Belletrism, Bigotry, and the Bummel: Six old books

I've been reading some older books lately. Here are my quick reviews of:

• How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist
• The Unexpurgated Code
• A Century of Humour
• Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)
• Three Men on the Bummel
• Men, Martians and Machines

With a scattering of ideas that might be tabletop-gameable.

How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist. Gerald Durrell (1984).

I read a bunch of Durrell's zoology-memoir books as a teenager. The prose is purpler than I remember it being! Sometimes that hits (describing a mole as a "furry ingot" is just delightful), but a firmer editor would have cut every other adjective.

Various pat little details also made me suspect that some of the anecdotes have been, shall we say, punched up. I don't think the stories really matter though. If you're reading this book, you're mostly in it for the descriptions of animals, and the author does just fine there. 

The Unexpurgated Code. J. P. Donleavy (1975).

This is a parodic "complete manual of survival and manners". It's infuriating. The premise (providing utterly cynical etiquette advice for social climbers and bastards) is such a good one.

In practise, that deep potential for humour is completely ruined by the violent misogyny (and several other forms of bigotry) which intrude on the text at every turn.

I opened this hoping to find unusual mid-century turns of phrase for a future project. Unfortunately the turns of phrase I found were unprintable. Avoid. 

A Century of Humour. Edited by P. G. Wodehouse (193?).

A book too old to bother printing its own publication date! Wodehouse mentions in the introduction "It is a bare thirty-four years since I started earning my living as a writer", so I infer the book was produced c. 1934–1939.

This is a hefty thousand-page tome that's been sitting on my bookshelves since forever. It's 77 short from almost as many authors, many of them former Punch editors. Notables include A. A. Milne, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wodehouse himself. The front matter strongly implies that the choice to include some of these works was in "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" territory. Yikes!

The book's main weakness is that almost all the authors are middle-to-upper class, highly educated, white male Brits, so there's shall we say a narrow band of perspectives. Anyone from another country or class has their accent written phonetically and that sure ain't the worst of it. William Caine's "Spanish Pride", for example, is a touching story of human goodness. It's followed immediately by another story by Caine that is so revoltingly racist I don't even want to type its title.

But some stand the test of time. My favourites were:

• The Shooting of Shinroe (Somerville & Ross)
• Family Faces (Herbert) 
• Chapters from Three Men In A Boat (Jerome) 
• Biffin on Acquaintances (Graham) 
• The House-Warming (Milne) 
• The Gold Cup (Darlington) 
• The Toy Dogs of War (Emanuel) 
• Soaked in Seaweed (Leacock) 

Almost all the stories are laced with that characteristically British styles of humour: sardonic-to-droll tiptoeing into absurdism with a focus on institutional incompetence.

When it comes to comedy, it's interesting to see what holds up and what is rendered bewildering by age. Take for example The Whole Truth, by Inglis Allen. On just page 734 alone we get

• an adverb for almost every verb: somewhat intricate, tolerantly rapping, looks down jocosely, silently contemplates, excessively jocund, assents with indulgence, taps mysteriously, says protectively, etc
• six instances of 'jocund' or 'jocosely', and a policeman who is described as 'stout' three times
• instead of 'says': observes, observes, observes, inquires, queries, assures, assents, says protectively, inquires, returns, cries, whispers

Pair this eye-rolling writing style with a slice-of-life plot and I have no idea what about the story is meant to be funny. I can only assume that it's some lampooning that's gone over my head.

I take it a a lesson for world-building that big cultural divides can spring up in only a few generations. Even societies that are close to us in absolute terms are full of now-inexplicable tics and customs. Would things be different if supernatural longevity meant a few of these authors were still around, providing a long thread of cultural touchstones and explanatory power? 

Side note: Spare A Penny (F. E. Baily, originally published 1932) uses the phrase "pack a gat", making the phrase at least 50 years older than I would have guessed.

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog). Jerome K. Jerome (1889).

I found the extracts of this book in A Century of Humour so fun that I went and read the whole thing. Three friends go rowing (and towing) up the Thames, with a travelogue itinerary of the towns and villages on the river. It's all wrapped in humorous anecdotes and tall tales.

The language, humour, characterisations, and situations are bizarrely relatable. Half of the jokes feel like they come from Tumblr! But then it hits you with a line like

"There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams."

Or they just find a corpse in the river like that's something you have to deal with now and then.

The dry/wry humour is counterbalanced by loving descriptions of the riverside country that remind me a little of Tolkien.

