Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

With extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
( Summing things up )

All things may be impermanent, but some of the titles in the ebook lending service of my city library can be downright elusive. Noticing Tom Standage’s recent A Brief History of Motion in the catalogue made me think I’d be interested in reading it as soon as I’d finished the book I was then working my way through, but when that had happened the title wasn’t available any more. His earlier A History of the World in 6 Glasses was available instead, and then it wasn’t, and then it was. I managed to sign it out, only to notice it evaporate from the catalogue itself while my ebook was still signed out.
( A thirst quenched )

My library’s ebook lending service is handy, but perhaps not that easy to browse into its back catalogue. “New releases” are much more noticeable in it, and one new release I noticed was a book named The Free World by Louis Menand, subtitle just readable in the cover thumbnail as “Art and Thought in the Cold War” (from the end of World War II to the Vietnam War). With some interest in decades I wasn’t alive for picked up both through other looks back and some things from that time, I went ahead and signed out the book when I had the chance.
( Thought and art )

I’ve made some good use of my municipal library’s ebook lending services over the past months, but their selection of titles can sometimes feel like “if you do find something you’ve already heard of, you’re lucky.” As the library itself moved back from “online holds and curbside pickup” to “entry with precautions,” I made a half-curious search of its catalogue for a book noticed months before in a Sunday supplement book review section with the thought this could save the cost of an ebook, and it turned out Alexander Rose’s Empires of the Sky really was available. The only problem once I had the book was that where “exposure to others” can be somewhat controlled, mere thoughts of “contaminated surfaces,” however overwrought they may now be, are harder to shake. I wound up keeping the book in my entry hall, reading it in sessions sitting on the steps right next to the hall and washing my hands immediately after each one. It did take me a while to get through the book for all the interest I took in its subject.
( Modes of transport )

A book titled Disney’s Land, with a cover illustration of a castle a bit squatter than and perhaps just a bit less familiar now than the one built in Florida about a decade and a half later, caught my eye at the local library. I have the general understanding there’s more or less a “fandom” for “Disney theme parks” (although given some of the things I’m always interested in “finding out more about,” I shouldn’t look askance at it), but I was willing to see Richard Snow’s book as something a little bit different than “one more enthusiastic product of a cottage industry.” I went ahead and signed it out.
( Through the castle gates )

I happened to be in my home town the weekend of its library’s used book sale, and dropping in there I happened to see a copy of a book I’d at least been aware of before. Buying Andrew Lambert’s Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Exploration, I settled in to a new examination of a part of history I’d thought myself pretty familiar with (although it’s not new enough to take into account the recent discovery of the lost ships, which seem to counter the simplest theories of disintegration). Lambert’s thesis is that the British polar expeditions of the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the mysterious fate of Sir John Franklin’s last voyage, had been one part of measuring magnetic fields across the Earth’s surface, and that this helped explain how they’d been set up. Not as grandiose as other speculations I’ve read in recent years, it did seem to make sense to me even if I wondered about comments the magnetic mission was ignored even as the first expeditions set out to search for Franklin, who’s presented with more nuance than the overconfident duffer so many other books have seemed to imply him as. As well, though, I did pick up on what seemed an inaccuracy or two about things not strongly linked to the central argument, including that an American scientific expedition stranded in the High Arctic in the 1880s “survived by resorting to cannibalism in a very military fashion. The black soldiers were eaten first, then the white, and then the officers by rank.” My unfortunate reaction was that having found books about the ill-fated Greely expedition before, while I knew some of its bodies had been cut up I was pretty sure it hadn’t been integrated, just a few years after the final betrayal of Reconstruction.

While conscious of the risks of “weaselly nitpicking,” I did go so far as to look up Lambert’s closest endnote to his claim and get wondering about Michael Robinson’s The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Looking into that book suggested the paperback was no more expensive than the ebook, even if both were a bit expensive as university press volumes, so I went ahead and ordered it from the local bookstore. Once the copy had been delivered, I seemed to speed through it faster than I had with Lambert’s book. While it didn’t go into a lot of detail about the American expeditions north, it did examine how they both tried to present themselves and were viewed as at home, and how that changed over time. It didn’t include the anecdote about the Greely expedition Lambert had reported, although it did mention some askew comments about Greely himself not being seen as sufficiently robust and manly. The book did wind up saying polar explorers had ended up selling themselves as somehow “compelled” to go north, even if they also hoped to make a good living with book deals and other endorsements afterwards.

It was somehow tempting to see even a little dissonance in a book about “American comics” spotted at an anime convention, but its being heavily marked down offered a different temptation to buy it. Working my way through David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” over the next week (while dealing with a cold it’s tempting in a different way again to blame on being in such a crowd), I recalled having heard a bit about the book when it had first been published over ten years before and glancing into it in the ship’s library on a cruise not that many years back, but also kept comparing it to a few other histories involving “the comic book scare” I’d read before.
( For one thin dime )

On a trip to the city library, a book on a “new arrivals” shelf with the title The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing got my attention. As the description inside the cover suggested, the four-letter codes said to define “personality types” are familiar to me, even if I’ve never taken a test promised to spell that code out. Signing the book out seemed the simplest way to learn a bit more about the subject at that moment, so I did that and started reading.
( Knowing yourself via questionnaire )

At the neighbourhood library, while paging through “BBC History” magazine I happened on an interview with Max Hastings about a book he’d just written on the Vietnam War. Having read some of Hastings’s other military history books, I thought it might be worth learning something more about a conflict more recent than World Wars One and Two. The first place I did look for information on the book was the area bookstore, supposing it might not be out in print over here yet. However, when I saw it was available in paperback in the store itself, I wound up buying a copy.
( 1945-1975 )

The Digital Antiquarian led off an eight-part series on Tetris with an introduction describing the first computers in the Soviet Union (which helps show how plenty of things could be said about that game) and their initial application to cybernetic economic planning. That did sort of surprise me by itself. Aware of how mainframe computers in the West could be viewed with suspicion ("Big Blue," after all, has the same initials as "Big Brother"), it had been easy enough to suppose that had some bearing on things over in the "Mirror World." (As it turned out, though, a later entry in the series did touch on attempts to apply computers to surveillance...)

The discussion that followed that first part made several references to a book by Francis Spufford called Red Plenty, described as a historical novel footnoted with hard research about the Khruschev thaw and the years when it had seemed the Soviet Union was growing faster than capitalism could manage. Looking up more information on the book, I became interested enough to order a copy through the nearest bookstore.
( Thoughts on the book and thoughts inspired by it )