Category Archive: Miscellaneous

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Massive Book Sales

Here’s something I wrote a while back, for homeschooling parents heading to a huge book sale and unsure which books they ought to be snatching up as fast as they spot them.

Having a list does help. But you may be in a hurry and not be able to stop and look up every author’s name in a list. It’ll take too long and there may be other people grabbing books.

The last sale I went to, there were a bunch of people using their phones to scan books — Amazon lowest sale price and Amazon sales rating, probably — to see what was valuable for resale.

So what can you do FAST?

(1) Best case: You’re going to know certain authors’ names. Don’t worry about titles. All the titles you need to know are the titles of books by that author that you already own, so you don’t buy duplicates.

But there’s no point trying to memorize (or check) a list of every last book Alice Dalgliesh wrote or which ones AO uses or whatever. Just remember the name: Alice Dalgliesh. And remember that you already have The Courage of Sarah Noble. Maybe remember that you’re especially looking for The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, but you probably want everything Alice Dalgliesh wrote anyway.

Memorize (or jot down) a few authors’ last names: Brink, Burgess, Coatsworth, Dalgliesh, Marguerite de Angeli, Eilis Dillon, Enright, Estes, Harnett, Marguerite Henry, Kjelgaard, Lenski, Meader, Meigs, Needham, Nesbit, Ransome, Streatfeild, Sutcliff, Treece, Van Stockum, Willard.

(2) Look for older books, preferably hardback. Check the date. Let’s be honest: Pretty much everything newer than about 1970 is a bit suspect.

I’m not saying there aren’t living books that are more recent than that, but the likelihood of twaddle (or immoral books or badly written books or whatever) after 1970 is higher. And yes, there was twaddle, etc., before 1970, but on the whole those books are better written.

Remember: This is a FAST rule of thumb to get POSSIBLE good books into the big box you’re carrying around with you (or by now, pushing along the floor with your foot as you move down the table).

(3) You’re probably not looking for # 47 in a series. You like The Boxcar Children? That’s great. But everything after #19 is a cheap knock-off written by someone else. You don’t need volume 47.

(4) You should be able to spot obvious twaddle and obvious junk. Your eyes skate right over Captain Underpants and Barney Belch’s Barfalicious Birthday and land on … Is that Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet?! All four Melendy books in a single hardback volume in great shape? Why, yes. You will add that quietly to your box.

(5) Look for the Landmark series of historical books. They’re uniform in size, have the word Landmark on the spine, usually a circle of some kind on the cover — like the picture I’ve attached.

Good rule of thumb: Know the names of a few series that you want to collect.

(6) There are a billion books about fish, the environment, the weather, mountains, snakes, trees, Ancient Rome, and so on. Most of them are pretty bland and pretty much the same. There are going to be a bunch of pictures and very little text (and of a somewhat twaddlish nature). Get some if you really, really want them, but … well, they’re not especially high quality. I suspect you’re mainly looking for The Really Good Stuff.

There are some great, classic science books of course, and it helps to know the names of some series and some authors (Fabre, Goudey, Selsam). But just because a book is somehow science-related or looks “educational” doesn’t mean you need it.  You can spend a lot of money buying mediocre science-related books (Usborne, DK, Magic School Bus) and not get very much bang for your buck.

(7) When you’re done, start over quickly. It’s amazing how much you missed the first time. You may spot things that you didn’t see before. Is that a Frog and Toad tucked between those two other books? They also sometimes bring out more books when they see the tables being depleted.

(8) When you’re done, sort. That’s the best time to look things up on your SmartPhone is you need to. If you’ve picked up some book published in 1947 and you’re not sure if it’s a good, living book, read a bit of it. If it seems silly, if it has really big print and really short words and short sentences (“Jane looked at the dog. The dog was black. It wagged its tail”), and above all if its tone is smarmy or it talks down to the reader, set it aside to put back.

My other piece of advice would be a caution, which may be totally unnecessary. Don’t lose your head and go on a buying spree. 

It happens. It’s possible to find yourself grabbing books, even though they aren’t in great condition or aren’t particularly high on your “must have” list.

Here’s a copy of Edward Eager’s Half Magic. Woohoo! Except … the spine is cracked and someone has used crayon liberally throughout. But it’s Edward Eager! Into the box it goes.

