JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 874
One of my favorite categories/threads in this blog is the
sublime-mundane pamphlet title.
Envelope Facts, Notes on Reading Aloud, Saturn Has Rings,
Know Your Groceries, Zipper Repair, Flagpole Painting,The Fine Art of Squeezing, Thirst and two dozen others
have bobbed to the surface here like antique lobster pots finding their way to
the daylight after 50 years of the big dark cold—at this point, no one cares what’s inside, sort of-- just the very story and
appearance is good enough.
Sometimes the story and the title of these indredibly-titled beasts are both fascinating, though usually it is
not the case: the contents of the pamphlets with some of these bizarre titles
are just a plain slice of Wonder
Bread, a big nothingness. The work on flagpole
painting is an incredible title—and it turns out that the contents make the
pamphlet the veritable Ulysses of
books of its genre, of which it may be the only one. But so it goes. At least everything that you’d need or want to
know is in there if you needed or were moved enough to paint a flagpole. Zipper Repair too is in this category—it
really is an exhaustive treatment on repairing zippers.
Today’s installment of five titles has only one in that first
category, the remainder being fundamentally eyebrow-raiser titles with somnolent
contents, exciting and sleepifying in one five-second motion.
A Short Treatise on Hickory Handles I am
sure is still useful to anyone making their own hickory-handled tools. It is a beautiful work—considered,
referenced, insightful, well-written and nicely illustrated. It is, in its own special way, achingly
wonderful. Not knowing anything about hickory handles I was very surprised to see that their story played out to 30 pages--it was so well written and documented that I read the entire thing. At one point in time, hickory handles were important.
The others are really more bark than bite—but their titles
are just weirdly gorgeous. "After Forty...What?" held hope, but the 1934 pamphlet didn't identify 40 as the new 60--it was concerned with (illustrated) tooth decay, and held no daydreams. Ditto "The Most Important Tooth"--I was hoping fo rit to be some one gigantic tooth in a field in Kansas, but I was wrong. Somehow the six-year-old molar is the most important, the seat of its infection leading to disease throughout the body. I dunno. I won't even go into the other two for fear of spoiling their titled wonders.
Some other examples: here, here and here.
[Where do these odd things come from?]
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