Popular pages

A Natural Curiosity isn’t one of the most popular blogs on the great series of tubes that makes up the Internet, but I do get visitors from some surprisingly far-flung places, and I notice some surprising patterns among the pages that people look at.

A few of my book reviews pop up again and again, and they are mostly reviews of some fairly obscure African works — including my review of And Night Fell, a South African prison memoir that I wrote about way back in 1984.

Maybe there just isn’t much else on the Internet about some of these books. Too bad.

And Night Fell by Molefe Pheto
Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti
A Woman in Her Prime by Asare Konadu
The Sand Child by Tahar ben Jelloun

The Book of Lost Books

Over the Thanksgiving break, I was talking with Jenn and my mother when the subject of lost books came up: Hemingway’s stolen suitcase full of short stories, Bruno Schulz’s novel The Messiah, manuscripts lost to deliberate fire (Sir Richard Burton, Nikolai Gogol) or to accidental fire (Malcolm Lowry, the library at Alexandria).

It occurred to me that a collection of these stories might be interesting to read and to write. I even thought of an appropriate title: The Book of Lost Books. (In my literal-minded way, I like books with concrete titles like The Tin Drum, or that baldly state what they are: The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, The Book of Daniel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.)

Before I started working, though, I thought it best to check whether anyone else had been there first. And so I found not only that the book has been done, but under the very same title. The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly was published in 2006, and I must admit that Kelly did a nice job.

I don’t see a chapter on Malcolm Lowry, though, and the loss of his enormous “bolus,” The Voyage That Never Ends. In his introduction, Kelly does mention that the original manuscript of Lowry’s Ultramarine was stolen from his publisher’s car and that the book “had to be recreated from what was left in Lowry’s wastebasket.”

Lafcadio Hearn and the velocipede

Next year the Library of America plans to publish the first volume of writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an intriguing but nearly forgotten author with a taste for the exotic and macabre. The book includes a selection of Hearn’s journalism from Cincinnati and New Orleans.

I’ve been reading Inventing New Orleans, which collects Hearn’s New Orleans writings. Only a fraction of these have been chosen for the new volume, and a comparison of titles shows that the most significant pieces have generally made the cut. It would have been good, though, to find room for more of the lighter and more ephemeral ones, like “The Unspeakable Velocipede.” Here is an excerpt:

The velocipede is like a vicious dog, because it always attacks any one who runs away from it; but it is also like a lion which attacks any one who dares to face it boldly. It is like a fox in treachery, like a panther in agility, like a tiger in cruelty, like a gorilla in ferocity, like a greyhound in speed, like a badger in taking a good hold of the calf of your leg, and like the Devil for impudence.

You cannot turn a corner so quickly that a velocipede cannot turn after you still quicker. There is but one possible means of escaping a velocipede. Velocipedes are like grizzly bears; they cannot climb trees....

The only way to attack the velocipede successfully is to attack their riders — as the Romans learned to do in fighting against trained elephants. Trained elephants sometimes turned and trampled down their own supporters. So with velocipedes. If you stand your ground well and direct your just rage and wholly excusable indignation against the rider, you will find the velocipede treacherously abandon its owner and fling him in the dust and trample wildly upon him.

Full moon

According to Astronomy Picture of the Day, tonight’s full moon will be the biggest of the year. If the sky is clear, enjoy!

The Green Bible

A couple of months ago, Harper Collins published what it calls The Green Bible, an edition of the New Revised Standard Version in which more than a thousand passages that deal with the earth — like these — are printed in green.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”
Job 12:7-10

“You shall not pollute the land in which you live…you shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the Lord dwell among the Israelites.”
Numbers 35:33-34

It’s a nice idea, the book looks attractively produced, and Harper Collins has lined up some impressive support from the likes of Bishop Tutu and the Sierra Club.

On the other hand, Harper doesn’t say much about the paper it’s printed on — a very serious matter to a lot of environmentalists. The paper is recycled, they say, but according to a press kit that means “10% recycled.” There’s no apparent reference to postconsumer content, and I don’t see anything about certification by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), which is the gold standard. In the video on the website, a Harper executive talks about the binding and paper being “recyclable,” which is an extremely low standard.

This was also not the first “green” Bible. Thomas Nelson published one last year, and that one was FSC-certified.