Scribal Terror

Book game

Curt Jester has an interesting meme going:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.

Let's try it as a game (rather than a meme) in the comments and see what we get when we string them all together.  I think it should tell us a lot about who reads Scribal Terror . . .

Don't identify your book -- we'll guess later -- and don't cheat -- it has to be the nearest book, not the best. I'll start -- this was right next to my mouse pad:

Looking to the models of the ancient Greek and Roman republics, exponents of republicanism defined a just society as one in which all citizens willingly subordinated their private, selfish interests to the common good. Both the stability of society and the authority of government thus depended on the virtue of the citizenry -- its capacity for selflessness, self-sufficiency, and courage, and especially its appetite for civic involvement. By its very nature, republicanism was opposed to hierarchical and authoritarian institutions such as aristocracy and monarchy.

George Macdonald Fraser, RIP

The author of the hilarious and endlessly fascinating Flashman series has died at 82. Here is the Telegraph obit.

The Bookshelf

Saturday is book day at Scribal Terror, so what are you reading?

Anthropodermic bibliopegy is in the news again

 Catholic News Service (via The Lion and the Cardinal) reports on the sale of a book bound in the skin of a Jesuit priest executed for his alleged role in the Gunpowder Plot:

The macabre, 17th-century book tells the story of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and is covered in the hide of Father Henry Garnet.

The priest, at the time the head of the Jesuits in England, was executed May 3, 1606, outside St. Paul's Cathedral in London for his alleged role in a Catholic plot to detonate 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the British Parliament, an act that would have killed the Protestant King James I and other government leaders.

The book, "A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and His Confederates," contains accounts of speeches and evidence from the trials. It measures about 6 inches by 4 inches, comes in a wooden box and will be auctioned Dec. 2 by Wilkinson's Auctioneers in Doncaster, England.

This was not an uncommon practice in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. According to Dan Alban of the Harvard Record, there may well be hundreds of books in libraries around the world, mainly from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, that have been bound in human skin. There is even one at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia that has a tattoo. Some people deliberately bequeathed their skin to be used in this manner;  however, Alban writes:

The skin of executed criminals was occasionally used for book bindings. The first known example of this was the binding of Samuel Johnson's dictionary in the skin of criminal James Johnson (relation unknown), after the latter was hung in Norwich in 1818. The museum of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, England contains a more famous example - an account of the trial proceedings against William Corder, perpetrator of the storied 'Murder in the Red Barn' of Maria Martin in 1827, bound in the executed murderer's skin.

The book in the photo below is the account of Corder's trial.

In another lurid instance, a human-hide-bound book appears to have been provided as a keepsake to a survivor:

"The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King btesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace."

Norman Mailer is dead

In other words, his corporeal existence has finally caught up with his talent. He stopped being interesting as a novelist when he sent off the proofs for The Naked and the Dead. After that, he only managed to be interesting as a buffoon and an egregious social climber.

Death in a nutshell

I was never particularly interested in dolls or dollhouses as a child, but if I'd had something like this, you couldn't have dragged me away:

Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940s. She stocked the larders with canned goods and placed half-peeled potatoes by the kitchen sink. Over a crib, she pasted pink striped wallpaper.

But you might not want your dolls to live there.

Miniature corpses  --  bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned  --  are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow.

Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain's rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Co., used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation.

She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell." At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall.

"The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall," she suggested in her curriculum notes.

NYT  review by Eve Kahn (at SFGate) of  The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz,  via Bioephemera. The photo is from an exhibit called Visible Proofs at the National Library of Medicine.

By the way, do you notice anything odd about the placement of the corpse in the photo?

How it works

Whatever "it" is. Peacay at BibliOdyssey has a collection of Arabic "mystery schematics" on display. Any ideas what this one does?

Gibbons

Catherine Mangu-Ward of Reason magazine references a scathing review offered up by Craig Seligman of Andrew Keen's book,  The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. Among his many faults, apparently Keen claims that Gibbons wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but doesn't say how many typewriters they needed or how long it took them to finish.