Census data is the weirdest source material for genealogical research and I will tell you why: it’s the easiest to come by and it’s frequently mentioned as the best place to start with one’s family research. But it’s also among the most inaccurate—perhaps the most inaccurate—data available.

Census-takers didn’t fact-check. How could they? People who answered the door for the enumerator—people who may not have been even related to the people the census-taker was looking to enumerate—frequently gave wildly inaccurate details. Birthdates, birth places and immigration years were fudged or guessed. Ages were wrong. Nicknames were supplied instead of given names. Spelling errors popped up everywhere.

I had a problem. I was tracking back a family as far as possible using a combination of the federal census (taken nationally every 10 years since 1790) and the New York state census (taken in Brooklyn every 10 years between 1855 and 1925). I knew my family’s data from the 1865 state census was accurate to a very high degree of certainty.

But the data from what seemed to be the same family in the 1860 federal census was sketchy. I knew I was comparing two families from the same large geographic swath of Brooklyn but neither street names nor addresses were recorded on either of the censuses, so I couldn’t match up those. The given names of the family’s two children matched but they were common names. Some of the ages seemed off. The spelling of the family’s surname was mangled—or was it the correct spelling for a different family altogether? The head of the household had the correct job title but I knew his name was Edward and this census clearly listed it as “Geo,” presumably George. And his wife was listed without any first name at all, just “Mrs.” I got a strong whiff of lazy nineteenth-century census-taker.

I’d let this fishy record sit because I didn’t want to deal with it. But it nagged me. Then I remembered something forehead-smackingly obvious. Census-takers, whether federal or state, didn’t track the families of their district however they pleased. They traced their way around blocks consistently and methodically, with the happy side effect of preserving next-door neighbors. Here’s a diagram from the Census Bureau’s Instructions to Enumerators showing how to canvass a city block for the 1920 census:

That’s when I realized the solution to my problem: in both censuses, I could try matching-up the family just before (and/or after) the one I was trying to prove. Only five years had passed between the two censuses; many families likely had stayed put. And they had. Thanks to my family’s next-door-neighbors, the Watkins’.

A snippet of the 1860 federal census is on the left. The 1865 New York state census is on the right. The names don’t completely match up and the ages aren’t all right—and see how the 1860 census taker cuts the same corners as he did with the family I was tracking, such as listing “Mrs.” (twice!) instead of a given name. But the similarities are numerous, and there are others, including job titles and countries of birth, that I’ve cropped out. I’m now convinced the family I thought I found in 1860 is the same one as in 1865.

(diagram via Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy (3rd Edition, 2006), edited by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking; census snippets via Ancestry Library Edition)

For my genalogical research, I want to know more about my great-great grandmother, but I have few facts on her birth and early life, so I’ve been investigating members of her immediate family. I’d collected a bit of information on her second of three brothers, Frederick, but as he aged into his 30s, my trail on him ran cold. Did he move? Enlist? Die? I let him go for a while.

Then, during a recent stray search in Google Books, I unearthed a New York State report that listed the people and corporations that changed names in Brooklyn in 1905.¹ There was Frederick. He had changed his given name to Paul and he had reverted his surname to the way it was spelled in Germany, before his parents-to-be sailed for New York.

Why did he do this? To find out, I took the subway to Borough Hall in search of the Kings County Clerk’s Record Room.

After passing through the x-ray at the Kings County Supreme Court, I got lost in a basement and inadvertently discovered where the courthouse keeps its employee restrooms, lockers, and secrets. A maintennance guy whose name may or may not have been Virgil showed me how to return to street level then go down a special elevator to the correct basement.

The Clerk’s Record Room is where Brooklyn keeps its extra-gruff public servants, the grizzled ones with mustard-thick New York accents. They dwell molelike in a florescent-lit cave of really uncomfortable rolling office chairs surrounded by walls of filing cabinets and mountains of bankers boxes that have handwritten labels like DIVORCE 11/2007. The décor is late-’70s bureaucratic. The PCs appear to have been scavenged from a slightly more recent electronics recycling event. When I arrived, several employees behind the service counter were debating the pros and cons of the various fast-food value menus; a sub-discussion on the merits of McDonald’s McRib sandwich was getting particularly heated.

