Goings-on

Last week I attended a book-themed fundraiser to aid research into Multiple Sclerosis. The evening was a lot of fun, and included a book swap where we were encouraged to offload our old books and purchase (very cheaply) those that others had donated. It was interesting to see which books people wanted to part with!

I thought myself lucky to have stumbled across a copy of The Not-so-very-nice Goings-on at Victoria Lodge (Faber & Faber, 2004), a humorous tale told with the aid of original illustrations from the nineteenth century "Girls Own Paper". Philip Ardagh's interpretation of the pen-and-ink sketches that once illustrated harmless stories about the lives of young ladies made me laugh!

Add to your reading list...

I haven't read any of Adam Browne's work before, but I'm very tempted to pick up a copy of this just-published book, which includes gorgeous illustrations by the author. For more information, and to see some of the artwork, click on the image and you'll be taken to the publisher's blog.

Cucumbers

Today I want to talk about cucumbers. My family and friends know that, like Dr Samuel Johnson, I think, "A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing." I'm not a fan of the modern, supermarket cucumber with its tough, bitter skin and watery, tasteless flesh and would much prefer to throw it out than add it to a salad.

When I was a child in Papua New Guinea, the cucumbers we bought at the roadside markets or from meris who brought them around in bilums were golden and round, and so sweet that I would eat them like apples. Pliny the Elder apparently reported: "We find it stated, also, by the ancient Greek writers, that the cucumber ought to be propagated from seed that has been steeped a couple of days in milk and honey, this method having the effect of rendering them all the sweeter to the taste." Not sure how that would work, but I wish it did!

Dr Johnson's contemporary, Jonathan Swift, found a use for the maligned vegetable in the research of the Grand Academy visited by Lemuel Gulliver:

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.

 Sunbeams from cucumbers? Might as well find some use for them.

To the ends of the earth

My partner has recently acquired a couple of new books that might be of interest to steampunk afficionados. The one pictured, To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps that Changed the World (Harper Collins, 2006) is a beautifully illustrated history of cartography from Babylonian clay tablets to 21st-century interactive virtual maps.

Looking at the maps of past ages makes me nostalgic for times when the world was still there to be explored; when dragons and sea monsters might feasibly have lurked behind the next mountain range or in the depths of a vast and uncharted sea. These days, with cameras everywhere accumulating data and satellites giving precise locations of everything on Earth, some of the magic is gone.

As author Jeremy Harwood says:

The electronic linking of such maps to other maps means that the amount of information that can be accessed is almost limitless. The availability of downloadable map data also means that today's mapmakers are spoilt for choice. Put at its simplest, provided that they possess the necessary software and skills, everyone who wants to can be a mapmaker.

Girlpower

This great project was proposed on Kickstarter earlier this year, with a target of $4000 to publish the first in a series of steampunk detective fiction novels for girls. As the funds raised exceeded the budget and eventually reached an amazing $90,000, the author has promised a series of four books, with all sorts of extras thrown in. Check out the proposal video below, and see if–like me–you can't wait for them to be published.

Our array of angry virtues

I recently read H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes. Have you read it? I have enjoyed several of Wells's other novels but this one struck me as being even more prescient than usual. His description of the box with moving pictures (when the Sleeper first wakes) is especially interesting, considering that the science of moving pictures was still in its infancy and television itself was a good 30 or 40 years from being invented. He was also concerned about how the improvement in technology and lifestyle would affect the human psyche. Here's a quote:

"There is a lot left for me to understand," said Graham after a pause. "Yet I see the logic of it all. Our array of angry virtues and sour restraints was the consequence of danger and insecurity. The Stoic, the Puritan, even in my time, were vanishing types. In the old days man was armed against Pain, now he is eager for Pleasure. There lies the difference. Civilisation has driven pain and danger so far off—for well-to-do people. And only well-to-do people matter now. I have been asleep two hundred years."

If you've never read The Sleeper Awakes, I highly recommend it. I picked up my gorgeous cloth-bound copy at a secondhand bookstore, but you can also download it for free from Project Gutenberg.

Something remarkable

Every so often, the planet Venus does something remarkable. Its orbit brings it to a point directly between the Sun and the Earth, where it appears to us as a black dot moving across the bright disc of the Sun. This transit of Venus is rare, occurring in pairs eight years apart and then not for more than a hundred years; it has fascinated astronomers for centuries.

Nick Lomb, Transit of Venus: 1631 to the present (NewSouth Publishing, 2011)

Seeing last week's transit of Venus was an exciting and humbling experience. More than just an interesting celestial phenomenon, it was an almost tangible link to astronomers of the past. Astronomers such as Jeremiah Horrocks, who was the first person to see a transit of Venus, in 1639; or poor Guillaume le Gentil, whose attempts to observe in 1761 and 1769 kept him away from home for more than nine years and only met with failure; Captain James Cook, who used the 1769 expedition to observe the transit in Tahiti as a base for exploration and discovery; or the Australian astronomers who used a Janssen apparatus to make a photoheliograph of the 1874 transit. 

I read about all of these people and the history of the transits of Venus and their effect on the world in a great book written by astronomer Nick Lomb. (Click on the book cover at left for more info.) The book is full of gorgeous colour: illustrations and diagrams from astronomers of past times; photographs of historic instruments; and modern astronomical images.

Astronomers such as Kepler, Halley and Isaac Newton—who all helped to predict and identify the dates of Venus transits—never saw the phenomenon themselves. Unfortunately, if you missed the one on June 6th this year, you probably won't get to see the next one, which is due in December 2117.