Alison Flood, of the Guardian, interviews a very knowledgeable book dealer and authority.

Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been “really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of history”. Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the “ultimate library”. No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world.

“I was asking, if you could put together the ultimate library, ignoring the value or the academic significance of the books, what would be on that shelf if you had a time machine and unlimited budget?” he says.

Following up anecdotes, talking to booksellers and librarians and trawling through auction catalogues, he came across stories like that of the 605-page Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein. “If that was on a shelf, what could possibly sit next to it?” he asks. “I mentioned it to a bookseller and they told me about a diary that they’d had, from the 19th century, written by a shipwrecked captain who only had old newspaper and penguins to hand. So Fate of the Blenden Hall was written entirely in penguin blood.”

There’s the American civil war soldier who inscribed his journal of the conflict on to the violin he carried. There’s the memoir of a Massachussetts highwayman, James Allen, which he “requested be bound in his own skin after his death, and presented to his one victim who had fought back as a token of his admiration”. Or the diary of the Norwegian resistance fighter Petter Moen, pricked with a pin into squares of toilet paper and left in a ventilation shaft; although Moen was killed in 1944, one of his fellow prisoners returned to Oslo after it was liberated from the Nazis and found the diary. Or the entirely fabricated book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: its author George Psalmanazar, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned man with a thick French accent, arrived in London in about 1702 and declared himself to be the first Formosan, or Taiwanese, person to set foot on the European continent. (“Obviously no one had been there and nobody knew what Taiwanese people looked like, and he became the toast of high society,” says Brooke-Hitching.)

RTWT

There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 30, 2020

The democrat party left is systematically using its control of the media to fabricate a completely imaginary racist and dangerously violent right-wing movement supporting Donald Trump and poised to initiate street combat at his command.

It’s total bullshit, designed to establish a kind of co-equal guilt and responsibility on the part of Trump and his Republican supporters for all the violence and destruction going on all over the country at the hands of BLM and ANTIFA thugs. This is nothing other than the classic Big Lie. But note how Biden even shamelessly references Kyle Rittenhouse as a case of “White Supremacism.”

Ann Coulter marvels:

After four months of looting, arson, window breaking, vandalism, intimidation, physical assaults, stabbings and shootings by Black Lives Matter and antifa, the first thing on the media’s mind is … getting Trump to condemn “white supremacists”!

It would be as if, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, the League of Nations demanded that FDR condemn American aggression in the Pacific.

Why on earth was Trump being badgered by both debate moderator Chris Wallace and Democratic nominee Joe Biden to denounce “white supremacy”? And why wasn’t Biden ever asked to condemn the nonstop violence by antifa that actually has been consuming the country for more than 100 nights now?

RTWT

——————————

Evita Duffy, at the Federalist:

If Chris Wallace’s goal during Tuesday night’s debate was to deflect from the months of left-wing violence from Black Lives Matter extremists and Antifa and instead blame it on President Donald Trump and his supporters, he did an excellent job.

“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups,” Wallace, the debate moderator, said to Trump. “But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”

Ignoring for a moment that Trump’s criticism of Joe Biden was absolutely warranted and that Wallace asked Trump to condemn white supremacists but did not ask Biden to condemn Black Lives Matter arsonists and looters, the question itself was specious. The violence in Kenosha was spurred by left-wing extremist groups, not white supremacists. We know — because we were there. …

Wednesday it was announced Rittenhouse is pursuing a libel case against Biden and his campaign for the advertisement suggesting he is a white supremacist. Rittenhouse’s attorney, Lin Wood, said he plans to “rip Joe into shreds.”

Not only was Wallace’s debate tactic dirty, but it is factually wrong to say the violence and destruction that consumed Kenosha was spawned by “white supremacists,” given that the overwhelming majority of arrests were of left-wing rioters. …

Many voters and residents of these torn cities aren’t buying it. “You’re telling me you’re going to burn down my neighborhood?” Valerie, a 25-year-old black woman and former Democrat from the inner city of Milwaukee, told the Federalist in Kenosha of Black Lives Matter. “No, I don’t want to be a Democrat anymore.”

So MSNBC can keep standing in front of burning cities and calling them “mostly peaceful” protests, and Chris Wallace can keep pretending the right is to blame for the violence. But we were in Kenosha. We talked to people on the ground. Voters know who the peaceful protesters are and who the rioters are.