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The Postures: A Missing Erotic Classic May 22, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern

Beachcombing has often celebrated in this place lost books and burning libraries. Today he wants to celebrate a book that while not lost (it can be found in a modern edition on the top shelves of academic institutions around the world) got through to us by the skin of its erotic teeth. Beach refers, of course, to  I modi (the postures): an opusculus best avoided by those with back problems.

I modi included a series of sixteen possible and borderline impossible positions in coitus: dressed up, this was the renaissance, in the rags of classical myths. (‘Yes, that’s Pandora giving head” etc). These images had been originally drawn by Giulio Romano who was, legend claims, so frustrated that the Vatican had not paid his bills that he drew them on the walls of the Hall of Constantine. From there Marcantonio Raimondi engraved the ‘positions’ and, in 1524, an edition was brought out. This edition may have been limited but one copy fell into the grubby little hands of the Italian poet Pietro Aretino who wrote a number of sonnets around the theme. A second edition then appeared in 1527 that included Aretino’s non-too gentle works.

The Pope, Clement VII (obit 1534), struck back. The Papal police rushed through the capital confiscating every copy and while Aretino’s poems survived the book disappeared from view: full credit to the papal security forces, getting rid of two editions is quite an achievement. A very few fragments survive in the British museum: where there are only the faces divorced of sexual activity (see the image above). There are rumours too that an edition was brought out at All Souls (Oxford) in the seventeenth century where it almost got several dons expelled: might this have come from the same book, later ripped up as it travelled archive-wards?

Apart from these BM fragments not a single copy of the original survives but by good fortune a pirated copy was brought out in Venice (Europe’s publishing capital at this date) in 1527. The fine original engravings were reproduced with blurred or missed details and, horrors!, one of the postures was missing. The lovers of Europe gnashed their collective teeth. But at least a shadow of the original survives and it was that which was brought to the university presses in 1988 with a commentary by Lynne Lawner. In the stacks of academic libraries ‘bald heads forgetful of their sins’ breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Beach is always on the look out for lost or almost lost books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

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23 May 2012: Angel W from robertstephenhawker writes ‘Hope this isn’t too lowbrow but I’m rather fond of Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan and the name Aretino rang a bell. Dunant structures her story (which begins in 1527) around a surviving copy of ‘Giulio’s Positions’ with Marcantonio’s original engravings and with ‘The Licentious Sonnets’ attached. If you haven’t come across it already and like that kind of thing it’s an entertaining romp, better than The Birth of Venus which I seem to remember receiving more attention.’ Thanks Angela!

The Gospel of the Witches: Missing or Faked? April 6, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern

Beach is not waving but drowning in the flood of work, but the summer is coming closer and – oh wonderful – closer. Soon he’ll be able to settle down to four months of light teaching and heavy research. Most of the cherry-blossom time will be given over to fairies. However, Beach has also been sniffing around the books of one Charles Leland (obit 1903). Leland, for those who have not heard of him, was an American who spent several years in Florence towards the end of his life. His writings ranged from ‘mere’ journalism, to work on the gypsies, to humorous pastiches, to discussions of the legend of Virgil. However, in his last decade he rounded off his scholarship with three works on witchcraft and popular belief in central Italy: these books have given him what immortality he now enjoys.

Leland had as his main source here a Tuscan witch called Maddalena (not her real name). Now the whole question of whether there were any Tuscan witches at this date is a controversial one: there are extremists who argue that there never were Tuscan witches and that even in the ‘burning years’ the trials and the deaths were all the result of hysterical inquisitors. This is going too far but were there really wise old women in late nineteenth-century Tuscany following a pagan religion: and this a generation before Margaret Murray got so delightfully het up about the whole question? Certainly, there is a case to be made that such witches as existed were confidence tricksters and shysters rather than minions of Diana.

Maddalena backed up, though, her claims with references to a book known as the Gospel of the Witches. She first mentioned this book to Leland in 1886 (he claims). But it was only in 1899 that he finally got his hands on a copy (sent by Maddalena) and went ahead and published it. This is Leland’s background to the gospel.

However, [old beliefs] die slowly, and even yet there are old people in the Romagna of the North who know the Etruscan names of the Twelve Gods, and invocations to Bacchus, Jupiter, and Venus, Mercury, and the Lares or ancestral spirits, and in the cities are women who prepare strange amulets, over which they mutter spells, all known in the old Roman time, and who can astonish even the learned by their legends of Latin gods, mingled with lore which may be found in Cato or Theocritus. With one of these [Maddalena] I became intimately acquainted in 1886, and have ever since employed her specially to collect among her sisters of the hidden spell in many places all the traditions of the olden time known to them. It is true that I have drawn from other sources, but this woman by long practice has perfectly learned what few understand, or just what I want, and how to extract it from those of her kind. Among other strange relics, she succeeded, after many years, in obtaining the following ‘Gospel’, which I have in her handwriting… I do not know definitely whether my informant derived a part of these traditions from written sources or oral narration, but believe it was chiefly the latter. However, there are a few wizards who copy or preserve documents relative to their art. I have not seen my collector since the ‘Gospel’ was sent to me. I hope at some future time to be better informed.

The key question, of course, is: did this book exist or was it just a product of Leland’s imagination? Leland himself admitted in his work to being ‘bitter’ at the lack of interest in his previous works on witchcraft: perhaps the Gospel was an attempt to convince scholars? However, if the manuscript did not exist then Leland made a very good job of pretending that it did. He translated much of it in his Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches. He also included the Italian in some cases. Unfortunately, the manuscript itself does not survive: if it could be found in an archive it would be the Holy Grail of modern Wicca-types who derive many of their ceremonies from Aradia and who get a little irate when scholars dismiss it out of hand.

Of course, even if the manuscript was dug up there would be another question: was it a genuine object handed down from hand to hand, or one created by Maddalena to sell to her American patsy? It is here that Beachcombing would have suspicions. Maddalena was no illiterate. Elsewhere Leland writes ‘Maddalena has written me her self about 200 pages of this folk-lore incantations and stories. It is a good thing that she likes to collect and write.’ In a later letter he writes that he paid her five francs a week for collecting. Not bad money for the 1890s. Then as Leland himself writes above: ‘this woman by long practice has perfectly learned what few understand, or just what I want’. It would be a curiosity if one of the pillars of modern Wicca was built on the creativity of a Tuscan cardsharp: the manuscript remember was in her handwriting.

