This Should Have Been On The Literature Blog But I Decided To Post It Here To Get My Mind Off Today's (Yesterday's) Market -- December 10, 2020

Wow, this is amazing. Over the years I have subscribed to The New York Review of Books. I don't know when I first subscribed. Maybe ten years ago. I often let the subscription lapse: it becomes way too political and non-interesting, and it becomes way too expensive. Then after not renewing for six months or so they start sending me offers to renew for $10 instead of the $100 rate or whatever it is.

The interesting thing: whether I subscribe or not, I have never lost my userid or password to TNYROB. I tried it tonight just for the fun of it and it worked. I last tried it on June 4, 2016. [Yes, I keep track of such things.] I generally also keep track of when I first establish an online account but in this case I did not.

Whatever.

The "holiday issue," unfortunately, is a dud. It feels about the same thickness and it appears to have the same number of essays as any other issue, but the content is sorely lacking. There was one bright spot; an essay/review of a series of paperback books on "animals" of all things.

From the essay:

For the past seventeen years, Reaktion Books has been publishing a series of volumes under the general rubric “Animal”—attractive duodecimos in uniform paperback editions, printed in color on heavy stock.

There are ninety-eight of them so far, from Albatross to Zebra, by way of Bedbug, Leech, and Swan. [To browse these ninety-eight books, click here.]

I first came across the series in 2010, when an advanced reader’s copy of Camel showed up in my mailbox, a book whose outlook—arid and elliptically comic—seems at one with its subject. It’s hard not to like a profusely illustrated book that recommends Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, quotes the work of Al-Jahiz (“the Arab world’s greatest ever essayist”), and describes the sound that camel ticks make when tossed into the campfire. 

I’ve now read thirty-five of the Animal books. 

Not all of them live up to the standard of Camel, which was written by Robert Irwin. 

But the series shows no sign of flagging, and one of the best is also the most recent: Human by Amanda Rees and Charlotte Sleigh.  

Each volume in the series runs to about two hundred pages and includes nearly all the things that invite the phrase “a real book”: index, footnotes, acknowledgments, dedication, and a bibliography whose quality depends on the author (Sardine, superb; Turtle, tragic). 

And they remind the reader how complex the eye’s interaction with the page is, how much work we do, without noticing, while reading illustrated books. For instance, the Batman postage stamps reproduced in Bat are nearly actual size. But the original Audubon engraving of a pelican is vastly bigger than its half-page reproduction in Pelican. 

The Animal books are filled with images—“96 illustrations, 52 in colour” says the back cover of Human—and as the pages turn it would be wonderful to see the images magically expand and contract to their real, worldly dimensions. But they don’t (not even in the e-book versions). And so the eye darts in and out, back and forth from picture to text (where the eye is more or less natively at home), nearly always with a little ocular wistfulness, a wish that it could see more fully, more intricately, more majestically. Most of the illustrations illustrate. But many are so small that they merely provoke the desire to see.

The illustrations are absolutely superb, so superb that I might order one or two of the books in the series on birds just to see how good these books really are. At $19.95/copy one can hardly go wrong, and with all the "cash back" I have at Amazon, I will get these books "for free." I seldom pay for books at Amazon any more. 

It's amazing. I pay for my airline ticket with a credit card -- I have no other choice -- and I get "cash back" in my Amazon account. What a great country. 

Anyway, I wrote all that to simply say that my new favorite word is duodecimos. I had known that word from before but I had forgotten. 

I think I first learned about it when studying the meaning of folio or quarto when I was in m Shakespeare phase some years ago. Link here to "book size." 

It all begins with the folio, a sheet of paper 12 inches by 19 inches. 

Going down that rabbit hole, one comes across another word I used to know (and love): incunabula.

An incunable, or sometimes incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively), is a book, pamphlet, or broadside printed in Europe before 1501.

The year 1501 is completely arbitrary, established by a Dutch physician and humanist back in 1569. A former term for incunable is "fifteener," in the meaning of "fifteenth-century edition."

Back to Reaktion Books and the Animal series, I will order the "raptor" books: eagle, falcon, and owl. Alas, there is no book on hawk (yet). I will also get the book Vulture, even though vultures are technically not raptors. Interestingly enough, they are more closely aligned with the storks. My hunch is when the storks host their family reunions, they dread seeing their cousins the vultures show up.