But in my months-that-seem-like-years of genealogical research in the courthouses, archives and tangled institutions of the tristate area, I’ve found that as long as one is prepared and knows what one is talking about around governmental employees, which I do, one can earn their respect and helpfulness. I got my hands on Frederick’s original Petition for his name change as well as the subsequent Order that sealed the deal. Then I got photocopies for posterity. These are revealing, often entertaining documents. The petitioner must explain why he wants to change his name.² Frederick told the court he wanted to change his surname because he was “desirous of restoring his name to the original family name[.]” And he wanted to change his given name “for the reason that he is a believer in the new science of the Cryptogram, and in compliance with that belief he desires to change his first and middle name as aforesaid to Paul William, so as to make it in concord.”

I see. I haven’t yet made headway on what this “science of the Cryptogram” was. I am having Tom Cruise visions of Scientology, however. And I note the timeframe of the name change aligns nearly with that during which Congressman and crackpot³ Ignatius L. Donnelly published The Great Cryptogram, a book that reinforced the then-popular notion that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

But now armed with Frederick’s new name I could see what he had been up to in the early 20th Century. Let’s see: he filed the petition to change his name October 11, 1905. He married on June 5, 1906. (He was 39. She was 21 and had been married once before and divorced.) On July 1, 1906, she gave birth to a girl. Yes, inspect that chronology and stroke your chin theatrically. I shan’t speculate, wildly or otherwise, about Frederick/Paul and his reasons for wanting to disassoiate himself with his original identity, but there’s certainly more scandal-page fodder here than what I knew of his pre-1905 life, which was only that he was a clerk at a life insurance company.

¹ I was going to focus this entry on Google Books but that would have been overkill and (more) boring. What I wanted to say is that it’s one of the best lead generators for genealogical research I’ve yet to find. Meaning, it will reveal a small fact, a possible clue, or a tempting Snippet View that then requires traditional shoe-leather research, to either a library or a records depository, as in this example. [back]

² The petitioner was also required to list his place of residence, his age, his parents’ names, whether he was married, whether he was in any legal hot water, and whether he had any outstanding debts, all of which are also helpful for genealogical research. Presumably the last two points exist to prevent the I-changed-my-name-so-I-owe-you-nothing gambit, but a tangent of my research will be to determine who Mr. W. H. Slyder was and why Frederick owed him $1,000. [back]

³ I’m not trying to be intentionally redundant. [back]

I’ve been going to the same barbershop in New York City since about 2005. No one recommended it to me and I don’t remember why I selected it, but I’ve stayed with it, even though it’s never been conveniently located to either where I’ve lived or where I’ve worked. The price is good, for New York, that is, and for a guy like me with hair as uncomplicated as it is sparse. I must have been walking around Greenwich Village, seen the striped pole, and thought, “This place looks good.” And it is good.

It’s mostly a standard barber shop. Spartan. Old Sports Illustrateds and girlie mags. About five chairs to wait in, but just two barber’s chairs, efficiently run, so ther’s never a long wait although there’s a constant stream of guys.

A few Russians run the place. They have thick accents and they know my face but not my name. They know my hair. They often ask whether I want my “usual business-style haircut.” When they trim my beard, they’re supposed to charge me extra, but they don’t. They won’t converse unless I want to. I prefer to keep things quiet because it enhances my relaxation. Good haircuts are relaxing to me, in the way that I imagine massages are to some people.

It’s in the small details. It’s not just the hair atop the head. They corner an end-tip of the electric razor into my ears, to get the stray wispy hairs there. They flatten a comb over my eyebrows and raze those suckers, too. And one must not forget the graceful finale of any haircut: the buzzing of the neck hair, that scruff that can get out of control in the shirt-collar region.

My barbers do all of these things, and during the holidays, they offer a complimentary shot of vodka and a selection from a box of small pastries. With or without the shot, I always leave feeling great. I tip well.

I’ve been concerned about my barbershop lately. This spring, another barbershop opened across the street, advertising aggressively cheaper prices with a gaudy animated LED sign. The last time I got a haircut, as I was paying, my barber told me it was possible the shop was being priced out of its space. A move could be in the cards. He took down my email address, just in case he needed to get in touch with me. Today, he pulled me aside and said the shop was almost certainly moving before my next haircut. He wrote down the potential address on a business card and handed it to me.