Any other perspectives on the lost (or never existing) Gospel of the Witches: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Burning Libraries! Two Lost Folklore Collections January 20, 2012

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern

Historical blindspots: every age has them. Take the relative lack of interest in folklore prior to the eighteenth century. When folklore heats up in the later nineteenth century you cannot walk across the parlour without tripping over a book on fairies or witches. This means that anything written before say 1860 is particularly precious and any loss all the more tragic.

Here Beach must introduce Robert Hunt (obit 1887) and a moving preface he penned for the the third edition of his deservedly celebrated Popular Romances of the West of England. Just to give this a chronological edge Hunt was born in 1807 in the prehistory of Cornish folklore. He first published his work in his fifties in 1865 and he came to reflect on how he had put it together in his early seventies in 1881.

There we learn that ‘the beginning of this collection of Popular Romances may be truly said to date from my early childhood. I remember with what anticipations of pleasure, sixty-eight years since [c. 1813 aged six!], I stitched together a few sheets of paper, and carefully pasted them into the back of an old book. This was preparatory to a visit I was about to make with my mother to Bodmin, about which town many strange stories were told, and my purpose was to record them. My memory retains dim shadows of a wild tale of Render the Huntsman of Lanhydrock; of a narrative of streams having been poisoned by the monks; and of a legend of a devil who played many strange pranks with the tower which stands on a neighbouring hill. I have, within the last year endeavoured to recover those stories, but in vain. The living people appear to have forgotten them; my juvenile note-book has long been lost: those traditions are, it is to be feared, gone for ever.’

Here are, as Hunt found, lost worlds. The precious folklore and beliefs of the English counties was slipping away more rapidly than ever before in the early, mid nineteenth century: with railways, national schools and a crumbling squirearchy intervening between Hunt’s youthful collections and his attempts in old age. Oh to lay our hands on those stitched pages… Beach wonders what became of them.

A similar tragedy took place even in the golden age of folklore collection in the early twentieth century. William Paynter (obit 1976) spent much of his twenties ‘witch-hunting, he went to every parish in Cornwall searching out the last generation of witch stories, publishing some in Cornish newspapers which are, thank God, still recoverable if dispersed.

He also though put these stories together in a manuscript entitled Cornish Witches and Wizards or Cornish Witchcraft that seems to have been completed by the early 1930s when he was about thirty. He failed, however, to find a publisher and could not get enough subscribers (those were the days!) to justify publishing independently.

‘The manuscript is now lost and it is presumed to have been destroyed along with most of his other folkloric data.’

A man who knew more about the last generations of belief in witchcraft than anyone else in the south-west, who had spent years travelling to gather every twig from the Cornish broomstick failed to pass on his knowledge to future generations. He ended up, instead, in old age selling dragons blood by post and appearing as a folklore pundit on local television. There are worse fates but not many…

Where are the snows of yesterday?

In the same place, of course, as Hunt’s baby collection and Paynter’s book on Cornish Witches.

Any other lost folklore collections? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Hearts, Genies and Gnosticism at Nag Hammadi October 14, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Contemporary

Howard Carter whispering ‘wonderful things’, Leslie Alcock finding Dark Age timber at Cadbury (‘that was Camelot’), Bedouin shepherds investigating a complex of caves at the Dead Sea… All wonderful, of course. But for Beachcombing none of these quite match the thrill of the discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

In that year, possibly in December, a group of Egyptian farmers led by one Mohammed Ali Samman were out digging for fertiliser near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi when they hit the mother-lode: a mummy and a one metre long red earthenware jar. The farmers, after some argument, decided to break open the jar, for one had pointed out that there might be gold inside. And, overcoming their fear of genies, the earthenware container was smashed and  Ali and his friends took out twelve  leather books. Disappointed at not discovering coins or nuggets Ali gathered up the books to take them home: his companions refused them, neither he nor they realising that what they had stumbled upon was in every sense more valuable than gold.

The books were not treated as they should have been. It seems that Ali initially tore the volumes up to share them out only throwing them back together when the rest of the party expressed their disinterest. He then took them home where his mother used pages from these sixteen hundred year old books to light her stove: [expletives deleted]. And there they would have remained had it not been for, of all things, a blood feud.

Ali and his brothers were intent on revenging themselves on a man, Ahmed Ismail, who had allegedly killed their father. In fact, this being rural Egypt in another age, he and his brothers hacked Ismail to bits with sharpened mattocks – Ismail had foolishly fallen asleep by the side of the road – and ate his still warm heart.

In the subsequent police investigation Ali feared detection  - he was eventually arrested for the crime – and gave the books to the village priest so they would not be discovered by the police, thus saving them from his mother’s kindle pile. The priest showed them to his brother-in-law who stayed at his house once a week to teach English and history. And from there they slowly made their way to Cairo, one - the so-called Jung Codex - getting lost in Switzerland on the way.

These twelve volumes were the most substantial Gnostic collection the world had ever seen and make a mockery of papyrologists pouring over itty-bitty fragments from the Egyptian sand dunes. Beachcombing has one English translation, which runs to 550 pages - on the table before him and the names, many unknown to theologians prior to the discovery, are redolent enough: The Thunder - Perfect Mind, The Gospel of the Egyptians, The Concept of Out Great Power… Reading even a few pages is like taking a walk in a very strange but beautiful city around twilight.

Ali, who sounds like the nicest sort of scoundrel, was never able to bring archaeologists back to the exact spot of the discovery. Or rather he brought them to three separate spots claiming that each was the site of the discovery! We cannot even be sure of the details of his account, details that were remembered decades after and that had important variants depending on when he told the story. Was there really a mummy, for example? Its inclusion sounds like something out of genie mythology.

Beachcombing would certainly have given six months of his life to have been there that day when the spade went ‘clink’. He would also, it goes without saying, have given six months of his life, not to have been there when Ali’s mother was making her cous-cous by lighting the Gospel according to the Crucifix or other such treasures from the burning libraries of the past.