And here are a few books that … well, nothing about them really grabs you but they are older and might not be twaddle and so into the box they go.

And then you get home and look through your pile and realize that you didn’t get anything that you’re really excited about.

This is especially tempting near the end of a sale, when they say (as they do at a sale near here on the third day of the sale) that it’s $5 a big bag. Great! You stuff it with almost everything you can find. But when you get home, they’re all books you might as well have just taken out from the library, nothing you really want to own. I speak from experience here.

A variant of this buying frenzy: You get so excited about picking up so many great books at such great prices that you start stretching your budget a bit. After all, that box set of Time-Life Books about great artists *might* be good for your home school … and it’s 10 books for $40, which is only $4 a book for a lot of great art and … But do you really want those books? Are they really something you want to stretch your budget for?

Well, maybe. And maybe not. Don’t buy stuff you don’t want to own. Don’t lose your head. Don’t give in to the voice that says “I might never find this Edward Eager book again, so I ought to pick it up, battered and broken and ugly and crayoned in as it is.” (That voice is worth listening to only if the book in question is extremely rare and available only at a high price elsewhere.)

Again, maybe this is totally unnecessary. But I myself have had some buyer’s remorse after a sale or two, especially when they tell me that it’s $5 a bag and I come home with a bag or two stuffed to bursting with books I’m not all that interested in.

Pre-Raphaelite “Comfort”

What would it be like to live in a house with furniture designed by, say, William Morris or someone with similar ideals?  Lest anyone read John Ruskin or Morris or the various Pre-Raphaelites and think he’d like to live in such an abode, I offer this from Angela Thirkell, the granddaughter of Edward Burne-Jones:

Curtains and chintzes in The Bower were all of Morris stuffs, a bright pattern of yellow birds and red roses.  The low sofa and the oak table were designed by one or other pre-Raphaelite friend of the house, or made to my grandfather’s orders by the village carpenter.

As I look back on the furniture of my grandparents’ two houses I marvel chiefly at the entire lack of comfort which the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood succeeded in creating for itself.  It was not, I think, so much that they actively despised comfort, as that the word conveyed absolutely nothing to them whatever.

I can truthfully say that neither at North End Road nor at North End House was there a single chair that invited to repose, and the only piece of comfortable furniture that my grandparents ever possessed was their drawing-room sofa in London, a perfectly ordinary large sofa with good springs, only disguised by Morris chintzes.

The sofas at Rottingdean were simply long low tables with a little balustrade round two, or sometimes three sides, made of plain oak or some inferior wood painted white.  There was a slight concession to human frailty in the addition of rigidly hard squabs covered with chintz or blue linen and when to these my grandmother had added a small bolster apparently made of concrete and two or three thin unyielding cushions, she almost blamed herself for wallowing in undeserved luxury….

As for pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in.  It is true that the spring mattress was then in an embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking-trough after a few weeks’ use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber.

Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, pp. 64-65.

Bells on Sunday

I suppose every one has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as cubes and triangles.  Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday.  This day has  feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to eternity and mornings full of far-off bells.

How varying are the evocations of bells.  They have almost as much power to startle a memory to life as the odours which annihilate the years between us and our childhood.  Wherever I am in the world, a grey warm Sunday with the sound of bells coming damped through quiet unceasing rain will mean Oxford to me.  In the underworld, twelve thousand miles away, that sound of bells in steady rain has translated me for a moment to Oxford in early summer and the scented drip from hawthorne and laburnum.

And even now to hear bells in London on a June morning makes me lose the many intervening years and go back to a pale gold Sunday when the sun shone on an endless leisured day. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, p. 15.

The Real Secret

The other day, I was sitting in a coffee shop and reviewing my exegetical notes on Matthew 8 and reading Gibbs’s commentary. Honest, I was. But I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation going on at another table, a man who looked ex-military rattling on and on about martial arts.

Well, not really. Martial arts, as taught in America, doesn’t use the real secret. This guy had studied under someone (in Tennessee, which, last I checked, seemed to be in America, but never mind that) who had revealed the secret to him.