Sitting here back in the office, I just pulled the card out of my pocket because I realized I’ve been going to this barbershop for years but I’ve never known its name. According to the card, it’s “The Barber Shop.” That’s just right.

In addition to archived legal documents, the Library of the Bar of the City of New York collects general-interest historical ephemera. They have, for example, a collection of ads for patent medicines dating from around the time the government delivered a national dose of huckster-depleting tonic known as the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act. That 1906 law prohibited miracle claims and, often, the foods or drugs making such claims. Among the most entertaining of these was Teutonic, a locally brewed snake-oil (or malt liquor, possibly).

In their Featured Exhibitions section, the Bar explains:

During the 19th century, New York was home to some of the nation’s leading breweries, including Schaeffer [and] Ruppert Liebmann. Most breweries were located in Brooklyn neighborhoods with the highest concentration of German immigrants. Liebmann’s Brewery was established in 1860 and became famous for making Rheingold beer. In 1896, in an effort to expand its business, Liebmann’s promoted a new miracle cure, Teutonic, which claimed to aid nursing mothers and those suffering from insomnia and dyspepsia. Teutonic was a concentrated liquid extract of malt and hops containing a much higher alcohol content than most beers. The success of Teutonic led to similar tonics being offered by Pabst and Anheuser-Busch.

(scan via eBay)

Tom Wilson, who created the cartoon Ziggy and spent most of his career in Greater Cleveland, died on Friday. I paid my respects by remembering one of the odder connections in cartoonery, which to me ranks on a par with, say, Disney and Dali.

When the young Robert Crumb set out from home in October 1962 to find his fortune in Cleveland, all he had with him was a suitcase and the suit from his high school graduation. A friend with connections got him a job at American Greetings, the greeting card company. After a stint working with an airbrush and cutting masks, Crumb was promoted to the color separation department, an exacting, technical job. To break the tedium, he doodled and affixed the sketches to the area framing his light-table drawing board. A worker in American Greetings’ Hi-Brow card department (those tall, narrow cards popular in the late ’50s and early ’60s) noticed the sketches and brought down his boss, a pre-Ziggy Tom Wilson, to take a look. Wilson was impressed and hired Crumb.

“What a life-saver!” Crumb recalled in 1997. “It was like stepping up from the galley to the captain’s quarters.”

It was such a contrast. I got another raise. For the first six months I did roughs for the writers of the lines so they could get their ideas approved. [Wilson] praised my work but kept telling me to make it cuter, less grotesque. My stuff was “too grotesque.” See, 80 percent of greeting card buyers are women, so it has got to be cute. The Hi-Brow studio really taught me how to draw cute. I found it hard to shake that formula. Maybe after 25 years, I’ve sifted that cuteness out of my art to some extent.

Here are two samples of Hi-Brow cards Crumb drew for Wilson at American Greetings:

Crumb moved on to become the country’s most popular “underground” cartoonist and made his name by drawing the decidedly un-cute cover of Cheap Thrills, the Fritz the Cat comic strip, and the original Keep on Truckin’ image.

(Harvey Pekar cartoon panel, card scans, quotes, and background information from The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (1997))

Glancing at a page from the 1870 census, I noticed something I hadn’t before. The family recorded by the census-taker directly below my great-great grandfather’s family had a notation written in a far right-hand column of the ledger normally reserved for recording “whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic.”

If I’m reading the handwriting correctly, two farmboys, an 18-year-old named Daniel and a 21-year-old named George, were “Killed by Lightning.”

This raises five thoughts and questions:

1. What a horrible way to go.
2. But better them than my great-great grandfather. (Back to the Future taught us about lightning strikes and close calls with one’s genealogy.) Hey, it was right next door; it could’ve been a close call. (Although “next door” to a farmer can be miles away.)
3. Don’t farmboys know better than to mess with lightning? Surely they didn’t fall for that final bright idea of “We’re trapped in a field in the rain; let’s head for that tree!”
4. Maybe lightning didn’t kill them but a drifter or dog named Lightning.
5. My big question: Why are two dead guys listed in the census, a record of the living? My guess is that they were alive during the headcount on August 12, 1870 but died soon enough thereafter for their family to have its entry amended. (The handwriting of the notations appears to be the same as the handwriting on the rest of the page, but the pen appears to be a different one, given the darkness of the ink.)