We at strangehistory.net are putting together a list of extraordinary archaeological discoveries and the events around them. Any offers? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Boethius’s Astronomy: Did it Exist? October 4, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval

Beach has always had a thing about Boethius (obit 525). Boethius penned the great Consolation of Philosophy, a strangely affecting study of human priorities, while waiting for his execution. Boethius hovers between Neo-Platonism and Christianity: he is, in some senses, the missing link between the two religions. Then Boethius also  wrote books that do not survive: always a strong recommendation, and among these is his Astronomy.

The proof that the Astronomy once existed are four fold.

First, in a letter, Cassiodorus – the most difficult Latin writer ever born? – claims that thanks to Boethius the west can read (i.e. has seen translated from the Greek): inter alia Euclid’s Geomoetry and Ptolemy’s Astronomy.

Second, there are several medieval catalogues that refer to works on astronomy associated with Boethius.

Third, there are some very doubtful references to Boethius’s Astronomy in two letters of the early medieval writer Gerbert.

Fourth, Boethius in his Arithmetic states that he intended to write an Astronomy.

Boethius’ Astronomy is one of these works that might have made a difference. It would, in fact, have given us (and the Middle Ages) a straightforward guide to classical thinking on the heavens without having to surrender the field to Firmicus and other dunces. But, as the careful reader will have noted, the ‘proofs’ above are about as weighty as dead leaves. Indeed, as the great Jim Tester noted (123) the Astronomy‘s existence is ‘an unanswerable question, with the balance in favour of the Noes rather than the Ayes’.

After all, Cassiodorus, in the reference cited before, seems to have been speaking generally of the communication of knowledge from Greek to Latin, something that Boethius did in all his works and that characterised his opus. Medieval catalogues err (constantly) particularly about authors. Gerbert is, as Beachcombing noted, ‘doubtful’. And Boethius promised many things that he did not achieve: he was an ambitious man whose life was cut horribly short. He was likely hacked to death with a sword on his master’s orders after a prolonged imprisonment.

What seems at first a case then of a burning library book might in the end be nothing more than an entry in an invisible library: a ghost summoned up by greedy medievalists and star-mad monks.  Still in the last fifty years unexpected plums have been fished out of monastic libraries. Perhaps, in the near future, a scholar will be leafing through a manuscript from Verona when… We can but hope.

Any other now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t books? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Updated BH News Stories (with thanks to readers)

Google Burns the Library at Alexandria May 28, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite

**The pages published here are typically historical ephemera written for fun. This present post matters, however. Please circulate**

Imagine a visit to the universal library: a building in which all books, manuscripts, scrolls, rolls and tablets from all civilisations and all ages have been placed next to each other on shelves running for tens and tens of miles. When Borges and others wrote about this fabulous place in generations past theirs was only a dream. But with the coming of the Internet the dream became achievable because, though a massive undertaking – comparable in its way to rebuilding the pyramids on the Moon  – a complete digital library is a credible endeavour and, what is better, all humanity can be invited to the opening party. How wonderful  that Google (‘don’t be evil’) decided to enlist itself for this task on behalf of the world. How wonderful that it was not left to tax-payers or national interests to fund the library as a progressive’s indulgence or an arm of chauvinism. Instead, a multinational, representing the best of western entrepreneurship, set up the project philanthropically. But hiding away here is one of the saddest and one of the least told stories of the Internet age – something you’ll get no hint of on the slavish Wikipedia Google Books entry – for Google has sabotaged their own act of creation and in doing so perhaps destroyed the hope of a universal digital library for ever. This is not a reference to the arguments over  recent books and copyright. But rather to the fact that in building their digital library – particularly in the scanning of pre 1950 books – Google are doing a piss-poor job.

The best way to show just how badly is through a brief comparison. Now archive.org (the best site on the world wide web?), has pooled all available pdf scans of books (and the efforts of the early and heroic Project Gutenberg) together. Google pdf books are also included – along with ones by other bodies including MSN. But the Google scans are far inferior to others in four crucial respects.

(i) Google scanning is often atrocious: books are sometimes incomplete or illegible.

(ii) It is not possible to take the text from Google pdfs with the cut and paste function.

(iii) As the pdfs are in black and white image quality is typically inferior.

(iv) Google has chronically overcompensated for copyright laws, particularly outside the US, with the result that many users are blocked from downloading relevant pdfs even when these are out of copyright.

To illustrate the extent of Google’s mismanagement the present author took four random titles that have been scanned by Google but also by other organisations and that are to be found at archive.org: for details see below.* Of the four books the non-Google scans are perfect. Of the Google scans one is a train-wreck with missing and blurred pages,  a second, is borderline unusable – try reading a novel where the first pages are missing, a third is flawed with image problems and a fourth, if you can get hold of a copy, passes muster – though the non-Google version remains superior here as well. It should be noted too that this is not an ‘unlucky’ or a manipulated sample (honest Indian). If anything Google got off lightly, thinking of some of the sorry Google-produced pdfs that this author has stumbled upon in his time…

The obvious counter-argument that Google will make is that ‘we are doing this as an act of kindness, free of charge: how dare you criticise us!’ And certainly it is true that for the first weeks in Google Books any new user will be gagging on the splendour of it all, quite unconcerned by such ‘tiny’ flaws. And, yes, it is an extraordinary experience to pretend to browse ALL books using Google Books’ search function. But, as imperfections, like the ones mentioned above, mount – and there is also the question of poor metadata – disillusionment sets in. After all, Google does not do all this free of charge. This is an extra service that brings millions of users to their search engines. They also have links on the book pages to Amazon and ABE books (not to mention Google Reader) so that when the book they have scanned is not available (for copyright reasons) the Internet user can purchase a paper copy: a bit cheeky when copyright has, in fact, expired, as is the case in three and perhaps four of the four volumes examined in the sample described above!! How long, after all, does it take a scanner to determine the death date (and hence copyright) of a well-known author like Sabine Baring-Gould!? There is the suspicion – strengthened by the manner in which Google hides the pdf download button away and puts up anti-robot technology to ‘protect’ their pdfs – that Google would prefer that as few people as possible have the autonomy to read these texts on their own, free of charge.

