Mark Twain on Jane Austen: I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

William Faulkner on Mark Twain: A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Ernest Hemignway on William Faulkner: Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

Tom Wolfe on Ernest Hemingway: Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness — it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.

John Irving on Tom Wolfe: He doesn’t know how to write fiction, he can’t create a character, he can’t create a situation…You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake….I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine….You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.

You can read more examples on the original Examiner article.

Antikamnia’s analgesic compound, which was never patented, was marketed as a ‘proudly ethical drug’ and used to treat headaches, fever, stomach aches, nervousness, insomnia and ‘the blues’. It was claimed to be a new synthetic coal-tar derivative but in fact contained almost 50% acetanilid, which was sometimes mixed with codeine or quinine. The toxic effects of acetanilid were exposed in a 1907 California State Journal of Medicine article, ‘Poisoning by Antikamnia’, and the company was prosecuted by the government in 1914 for violating the disclosure terms of the Food and Drug Act of 1906. The calendars were issued from 1897 until 1901. Each panel in the Antikamnia calendars depict fantastic and comical skeletons dressed in different styles and occupations.

This particular Antikamnia calendar includes:

January/February, “Extra! All About The [-----]!!!,” as a raggedly-clad newsboy, hawking newspapers;

March/April, “His Fourth of July!”, with March 17 printed in green, the skeleton wearing a top hat with clover leaf, and green sash, smoking a pipe;

May/June, “Ein Stein!”, with beer stein and German pipe;

July/August, “The Doctor’s Enemy,” as patent medicine salesman, with top hat and spectacles, in one hand a bag marked “No Genuine Goods, Substitutes Only,” in the other, a card “Fred. Smith & Co. Manf’g Chemists / Motto / Quantity not Quality”;

September/October, “Practicing – At The Bar,” as a prosperous-looking attorney or business man, with top hat and cigar, leaning against a bar with shot glass in hand;

and (pictured) November/December, “A Rough Rider,” as a cowboy, with appropriate hat, gun and holster/ perched atop a box “From the Antikamnia Chemichal Comp. / St. Louis, Mo.”

Verso of each card with text regarding the various products of the company and the diseases for which they are recommended (a sampling: Chronic Rheumatism, Puerperal and Malarial Fevers, Bronchitis, Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, Typhoid, all Neuroses due to Irregularities of Menstruation, etc.).

I love it. So ghoulish!

The Antikamnia Chemical Company hired local physician-artist Louis Crucius to do the art for the calendars. Crucius was also a pharmacist, and did the “Skeleton Sketches” drawings while working at a pharmacy. Five years worth of the calendars – 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, and 1901 – were printed.

I wondered what other book-related board games I could find, and whether we had them available on AbeBooks. Here are a few of the gems I discovered:

This Uncle Wiggly board game comes from Howard Garis, author of the Uncle Wiggily Bedtime stories and other Uncle Wiggily books.

Peter Rabbit’s Race Game, based on the adventures of Beatrix Potter’s beloved character, Peter Rabbit.

A Starship Troopers board game based on Robert Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers (one of our 50 essential science fiction books!)

This is an Alice in Wonderland card game, not a board game, but still wonderful – “The New and Diverting Game of Alice in Wonderland, consisting of forty-eight pictorial cards…” one copy from 1905, one from 1920. Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

This is a Walking Dead board game (zombies!). It’s based on the TV show, but the TV show is based on The Walking Dead graphic novels by Robert Kirkman.

And of course a Game of Thrones board game… which I can only imagine should never be played by children. Ever. And by children, I mean anyone under 25.

…ever.

Happy reading, happy gaming!

The students estimated the size of the peach, described by Dahl as being tall and wide like a small house, and derived that it would take 4,890,579 Newton’s of force to lift the massive fruit into the air. They then sorted out the carrying capacity of a seagull (based on its wingspan, the density of air around it and the speed it would travel) and derived that James would have required nearly 2.5 million seagulls.

For shame Mr. Dahl, factual inaccuracies in children`s stories is just something I cannot abide. I had better not find out about an Oxford student’s discovery that Foxes are incapable of stealing cider from deranged farmers.

Imagine if the creepy King of cosmic horror, Mr. H.P. Lovecraft himself, was available to offer you guidance in all your relationship problems? It might look a little something like this:

Dear Howie,

My girlfriend has metamorphosed into a kind of polyhedron with many pairs of feelers, membraneous wings, and fanged orifices on stalks. Should I talk to her about this, or keep hoping it’s just a phase? Snapshot enclosed.

