The Officer and the Jew

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This is a very good column by British novelist Robert Harris (Fatherland and Enigma) about Georges Piquart, the high-ranking French Army officer who in 1896 discovered Alfred Dreyfuss–the disgraced Jewish officer accused and convicted of passing secrets to the German military–had been framed and was rotting on Devil’s Island a victim of gross injustice. Piquart, who earlier had suspected Dreyfuss and was even anti-semitic toward him, nonetheless blew the whistle all the way to the top of the French military. For his trouble, he was persecuted and imprisoned for a year. His info did eventually reach a civilian legislator. The real traitor Esterhazy was finally exposed and Dreyfuss at last exonerated and freed from Devil’s Island. Yesterday was the date Piquart died, in 1914. Harris’s next novel will be on Piquart, An Officer and a Spy. One really good nonfiction book on the Dreyfuss Affair was Nicholas Halasz’ Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria. Harris’s piece revives the Halasz book for me, like I read it last week, though it was years ago, when I was at Franconia College. If I still have my old copy I’ll photograph it and share the cover here. Also eager to read Harris’s new novel.

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A Windy Day for the New York Times

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I feel a draft from this sentence in a NY Times story on Chris Christie’s most senior appointee to the Port Authority, David Samson. This is some seriously over-written and comically bad news writing:

“The firm’s doors in West Orange and Trenton often spin from the wind of its lawyers departing for, and soon returning from, state government positions.”

As the New Yorker used to put it, “Block that metaphor.”

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#FridayReads, Jan 10–Robert W. Fuller’s Visionary Novel “The Rowan Tree”

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Rowan Tree cover

#FridayReads, Jan 10–Robert W. Fuller’s The Rowan Tree

In 2011-12 one of the most enjoyable assignments I undertook was the editing of the manuscript of The Rowan Tree, a novel by noted thinker Robert W. Fuller.

Though I last worked on it a year ago, I’m writing about it today because I recently received a copy of the printed book from the author, and have been dipping in to it again, relishing the formal book presentation of a work I had last read on-screen. In 2013 Fuller self-published it and just before Christmas let me know that the book has been doing extremely well, finding readers all over the world. That’s fitting, as it’s truly a global book.

It opens in the late 1960s with the installation of protagonist Rowan Ellway as the new president of a small Midwestern college; it closes in 2030 amid the climax of a U.S. presidential campaign involving Rowan’s son Adam, who was earlier Speaker of the House of Representatives. The novel’s sixty-year arc touches on campus life, ballet, college basketball, interracial relationships, world government, and the bright red berries that drop from the rowan tree. At the same time, readers are treated to memorable characters like Easter Blue, a female African-American student who becomes Rowan’s ally in reform and soul mate in life; Marisol, a talented ballerina and Adam Blue’s half-sister; Élodie, a French-Vietnamese doctor with Doctors Without Borders; and Lahiri, a metaphysically-minded professor of geology in India. The Rowan Tree captures the universal quest for dignity in our time and envisions this quest in the decades to come. The novel relies on realism for its storytelling yet is unabashedly speculative in its vision of the future, in the sense that Margaret Atwood uses the term ‘speculative fiction.’

Fuller’s background is as fascinating as the novel, and key to the writing of it. His father worked at Bell Labs where he invented the solar cell. Bob was a childhood prodigy who attended Oberlin College at age 15, then got his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton, at 18. At 24 he co-authored Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics, a textbook still widely used today. At 33 he was named president of Oberlin College, then the youngest college president in the nation. In the years that followed, he worked with the government of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi to alleviate famine; with President Carter on the Presidential Commission to End World Hunger; and with Soviet scientists to reduce nuclear stockpiles during the Cold War. With the collapse of the USSR, Fuller’s career as a citizen-diplomat ended. From his status as a former college professor, president, and envoy, he reflected that at times in his life he had in society’s eyes been a ‘somebody,’ whereas now he was a comparative ‘nobody.’ This led him to identify the abuses of power inherent in unmerited rank as the unexamined prejudice of our age, and write through that prism.

While the novel outlines his vision of a just society, it is no mere manifesto. It’s an exciting and pacy story with an engrossing plot, structured like an Arthurian quest, climaxing with a vision of a world in which the attainment of dignity for all—the holy grail—is at last within reach. You might say the novel is a “Fountainhead for liberals.”

I’m happy for Fuller–his book is totally worthwhile and it’s a great read. He also sent me a screenshot (shown below) that shows that his book is finding readers on Amazon, where readers have left worthy comments like this one, which I’ll assign the last word in this post: “The narrative takes the reader to unexpected places, cleverly spanning history with glimpses of a future possible. The philosophy could have so easily been overdone, but instead allowed the characters to evolve in each of their own story arcs. I have been reflecting on my own responses ever since. Read it and allow the lessons to shape your own story…” The Rowan Tree

 

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A Basket Full of Holiday #FridayReads

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PT #FridayReads photoDelighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
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My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.


Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.


I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.


I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.

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William Morris’s Historic Printing Press Gets a New Home in Rochester, NY

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Albion No. 6551On December 5 New York Times reporter David Dunlap published a fascinating article about the forthcoming sale at Christie’s auction house of the illustrious printing press that under William Morris’s cultivated hand and eye printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, with illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Completed between 1894-96, it is among the most important modern fine press books ever printed and published. I’ve always enjoyed Dunlap’s reporting, in which he usually covers architecture. He brought the right sensibility to this article, which I loved for it being stuffed with factual nuggets like these:

“The instrument on which this artwork  [the Kelmscott Chaucer] was composed was the Improved Albion Press No. 6551, a hand press almost seven feet high, weighing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds, that was made in 1891 by Hopkinson & Cope in England. It is to be auctioned on Friday by Christie’s [in New York]. The estimate is $100,000 to $150,000.”