Far more seriously though is the fact that Google’s project to scan the world’s book and create a new Alexandria ‘for that library where every book shall live open to one another’ prevents other better intentioned projects from doing the work with the requisite love and care – this is certainly the experience of funding-starved bodies trying to follow in Google’s footsteps. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a British ornithological organization wanted to scan to pdf and make freely available on the Internet all the five hundred or so British bird books written between 1850-1900. They would apply for cash (twenty thousand dollars?) to their own trustees, perhaps external bodies, perhaps local companies, perhaps even to a governmental body. In each case though they would be turned down, because ‘Google is already doing it’. But Google, as we have seen, are not already ‘doing it’. The illustrations in the bird books Google had done would be difficult to enjoy. Pages would be missing or blurred. And as the organisation is in the UK (i.e. the EU in copyright terms) UK users would not be able to download most of them anyway because of spurious copyright concerns!

Google, in historical terms, are building the library of Alexandria anew with one enormous digital hand and sloshing gasoline up and down the shelves and lighting matches with the other: Google, creator and destroyer of one of the most exciting projects that humanity has ever undertaken.

Don’t be evil!

Pah!!

Any comments will be published below: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

28 May 2011: First Dianne writes in from Medieval Writing (that is well worth a visit). She suspects that Beachcombing is going over the top – and she may well be right: ‘‘Burns’, hmmm – a little hyperbole perhaps? The books are still there, even if the first, excessively hasty, attempts to digitise them are a trifle substandard. I did put up an earlier post about my problems with the Google books copyright issue, where I found myself having to print a large book one page at a time from the read online version because Google would not let me download a book that was, in fact, out of copyright. I couldn’t find a proxy server with a big enough bandwidth allowance to let me download the pdf. It has to be said that some of the Internet Archive scans are pretty crappy as well, and also the free Kindle versions they put up. I think there are people just going around university libraries doing very quick and dirty jobs on the whole thing. No doubt a lot of time and energy is being wasted, but I guess it represents the first steps to something like a universal digital library. I don’t think even a university funding body would suggest that a fine ornithological treatise had ‘been done’ in digital edition if the only copy was a grotty Google books edition. Instead, they would say it wasn’t in their immediate priorities and tell you to try to find private funding, but then they would do that anyway.’ Beach has heard lots of anecdotal material about funding being scotched – he would grateful if anyone could send any specific examples in. As to non-Google scans being substandard, he has almost always found that they are first rate. Next up is Woodwose. She is more irate and some of these details did damage to Beach’s blood pressure: ‘I am generally a techno-innocent and babe in the woods when it comes to dealing with huge corporations-as-the-antichrist, but this really makes me angry. My friends and I find our books – still in copyright – at least partially available on Google’s ‘service’, with no compensation.  I use Google books a fair amount and never realized that there was a way to cut and paste the text in out-of-copyright books. I admit that I have never run across corrupted files or badly scanned pages in a Google book – which must just be luck of the draw. The horror you describe reminds me of a situation we had with the Ohio Historical Society. (Brace yourself.) In the early days of scanning technology, the Historical Society decided to scan all available death certificates and then THROW AWAY THE ORIGINALS. [aaaargh!!!] There are so many errors that the certificate database is for most intents and purposes useless. And those originals are gone forever. I’m afraid that we did not learn from this and, thanks to Google, have plunged even further into this madness – the Ohio libraries Tsar has decreed that to eliminate wasteful duplication, only one or two copies of most books will be kept throughout the state. Duplicates are to be purged and sold or thrown away. No sense in having too many books – EVERYTHING is online, says the Tsar blithely. The director of the OSU Library (the largest University in Ohio) did such a bang-up job with the ‘remodeled library’ (read coffee-shop with free wi-fi) that he was hired by the Kent State Library expressly for the purpose of ‘getting rid of the books in the library’. I don’t know where this is going to end. The Google lawsuits don’t give me much hope that the world is going to change. The people in charge of libraries no longer seem to care about learning, but seem to be business majors–regarding books as commodities like cans of beans. They seem to grasp at the newest, shiniest technology as an end in itself, not as a means to promote learning. Anti-clutter people always say – you don’t need to buy books – everything’s available for free at the library!  But, of course, that is no longer true – I feel I need to maintain my own library. My husband is about to retire and normally we would be thinking of downsizing to a smaller house. But we cannot give up our books. The traditional wisdom is, when you downsize, donate your books to a library!  I have tried that – with disastrous results. Long, depressing story, will omit. So I have loads of books in subjects that no public library would want and which I refuse to donate to some college so they can sell them for pennies on the dollar through Better World Books. But, of course, they don’t need them anyway – because Google has put everything on line….  (Except 99% of my art/costume history collection.) My apologies for this wide-ranging rant which I have made All About Me. I believe in books the way some people believe in their deities and I am saddened by the malignant Fahrenheit 451 spirit that is abroad. Google has much to answer for, but I do not know how to stop them.’ Then finally Ricardo with some pointers on copyright law. ‘I basically defend a return to a 20 year copyright term and I’m against DRM technologies that place a key on culture, stopping things from entering the public domain after the copyright has expired (because, although the copyright has expire by law you can’t break the DRM and yourself make a copy for others).  About the 20 years… it might be even less. I think this term should be connected with the average time works have been shown to have a commercial value. I wouldn’t mind some registration process where you (the author) could renew your copyright explicitly while you are alive. You would just have to do it regularly. When you lost interest the work would simply expire and revert to public domain. Basically… where do you start? With an ‘American’ mind frame, copyright should be given for encouraging creativity or in a ‘French’ mind frame, copyright is an expression of some ‘natural right’?’ For Beach the catastrophe here was the EU’s decision in the 90s to merge European copyright according to the strictest regime of all: the German, a system so strict that it was not strictly enforced in Germany! Beachcombing being a bit of a radical would even favour eternal copyright for author and family members as long as the family paid ten dollars per book every decade, say. Then on the question of Google Ricardo writes: ‘Google is a for-profit private entity. Trusting them to do ‘no evil’… it should always be understood that it will always be their definition of ‘evil’ in that phrase. So, what for them is Good might not be for the rest of us (and, in the long term, probably isn’t). Which can be seen by the way they jolly go along with China in matters of censorship. But yes, I concur with the gist of the post, question is, how to turn things around… One thing I see is not the competition for funding (it can be proven that, in fact, Google is sloppy work, not good for preservation and use) but the niche carving that Google has done, with this copyright thing, that stops others from also digitizing…’ Ricardo finished his email by introducing Beach to Europeana that is well worth a look. Thanks Ricardo, thanks Woodwose and thanks Dianne!