[Update: When I thought about it some more, this talk reminded me of the way some Christians talk about sanctification and our growth in godliness — as if you’re not suppose to be “trying,” as if it’s never right to tell anyone to “try harder,” as if it should all just flow naturally from grace without any effort on our part, as if our efforts are somehow in conflict with grace.  Same sort of bushwa, different barrel.]

No Truer Heaven?

In his survey of Augustine’s City of God, Edward R. Hardy, Jr. talks about the way things were in America at the time he was writing (c. 1955):

Perhaps our national temptation … is a new form of the imperial ideal in which the civic idealism of the “American dream” replaces the religious vision of brotherhood in God.  If St. Augustine heard a modern American school or congregation singing with devout fervour:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

he would assume that these words referred to our true fatherland, the heavenly city which can be reached only after the sin and sorrow of this earthly pilgrimage are ended.  And we should have to tell him that for many of those present there was no truer heaven than the future United States of America.  Some would suggest that our national church is the public-school system, as in St. Augustine’s time schoolmasters rather than priests passed on from generation to generation a more than secular loyalty to the great traditions of Rome (“The City of God,” in Roy W. Battenhouse, ed., A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, pp. 258-259).

Keeping Ranks

F. W. Boreham, commenting on 1 Chron 12:38 (“All these men of war, who could keep ranks, came to Hebron with a loyal heart to make David king over all Israel”), tells the story of the Scottish lad who joined the army.  On parade day, his mother and sister were proud to see him marching but were surprised by something: “Look, mother!” his sister says. ” They’re all out of step but our Jock!”  Boreham comments:

It is not for me to decide whether Jock is right or whether the others are.  But since the others are all in step with each other, I am afraid the presumptive evidence is rather heavily against Jock.  And Jock is well known to all of us.  Nobody likes him, and nobody knows why they don’t like him.  In many respects he is a paragon of goodness.  He loves his church, or he would not have stuck to it year in and year out as he has done.  He is not self-assertive; he is quite willing to efface his own personality and be invisible.  He is generous to a fault.  Nobody is more eager to do anything for the general good.  And yet nobody likes him.  The only thing against him is that he has never disciplined himself to get on with other people.  He has never tried to accommodate himself to their stride.  He can’t keep rank….

Why should Jock destroy his own personality in order to render himself an exact replica of every other man in the regiment?  Is individuality an evil thing that must be wiped out and obliterated?  The answer to this objection is that Jock is not asked to sacrifice his personality; he is asked to sacrifice his angularity.  The ideal of British discipline is, not to turn men into machines, but to preserve individuality and initiative; and yet, at the same time, to make each man of as great value to his comrades as is by any means possible (“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” in Mushrooms on the Moor, 182-183).

Boreham elaborates:

Jock … may be firmly convinced that the stride of the regiment is too short or too long.  But if, on that ground, he adopts a different one, nobody but his gentle and admiring little sister will believe that he is right and they are wrong.  Jock’s isolated attitude invariably reflects upon himself.  “The whole regiment is out of step!” he declares, drawing attention to his different stride.

That is too often the trouble with Jock.  “The members of our Church do not read the Bible!” he says.  It may be sadly true; but it sounds, put in that way, like a claim that he is the one conscientious and regular Bible-reader among them.  “The members of our Church do not pray!” he exclaims sadly.  It may be that a call to prayer is urgently needed; but poor Jock puts the thing in such a light that it appears to be a claim on his part that he alone knows the way to the Throne of Grace.  “Among the faithless faithful only he!” “The members of our Church are not spiritually-minded!” he bemoans; but somehow, said as he says it, it sounds suspiciously like an echo of little Jack Horner’s “What a good boy am I!” (185).

Intimations and Coincidences

In a recent blog entry, Doug Wilson pondered the potential significance of some coincidences that cropped up recently in his reading.  I’ve had the same experience more than once, though, like Doug, I don’t know what weight or significance to attach to these experiences.   They’re certainly not all profound or obviously meaningful.

The other day, just for the fun of it, I was reading a book about the old pulp magazines, which generated a blog entry on westerns and another on the amount of writing some pulp writers did and how much they were paid for it.

In a chapter on the pulp hero named Operator # 5, there was a discussion of the novels in this series about  the invasion of the United States by the Purple Empire, headed up (of course) by the Purple Emperor.  There’s a picture of the first of those pulp novels to the right.

