresponding to Antarctica), which figured in different forms in many famous maps, although no human being is known to have seen Antarctica before 1820.

Detail from map of the Turkish Empire, 1606

Map of Moscow, 16th century

PS
If you are interested in learning more about old maps, the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin is a good place to start.

The Best After Dinner Stories

On dark and cold winter nights, reading a humorous book can cheer you up. The other night I started rereading "The Best After-Dinner Stories" published by my favourite publisher, The Folio Society. The book, compiled by Tim Heald, is a gem if you are a friend of good old-fashioned British humour.

Here is one of my favourite anecdotes:

The Russians were attempting to set up a spy ring in Wales. A top KGB agent called (of course) Vladimir was told, 'Proceed to Cardiff and take the branch line to Abercvmscwt. There you will meet a man called Jones. You will say to him, "The daffodils are blooming early this year". He will reply, "Yes, but the tulips are late." He will tell you how to set up a spy ring.'

Vladimir finally arrives at Abercvmscwt and asks the  ticker collector, 'Do you know a man called Jones?'. The ticket collector replies, 'Well, it depends which Jones you want. There´s Jones the Bread, Jones the Milk, Jones the Death (he´s the funeral director). In fact, my name is Jones.' 'The daffodils are blooming early this year', says Vladimir. 'Oh', says the ticket collector, 'it´s Jones the spy you want.'

Simple pleasures nr 9: Free audio books

Do you want to listen to Aldous Huxley read his "Bave New World", Hemingway reading a short story or tens of other great books -  for free? Sounds too good to bee true, but actually the outstanding Open Culture site offers all that - and much more. I just finished listening to Jane Austen´s Pride and Prejudice, which has always been one of my personal favourites, also as a video (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle). It is true that many of the audiobooks are read by volunteers, not professional actors, but still, this is a wonderful resource for friends of good literature.

Brideshead Revisited

"Waugh's most deeply felt novel . . . Brideshead Revisited tells an absorbing story in imaginative terms . . . Mr. Waugh is very definitely an artist, with something like a genius for precision and clarity not surpassed by any novelist writing in English in his time."
 New York Times

Best series ever
Washington Post


Evelyn Waugh´s magnificent novel was dramatised by British Granada Television in the early 80´s. The series - altogether thirteen hous of television, shot enterily on location - deservedly became a huge success, and is, at least in my opinion, unsurpassed by any other television dramatisation.

Evelyn Waugh described his novel in a note to Lady Dorothy Lygon (the original model for Lady Cordelia Flyte):

"I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons of sex and drink which, after all, are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays".

Sadly, the technical quality of the complete series discs is not as good as one could wish, but nevertheless, this series is a must for everybody who enjoys watching quality television.

Here is an excerpt from the Granada television production:

Watch a documentary on the making of Brideshead revisited:

Die Buddenbrooks

Today, by chance, I read a review of one of my favourite books, Thomas Mann´s Die Buddenbrooks, the story of  the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family in Lübeck. It is not often that one totally agrees with a reviewer, but in this case it happened:

Remember the time when as a child you could turn round a book after finishing the last page, re-start it right away and enjoy it immensely again and again and again? I thought that was an ability only kids have until I read (and re-read and re-read and re-read and...) Thomas Mann’s Die Buddenbrooks
---
Thomas Mann wrote Die Buddenbrooks at the age of 24, describing the story of his own family in Lübeck. It is his masterpiece and sets the tone and many of the themes for his following works, one of them being the refined and sophisticated artistic attitude opposed to the simple, healthy and pragmatic life facing stand.
Needless to say that I love this book and could go on and on and on about it. I read it about 7 times in the last 15 years, and I’ll definitely read it again. The characters are vividly drawn, their relationships, motivations, thoughts and feelings are viewed lovingly and ironically at the same time, their lives give a deep insight in a changing time and society, and all this is done in an effortless and delicious language (in the German original). If you read just one German classic, this should be it.

Read he whole review here:
http://www.booklore.co.uk/PastReviews/MannThomas/DieBuddenbrooks/DieBuddenbrooksReview.htm

Mann was only 26 when this, his first novel was published in 1901.
First books often turn out to be the best books of a great number of
authors. So it is - at least in my opinion - also in Mann´s case. Deservedly, Buddenbrooks also was the novel that won Mann his Nobel prize in Literature in 1929.

PS
If you plan a trip to Lübeck, Mann´s northern German home city, a visit to the beautiful Buddenbrookhaus museum is highly recommended!

http://die-luebecker-museen.de/de/75/infos.html

In Praise of the Printed Book - and the E-book

New media guru Nicholas Negroponte recently proclaimed the death of the physical book within five years:

The physical book is dead, according to Negroponte. He said he
realizes that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept. But
you just have to think about film and music. In the 1980s, the writing
was on the wall that physical film was going to die, even though
companies like Kodak were in denial. He then asked people to think
about their youth with music. It was all physical then. Now everything
has changed.

Negroponte, fortunately, qualified his death sentence:

By “dead,” he of course doesn’t mean completely dead. But he means
that digital books are going to replace physical books as the dominant
form. His argument is related to his One Laptop per Child Foundation.
On those laptops, he can include hundreds or thousands of books. If
you think about trying to ship that many physical books to the
emerging world for each child, it would be impossible, he reasons.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/physical-book-dead/

I welcome the arrival of new media, and particalarly different kinds of e-books and e-readers. However, Negroponte is probably far too negative about the future of the printed, physical book. Here I share the opinion of the CEO of the publishing giant Random House, Markus Dohle, who thinks that printed books will still dominate "for a long time to come".

The market share for electronic books, even in the United States, will
more likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015. But this development
still represents a huge opportunity for us. It creates new growth. I
meet people in America who say: I started reading again because of my
e-reader -- and so did my children.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,709760,00.html

And I am convinced that here will always be a demand for beautifully produced printed books - the kind of books printed by e.g. the Folio Society in London.

http://www.foliosociety.com/