31 May 2011: ‘First off Sami from ty.rannosaur.us writes in – his less than sympathetic comments were true of about a third of the forty or so emails that Beach has got on this to date on this subject. She also makes the very important point that Google fixes problems. ‘I don’t understand what you are getting at. Are you upset at the quality of Google’s scans or the idea that Google doing these scans reduces funding for academia? Google Books has been a treasure trove of useful information for me and they have been fairly decent about going back and fixing them after I report them. I can’t really get upset about having instant access to millions of reference material that I don’t have personally. I will agree with you about metadata, Google’s current practice is atrocious.’ Then comes Professor Poe: ‘About 8 years ago (I think), I met some people in Michigan (at UMichigan?) who ran a project that solicited people to make good electronic books. At least I think that’s what they did. Maybe they corrected electronic books in Project Guttenberg. I can’t recall, other than to say it was a ‘distributed’ effort involving the preservation of old books. Lots of volunteers. I was going to do a magazine article on them. They knew about this Google thing, and talked my ear off about it. They did just what you did: compared good texts to Google’s scans. And they found a remarkably high rate of error. I lost touch with them (obviously), but I’m keenly interested in this problem. Do you know what is being done about it, if anything?’ Beachcombing fears absolutely nothing… Then comes MommaMackie ‘Reading about Google’s project was like being told of the attack, violation and possible approaching death of my oldest and dearest friend. What is it about the science of information technology that brings out the stupidity in people? The destruction and/or disposal of original and rare documents after they’ve been scanned into the system is irresponsibility on the highest level [this a reference to Woodwose above].  Their failure to confirm the usability of the scanned data beforehand simply compounds their sin a hundredfold, in my opinion. And it is pretty obvious that the project was not being led by true librarians, with true love and respect for the value of the original bound and unbound documents.  Selling them for pennies on the dollar or simply burning them? Had they sold the books, etc., at a fair market value, the project would have paid for itself many times over AND the originals been placed in hands that would treat them with respect.’ Thanks Sami, Marshall and Kathy!!!

25 June: Jonathan Jarret over at a Corner of Tenth Century Europe partially disagrees: ‘I do indeed care about this one, though I would have to agree that you may have gone over the top with the rhetoric. Google is of course not destroying this stuff, merely messing up good access to it. One can understand that the scale they’re working at (though the grunt work is usually being done by volunteers or temps in academic libraries, which is where the real quality problem comes from) permits minimum checking, though it is disheartening to see a service that works on keywords so inattentive to metadata; but, what they could do to solve that is make the meta-data checking even easier and more responsive, and possibly also accept revised or improved scans –and there is two-way traffic between Google and archive.org, so bad Google copies are sometimes replaced –but they have a bottom line to make. For a lot of the awful early copies, for example, we have to blame not Google but Stanford, who were one of the earliest participants with Google in the whole Google Books venture. The real problem is that Google have been allowed to do this at all; given that, we can expect little better, and we can still hope that they will improve things. So on that score I refuse to lose hope. It needs a lot of user contribution but it can get better. There may of course be a better plan altogether, which I go on to below. I would meanwhile, however, raise a controversial finger and suggest that the real firelighters for the libraries have been electronic journal providers. Stories of people getting rid of books are thankfully rare, and even if they do, though it is painful for us to contemplate it, because we love such items, it is usually the books with the fewest readers that get the chop (the pulp? the second-hand shop?). The real danger is to journals. Probably we can all think of actual institutions, direly in need of shelf space (because these worthy but misguided places still buy books too) who having acquired a JSTOR subscription or whatever at who knows what expense, have then junked their eighty-year run of the English Historical Review or similar because that really is online, in good quality, and they really need the space. And no-one will buy that, no-one has the space much though they would like it except for another library, which is probably in the same plight and sees no point. Then the library’s budget is cut, the subscription price goes up and they have to cancel it. (The money is probably put towards a sports coach.) Goodbye, access to all journals concerned; no going back. That’s where the fires have started, IMO. So, what can we do? We can join in with this:  and get it done properly. While I feel your pain, in other words, I think that circulating a solution may be better than becoming the Ginsberg of Google Books…’ Patrick from US Military History has even stronger opinions: ‘While I agree to the extent that often Google Books has corrupted or at least bad scans, at least the scans are there.  I too, tend to check Archive.org first because their digital copies are invariably of higher quality.  That being said, there are many books that are only available on Google Books and so I will still use them.  I live in Germany and I simply must rely on digital copies of books a lot of times because as much as I would like to, I don’t have the money to buy a physical copy of every book I use.  I therefore prioritize my buying and use the digital sites to make up that lack.  I too, think Google goes a little overboard with their copyright policy, but you yourself have pointed to an at least marginally quasi-legal work around through the use of proxies. The fact remains that Google Books does a good service by making the contents of some very eminent libraries available online.  Libraries that many people will never be able to visit.  For that alone, Google is to be commended.  It is easy for people to get ten-different kinds of worked up when ‘evil’ big business does something that is not to their standards.  The question I have is, who else is making such a huge effort at digitizing books?  The answer is no one else is doing it on the scale Google is because only Google has the funding, we can complain and maybe Google will institute better QC methods into their scanning, but from where I sit it seems just as likely that they could decide it is a flawed product and stop doing it and for all the good Gutenberg and Archive.org do, they do not have anything like the deep pockets that Google has.  Then again, I don’t automatically assume that something is bad if a corporation is doing it.’ Beachcombing would reply by saying that he is certainly not anti business and he is glad that it has fallen to a corporation rather than a state to undertake the task. However, he has an overwhelming sense that humanity is only going to ever do this once and it is being done very, very badly… Thanks Jonathan and thanks Patrick!

