The Loeb Classical Library has been a reliable, if not always inspiring, cultural institution since 1912. This year, the Loeb Library marks a publication milestone with the arrival of its 500th volume: Volume I of the Lesser Declamations of Quintilian.

The Loeb Library is celebrating this landmark with the publication of an anthology: the Loeb Classical Library Reader, featuring selections from 33 Loeb titles.

Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus, acknowledges the occasion with an essay in the Weekly Standard.

They may look quaint, but these midget volumes have become the missals of the bookish classes. Generations have known them as “the Loebs,” though they belong to what is properly called the Loeb Classical Library, and, within the English-speaking world, they are deemed an essential accouterment to the life of the mind. For within them we can find, in all their antiquated Greek and Latin glory, those exquisite feats of the ancient Greeks and Romans in poetry, drama, philosophy, and history–not to mention architecture, agriculture, geography, engineering, mathematics, botany, zoology, and even horsemanship and hunting…

From the publication of the first volume of the series in 1912 (the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius) the Loeb Library, which never published in any particular order of works, has always catered more to those unable or too unpracticed to read Greek: 322 of the current collection are greens (Greek), while only 177 are reds (Latin). The Top Ten Loeb Bestsellers are predictable: Homer (three volumes), Virgil (two volumes), Ovid, Hesiod, Caesar, Aristotle, and the All-Time Number One, the Plato volume containing the dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and the Phaedrus.

Not surprisingly, these volumes hew closely to those texts most often assigned in schools and universities.

When surveyed as a whole, the Loeb Classical Library does make an arrestingly imposing set of books, so much so that the Harvard University Press has broadcast some fun facts worthy of Trivial Pursuit. The Loebs take up precisely 43 feet of shelf space, weigh 372 pounds, and were anyone ever inspired to do this, he could stack the volumes vertically end-to-end to build a column of 276 feet, the height of each tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine describes in yesterday’s New York Times magazine the impending electronic Universal Library:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now…

..Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn’t make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you’ll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

The only fly in the ointment of Kelly’s optimism is the enormous extension in recent years (in a series of concession to corporate interests) by Congress of the duration of copyright.

“Papa likes to know what a man is going to say to him before he starts to talk,” Cathy told Christopher. “If there’s no horse in the first sentence, he knows he’s in the wrong company.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 65.

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The male parent seldom spoke. On first meeting he had established that he and Christopher had been in the same regiment of Marines in different wars and in the same house at Harvard; he had never asked Christopher another question. “He knows everything about you, knowing those two things, that he needs to know,” Cathy said.

— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 103.

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“I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”

“Canada? Ah, no, America is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses are dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia which is positively bloodthirsty.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 127.

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In Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets, propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 139.

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“This woman had the greatest private collection in Spain, portraits of her ancestors,” Rodegas said. “She was asked by a journalist if shec was not filled with awe, to possess the works of all those dead geniuses. ‘Awe?’ she replied, ‘Genius? Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, were simply the people my family hired before the invention of photography.’”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 250.

I have a lot of books. Only part of our library is here in California, but it is still a lot of books by normal people’s standards, and a sufficient quantity to make moving something of an ordeal. My personal opinion is that real estate prices in the Bay area are as demented as the local politics, and I don’t have any real desire to buy the sort of house persons who are not Larry Ellison can afford, so we’ve been renting. Our first house had major electrical issues (the computers in the office reverted to UPS backup power whenever the pool vacuum came on), and the landlord would not invest in better power, so we moved.

I was walking through the old dump, doing some final clean up, and found casually discarded on the floor one miniature book. It was a 1991 facsimile reprint of Antoni Swach’s tiny Polish Armorial of 1705, only 3 3/4″ (95 mm.) by 2 1/4″ (55 mm.) in size. The Swach was small enough that the Mexican movers obviously did not think it could possible be a real book, or of any value at all, and just swept it to the floor when emptying its shelf. I was deeply annoyed, and was (at that particular moment) thirsting for Mexican blood on a scale reminiscent of Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

But miniature books, as the Wall Street Journal tells us today, come a lot smaller than my Antoni Swach, and are frequently lost.

The one on the left is less than one
millimeter square.

Katherine DeBrecht has published another of her satirical children’s books. The new one evidently features various leftwing Hollywood celebrities popping out the hamper to tell the kids what to do and think, while urging them to buy expensive consumer goods. This is a sequel to her earlier Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

William Corder’s Trial, bound in William Corder’s skin

A Boston Globe article exploits a fairly well-known bibliographic curiosity to provoke some public shock:

Brown University’s library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather.

But here’s its secret: the book is bound in human skin.

A number of prestigious libraries — including Harvard University’s — have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject…

The library has three books bound in human skin — the anatomy text and two 19th century editions of “The Dance of Death,” a medieval morality tale.