I’ve been waiting to blog about Dunlap’s article, because I wanted to report the auction result, if I could. And from a report I just found today, I’ve got that now, and also great detail on the provenance of the press. For instance, I’d been wondering: 

How did the Albion Press No. 6551 even get to North America?

Turns out, in 1924, noted type designer Frederick Goudy shipped the Albion across the Atlantic to his print shop in Marlborough, NY. I’m glad it wasn’t wartime, when the ship could’ve been the target of a U-Boat crew. In a real sense, the precious Albion carried the legacy of Morris’s elevated enterprise, so devoted–all-in, as we say now– to cultivating the art of the book. In 1960 the press was acquired by J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman of White Plains, NY. Under their ownership it was moved on three occasions, the last time when they moved house to Ardsley, NY. Though the family had long been active in fine printing circles, they came to find day-to-day operation and maintenance of the press beyond their capacities. Current owners, Jethro K. Lieberman and his wife Jo Shiffrin, told Dunlap, “It’s time for someone who will put it back into service.”

Dunlap reports that over two years in the last decade of the 19th century, 438 copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were printed by Morris and his pressmen on the Albion, and that every copy is accounted for, whether in institutions, libraries or private hands. He writes,

“Four belong to the Morgan Library & Museum. John Bidwell, its curator of printed books and bindings, permitted this reporter to examine a volume bound in white pigskin.The sheer amount of ink on paper is breathtaking. The decorated pages are blacker than they are white. Yet the printing is so exact that there is not so much as a stray smudge in this jungle of leaves, vines, berries and flowers.”

The report on the auction, running at What They Think, a site devoted to news of the commercial printing industry, reports that the Albion N. 6551 will now be housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate NY in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. It was bought for RIT by the “Brooks Bower family. Bower, a 1974 graduate of the School of Print Media, is an RIT trustee and chairman and chief executive officer of Papercone Corp., an envelope-manufacturing firm in Louisville, KY.”  The auction price was $233,000, well above the estimate. It will be put in to regular use by RIT students. I was pleased to read this thorough provenance of the press, which includes a lovely bit of history provided in part by Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection:

“’From 1932 to 1941, Albion No. 6551 was owned by the Cary Collection’s namesake, Melbert B. Cary Jr., director of Continental Type Founders Association and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. . . .Cary bequeathed the press to his pressman George Van Vechten, and in 1960, J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman acquired Albion No. 6551 for their Herity Press. They topped the press with a Liberty Bell, a reminder of the vital role that private presses play in the freedom of the press.’ Albion No. 6551 will join the Cary Collection’s Arthur M Lowenthal Memorial Pressroom, a working collection of 15 historical printing presses and more than 1,500 fonts of metal and wood type. Supporting study of the press is a collection of Kelmscott Press publications and archives of material related to Frederic Goudy and Cary’s Press of the Woolly Whale. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is located on the second floor of The Wallace Center at RIT. Hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For information, call 585-475-3961 or go http://cary.rit.edu.”

It’s been a good week for the art of the book, as last Friday I saw gorgeous printed materials at the Center for Book Arts’ holiday open house, and now this news about the outcome of the Christie’s auction. I hope to see the Cary Collection and the Albion No. 6551 someday. The photo at the top of this informational post and those borrowed below for it I happily credit to Eddie Hausner and Marilynn K. Yee, photographers of The New York Times, and thank them for this fair use.Kelmscott ChaucerJPKELMSCOTT1-articleLarge-v2

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A Belated #FridayReads–Peter Warner’s Smart Spy Novel “The Mole”

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In early November I’d been to the launch party for the spy novel The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates, and am only now getting around to reading it. I’m really enjoying this heady thriller whose narrator and protagonist is a Canadian transplant to the U.S. that finds himself on the staff of the real-life senator from Georgia, Richard Russell. I tweeted about the book last Friday and neglected to share about it here until now. Highly recommended, the sort of book for which I’d like to put my work aside so I can burrow deeper in to the unfolding tale.

Note: This piece is cross-posted at my other blog, Honourary Canadian.

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Celebrating Books & the Season at the Center for Book Arts

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Center for Book ArtsHad a great time at the Center for Book Arts holiday open house and sale last night. My wife Kyle, a visual artist, used to teach a course on printmaking at the Center and it was fun for both of us to revisit the big loft space in Chelsea on W. 27th Street and see the place full of people. We found the work of many, many talented book artists and paper artists on display, Kafana Mundial, a musical trio (clarinet, accordion, and percussion) playing Balkan music, and lots of nice food & drink. Everywhere my eye landed I saw printing presses, drawers of old metal type fonts, bookbinding materials, and beautiful examples of paper craft and book art. We enjoyed speaking with Alex Campos, director of the Center; Barbara Henry, master of letter press printing who’s done a stunning Walt Whitman book under her Harsimus Press; Roni Gross, book artist and publisher of Z’roah Press; and Esther K. Smith, artist, author and co-publisher of Purgatory Pie Press. Here are the best pictures Kyle and I took last night. Please click here to see all of them  

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#FridayReads, Nov 22–Patty Dann’s Novel “Starfish”

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Starfish

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