Amateur Photographer

Dear Amateur Photographer: –

I do not know long it was before I dared to inspect your snapshot. Once I did, I immediately fell wholly to the floor. How much time passed after that, do not ask me to guess, but a momentary fragment of memory shows me racing dementedly past a long stone colonnade towards a curious hummock. After that, mercifully, all is blackness. My aunts discovered me beside a nearby megalith, with my faculties paralyzed, a mark on my forehead bespeaking all too vividly the ravages of some snail-like marsupial. It was months before I regained the ability to talk any language but proto-Algonquian. Now my senses have somewhat cleared, I recommend you break things off with your fiancée as tactfully as possible, not letting her suspect you have noticed any change or blemish. Hers is such an image as — but I cannot go on. I have barricaded myself indoors, and hope never to look at another photograph, or touch any variety of leafy vegetable. Even Dalgaard’s worst prophesies fell short of the unspeakable reality! A rank odor now pervades everything, the hills resonate with sustained prehuman howling, and I keep losing my place in the Unrecommended Codex of Naarg,

Yrs Strkly. Trrfd., – HPL.

Dear Howie,

Last week I received a “you probably don’t remember me” note from a man I went to a school dance with nineteen years ago. He is married and has three kids, but states he is not happy. What should I do?

Concerned Lady

Dear Concerned Lady: –

Although humankind has a yearning toward whatever is redolent of mystery and allurement, it is well that certain lacunae in our knowledge should remain forever unfilled. Your shadowy correspondent’s mention of the ill-regarded numbers nineteen and three recalls an unutterable experiment performed on sticklebacks by the Swedish icthyologist Dalgaard. I dare not describe his observations, but he concluded that, the longer we can remain innocent of our place in the cosmos, the better it must augur for our mental integrity. He came to understand there was more meaning than is commonly supposed in the nebulous half-inscriptions found on abandoned wharves — while who knows what malign significance underlies the latest findings on the growth of angiosperms, or the cycle of the solar spots? What of the transgalactic pulsings that have cost more than one astronomer his powers of reasoning? I have heard it whispered that the imprints found on Dalgaard’s pillow, toward the end, resembled the fronds of a kind of bracken previously unknown to botany. The muffled clattering sounds from my roof impel me hastily to conclude,

Yrs most cordially & sincerely, – HPL.

All this and more at bygonebureau.

While we were there, we heard tell of a Gladys Knight cookbook, as well. But why, I wondered, would a singer have a cookbook? Who cares what a musician eats for dinner? Well, as it turns out, a lot of people do. Celebrity has sway.

If you’re wondering what to take to your next potluck, why not ask a likely expert, like Patricia Cornwell, Dolly Parton or Vincent Price? Wait. What?

Yes, it’s true, all of those people have written cookbooks. There are plenty of weird celebrity cookbooks. It seems cookbooks allow for a broad bandwagon, and all kinds of celebrities are jumping aboard to publish their own tasty tomes. And while some might clearly be appealing for the novelty, others sound legitimately delicious. Maya Angelou’s California Green Chile and Cheese Pie, for instance, or Sheryl Crow’s Fried Green Tomato BLT. From Cookin’ With Will Rogers, to Cooking with Kenny Rogers, enjoy this list of cookbooks from the unlikeliest celebrities.

We do not have any copies of Cooking with Poo:

But we have several copies of Cooking with Pooh:

That is all. Carry on.

The project is an adaptation of Sedaris’ essay called “C.O.G.”, from the 1997 collection Naked, from writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez. Alvarez is so far little-known, but his 2009 directorial debut, Easier Than Practice, impressed critics and earned him an Indie Spirit Award in the “Someone to Watch” category.

I loved C.O.G. when I read it. Sedaris wrote it about the time he spent working as an apple-picker in Oregon orchards in the 1980s, and the wonderful and alarming people he encountered along the way. I remember it the characters being almost cartoonish, but Sedaris’ writing is such that I bought into it wholly and laughed my way through the whole thing.

What is exciting is this, in two parts: 1) David Sedairs, to now, has flat-out refused to allow any of his work to be adapted for screenplay; and 2) It was Alvarez himself, with a visit to Sedaris on his book tour, and an impassioned six-page email follow-up, who convinced the author to let him proceed.

Shooting is slated to start in October 2012. I am crossing fingers and toes that this goes forward and makes it.

If you’ve never read Naked, I recommend it very highly – that, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Holidays On ice are my favourite Sedaris collections.

via indiewire.com