Jerome has a very endearing trick where his first-person authorial voice tells you something with a false earnestness that is part of the joke.

For example, in Chapter 13 there are some passages roundly condemning steamboats on the river, and talking about the tricks the protagonist uses to deliberately hinder them:

There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch that has the knack of rousing every evil instinct in my nature [...]

They used to have to whistle for us to get out of their way. If I may do so without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the other craft on the river put together.

“Steam launch, coming!” one of us would cry out, on sighting the enemy in the distance; and, in an instant, everything was got ready to receive her. I would take the lines, and Harris and George would sit down beside me, all of us with our backs to the launch, and the boat would drift out quietly into mid-stream.

On would come the launch, whistling, and on we would go, drifting. At about a hundred yards off, she would start whistling like mad, and the people would come and lean over the side, and roar at us; but we never heard them! Harris would be telling us an anecdote about his mother, and George and I would not have missed a word of it for worlds.

and then three chapters later, this turnaround:

At Reading lock we came up with a steam launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley. It is very delightful being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself to rowing. The run would have been more delightful still, if it had not been for a lot of wretched small boats that were continually getting in the way of our launch, and, to avoid running down which, we had to be continually easing and stopping. It is really most annoying, the manner in which these rowing boats get in the way of one’s launch up the river; something ought to done to stop it.

And they are so confoundedly impertinent, too, over it. You can whistle till you nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry. I would have one or two of them run down now and then, if I had my way, just to teach them all a lesson.

 Delightful.

 

Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome K. Jerome (1900).

The sequel to Three Men in a Boat is a bicycle tour of the Black Forest, sporadically illustrated.

It starts off with a promise: "I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages."

The book has sequel problems. There's no dog, for a start! It's less funny and characterful than the first. It also deviates frequently from anecdote into much longer reports about 'what the Germans are like as a people'. This is slightly eerie, given the burgeoning historical context, with passages like:

In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. He disputes, not government, but the form of it. The policeman is to him a religion, and, one feels, will always remain so. 

and 

Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continue, it will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine. But maybe his method has the advantage of producing a continuous supply of good governors; it would certainly seem so.

Overall, where Three Men in a Boat is entertaining and funny, Three Men on the Bummel mostly just feels like one historical English writer's account of a German bicycle journey.

(By the way, a 'Bummel' is only explained in the book's final paragraph. It is a journey "without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand.")

 

 

Men, Martians and Machines. Eric Frank Russell (1955).

I enjoyed this book as a kid and went into the re-read with nostalgia goggles. It's slightly Wodehousian – Russell was British but writing for American readers, and that shines through. The language feels even older than the mid-century, and the descriptions of action are quite convoluted. It's hard to believe I got through this as a child!

I was tickled by the nonsensical futurism. There are friendly chess-playing Martians, tobacco and beef ranches on Venus, and spaceship cargos of watch-making tools and radium needles. The objects 'duralumin gangway' and 'rawhide suitcase' appear in consecutive sentences.

I love this whole aesthetic and might draw on it if I ever make a SF game. Crewmembers carry a needle-ray projector, mud-skis, "thin, multi-purpose oil", a jar of graphite, a microwave radiophone powerpack, and "nutweed pellicules". There are audiojournalists, astro-computators, plate photography, grenade-sized atomic bombs, and pervasive cigarettes. To my surprise, a "quasi-arc welder" turns out to be a real thing.

The book establishes its main characters with a very short story on the delightfully-named spaceship Upskadaska City. The remaining three self-contained chapters are set in an experimental FTL spaceship which provides the framing device (first contact on three different worlds). To the modern eye the protagonists in these situations come across as inept, aggressive, and basically 'would-be colonisers'.

Men, Martians, and Machines hasn't aged well. There's casual and direct racism throughout, plus coded forms: the Martians read in several ways as problematic Asian stand-ins, and newly discovered aliens are immediately labelled "greenies" despite having other notable physiological differences from humans. There are no female characters. Of the two mentions of women in the whole book, one is sexist.

The actual stories aren't particularly good. The ship has a dedicated radio operator... who didn't think to check the radio waves upon landing on a new alien planet. Radio is presented as being centrally important, and then in one story the Martian crew members turn out to have been telepathic all along, saving the day. In fact the Martian and robot characters have such huge advantages that the human crew are rendered narratively worthless. I was also annoyed by Captain McNulty's inconsistent characterisation: he is by turns understated and taciturn, opinionated and bloviating, risk-averse and non-committal, or self-assured and overconfident.

