Favorite Maxims, Some of them Mine

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“If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a comfortable living.”—A Yiddish proverb quoted by W.H. Auden in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book * (A William Cole Book, Viking Press, 1970)

“It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re on the ground with the turkeys.”–Seen above the bar at Cleveland’s Euclid Tavern, circa 1970s-80s, source unknown

Three of my own coinage:

“Stay neutral, lean positive.”

“Being an editor allows me to express my latent religiosity, since I spend so much time praying for my books.”

“Publishing companies have long been known as ‘houses’ because they (are supposed to) offer hospitality to writers.”

* For those curious about what a commonplace book is, please see my pictures of the front and back flaps, and back cover, from my treasured copy of A Certain World. I recall from my years as a bookseller that E.M. Forster also assembled, or perhaps I should say, he collected materials for a commonplace book of his own. I love Auden’s contribution to this overlooked literary form.

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A Surprising Symbol of Scottish Sovereignty

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Fascinating, and timely obit of Ian Hamilton, 97, who in 1950 was part of a crew that broke into Westminster Abbey and absconded with an ancient 336-pound stone, a symbol of Scottish sovereignty, later conveying it back to Scotland from whence it had been taken to England in 1296. Hamilton and his cohorts broke into the Abbey with just a crowbar, and located the heavy relic under the Coronation Chair where kings were crowned. Moving it, the stone split into two pieces, but they somehow got it out of the building and into a car.

This was of course long before the current popular movement agitating for Scotland’s independence from the UK. Ever since Brexit was imposed on the UK in 2016, I’ve been lamenting its impact on the country, and in particular on Scotland. With the third British Prime Minister of the past seven weeks now taking office, the chaos Brexit has engendered is clearer all the time.

As a lover of Scotland, my hope is that the country will become independent in coming years and re-join the EU as an independent nation. Hop-skipping along the map from the Republic of Ireland to Scotland and then onto the European Continent, the EU could in the future become a strong economic and political bulwark as the chaotic 21st Century advances toward what kind of future we know not.

I must add this: I love Great Britain, and England, too, but, the UK is not apt to rejoin the EU—even the Labor party, which I hope to see win a majority in Britain’s next general election, is not yet advocating a re-do on Brexit—so I hope to see Scotland independent one day soon. I know Mr Ian Hamilton, RIP, would have approved.

A tip of the cap to NY Times reporter Richard Sandomir, who wrote the obit of Ian Hamilton.


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Remembering My Dad, Earl I. Turner, on Father’s Day 2022

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My father, Earl I. Turner (Feb 7, 1918-July 8, 1992), was a dear man who showed me so much about being a kind and decent person. Here’s a letter he wrote for his three children on May 8, 1978, four days after we’d opened Undercover Books, our bookstore in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Jewish tradition embraces the idea that a parent may offer to their children what’s termed an “ethical will,” which is pretty much what he gave us here, with its discussion of ethics in business, while standing up for one’s self. The photograph was taken on a visit he made to the Canadian Rockies in 1982, a sightseeing journey that he gloried in. My own enjoyment of gorgeous scenic views was no doubt inspired by him. His handwriting and signature were very distinctive, and I’m always comforted when I see his script on something, as here. Thank you, Dad, gone thirty years, love for you always.

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Remembering David Janssen in “The Fugitive,” an Every(Wronged)Man Hero

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My favorite male TV star from childhood was David Janssen in “The Fugitive,” playing the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimball. The sympathetic protagonist endures the loss of his murdered wife, then gets collared and condemned for the killing until a train wreck en route to the “death house*” frees him from the clutches of the implacable Lt. Inspector Philip Gerard. Played by the sober Canadian actor Barry Morse, Gerard, like Javert in Les Miserables, tracks the escaped man from one end of the land to the next. Floating from town-to-town, job-to-job, Kimball relies on the anonymity a loner could still have in the 1960s—no one ever asks him for so much as a Social Security number. I don’t think the program could be made today. The show was inspired, in part, by the real-life murder of Marilyn Sheppard in Cleveland, with her doctor husband Sam the accused, which I also paid attention to in the mid-60s. As the fugitive who could never set down roots anywhere, in each teleplay forced to abandon newly forged friendships, Janssen’s Kimball somehow maintained a grim good humor, which I’ve always admired. The show still looks good nowadays.

I have no doubt that my enjoyment of “The Fugitive” is part of the reason why I have always been drawn to publishing books about the unjustly accused, such as Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America. by William F. Burke and Joe Jackson, Introduction by William Styron. One of the first posts I published on the blog was the story of how I came to work with Styron in championing Dead Run.

#TVShows #1960s #exonerations
*The pulse-pounding Intro, with its line about “the death house” was voiced by the baritone actor William Conrad.