(image via FamilySearch.org)

In Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report (based on a short story by dystopian future-obsessed paranoid Philip K. Dick), oracle-like clairvoyants envision crimes that haven’t yet happened. They broadcast these visions to police officers in the Department of Precrime who arrest the would-be criminals, wipe their memories, and imprison them.

On Monday, Erica Goode of the Times reported that the Santa Cruz Police Department has been testing an analogous “precrime” technique named predictive policing. A computer program analyzes years of data on past crimes to predict that certain specific crimes, such as car burglaries, are especially likely to occur on a specific day in a specific location. So far, the program, which was developed by researchers who based it on models that predict earthquake aftershocks, “has helped officers pre-empt several crimes and has led to five arrests,” according to the Times.

Equally fascinating and unnerving!

(link via Tantek Çelik, who made a Minority Report connection; crop of a Minority Report teaser poster via teeVault)

A tangent of genealogical research on my family led me to the 1901 potboiler by Ebenezer Mack Treman and Murray E. Poole, The History of the Treman, Tremaine, Truman Family in America: With the Related Families of Mack, Dey, Board and Ayers: Being a History of Joseph Truman of New London, Conn. (1666); John Mack of Lyme, Conn. (1680); Richard Dey of New York City (1641); Cornelius Board of Boardville, N.J. (1730); John Ayer of Newbury, Mass. (1635); and Their Descendants. (If you must, you can read it here.)

There amid the front flyleafs is the coat of arms and crest of the Tremayne family.

Not only is it weird, it’s literally mostly arms. Neither the book nor a quick internet search reveals much about the meaning or history. In passing on page 13, Treman and Poole note:

The family of Tremaines is of ancient standing. Their arms consist of three united arms with clinched hands, and two hands above support a Saracen’s head as the crest.

A few pages later, the authors quote a more poetic/archaic description from 1620:

Arms. 1. Gules, three dexter arms, conjoined at the shoulders, and flexed in a triangle, or, with fists clenched argent [Tremayne] [...]

Crest. Two arms embowed, vested or, holding between their hands a head proper, on the head a hat sable.

Seems rather pugnacious.

About 115 years ago, that is. From the March 11, 1897 issue of The New York Times:

(link lead via The Atlantic Wire)

Google Books, you may need to calibrate a scanner. The whole book is like this!

(link via jwz; screencap of scan via Google Books)

When I’m doing genealogical research on my family, I’m interested in everything I find, whether it’s what I’m looking for or not. A lot of this has to do with an obsession with libraries and research that I’ve been unable to shake since grade school, when I volunteered for non-paying summer jobs at my local public library, shelving books and sorting card catalogs.

Earlier this week, I was at the main branch of the New York Public Library—for non-New Yorkers, that’s the big one with the two giant marble lions flanking the entrance—also, the opening of Ghostbusters. At the Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy, I requested an item billed only as “Young family clippings.” The catalog record had no details on which Youngs or what kind of clippings. (Newspaper? Lawn? Fingernail?)

When the librarian brought me three folders, I wasn’t surprised to find the first two stuffed with dozens of random letters, family trees, family histories, newspaper articles and the like, all dealing with Youngs that had nothing to do with mine. The third folder, which deserves a separate record at the NYPL, contained a dozen-some issues of Born Young, a typed and stapled newsletter spanning sporadically from the early 1980s through the early 1990s.

What a great idea! “A newsletter for genealogists researching the surname YOUNG and its variant spellings.”

I’m kidding, of course. It’s a terrible idea. Every issue is shotgun blast of Young pellets—births, immigrations, marriages and deaths of random Youngs spanning every era and geography. It’s a mess. It would make sense to have a newsletter like this if its name was, I don’t know, Born Zabriskie—any name less popular than Young.

The publisher inadvertently reinforces this point on the first page of the September 1985 issue, scanned above. Here’s an excerpt:

According to calculations using the census of 1790, YOUNG was the 28th commonest name in the colonies, with 5847 people by that name (including various spellings). [...] At present [1985] it is estimated that YOUNG is the 24th most common surname in the U.S. with an estimated 423,800 persons with that name.