I set that book down and picked up Kenneth Grahame’s Pagan Papers (a dud, by the way; stick to his The Wind in the Willows and The Reluctant Dragon) and what should I find at the end of an essay on getting a bookbinder to put expensive bindings on your books?  These words:  “For these purple emperors are not to be read in bed, nor during meals, nor on the grass with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief periods are all the whirling times allow you for solid serious reading. Still, after all, you have them; you can at least pulverise your friends with the sight; and what have they to show against them?”

Two occurrences of the phrase “purple emperor” in the space of a few minutes.  I’d understand that if either of these books was about butterflies (and I suppose Grahame may be making a metaphorical allusion to the purple emperor butterflies, though the allusion is not entirely clear to me).  But what are the chances of finding that precise and unusual combination of words twice in two very different books, neither of them about butterflies, in the space of fifteen minutes?  A big coincidence, certainly, but intimating … what, exactly?  Probably nothing.  Certainly nothing clearly.  But then, why the noticeable coincidence?

Ephemeral Inheritance

A book is a gift that keeps on giving.  If you write a book and have it published, it has a certain weightiness to it; it ends up (you hope) in someone’s library; it gets passed on to someone’s children.  Maybe — just maybe — it becomes a classic.  But even if it doesn’t, it may still influence generations to come.  I hope that happens, for instance, to Jim Jordan’s Through New Eyes.  How awful if that were forgotten by the next generation.

Blogging, however, isn’t nearly as weighty or as lasting.  When I am dead, will someone collect all of my blog entries and pass them on to my children and they to theirs?  Never mind me.  My thoughts may not be worth collecting.  What about Peter Leithart?  There’s gold in his blog entries, of which he sometimes turns out two or three a day.  Some of them will show up in books, and for that I’m thankful because that form of publication will give them longer life.  But will the individual blog entries last into coming generations?  I doubt it.

Facebook and Twitter?  They’re useful tools.  You can draft a sentence or two and send it out and find out immediately that a bunch of your friends have read it and liked it, and God may use that to influence a lot of people in good ways.  But they’re ephemeral in the extreme.  Ever remembered something one of your friends said and then tried to track it down?  Even if you remember who said it, good luck finding it on his Facebook page.  It’s not that sort of medium.  Nothing in it lasts into the future.  Except those embarrassing photos someone tagged you in.

By all means post helpful comments in your Facebook status or Tweet a sentence you’ve just read.  But if you want your thoughts to last a bit longer and for people to be able to find them again, don’t shut down your blog (as some people seem to have).  And if you want your thoughts to be preserved for future generations, there’s still no substitute for a book.

Patience

The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are — Henri Nouwen.

Too Much Lawyer

The whole point is … not that our Judges have a personal power, but that the whole world around them, the newspapers, the tone of opinion, encourage them to use it in a very personal way. In our legal method there is too much lawyer and too little law. For we must never forget one fact, which we tend to forget nevertheless: that a fixed rule is the only protection of ordinary humanity against clever men — who are the natural enemies of humanity. A dogma is the only safeguard of democracy. The law is our only barrier against lawyers. — G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works 27: The Illustrated London News 1905-1907, p. 290.

The Power of Optimism

At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement.  But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay.  The reason of this is not difficult to discover.  No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful.  There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired.  The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell.  No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles.  The cause which is block all progress to-day is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. . . .  Things must be loved first and improved afterwards. — G. K. Chesterton, “In Defense of a New Edition,” The Defendant, pp. 7-8.

Deschooling Society

Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is, in many ways, a disappointing book.  The problem is not just that it’s outdated.  The problem is that the flashes of insight that impressed me at the beginning of the book were reduced to a trickle midway through and that, while I appreciated a lot of Illich’s critique of compulsory government schooling, his own suggestions for a “deschooled” society struck me as quixotic and utopian, bordering on ludicrous.

That said, there was stuff I appreciated, stuff that (even if you don’t agree with it) makes you say “Huh!  I need to think about that some more,” beginning with the opening paragraph:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.  They school them to confuse process and substance.  Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success.  The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.  His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.  Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.  Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question (1).

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