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Bibliophile publications, and the literature of the supernatural, sometimes feature colorful stories of rare older books, particularly grimoires (i.e., instruction manuals for practicing black magic), purportedly bound in human skin (usually that of a virgin slave), but real examples seem to be mostly unique Victorian and Edwardian exhibition bindings of anatomical texts or avant garde literature.

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The above story probably came about via a reading of this one from the Harvard Law School Record.

Glenn Reynolds is a Sci Fi enthusiast, and commonly mentions titles he has recently read. Last week, he recommended John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.

Scalzi is a clever author. Old Man’s War is an affectionate homage to Heinlein’s beloved Starship Troopers, updated to meet perfectly the need for wish fulfillment fantasy of aging boomers. Where ST featured teen-agers joining the Space Marines in order to serve a tour of duty as the price of citizenship, OMW features senior citizens signing up for interstellar combat tours as the price of physical rejuvenation.

Enlistment in the Colonial Defense Force provides seniors a one-way ticket to a Darwinist Gallactic frontier, in which Homo sapiens is fiercely engaged in battle for survival in a Universe with limited resources and lebensraum, and apparently unlimited hostile competing alien species, many of whom look upon mankind as a tasty entrée. Fortunately, humanity’s fate is in the hands of the same kind of clear-eyed WWII-style no-nonsense “kill ’em all” kind of leadership we remember from the original Heinlein Å“uvre.

Internationally renowned angling author Ernest George Schwiebert Jr. passed away Saturday morning, Dick Talleur reported on the Michigan Sportsman web-site. He was 74 years of age. Newspaper obituaries have not yet appeared.

Schwiebert graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from Ohio State University in 1956, cum laude. He also earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in 1960, and a Ph. D. in Architecture in 1966, from Princeton University . He wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Primitive Roots of Architecture. He resided in Princeton, New Jersey, and practiced for many years successfully as an architect in New York City and in Princeton.

While still an undergraduate, Schwiebert wrote his first book, Matching the Hatch (1955), which astonished the American angling community by realizing American angling’s most avidly desired, yet most unattainable, theoretical goal: reconciling traditional artificial fly patterns and their use in actual practice with Science. The book’s title became a by-word for the preferred methodology of serious dry fly fishermen everywhere.

Efforts at codifying a list of the most effective traditional fly patterns, and identifying scientifically the specific natural insects they imitated, thus reconciling angling with entomology, had been underway since the turn of the century, when Theodore Gordon’s articles in the English Fishing Gazette, reprinted domestically in Forest & Stream, began popularizing the ethos of Frederick Halford’s dry fly purism in North America. Previous authors, most notably including Louis Rhead, author of American Trout Stream Insects (1916), and Preston Jennings, whose A Book of Trout Flies appeared in a luxury edition published by the illustrious Derrydale Press (1935), had tried and failed. The goal of establishing the scientific identity of the most traditionally important mayfly hatches, determining what fly patterns constituted their most effective imitations, and which versions of these patterns were most correct, had represented the perennially sought for, never achieved, goal, the Unified Field Theory, of American angling for half a century. The sporting establishment was shocked to find that the for so long seemingly-impossible had been accomplished deftly and with unanswerable precision by an angler so young.

In a single step, the youthful Schwiebert vaulted to the supreme heights of angling authority; and, over the years, other publications appropriate to his sporting stature followed. Architectural training had taught him draftsmanship, and he subsequently became a skilled illustrator and water-colorist. This latter talent was placed on display in Salmon of the World (1970), an opulent portfolio of portraits of all the species of the King of Gamefish, produced in a small edition, and much coveted by collectors. With Nymphs (1973), Schwiebert proceeded so far into entomology that he passed beyond nearly all of his readers’ ability to follow. The boxed two-volume Trout (1978) at some 1800 pages length was intentionally monumental, and simply overwhelming, covering angling history, species biology, techniques, and featuring a rhapsodic and passionately detailed survey of high end tackle. Schwiebert wrote regularly for angling, and other sporting, serials, and published three collections of stories and memoirs: Remembrances of Rivers Past (1973), Death of a Riverkeeper (1980), and A River for Christmas (1988).

In the course of a long and illustrious career, he fished, and wrote about, the finest rivers all over the world. He was a regular habituée of the choicest waters and the most exclusive clubs, and was renowned for his enthusiasm for the best of everything. As the years went on, Schwiebert’s elitist perspective and idiosyncratic writing style came in for a certain amount of criticism. He was reported to be a colorful personality, and intensely competitive, by those who travelled in the same circles. Criticisms of Schwiebert’s latest book and anecdotes of conflicts in the field and at events became staples of gossip in the sporting community. One envious scribbler went so far as to caricature the great man in an anonymously published, pretentious and ridiculously overpriced, lampoon.