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New York City Winters, Then & Now—Climate Change Reflections

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I moved to New York City from Cleveland in early March of 1985, almost 37 years ago. In many of the winters I’ve experienced since the move east, the Hudson River would become icy, as attested to by these pictures I took in January 2015.

Sometimes the ice would be close to shore, as seen here, with the tidal nature of the Hudson ensuring the river didn’t freeze hard. But in the ’90s, I remember extended runs when temperatures didn’t rise above freezing for days or weeks, and temps in the twenties, teens, and single digits were common. Then the ice would become more solid and fill in across the middle of the river. With the tidal shifting less impactful, the ice could stretching toward New Jersey. Someone foolhardy might’ve thought they could walk across, but that would have foolish indeed.

Despite the blustery cold, it was thrilling to watch and listen as the floes heaved, ground, and pitched against one another. I used to feel like I was in my own private Shackleton expedition. If you’ve read Alfred Lansing’s stirring narrative about that sojourn to the South Pole, the ships became trapped amid colossal bergs that stoved in their sides and collapsed their masts. The sailors were driven to near madness by the grinding and gnashing of the ice.

The past several winters? Not so much, a function of planetary warming, I believe. Our winters are definitely becoming less cold. More evidence of this? Flocks of geese used to visit the Hudson shores seasonally, and leave for months at a time, flying further south for warmer climes. Now they’re resident year-round.

 

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William Blake and My Close Friend Rob Adams

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When I woke up this last morning of the long Thanksgiving weekend, I looked at Twitter on my iPhone and saw that this date November 28 is the birthday of the timeless artist William Blake (1757-1843). Immediately, I thought I would share an image of the precious work I have by him, an engraving from his hand, given to me years ago by my close friend, Robert Henry Adams (1955-2001).

After I shared a social media post seen here, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I realized I could also do a fuller post that links to earlier blog essays I’ve shared on this website (here, here, and here) about Rob, our meaningful friendship, and a third Franconia College friend pal with whom we constituted a troika, Karl Petrovich.

The Blake gift doesn’t exhaust the fine art that Rob gave me, or occasionally, that I bought from him. There are no less than a dozen such pieces in my Manhattan apartment, such as a print I bought of a circus aerialist by British artist Dame Laura Knight. Another is the framed Lincoln portrait by Civil War-era photographer Alexander Gardner shown here. Sometime in the late 1980s Rob spotted it at an auction, and bought it relatively cheaply due to the unfortunate crease in the middle. Always one to see the bright side, despite the defect, Rob had also spotted the signature, “Your Obt Servt A. Lincoln“, seeming to him in pencil or faded ink, and not a mechanical or mass-reproduced autograph. This made it all but certain it was from Lincoln and Gardner’s time, done in the sixteenth president’s own hand. FYI, the printing near the bottom of the picture reads, from left to right,

A. Gardner, Photographer.         Published by Philip & Solomons, Washington D.C.               Washington

Rob didn’t want to try re-selling it because of the imperfection, and so gave it to me, a (probably) autographed Lincoln photograph. Pretty amazing, right?!

There was some sweet symmetry to the Lincoln gift, because earlier, in the 1970s, for Rob’s wedding to Chicago fashion historian Sandra Adams, I had given him the oversized photography book The Face of Lincoln (Viking, 1979, 15″ x 11 1/2 inches), collecting every known photograph of Lincoln, which at my family’s bookstore in Cleveland, Undercover Books, we were then stocking and selling.  

 

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A Tribute to the Old Man of the Mountain, Franconia Notch, White Mountains—RIP

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I was extremely lucky to spend a good chunk of my young adult years as a student at Franconia College, in Franconia, New Hampshire, located in the White Mountains, near the dramatic topographical feature called Franconia Notch. I made many close friends while a student at the college from 1973-77, like the late Robert Henry Adams and Karl Petrovich, with whom I formed a troika (the power trio’s pictured below), both of them lost to me along the way, sadly, and other good friends whom I still know and appreciate today. Franconia College was an experimental institution, part of the ferment of the times, an educational environment I relished, and am still grateful I experienced. The scenery that I saw everyday in the area and from a small cabin where I lived with my black Lab Noah was majestic, as pictures here will show.
I often photographed the jut-jawed Old Man of the Mountain, aka The Great Stone Face and The Profile, a historic feature of the landscape that humans began marveling at centuries long before New Hampshire was settled by descendants of European colonists. In later decades, the craggy rock face was held together by cables and guy wires, all of which collapsed in 2003.


Going back to the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Great Stone Face” in 1850, a tale about the denizens of the region, and the legendary profile that towered above them. He wrote, “It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, withs long bridge, and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other.” 

Click here for more pictures.

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