(According to U.S. Census data, Young was the 31st most-common surname in 2000. Young doesn’t vacillate much!)

Given these rankings in consideration of the total population of the U.S., how likely is it one can find specific information on a specific Young in Born Young? I have done the math¹ and I will tell you: unlikely.

Of course, this didn’t stop me from reading every issue of Born Young in that folder only to confirm there was nothing relevant to me. Did I waste my time? No! I had fun. I got to go the library, the one with the lions out front. I got to read some stuff. I learned some things about the surname Young. And I got to write a twee little blog entry on it.

The HP Officejet 6500 is my kind of printer. It doesn’t look brawny but when confronted with a potential jam, it didn’t stop and wink an amber light for help. It plowed ahead stubbornly, though that meant printing at a rakish angle, tearing the paper and leaving behind battle-scars of black and magenta ink.

Here’s a 1945 telegram Dorothy Parker sent her editor about two types of block: writer’s block and one that exists today in the form of “I should call but I’m going to email instead.”

And, yes, Parker (or the Western Union rep who transcribed the dictated message) misspelled incompetent.

THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT=

(link and image via The Atlantic Wire via the always-excellent Letters of Note)

I don’t know about you, but summer’s here and I’m already making lists for my eventual vacation. Back in 1963, the American painter Adolf Konrad needed to remind himself of what to pack for a European vacation. Instead of listing the items, he sketched them in a pocket memo book. (On a separate page, he sketched a cartoon version of himself in his underwear, paper doll-style.)

I’d call Konrad’s notebook pages the centerpiece of the exhibit “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art” at the Morgan Library & Museum through October. If you’re a fan of lists, check it out; go on a Friday between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. and get in for free.

(scan via the Morgan Library & Museum)

Where have I been? In the past. Genealogy, other than being a word I have trouble spelling, consumes my free time, and some of my other time. I’ve been tracking the men of my surname, from my dad straight back to my great-great-great grandfather. My favorite find? Between my great-great grandparents’ German roots and their modern prosperity in northern New Jersey, they lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn! That’s where I live! The proximity excites me. I may have walked the same streets they did, saw the same buildings. I’d had with me all along a crude map inadvertently encompassing the places they’d been born, married and buried. The house in which they lived was a block from where I buy my groceries.

I try to put myself in their time: Brooklyn, make it about 1880. Currier & Ives printed a beautiful map of the place. Brooklyn was so Brooklyn it wasn’t part of New York City yet. There were no subways, of course. The Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t opened. How to get to Manhattan? Take a ferry. Hey, Whitman wrote a poem on that. Let’s apply the Ken Burns effect and pan for details on these characters!

For an amateur genealogist focusing on late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, federal censuses are the easiest source to mine for family data. But they also can be the most inaccurate, given that the data isn’t verified and any damn-fool family member or neighbor could have given the answers. Imagine the average dad-stereotype answering a knock at the door and trying to remember all his kids’ birthdays (or even how many kids he has). One relative of mine has a different birth-year recorded on every federal census taken between 1870 and 1920!

Of course there’s plenty of alternate information on the web. The best two genealogy sites are the subscription-based ancestry.com and familysearch.org, which is free but run by Mormons. Both contain riches of data but much of it is incomplete or transcribed incorrectly in the print-to-digital process. I’ve found that actual birth, marriage and death certificates, supplemented by smaller stuff like draft cards and social security records, are the brightest coins in the kettle. Many of these items aren’t online, or they’re online but missing crucial details. So I make phone calls, ask questions and take notes. I squint at microfilm frames, spidery handwriting and terrible copies of copies, often all three at once. I reason with bitter, reticent government employees. I chat with old ladies who work at cemeteries who I can tell from their voices wear eyeglass frames from the ’60s. I weigh evidence like a detective: Does a relative’s birthdate on a WWII draft registration card and in the U.S. Social Security death index outweigh an alternate date recalled by a family member who knew the guy?¹ And I love it all.