*So as to pick randomly we took the first two titles using ‘Beach’ (this website’s moniker) as a search word and the second two titles using ‘strange history’ (our web address) as search words, picking only books that were in both Google’s and other scanners’ collections.

The four books that came up were:

A) William Henry Babcock (obit 1922) Cypress Beach (1890) [Google] [Other]

B) George B. Somerville (obit 19??) The Lure of Long Beach (1914) [Google - not downloadable, read via archive.org] [Other]

C) Sabine Baring-Gould (obit 1924) Strange survivals; some chapters in the history of man (1905) [Google] [Other]

D) Sabine Baring-Gould (obit 1924) Freaks of fanaticism and other strange events (1891) [Google - not downloadable, read via archive.org] [Other]

The contrast between the flawed Google operation and that of its rivals is striking. All non-Google scans are perfect and in colour. It is a simple matter to cut and paste from the text. The only negative thing to be said about them is that they are often several times larger in MB than their Google equivalents.

The Google scans, meanwhile, score poorly. Here are the details. Note that ‘EU users’ probably serves for all non-US users in what follows:

A) Google’s Cypress Beach. This book, despite being out of copyright in the EU, is not available to EU users  in pdf form. It is in black and white and it is impossible to lift text from it employing the copy/cut/paste function. Then the Google version has missed several pages between the contents leaf and page ten!

B) Google’s The Lure of Long Beach. This book is perhaps not in copyright in the EU – though this is uncertain because of the lack of an established obit – in any case, it is not available to EU Internet users. It is in black and white and it is impossible to lift text from it using the copy/cut/paste function. The Google version has all the pages this time but none of the (luscious) images, an important part of the work in question, on the online reader! This might be corrected in the pdf version but there seems to be no way to get this, even using some of the tricks described at the base of this page.

C) Google’s Strange survivals. The book despite being out of copyright in the EU is not available to EU users  in pdf form. It is in black and white and it is impossible to lift text from it using the copy/cut/paste function. Then the Google version has been badly scanned: pages 256, 260 are blurred (though they can be read), pages 247-248 and 267-268, meanwhile, are missing. If the reader if forced to read the text on archive.org’s online reader because they can’t download the pdf then they will find that pages 88-89 appear three times there (!) and that pages 247-248 and 267-268 but also 96-97 are missing.

D) Google’s Freaks of fanaticism. The book despite being out of copyright in the EU is not available to EU users from Google books in pdf form. It is in black and white and it is impossible to lift text from it using the copy/cut/paste function. Here the scan on the online reader is almost perfect with only a couple of finger shots intruding at 8 and 441, though note that these do not impede reading. However, the present reader was not able to get the pdf scan because Google kept refusing access despite the button appearing!

Note for non-US users there are ways around. Imagine you find a Google book that you want to read but on the relevant Google page there is no pdf download button. If the book was published prior to 1920 you have probably run into a copyright difficulty with Google trying to respect your local copyright laws and perhaps overcompensating. There are three solutions that Beachcombing knows of. (i) Go to archive.org and look for the Google volume there: when you find it click on the ‘read online’ function. (ii) Go to archive.org and look for the Google volume there: when you find it click on the ‘Full Text’ function, though expect some difficulties! (iii) To disguise an EU Internet address and download the pdf as if you were Stateside employ an anonymous proxy.   Beachcombing, being a law-abiding sort should remind readers that EU copyright extends for seventy years from death (not publication!): clearly if you were to get a Google pdf with an anonymous proxy it would be important to establish personally that the text in question was within those limits so that you could respect local laws… Beachcombing certainly wouldn’t like to upset the authorities in Brussels, may they be blessed in their wisdom and munificence.

Misplacing Masterpieces at Railway Stations April 29, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary

Beachcombing heard today that his father – pater Beachcombing – will soon be coming for a visit to the Beachcombing house in Little Snoring – the first time in a couple of years, so a cause of celebration.

Beachcombing’s favourite story about his father is that once while travelling by train to his publisher in London Beachcombing Senior visited the urinal at a tube station.

He placed (as you do…) his briefcase with his newly-written book on the floor besides him and a moment later he noticed a hand reach out to take said briefcase. One of the metropolis’ notorious railway thieves had almost stolen his only copy – decades before usb drives and photocopiers – of three years sweat and toil.

Beachcombing senior got off with a scare but the truth is that railway stations are vortexes of evil and particularly dangerous places for writers.

Beachcombing remembers T.E.Lawrence’s famous train change at Reading in December 1919. Lawrence of Arabia – a curious personality who Beachcombing has offered up for scrutiny on another occasion – went to have something to eat in the café there and left without his bag.

In the bag was a manuscript of the war in the desert that was something like a quarter of a million words long.

If that wasn’t bad enough the manuscript was in a bank messenger’s bag, the kind that normally would hold sovereigns and that screams ‘STEAL ME’.

Once in Oxford, realising his error, the Sandman telephoned back to Reading, but there was no sign of the first draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a draft that was ‘shorter, snappier and more truthful than the present version’.

Rewards were offered, stories appeared in the press but ‘nothing doing’, his manuscript with several of Lawrence’s original notebooks had vanished into the ether.

From there Lawrence rapidly wrote a second draft that did not please him and that he would burn with a blow-torch in 1922.

The third draft became, of course, an instant classic when it was published in the same year.

Hemingway or, what is worse, Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, lost some of her husband’s unpublished works on a train at Paris, while travelling to Lausanne, also in 1922.

She had asked a guard to keep an eye on a suitcase full of EH’s characteristic manila folders packed with his terse prose.

This, however, proved a mistake.

When she returned the valise had vanished.

Beachcombing hasn’t generally got much time for EH being a partisan of F. Scott. But he would have certainly like to have been there – a WIBT moment – when poor old Hadley confessed that she had ‘misplaced’ various self-proclaimed master works.

EH was capable of the most curious histrionics over a caught fish or a bad review: God knows what he was capable of if you lost a couple of years of his life…

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes that he associated the Lausanne area with the beginning of the end of his marriage to Hadley…

‘No other writer or even painter—no one who makes something with all their soul could ever have left that valise on the train. Because they’d have known what it meant.’

