Neglected Books

Canadian spice sales could make a serious dent in the profits of 1990s Britpop group because....?

Oh, right: because lawyers.

55. And his career was essentially over when the first Perry Mason series ended. Here he is at 19: his body was running too far ahead of the calendar, I guess.

Thanks for the background. While I haven't forgotten my copy on a bus, it probably feels forgotten on my bookshelves.

Good to know. One mustn't forget a book in just any old mode of transportation. I believe trains are still the preferred place to forget manuscripts.

Interesting way to praise a book.

From "New Novels," a set of reviews by D. Painter in The Listener, August 5, 1948:
"Mr. Scott-Moncrieff's Cafe Bar appeared sixteen years ago, and I have rarely so much regretted leaving a book half-read on a 38 bus."

"This scandal will go nowhere."
"Why?"
"Because we've got money!"

Never changes, does it? Frank Morgan usually played a good guy (if often a befuddled good guy), so it's refreshing to see him as corrupt and sinister in Billion Dollar Scandal (1933)

Thanks for that. I'm still hoping for a few more reviews. Not even the Lincoln Journal Star, the main paper in her home town, found it worth mentioning. As Virginia would say, probably too many words and not enough pictures.

I have a feeling Virginia would have gone direct to the after party.

Whole chunks of bureaucracies and other large organizations would grind to a halt if executive summaries disappeared. Barking out, "Just cut to the chase!"is taken as a sign of decisiveness, not a symptom of limited knowledge and short attention span. As we can see in practically every headline now.

With a total of one review of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts (or, as bookstore browsers call it, "Who? By Who?") two months after publication, I wouldn't mind getting just a smidge closer to being reviewed to death.

It is almost 500 pages longer, or more than 2½ times more paper. The paper inside M&D is more expensive than the cardboard outside Shadow Ticket. The most confounding thing about current book prices isn't that they're so high but that if they followed inflation, they'd be even higher.

Anne Goodwin Winslow was 68 when she wrote her first book, The Dwelling Place, an amused, affectionate, poetic tribute to the home outside Memphis where she grew up and to which she returned after decades of travel as an Army wife. It makes you wish you could be her guest.

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I will be fascinated to see the audience's reaction. I'll bet a handful of people have seen it lately. It's on DVD, but not remotely on interest to anyone but completists.

It's a slow night in LA two weeks from now and you're thinking, "Boy, I wish there was a special screening of an obscure 1930s screwball comedy we could go to. And if there was a special talk to go along with it, that would be fantastic!”

Well, folks, I'm here to help you out. And there'll be cake!

"The first thing we do, let's fire all the lawyers who know anything about the laws of armed conflict." Donald I, Part II, Act IV, Scene 2

In the Absence of Magic, by Ernst Pawel (1961). The biographer's only novel, a portrait of a popular historian and narcissist as seen by his psychiatrist. "The most thoroughgoing analysis of evil for many a long slap-happy day," wrote John Davenport (in an odd choice of phrase).

Roddy Ho is a hacker. Back when the US cared about rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict, a lot more than a band of cowboy hackers was required to deliver military cyber effects.

He's the comedic equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard.

I was once described as "the Orville Wright of cyber warfare" in an official (unclassified) Air Force report.

"Rapscallion!" Berton Churchill expands Warren Hymer's vocabulary in Kid Millions (1934), one of the more enjoyable Eddie Cantor movies (made so by the relative absence of Eddie Cantor in many scenes).

Today's #BookMail: Proofs of Ethel Mannin's An American Journey, with an introduction by @joannapocock.bsky.social. Coming in May in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press @bhousepress.bsky.social. A trip across America by bus in 1965, full of uncomfortable parallels with America in 2026

Actors were making a couple dozen movies a year back then. Of course they had to talk fast: the assistant director of their next film was usually standing off camera waving, "Hurry up! Hurry up!"

No Goodness in the Worm by Gay Taylor is a lightly fictionalized memoir of Taylor's affair with the writer A. E. Coppard. But it's definitely a post-affair account: "Miss Taylor ... views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable."

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It varies. They came out simultaneously from both, McNally was first with Ex-Wife. McNally has definitely published far more titles by now, though.

Lucy Scholes is the primary link between the two publishers. McNally started after Faber relaunched its rediscoveries list, but there are a fair number of duplicates between the two lists.

Except...a lot of the credit goes to Faber, which published many of these first, and then McN followed with a US edition.

One Way Passage. Just sayin'.

The Department of Violence with No Wussy Rules of Engagement Hoo-Ah Bring It On Aren't My Tats Cool Bro Can I Get a Chest Bump I Am So Jacked Now Praise Jeebus!

How huge was this album?

My dad had it — and he never bought an album that a dozen people he knew didn't already have.

Oh dear, it's a McNally Edition. There must be something beyond a young girl's strange, erotic journey*, etc. ... I hope.

*Seinfeld reference