It churns up a weird mix of feelings. There’s initial shock, as of Robinson Crusoe finding a lone, strange footprint on the shore of his island. Then there’s the giddiness of research, confirmation and compilation. It’s like completing a crossword puzzle with humans as the answers to the clues—but many of the clues are wrong, misleading or missing. I’m stubborn and competitive; I get absorbed with filling in blanks. Ultimately, though, comes the sad realization that what I’m assembling are papier-mâché skeletons made of calendar pages. Many of my relatives were of little note so there’s nothing in those dates but the narrowest suggestions of who these people were, what they did and felt, where they went, what they looked like, how they spoke. It’s as if my whole knowledge of something magnificent and somewhat obscure—rhubarb, say—was based only on reading its dictionary definition. It’s a poor substitute for the real thing. But in the case of distant kin, it’s the only option to remember them.

(illustration from Robinson Crusoe by Walter Paget (circa 1896) via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

¹ Yes. [back]

Contact sheets illuminate the creative process and what’s going on in the mind of a photographer. One of my favorite examples is Diane Arbus’s contact sheet for Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. for what it shows about her editoral process—her choice of a grotesque frame from an otherwise ordinary roll. Same thing for the contact sheets of W. Eugene Smith, which reveal how he built the photo essays that made him famous. Contact sheets are powerful; the one for Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier called into question whether the shot was taken where Capa said it was and whether he may have staged it.

I was amazed to stumble across the following contact sheet, which I’d never seen before. It was scanned from the out-of-print book The Work of Hipgnosis, which recounts the history of the British design firm behind many memorable rock album covers of the ’70s.

It gives a look behind the scenes of the photo taken by Storm Thorgerson for the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. Here’s something you don’t see a lot in this age of Photoshop and other digital tools: a guy lit on fire for the sake of rock ‘n’ roll. Observe him, in the bottom row of exposures, booking it to get extinguished. What’s nuts is that whenever I previously saw the album cover, I thought the burning man was a mannequin.¹

(photos by Storm Thorgerson; scan via this isn’t happiness)

¹ Confusing the matter, there are two versions of the album cover photo. According to the internet, U.S. vinyl pressings on Columbia use a shot of the burning man standing straight. European vinyl pressings on EMI (and all U.S. CD pressings) use a less realistic (to me) shot of the burning man leaning forward at a weird angle. [back]

The first “strike anywhere” friction matches, invented in 1826 or 1827, sparked and smelled strongly of brimstone, so a marketer branded them Lucifers. (It was also likely a nod to the Latin source of the word: “light-bringer.”)

Despite their pyrotechnic bluster, these matches were a vast improvement over previous versions. A journal from the time recalled, “Before the invention of lucifer matches, the process of obtaining fire in every house, with few exceptions, was as rude, laborious, and uncertain as the effort of the Indian to produce a flame by the friction of two sticks.”

Lucifers caught on and their name persisted as a generic, lowercased nickname for all matches, even after the introduction of “Close Cover Before Striking” safety matches a few decades later. The name pops up in a British marching song from World War I, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” and Wikipedia alleges the nickname persists in the Netherlands today.

(lead from @GreatDismal, who Tweeted that “Lucifer was a brand that became synonymous with "safety" matches.” and “Prior to Lucifers, matches were unreliable and very unsafe,” in response to a question about his use of the term in The Difference Engine; scan of a cigarette card [circa 1908-1919] from the New York Public Library Digial Gallery)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 5 in a series.

You may think this one’s easy—it’s called Water Street ’cause it’s near the water. Well, slow down there, chief. It’s called Water Street because some of it used to be under water. In fact, 400 years ago, nearly a third of Lower Manhattan was under water. Or, rather, the land didn’t technically exist yet. Stating in the 1650s and lasting through the nineteenth century, landfill, typically made of logs thatched together, extended the city's edge. Sometimes this was done creatively. During excavation at 175 Water Street in the early 1980s, archaeologists uncovered the remains of an early eighteenth-century merchant ship that had been scuttled there as a wooden retaining wall. Egbert L. Viele identified landfill like this “Made Land” in the keys of his Manhattan maps, which were famous for illustrating the differences between the island’s original shoreline and subsequent landfill. You can view one in detail here.

(info via Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America; detail of the Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York (1865) by Egbert L. Viele via the David Rumsey Map Collection)

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 3 in a series.