The final story of Men, Martians, and Machines is by far the best. At this point Russell seems tired of his central conceit: many characters resent or regret going on another mission, and several (including the narrator) want to retire. The setup is more of a science fiction horror story. It's a sort of proto-antimemetics trope, and also made me think of Arnold K's false hydra. The weird ending is a high point, tying together a couple of the book's throughlines.

Twentieth Century art and design: Three book reviews

Let's take a trip back in time. 

This year on the blog I've been reviewing books about graphic design (here, here) and books of graphic design (here). Today I have a few more in that category, exploring the graphic design of the twentieth century.

Read on for 'art through precision' by M. C. Escher, vintage typography reclaimed, and a hundred years of science fiction illustrations.

Book 1

 

The graphic work of M C Escher. 1975. Maurits Escher. Translator John E. Brigham.

I was interested in M. C. Escher's work as a child, but haven't thought much about it (beyond one Escher print on my wall) between then and reading this book now. This is a reprint of his 1961 book.

Escher selected and arranged the contents, and wrote the book's introduction (the entirety of its text). In translation, Escher sounds like an old-timey wizard. This isn't helped by him name-dropping his dark arts:

 

Extract from book. "This was in 1946 when I first made the acquaintance of the old and highly respectable black art technique of the mezzotint".

(Copy Editor Brain never turns off; even in five scant pages of text I noticed the weird paragraph breaks, 'lightening' for 'lightning', etc.)

A remarkable commentary 

I want to start with Escher's own explanation of this book.

"Apart from prints 1 to 7 inclusive, all the numbered reproductions in this book were made with a view to communicating a specific line of thought. The ideas that are basic to them often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us."

Escher makes it very clear that his artworks are deliberate visual expressions of specific ideas (these come across as mathematical ideas to the modern viewer/reader, but he shies away from the word). He takes pains to describe how and why each piece develops the idea. So when, for example, he talks about infinity, it's not in a vacuous or emotive way, but in very specific and grounded terms, of nadir and horizon and reduction and proportion and geometry and limits. I've actually never seen art explained so clearly before, and I found it very endearing.

The process of artistry

Escher says he finds as a mature artist that an artwork comes about in two phases. First there is a lengthy, difficult visualisation and numerous attempts to get a detailed concept sketch right. "After this, to my great relief, there dawns the second phase, that is the making of the graphic print; for now the spirit can take its rest while the work is taken over by the hands."

Manual skill has been sublimated and the toughest work that remains is deciding on its application. 

It's slightly melancholy to read Escher casually mentioning the secrets of what might as well be lost arts for most people – specifics of woodcut printing, hand-etching mezzoprints, etc – in a way he clearly expects his reader will be familiar with.

 

 

So yes this book is absolutely fascinating, for reading as much as viewing.

The commentary also achieved its goal, in helping me understand some Escher works I've seen before but not comprehended (or perhaps only appreciated the artistry without realising there was something to comprehend). For example:

This print explores the use of 2D artworks to denote 3D objects and the fact that there's no true way to experience 2D in our 3D world. Escher depicts three shapes. The first is a sphere. It rests atop the second, a reinterpretation as a 2D form giving the illusion of a sphere, made paper-thin and folded in half to reveal the deception. One of its edges rests (as if it really were the lower half of a sphere) atop the third, another reinterpretation as a 2D image shown in perspective resting on a flat surface.

In summary

A really enjoyable book. I got far more out of it than I expected to.

Also there's a vein of TTRPG inspirations here, e.g.:

 

When Escher's work enters the public domain in ~2043, it's going to be a huge boon to indie RPG and art zine scenes.

 

Book 2

 

 

Vintage typography & signage. 2018. Frank H. Atkinson, Charles J. Strong, & L. S. Strong.

I've used these reviews to vent about textual errors before. Finally, an exception: this book is completely without typo. How does it accomplish this? It has only a single paragraph of text.

The remaining 120 pages are all dedicated to recreations of various signs, illustrations, and typefaces from the early 1900s.

The original sources are two books, Frank H. Atkinson's Sign Painting (1900) and Strong's Book of Designs (1917). I don't understand why this information isn't given up front in the aforementioned single paragraph of text. The book just says "two rare, early-twentieth-century sources" and relegates the titles to the tiny legal text in the front matter. It feels faintly distasteful. On the other hand, only the three twentieth-century artists are credited (L. S. [Lawrence Stuart] Strong is Charles Strong's son; their Book of Designs is a collaboration).

