Family cottages and cabins can be great places to find books -- especially if they've been around for a couple generations, and are shared by several branches of the family.
At my family's cottage, a few weeks ago, I found the incomparable Cleanliness & Godliness. At my wife's family's cabin this week, the hunting wasn't as good, but I did discover an oversized hardcover reprint called the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. It had the Study in Scarlet, the Hound, and three or four of the better-known stories, and was apparently aimed at eleven-year-old boys, with exciting pictures and all the longer words glossed in the margins.
What made it a find, though, was what came after the Holmes stories: a fairly arbitrary (and completely anonymous) article on how to detect forged documents. Now, none of the Holmes stories were about forgeries, and none of the techniques discussed had anything to do with the Holmes period, but I did learn that ball-point pens were unavailable before 1945, that if you ever find two signatures exactly alike you can be sure that one's a forgery (I think I already knew that), that old people's hands often shake (knew that too), and that you -- yes, you -- could enter the exciting profession of document verification!
I wish publishers did this kind of thing more often. I hope that if Sandbag Shuffle is re-printed after my death, the publishers throw in instructions for building a teepee, or a recipe for homemade root beer, or something.
At my family's cottage, a few weeks ago, I found the incomparable Cleanliness & Godliness. At my wife's family's cabin this week, the hunting wasn't as good, but I did discover an oversized hardcover reprint called the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. It had the Study in Scarlet, the Hound, and three or four of the better-known stories, and was apparently aimed at eleven-year-old boys, with exciting pictures and all the longer words glossed in the margins.
What made it a find, though, was what came after the Holmes stories: a fairly arbitrary (and completely anonymous) article on how to detect forged documents. Now, none of the Holmes stories were about forgeries, and none of the techniques discussed had anything to do with the Holmes period, but I did learn that ball-point pens were unavailable before 1945, that if you ever find two signatures exactly alike you can be sure that one's a forgery (I think I already knew that), that old people's hands often shake (knew that too), and that you -- yes, you -- could enter the exciting profession of document verification!
I wish publishers did this kind of thing more often. I hope that if Sandbag Shuffle is re-printed after my death, the publishers throw in instructions for building a teepee, or a recipe for homemade root beer, or something.
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