Get your mind out of the gutter. (Or take it uptown.) Beaver Street’s name honors New Amsterdam’s first major export¹, the trade for which was once centered on its blocks. Folks back then enjoyed beaver hats. Concurrent with the burgeoning beaver-fur trade, John Jacob Astor made himself the richest man in America. There’s a wee beaver hiding on the city seal. And the beaver has been the New York state animal since 1975. You must agree: it’d be cooler to have a giant bronze beaver representing New York City’s Financial District than a charging bull. Sort of like how Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to represent the U.S. instead of the eagle.

(info via Jim Naureckas for New York Songlines); beaver engraving (circa 1806/1807) via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery

¹ Beaver. [back]

In Lower Manhattan, many streets are named after common things. How did these streets get those names? Part 1 in a series.

In 1653, the citizens of New Amsterdam, a settlement clustered in the very lower tip of what’s now Manhattan, worried that the English might invade by land from the north. So they built a wall, stretching from river to shining river, all the way across the island, out of logs that were 12 feet high and 18 inches thick. The British didn’t attack. The path running alongside the wall took its name. In the summer of 1791, brokers congregated under a sycamore tree there and began trading shares of stock. Early the following year, the first Stock Exchange Office opened at 22 Wall Street. The rest is crisp suits, crisper money and vicissitudes on a really long line graph.

(info via The New Netherland Institute; illustration via A Landmark History of New York by Albert Ulmann (1903))

The Book Saver Book Scanner, showcased in January at CES, aims to ease the conversion of old-fashioned books to PDF files for eBook readers. It will photograph a book’s content but a human must turn each page and push a button. Watch those fingers!

(link via Libraryland; scan via Google Books)

It was damp and cold in Moncourt, France on November 16, 1973. Noir novelist Patricia Highsmith made a list:

Little Crimes for Little Tots. Things around the house — which small children can do, such as:

1. Tying string across top of stairs so adults will trip.
2. Replacing roller skate on stairs, once mother has removed it.
3. Setting careful fires, so that someone else will get the blame if possible.
4. Rearranging pills in medicine cabinets; sleeping pills into aspirin bottle. Pink laxative pills into antibiotic bottle which is kept in fridge.
5. Rat powder or flea powder into flour jar in kitchen.
6. Saw through supports of attic trap door, so that anyone walking on closed trap will fall through to stairs.
7. In summer: fix magnifying glass to focus on dry leaves, or preferably oily rags somewhere. Fire may be attributed to spontaneous combustion.
8. Investigate anti-mildew products in gardening shed. Colorless poison added to gin bottle.

Ghastly! Reminds me of a sort-of reverse version of Edward Gorey’s equally grim The Gashlycrumb Tinies from 1963.

(Highsmith link via Joan Schenkar in The Paris Review Daily; additional info from Schenkar’s bio The Talented Miss Highsmith)

The movie is still lingering so fans of the Bluth Family will have to make do with these Arrested Development paper dolls by illustrator Kyle Hilton. Make your house their model home!

(link via Peter Vidani)

Sophie Calle worried that people would forget her on her birthday.

To celebrate turning 27 on October 9, 1980, she invited 27 people to her apartment for a dinner party. At her request, one of these people was a stranger chosen by another guest. Every following birthday until her 40th, she increased the number of guests to correspond with her age and she always invited a stranger.

Instead of using the gifts she received, she kept them “as tokens of affection.” Eventually she displayed them in tall white cabinets, one per birthday. Each has a glass door labeled with the year and a list of its contents.

(information and photo of Calle’s 1980 birthday cabinet from her book, Double Game (1999))

This has to be the best Christmas wrapping paper I’ve yet bought. I picked it up in a rush last year at my local dollar store, thinking, wow:

1. It’s a giant roll, almost 3.5' tall and thicker than a baseball bat.
2. The paper stock is heavy, which means no naughty cheap-paper “peek-a-boo” effect on a wrapped gift.
3. It’s made in the U.S.A., birthplace of both Santa and Jesus, so far as I can tell.
4. There’s what appears to be an officially licensed character on there: Frosty the Snowman, from the 1969 TV special of the same name.
5. It’s only $1!

“Heck, why not?“ I thought. At that price and quality, I’ll buy another roll, printed with a colorful photo of Christmas candy.

Had I taken my time, I would have realized that both rolls, which I’d assumed had been semi-abstracted in a hip artistic fashion, were misprinted. Specifically, they’re horribly out of register.