Real achievement of the scale of Ernest Schwiebert’s will always find detractors and provoke envy. It probably also true that, that like many of angling’s other greats, Schwiebert possessed a full consciousness of his own worth, and could at times be difficult. The roll of major angling writers is thickly populated with egotists and curmudgeons. His passing, however, is bound to silence criticism. Even those who did not like Ernest G. Schwiebert will be forced to acknowledge that we have lost probably the single most important angling theorist of the last century, the most important figure in North America this side of Theodore Gordon.

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12/13 Press reports are beginning to appear:

Field & Stream

NY Times

Hilzoy asks:

What’s the (European) work that is most inexplicably not in print in an English translation?

Let’s substitute regrettably for inexplicably, since the reason is not inexplicable at all, and mention the novels and stories of Catholic, Conservative Werner Bergengruen (1892-1964), particularly his trilogy: Der letze Rittmeister (1952), Die Rittmeisterin (1954), and Die dritte Kranz (1962).

Only the first of the trilogy, published in England as The Last Captain of Horse — a Portrait of Chivalry (Thames & Hudson, 1953), and Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht (1935), published as A Matter of Conscience (Thames & Hudson, 1952), have ever been translated, and both are long out of print.

The Establishment has never liked Ayn Rand, but her books continue to sell, and Rand and her ideas enjoy a strong popular following, combined with growing academic attention, as Jenny Turner notes disapprovingly in a London Review of Books article on a new biography by Jeff Britting.

Rand is everywhere on the internet: stickers, coasters, car number plates, CDs featuring a Randian ‘Concerto of Deliverance’ at starshipaurora.com. Randians can meet ‘at least’ four thousand others, it is claimed, through the Objectivist dating agency at theatlasphere.com, which last January carried an ad for an Ayn Rand social evening at a New York City restaurant called Porter’s (the evening was to feature ‘gourmet hors d’oeuvres’ served by ‘uniformed strolling waiters’ and ‘an artistically decorated birthday cake’). Professional philosophers can join the Ayn Rand Society at aynrandsociety.org; people in easy reach of Denver can choose between FROG (Front Range Objectivist Group), FROST (Front Range Objectivist Supper Talks) and FROLIC (Front Range Objectivist Laughter Ideas and Chow). Names pop up from website to website, agreeing and disagreeing, welcoming and banning, calling for papers, publishing books. There’s a whole community of Objectivists out there, with its own structure and hierarchy, controversies and disputes, outcasts, fellow-travellers, stars. A peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was founded in 1999, and continues to run out of New York University; a paper by Slavoj Zizek is among past highlights. In 2001, the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Research established a $300,000 fellowship in the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin’s current Anthem fellow is the author of, among other things, a paper called ‘Money Can Buy Happiness’. Fellowships have also been established at the University of Pittsburgh and Ashland University in Ohio.

The astute reader will detect in Turner’s review the suspiciously well-informed Rand reader professionally performing a proper hit job on a once well-loved author in order to establish the reviewer’s credentials as an authentic literateur. A bit of praise for Rand’s storytelling is permitted to creep in:

But really, storytelling was Rand’s talent, and it is in her novels that her vision takes its truest shape. In Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, power, greed, life’s grandeur flow hot and red in thrilling descriptions of urban and industrial landscapes, all ‘girders, cranes and trusses’ and ‘glowing cylinders’ and ‘fountains of sparks’ and ‘black coils of steam’. She’s good at sublimes, in other words, physical and elemental, the awe and terror as great as in any Romantic view of rocks and hills.

But is quickly tempered with condemnation, ringing every chime in the Rand-villain repertoire from 1957’s:

‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding — To the gas chambers, go!’ Whittaker Chambers wrote in a notorious 1957 review. It was a crude thing to say, but you can see why he said it.

to today’s:

Slavoj Zizek sees Rand as one in a line of ‘over-conformist authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it’. Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism ‘without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare etc, sugar-coating’, he argues, actually serves only to make the inherent ridiculousness of capitalism ever more plain.

It may be accurate to say that Rand’s novels are examples of “the really good bad book,” but it will take far more integrity and accuracy than this reviewer is able to bring to the task to do justice to their “really good” features and to appraise properly what about them may be bad.

Liberals don’t want to lose the battle of ideas among the pre-school set, and have hurried to respond with their own entry in the contest to sway young opinion: Why Mommy is a Democrat, a “28-page paperback depicting the Democratic principles of fairness, tolerance, peace, and concern for the well-being of others.”

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The conservative provocation.

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Liberals are pretty unhappy about Katharine DeBrecht’s recently-published children’s book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed.

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The democrat response.