Most of the examples are in black and white, with a few decorative initials and full page illustrations rendered in colour. Stylistically, the examples are all either 19th-century traditional signwriting or distinctly Art Nouveau.

It was pretty easy to chase down the source texts for comparison: Sign Painting and Strong's Book of Designs are both archived.

In summary

I wonder what the process of cleaning up the originals for republication was like. On the one hand, they certainly appear to be in a smooth modern format. Are they vectorised, manually or with an automatic tool? Or is the publisher having access to the original printing plates sufficient to produce nice crisp copies that you can't get from archives of old original print copies?

I find it notable that no additional artist or author involved in publishing this modern edition is credited. I'd hesitate to call it a cash grab, but this isn't a high-effort book. It's a good resource for works from the specific era. Some of the examples were interesting enough that I've downloaded copies of the original sources from archive.org for inspiration or use.

Book 3

 

100 years of science fiction illustration. 1975. Anthony Frewin.

The photo above is my battered old copy of this book, often flicked through but never read cover-to-cover. It covers the 1840-1940 period. The writing is quite editorial in tone, with a Britishness that occasionally comes through when cross-examining twentieth century American writings about the state of the art in science fiction.

 

Amazing Stories

 

Tracing the origination of science fiction

There's no hard line to be drawn at the start of the SF era, and author Anthony Frewin's choice to begin with the work of Grandville in the 1840s is in a sense arbitrary, especially since the book follows it with a 40-year gap before including the works of Robida.

When tracing the genre's roots and trying to establish when it really became an entire new category, Frewin credits John W. Campbell as having "moulded" all of SF to come. Magazine editor Hugo Gernsback takes some knocks in the process:

"Gernsback (1884-1967) may not have been the 'Father of Science Fiction' as so often has been claimed, but that he made a substantial contribution to the development of the genre no one could deny. To say that he gave SF an almost universal popularity at the cost of castrating its literacy is not far from the truth."

Frewin calls Gernsback's prose "bereft of sensitivity, devoid of humour, pedestrian in the extreme, and evincing enthusiasm for nothing more than the most abject of gadgets".

From the sample included I have to agree Gernsback's writing was unimpressive. It also taught me that in the 1920s we almost settled on the term "scientifiction" instead of "science fiction":

 

Regarding science fiction artistry specifically, Frewin notes that the work of Frank R. Paul as a magazine cover artist would come to characterise all SF work for "forty years" [1927-1946].

Trends, critiques, and content

Frewin traces the rise of science fiction chronologically, era by era and artist by artist, with an understandable focus on the magazine industry where most of it was happening. He generally doesn't withhold criticism – "The turtle-men are ill-executed and of little consequence" is a great line, doubly so out of context.

He has a number of other bangers, such as referring to 1938 as the year SF technology stops looking like "the inside of a radio set". And on changes in SF and publishing trends: "Today's format is tomorrow's doormat".

For my purposes though, the text was a bit judgey without always having strong explanatory power; I would have preferred more focus on why Frewin thinks some work or other is "insipid". 

100 years of science fiction illustration was published in 1975, of course. The editorial tone could have been a lot worse. Instead, Frewin comports himself well, calling out xenophobia, the depredations of war, and narrowness of writers' assumptions.

The book reproduces tons of neat images. There's lot of technical proficiency on display, all with that instantly recognisable twentieth century science fiction feel.

Errors

100 years of science fiction illustration feels a little amateurish in production, perhaps appropriately given so much of its subject matter is about grasping blindly at new concepts. The book layout is odd. The paragraphs have neither indents nor spaces, making it hard to tell where they start. Many paragraphs end in ellipses, for all that the text lightly mocks this practise several times.

The choice of a typeface with fine lines means that when printed white-on-black, commas turn into full stops. For example:

And there are lots of outright mistakes in the copy. Entire repeated lines. Misspellings, often consistent ("canon" and "apocolyptic" throughout). Missing spaces. An arbitrary mixture of italics and quotes for titles, and at least one mis-titled story.

In summary

 

This book delivers just what you would expect from the premise. I'm not at all well-versed in science fiction history, so it's possible it has omissions, but the text felt comprehensive and thoughtful and the illustrations were very engaging.

 

Relevance to my 'learn about graphic design' goals

I'm enjoying expanding my art analysis palette. It's good to take a closer, deeper, and more systematic look at types of artwork that feel familiar but only from having seen instances in passing.

Tune in next time for a study in highs and lows when I look at Graphic Design for Dummies!