Any other literary casualties of train stations and trains: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Iambulus’s Island March 3, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient

**Beachcombing dedicates this post to author and Diodorus scholar Ed Murphy (After the Funeral) who inspired the following**

Ancient historian, Diodorus Siculus (obit 1st cent BC) has appeared before on this blog for his description of a mysterious island out in the Atlantic. However, Diodorus, at the end of his second book, also wrote about an island in the Pacific: Iambulus’s Island (as Beachcombing will call it). As so often in his work Diodorus is valuable here not because of his acumen (unusually for a Sicilian he had but little) but, rather, because he uncritically quotes lost sources: in this case a text by a certain Iambulus who had had a very unusual adventure in the Red Sea.

There was a certain Iambulus who from his boyhood up had been devoted to the pursuit of education, and, after the death of his father, who had been a merchant, he also gave himself to that calling; and while journeying inland to the spice-bearing region of Arabia he and his companions on the trip were taken captive by some robbers. Now at first he and one of his fellow-captives were appointed to be herdsmen, but later he and his companion were made captive by certain Ethiopians and led off to the coast of Ethiopia. They were kidnapped in order that, being of an alien people, they might effect the purification of the land. For among the Ethiopians who lived in that place there was a custom, which had been handed down from ancient times, and had been ratified by oracles of the gods, over a period of twenty generations or six hundred years, the generation being reckoned at thirty years; and at the time when the purification by means of the two men was to take place, a boat had been built for them sufficient in size and strong enough to withstand the storms at sea, one which could easily be manned by two men; and then loading it with food enough to maintain two men for six months and putting them on board they commanded them to set out to sea as the oracle had ordered. Furthermore, they commanded them to steer towards the south; for, they were told, they would come to a happy island and to men of honourable character, and among them they would lead a blessed existence. And in like manner, they stated, their own people, in case the men whom they sent forth should arrive safely at the island, would enjoy peace and a happy life in every respect throughout six hundred years; but if, dismayed at the extent of the sea, they should turn back on their course they would, as impious men and destroyers of the entire nation, suffer the severest penalties.

Diodorus explains how Iambulus finally arrived on the happy island: that has variously been identified as Madagascar and Sri Lanka and ‘Polynesia’. And how ‘after remaining among this people for seven years… Iambulus and his companion were ejected against their will, as being malefactors and as having been educated to evil habits.’ Then landing in India, he made his way to Persia and then finally back to the Mediterranean where he told his tale to the marvelling Greek world.

And what marvels! Iambulus’s island – that was, btw, perfectly circular in an Atlantean fashion – had men with two tongues (or perhaps divided tongues?) who were able to simultaneously hold two conversations, shared everything and who ate sweet snakemeat. Their children were brought up in ideal clans, where the reader gathers there were no arguments, and the Iambulians lived to about one hundred and fifty years without illness. Bad things didn’t ever seem to happen among the Iambulians but if you did accidentally cut off your hand there was a remedy. Large tortoise-like animals had an extraordinary potent blood that was ‘like glue’ and that would stick your hand back onto your aching body.

At this point the reader will have understood that the problem is not where Iambulus’ island is: but how, on earth, Diodorus fell for an early Greek Gulliver’s Travels. The normal ‘misunderstandings’ when travellers tell their tales through a chain of Chinese Whisphers are not relevant here given that the author of Diodorus’ source, Iambulus, claimed to be the witness to these Shrangri-La shennanigans. The only ever mention in antiquity – in Lucan – is to dismiss Iambulus (in the nicest possible way) as a fantasist.

Probably as later scholars – and this is the point that Ed Murphy makes in his edition: The Antiquities of Asia: A Translation with Notes of Book II of the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus – Diodorus was attracted to the credible frame of the tale, which contrasts so convincingly with the soft-yolky centre. Even Beachcombing, hoary old sceptic that he is, hesitated when he read about the details of spice-dealing Arabia and the Ethiopians purifying their lands… But then he got to the double speaking, split tongue Iambulians and almost choked on his pipe.

This, then, is fantasy read as history: think thirtieth-century historians taking H.G.Wells as a serious source for ‘contemporary’ events. (‘And then the Martians attacked London…’).  There is even the convention that the travellers need to be expelled, found in so many utopias from Homer to Swift.

It is too early in the morning to get all utopian so Beachcombing has simply included here a pdf link for the full Iambulus Episode. May it bring happiness to those who search for it. Beachcombing fell into a wretched melancholy upon reading about those distant, merry lands.

Any other opinions on Iambulus’s Island: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Walter’s Ancient Book in the British Tongue February 25, 2011

Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain was not only one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. It was also one of the most mysterious and controversial. In c.1136 Geoffrey offered to the world and to his patron Robert of Gloucester this epic relating to the ancient and early medieval history of the British Celts from their first king through to the Saxon-British wars of the seventh century. He also ushered onto the central stage of European literature Arthur of Round Table fame. Yet before Geoffrey there are only whispers of these histories and legends: where then does Geoffrey get  ‘copy’ to fill out twelve substantial chapters?

Well, if we take Geoffrey’s words on trust (a big ‘if’) there is no mystery.

Oftentimes in turning over in mine own mind the many themes that might be subject-matter of a book, my thoughts would fall upon the plan of writing a history of the Kings of Britain, and in my musings thereupon it seemed to me a marvel that, beyond such mention as Gildas and Bede have made of them in their luminous works, nought could I find as concerning the kings that had dwelt in Britain before the Incarnation of Christ, nor nought even as concerning Arthur and the many others that did succeed him after the incarnation, albeit that their deeds be worthy of praise everlasting and be as pleasantly rehearsed from memory by word of mouth in the traditions of many peoples as though they had been written down. Now, whilst, I was thinking upon such matters, Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, a man learned not only in the art of eloquence, but in the histories of foreign lands, offered me a certain most ancient book in the British language that did set forth the doings of them all in due succession and order from Brute, the first King of the Britons, onward to Cadwallader, the son of Cadwallo, all told in stories of exceeding beauty.I gathered gay flowers of speech in other men’s little gardens, and am content with mine own rustic manner of speech and mine own writing-reeds, have I been at the pains to translate this volume into the Latin tongue.

