Ahh, The Smell of Books

If you're thinking about a Kindle, and you want to remind yourself of the olden days, look no further.

An Open Letter to Green Lion Press: Bane of my Existence

Dear Green Lion Press,

I am currently a sophomore at St. John's College, Annapolis. I have
purchased several Green Lion titles, including Euclid's Elements
(paperback), Aristotle's Metaphysics (paperback), and On the Soul
(paperback), and Apollonius' Conics (hardcover). Generally, I have found
the translations to be of fine quality, and the notes are helpful,
especially the use of non-transliterated Greek.

However, I have pretty serious grievances with both the aesthetics and
the construction of your books. I will start with construction, as I
believe that is the more dire issue. I was excited to buy the hardback
Apollonius because it is more attractive on the outside and I assumed it
would last longer than the paperback. I was wrong. My $44 investment now
has a loose hinge for the front cover, the glue for the headbands
failed, and they have become completely detached from the pages. The
signatures are bound together very loosely, making for awkward page
turning, especially when switching from one signature to another.

I have also had a consistent problem with your paperbacks where the
first signature begins to come out of the binding.

I do not know how these issues can be rectified, but they need to be.

Now on to aesthetics. Apollonius' Conics looks nice on the outside, but
I think that's the only one of my Green Lion purchases that I would term
"attractive". Use of garish colors and distorted closeups from Raphael's
"The School of Athens" does not appeal to me.

Inside, your typefaces look like the ones I could find by default in any
word processing application. I applaud your focus on giving the reader
plenty of room for notes and providing clear text, these are two reasons
I have bought your books, but using Arial font is just ugly.

In my opinion, muted, solid colors for covers and new fonts would take
care of the aesthetics.

Thank your for your time, I hope you take my comments and observations
in the spirit they were given: constructive criticism. I also want to
emphasize that I applaud your mission to keep these texts available for
reasonable prices and in a format that allows the reader to really
engage with them. However, these issues have come up with such
consistency that I would not be a repeat customer unless I saw some
improvement.

Thank you again,

Roger Robertson Jr.

Finds: Two 19th Century Interlinear Texts

Chambersburg, PA is really the place to go for interesting book finds. Here are two interlinear translations of Latin authors purchased for a total of $10.00. Both were published by David McKay Company based in Philadelphia.



The first contains Cicero's Four Orations Against Catiline, and was published in 1885. It remains in excellent condition, but unfortunately three leaves appear to have been torn out and placed back in the book unattached. The text block remains sound along with the binding, which is reinforced by headbands. The cover is a kind of flexible hardcover.



The second edition is of the complete works of Virgil, published in 1882. The binding is completely sound and all pages are intact.

Finds: Four Early and Mid-60's Mystery Book Club Editions

I found three of these at a flea market, and one more at a thrift store. Each of these is a book club edition, hardback octavo. I bought them because of their great covers and thought I'd share them for the same reason. I don't know how good they are, two of them had the front flap bookmarking a page about 100 pages in, if that's any sign.

Die a Little Every Day, by Lawrence Fisher. 1963. Random House Mystery (Book Club Edition). The front flap tells us it's about Virginia Fraley, the "wife of a local bigwig," who couldn't stop after she hit a pedestrian. The cover, designed and drawn by Richard Corson, tells us she proceeds to grab a revolver. I'm not quite sure what the banana leaves are doing there, if that's even what they are.

Philippe Diolé, trans. Peter Green. 1965. Viking. (Book Club Edition). The flaps tell a story of 5 Europeans heading off on an adventure through Africa, four of whom are "bent on helping the Congolese and on rescuing a friend from prision." The fifth, it tells us, is "a tough old African hand" who acts as narrator. This was the first novel of Diolé to be translated into English. Jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea.

Plot it Yourself & Gambit, by Rex Stout. 1959 & 1962. Viking (Book Club Edition). Both of these are in the Nero Wolfe series, which was nominated the Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon. Design on both is by Bill English.

Hyphenation in the digital age

if:book looks at the way digital reading devices treat hyphenation, a snippet:

Why don't these reading devices hyphenate their lines if they fully justify them? This isn't, for what it's worth, a problem that affects more than just these devices; plenty of text on the web is fully justified and has no hyphenation. The problem is that hyphenation is trickier than it might initially appear. To properly hyphenate a paragraph, the hyphenator needs to understand at least something about how the language that the paragraph of text is written in works.

Find: Old Oxford Iliad (vol 2)

This Iliad was found for me at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. This Iliad is in two parts, and I've only got the second, which covers books 13-24. The book consists only of the greek text for the second half of the work and is followed by commentary. I haven't done more than running my eyes over the commentary, but it looks like it is mostly comprised of short glosses of words and hints about construction. There is no critical apparatus at the bottom of the page, and I can't seem to find one in the commentary.

It's quite a handsome volume, inside and out, only a touch bigger than a Loeb. The front cover has a simple stamped-on design. The pages are clean and serious, and the Greek typesetting is standard and clear. It is not stamped with the Oxford Classical Text stamp. There is no introduction, and the small preface is in English, which the OCT seems to have only recently reverted to.

I would be fantastic to have both of these. This one feels nice in the hands, and makes me want to go and translate some of its content.

Details: Oxford, Fourth Edition, Revised, 1968. Ed. D.B. Munro.

The Bilingual Book List

Bilingual books are often helpful to have and hard to find. We thought we'd create a list of bilingual editions of books, organized by author, to make the process a little easier. We will update as we find more, and you can send suggestions to johnvining@gmail.com. It will start small, but we will be building it up regularly, when time and editions are found.

Note: For Greek or Latin books of the classical period, one should check the 500-volume-large Loeb Classical Library first. Because that collection is so extensive, those editions will not be listed here.

Anselm (St.)
Proslogion -- Notre Dame (0268016976)

Catullus
Poems -- California (H 0520253868 S 0520242645); Mosaic (0889628106)

Dante
La Vita Nuova / The New Life -- Dover (0486453499)

Descartes
The Geometry -- Dover (0486600688)
Discourse on Method -- Notre Dame (0268008701)

Horace
Epistles -- FSG (0374528527)
Odes -- FSG (0374525722)

Montaigne
Essais -- St. Martin's Press (Selected Essays and Writings, 0312546351)

Virgil
Georgics -- FSG (0374530319)
Eclogues -- FSG (0374526966)


Publisher Codes: FSG (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)