An Immodest Proposal

According to the news media, Canadians are increasingly fed up with porch-bandits stealing the parcels that are a concomitant of this pandemic year. I believe I have come up with a solution to the problem.

First, collect any fruit cakes you have got hanging about your house. As we all know, Christmas cakes are often baked but seldom eaten.

Second, wrap the cake(s) in aluminum foil.

Third, place the wrapped cake(s) in any cardboard box available. Ideally, use a box with an Amazon label.

Fourth, place the box onto your porch. Leave it there for human nature to take its course. It would serve the $^@#*^^%$ right.

Image by Mokkie by way of Wikimedia Commons

Books Read 2020

Photo by Abhi Sharma from India, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Back before the pandemic began I made, for some reason, a decision to keep track this year of all the books I read in 2020. Mostly, I think, I wanted to do this because I had never really known how many books I read. I do like reading, and I was curious to know if I could somehow quantify this liking.

Well, the year's not out yet but to my surprise the answer to my curiosity is: I like reading a lot. I have read nearly a book a day in 2020. Almost equally surprising was my discovery that I didn't really increase the pace of my reading once the pandemic had forced us (or at least those of us with a modicum of common sense) to stay indoors for the most part.

I had thought I might manage one or two blog posts from this list, but that is clearly not a responsible way to approach things. So instead, stand by for a month-by-month list of what I read this year. If I'm really feeling ambitious I might even attempt some sort of breakdown-cum-summary toward the end of the year. The listing begins on 16 December.

This is why (some) people collect books

Cover of Charles Kingsley's The
Water Babies, (1886) Macmillan

Occasionally I fall for the concept of The Book As Object. (Mostly I treasure books for their content above all, so first editions or authorial inscriptions or even condition don't figure for me.) Today is one of those times. Back in the days when dust jackets were literally that (plain paper wraps that kept dust off the boards during shipping), publishers went to increasingly impressive lengths to make the actual boards do a job of selling their books. The results, in some cases, were spectacular.*

The Public Domain Review (one of a number of lovely websites that make public domain materials easier to track down and enjoy) has published a beautiful overview of some of the best of these covers. I strongly urge what few readers I have to check it out. Some of the examples are of breathtaking beauty, and even the plain ones are impressive.

(The example to the right is by no means the best of what's on display here. Even popular science books, such as The Story of the Sun or Spectrum Analysis, got beautiful coloured covers.)

Lorna and I have a few books in our library with this sort of cover, but as I said we don't really collect books as things in themselves. Willing to bet some of our friends, though, have between them hundreds of these in their collections. Book people are sometimes weird, but invariably interesting to know.

*And expensive. By the time dust jackets could carry that graphic responsibility thanks to inexpensive mechanical reproduction, the art of embossing and colouring board bindings had become prohibitively expensive and most publishers were happy to stop doing it.

The Physicality of Nostalgia

 

One of the great 45 rpm label designs
(image ganked from canuckistanmusic.com
'cause my own copy is long gone)

Lately I've been reading about pop music (and despite this post's title I haven't focused exclusively on the music of my adolescence—just mostly) and one thing I read (it was a while back and I've read a lot of books during the lockdown but it was probably in David Hajdu's Love for Sale: Pop Music in America) had a sort of Proustian impact, a non-edible madeleine moment. The impact hasn't diminished in the month since I read Hajdu's book* so I thought I would noodle something about it here.

Hajdu was writing about the current state of pop music, in which songs are streamed and nobody seems to own anything, as compared with his (and my) adolescence, when one of the biggest aspects of loving music was being able to hold the record in your hand. When I read this I had a sudden flash of memory of my own early adolescence and hours spent looking at (and occasionally purchasing) 45 rpm singles from the record department of the Woolco† store at Southland Drive and MacLeod Trail in south-west Calgary.

For me (at the time, at least) it was never just about the music. I absolutely loved the single as object, and a huge part of this was in the labels. Some were better than others to my eyes (RCA was dull, Capitol—with its massive orange-yellow swirl—was much more exciting (and Capitol had both the Beatles and the Beach Boys!) and Roulette (Tommy James and the Shondells; at the time I didn't know how seriously mobbed-up that label was) was so garish it could almost induce seizures when you spun a disc. After playing a Roulette single it was almost a relief to look at the relatively sedate labels from Atlantic and its subsidiary Atco.

For me the best-looking label is the one I've chosen to illustrate this post—and I'm pretty sure it's something few non-Canadian readers could have seen. Nimbus (I also remember it as Nimbus 9) was the label used by legendary Toronto-based producer Jack Richardson. I had Nimbus singles in my collection because I was a nearly-obsessive Guess Who fan (theirs were among the first LPs I ever bought) and I was always ready to shell out my seventy cents (or whatever it was) to buy a new Guess Who single. And the colours and the graphic on the Nimbus label sang to me nearly as clearly as did Burton Cummings. Even when I'd forgotten pretty much everything about 45 rpm records I still remembered that pink-and-orange label.

I hadn't thought about any of this for decades until the Hajdu book; at one time I had hundreds of 45s, but the best of them had been played so much they wound up sounding as if one was listening to them under water, and when it became possible to replace them with CDs I did so. For another decade or so afterward I continued to lug the boxes of singles around with me from one home to the next. But eventually I got rid of them, just to free up storage space.

So now I have to use the web to remind myself of what those old labels looked like. Seems appropriate, somehow: music is mostly ephemeral now (even the music I grew up with), so it only makes sense that my nostalgia for the discs and their labels has to be virtual as well.

*Strictly speaking a re-read; I first came across the book a couple of years ago, but read it again in July as part of a binge of pop-music books. I have been tracking my reading this year, not just as pandemic therapy, and intend to do a series of posts on the list toward the end of 2020.

†I had originally published this as "Woolworth's" but I now believe that was incorrect. A bit of research (which I ought to have done before posting) shows the store was actually a Woolco... a department-store version of the Woolworth five-and-dime.