catalog reading

I came across an entry in a catalog for a book with, as early modern books are wont to have, a really long title.  The title in the Worldcat citation is Iobi Ludolfi aliàs Leut=holf dicti Historia Aethiopica: sive brevis & succincta descriptio regni Habessinorum, quod vulgò malè Presbyteri Iohannis vocatur : in qua libris quatuor agitur ... : cum tabulâ capitum, & indicibus necessariis, which is more than a mouthful.  Who was it that said that his mouth felt as if a mouse had pissed in it, then died?  At any rate, no doubt that's how I'd feel if I tried to declaim that title.

What really drew me to the book, however, was the description for the illustrations noted in the catalog I was consulting. To wit:

Map - Ethiopia. Banana. Sheep. Elephants. Monkeys. Hippopotamus. Execution - Beheading of missionaries.

Where else can you get a banana, elephant, and a beheading, all in one, convenient seventeenth century package?  

Cyrano de Bergerac

I am in the process of reading Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon in an 1899 Doubleday reprint (on Google Books, thanks Google Books!) of the 1687 translation by A. Lowell (or, as the work says, "Englished" by Lovell).  A few choice quotations from the section about the author:

• “The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of a country curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no means contradictory).  Cyrano dubbed his master an “Aristotelic Ass,” and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.”

• “He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and ‘doing other crazy things.’” I feel like such a lame student in comparison.  Why, I haven't burned a single tradesman's sign over in Grad School City.  I haven't even thrown a stone at the townies (though sometimes I am sorely tempted).  Perhaps I should remedy this situation, and take up the life of a 17th century Parisian student.      

• On Cyrano's famed nose: “not ridiculous, but monumental! … It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons…”  Even Cyrano himself had hilarious things to say about his nose though—“This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.  Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain."

The section was written by a Curtis Hidden Page, a professor of English literature at the turn of the century (no, not this past one).  His is a name straight out of a Jasper Fforde novel!

Try some salt next time!

After a day of reading, it's Top Chef time!  I'm watching it now, and for the quickfire challenge, the contestants were suposed to peruse Modernist Cuisine (a book I already salivated over when it first came out), in order to create a modernist dish for Nathan Myhrvold, one of the authors. During the commercial*, I went back to Amazon to salivate over the set again, knowing full well that I would never spend $500 on a set of books, no matter how much I wanted to read them,** and went to read some of the reviews that have been posted since I last checked the book out.  For any item, I always read the negative reviews first, since I find criticisms more illuminating than platitudes, but mostly because for most items, there are at least a few negative reviews that are so bad, they are unintentionally hilarious, and make you wonder if the person who wrote them can manage, in real life, to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Except perhaps the person who complained that the measurements were all in grams, and the alarmist who equated the book with a nuclear disaster (to wit: "I love to keep my cooking simple, done by instinct with empirically felt impressions, not in the consultation of an operations manual for a nuclear power plant!"), there was nothing all that illuminating about the book in the comments section.   There was, however, a reviewer who noted that the book was terrible because it tasted awful :)  That was clearly a joke.  I can only hope that one of the comments ("You're not supposed to eat it") was also a joke!

Oh, how I want this set to miraculously be offered used on Amazon for a song!




* I'm not in my lonely, TV-less apartment, and I forget that you can zap past all the commercials when something is Tivo'ed.  This newfangled technology is a far cry from how I usually watch TV, which is all for the best, seeing as how Top Chef isn't (legally) posted online.


** I wonder if I can get the library to get it via ILL.  While I probably could, I feel like I shouldn't, thought that wouldn't be the largest set of books I have ever ordered via ILL.....  I wonder if our public library has an ILL system that has access to this book?