This ‘most ancient book in the British language [Welsh, Breton or Cornish]’ Britannici sermonis librum vetustissimum is perhaps the greatest lost work of the Middle Ages. Nor does it survive transparently in Geoffrey’s ‘translation’. Indeed, most scholars over the last century have taken Geoffrey’s claim to translate with a pinch of salt: Geoffrey’s work is just too twelfth-century and the bombastic Latin too far from a vernacular Welsh or Breton text.

But more seriously the ancient book itself has been decried as a ‘fantasy’, a ‘fiction’ and (getting all post-modern) a ‘game’.

Beachcombing is extremely sceptical about Geoffrey’s work as a translator. However, he would be rather more chary about cancelling out the existence of the ancient book altogether.

First, the circumstantial details are not invented. Walter (obit c. 1151?) certainly existed and seems, from our little evidence, to have been learned. Indeed, as Archdeacon of Oxford, he appears in several charters with a certain Geoffrey Arthur, almost certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth. Either they plotted together or shared a genuine source together or Geoffrey’s claim would have been vulnerble to contradiction.

Second, Beachcombing has never come across a convention in twelfth-century Latin literature for inventing phantom sources save in out-and-out forgeries: whereas inventing details was par for the course.

Third, Geoffrey certainly read Welsh and possibly Cornish and Breton.

Fourth, Geoffrey’s rivals and enemies (including Gerald of Wales) claimed that his book was full of lies, though never directly attacked Walter’s book.

Then, fifth, and most interestingly, a near contemporary Gaimar – and one who is a far better documenter than Geoffrey – writes routinely about the existence of this book of Walter the Archdeacon, a man he likely had dealings with. Gaimar, Beachcombing repeats, is a documenter not an inventor. (Short ‘Gaimar’s Epilogue’)

So how great a loss was this ancient British book? Well, given our lack of manuscripts in Welsh before this date a tragedy and a half.

It would have been of extraordinary value for understanding an earlier phase of the Arthurian legend – being ‘ancient’ this text was presumably older than 1000 AD or believed to be by Walter and Geoffrey? It would also have been a useful primer for Old Welsh as it mutated into Middle Welsh.

But as far as legendary material goes it is possible that it was an outline of British history rather than a text-book. Perhaps it was even an early translation of that Welsh classic the ninth-century Historia Brittonum: a Welsh ‘book of invasions’ written in the vernacular. Having said that Beachcombing would wreck his kitchen just to spend ten minutes turning the pages that lucky Geoffrey saw.

And where did Geoffrey get the bulk of his information from if not from this book? Why not from his childhood in Monmouth Wales where he likely grew up in an Anglo-Norman or Anglo-Breton family. Medievalists preach about the existence of an important oral culture in medieval society, but sometimes forget just how that same oral culture must have suffused and formed the imaginations of men like Geoffrey. No wonder there are so many correspondence between Welsh tradition and Geoffrey’s writings.

Any other views on the librum vetustissimum? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Plato’s Atlantis before Plato December 5, 2010

Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient

Ah Atlantis… Say the word to a marine biologist, whose marriage has just ended, or a billionaire at a loose end and the chances are that they will go running off and find Plato’s mysterious continent in Bolivia or Ireland…

Indeed, almost every region, island and country in the western hemisphere – including Bolivia and Ireland… – have been offered up as the ‘true’ Atlantis in the last hundred years by men and women with (at least temporarily) more energy than sense.

But Plato’s Atlantis begins with, well, Plato and, unlike other legendary or mythic locations – e.g. Troy,  there is, scholars assure the reading public, not a trace of this other world in the writings of the Greeks and their neighbours before it appears in the fourth century. Not surprisingly there has long been the suspicion that Plato just made the whole continent up to serve as a political examplar of how the human ant-nest should function.

However, not so fast! Beachcombing has given the general scholarly view on Atlantis here: Plato pulls Atlantis like a dying dove out of his philosopher’s top hat in the middle of the fourth century B.C., blah, blah, blah… But that is not, in fact, the whole story. For in the fifth century B.C., forgotten by all but bookworms and Beachcombing, Hellanicus of Mytilene (obit 405 BC) had got to Atlantis before Plato.

Now Hellanicus was one of these writers beloved of burning-library buffs who wrote many works (22?) and yet whose works were so unloved in their day that none survive bar fragments. What an indictment…

Still the titles, which do survive, are worth salivating over: the Facts of Troy (an oxymoron if ever there was one), the History of Lesbos (Hellanicus’ home island) and perhaps, most excitingly, Atlantis.

And what was Atlantis about? Are we to imagine that Hellanicus had, as Plato claimed to have, links to Pharonic Egypt with knowledge drills pushing down deep into the wells of time?

Not a bit of it.

Atlantis, for Hellanicus, was the daughter of the titan Atlas. And a fragment of Hellanicus’s opus survives with the following line: ‘Poseidon coupled with Celaeno, and their son Lycus was settled by Poseidon in the Isles of the Blessed and made immortal.’

Now Beachcombing would certainly run around the town a few times naked if that would bring back Atlantis from the furnace of lost books. But, even if Classicists get really lucky – and it is never going to happen – the truth is that there would only be a long list of genealogical happenings in the Atlas family such as that quoted above: deaths, couplings, births and – Mediterranean divinities being Mediterranean divinities – rapes.  

Atlantis then is a dead end at least as far as Plato’s island Atlantis goes. But it does lead to a question. Did Plato – if he really invented the whole story – cast around for a name and borrow it from Hellanicus’ recent scribbling?

Beachcombing suspects that there is something more to the Atlantis legend than pure invention, while not subscribing to Bolivian, Irish or extra-terrestrial theories. But he wouldn’t put it past Plato to greedy-read ‘Atlantis’ from a near contemporary, especially one who had something of his own reverence for traditional religion. This would have been particularly easy if he wanted to establish the connection with the Atlantic – where Atlantis was – a term that Herodotus had introduced or popularised.

Beachcombing is always on the look out for modern theories on Atlantis – particularly the crazy ones. Any suggestions gratefully received. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

For more on Atlantis from Beachcombing click here.

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