But I’ve come around. I think both have their charms. For instance, they share some side effects with prescription medication, such as dizziness and loss of appetite. They may also make a gift-recipient seek out and put on a pair of 3D glasses. It won’t make them see my wrapping paper any more clearly but, ha ha, now they’re wearing 3D glasses! On Christmas!

I’m wrapping my gifts with this paper again this year, for sure.

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

“Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” by Dan Albergotti, from Southern Humanities Review, 35.2, (Spring 2001)

(poem via Libraryland; sperm whale illustration [1874] via the NYPL Digital Gallery)

This bird’s-eye-view map of Brooklyn, sketched by C. R. Parsons and published by Currier & Ives in 1879, is amazing in its detail. This is the sort of illustration I could stare at as a child, imagining intertwined stories of its people, buildings and boats.

Points of interest include the Brooklyn Bridge (then named the East River Bridge), the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (the building with a crown-like dome on the far left of the full map; it exists today and is still a bank), Prospect Park (12 years young at the time of the map) and Governors Island (then home to a major Army administrative center).

(image link via A Continuous Lean)

Laver’s Law attempts “to compress the complex cycle of fashion change and the general attitude towards any certain style or period into a simple timeline.” It first appeared in 1937 in James Laver’s book, Taste and Fashion.

(scan from p. 202 of the 1948 reprint editon of Taste and Fashion from Google Books)

This cartoon, by Frank Cotham, ran in the October 25th issue of The New Yorker:

On the 27th, the magazine’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, answered readers’ questions in a live chat. Slate staff writer Farhad Manjoo asked Mankoff:

Hi. I’ve asked thousands of people on Twitter to explain this Oct. 25, 2010, cartoon, and nobody gets it. Can you tell me the joke or reference? I’m stumped!

Mankoff replied:

I think that was originally a topical cartoon that is no longer and honestly right now I forget the topic. A mistake.

Another reader tried to analyze the cartoon (“...‘this isn’t working out’ is completely unilateral—she has to ‘put him on a plane’ (as a passive entity) back to Ohio”). Mankoff wrote:

No that’s not it. It was a topical cartoon. Maybe about some kid who the father was trying to get back from another country. Totally blanking on this now but I’m sure that was it. We forgot to run it and then did which was a mistake.

There you have it: a mistake. This is what happens when you keep messing with the Midwest, New Yorker.

(story lead via The Approval Matrix in this week’s issue of New York magazine)

A quick-and-dirty Photoshop from my “Inspirational Poster” series. The original image is of a classic Guinness sign.

I received the reprint edition of The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book (1935) today in the mail. Oh, boy! I hope to find a few new cocktail recipe ideas in here.

“The Whole Flavored with Dashes of History Mixed in a Shaker of Anecdote and Served with a Chaser of Illuminative Information” Now those were the days of mighty subheads (and overextended metaphors).

(scan via The Wormwood Society)

A corny poster from the U.S. Food Administration in 1918, during a wheat ration.

With restrictions on wheat, substitution became a very familiar part of the home front experience. Corn, barley, rice, oats, rye, potato and other flours appeared in breads. Recipes for bread and other wheat based products recommended no more than 50 percent white flour.

The use of sugar was also limited by the Food Administration. Once again, substitutions were found to fill the sweetener gap as honey and various kinds of syrup, such as corn, made their way into recipes formerly calling for sugar.

(scan and text via the Boston Public Library)

American Drink points to a scan posted at The Chanticleer Society of a prescription, issued in 1928 by Dr. “Docie” Ballenger of Batesburg, South Carolina, for “some good whiskey.” A number of similar prescriptions were issued during Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933. You can see several handsome specimens on eBay.

Here’s a scan of one issued in March 1933 in Cleveland by one Dr. Ralph S. Mann. I poached it from an eBay bid ending October 13 and the seller, ginger.1, noted “It was issued by the Treasury Department and when held to the light, INDUSTRAL ALCOHOL is partially watermarked.”

Prohibition began on January 16, 1920. The following week, a New York Times editorial was already explaining that many physicians of the time gave whiskey to patients in the “wasting stages” of influenza for stimulation, stressing that “the lives of a great many people may hang in the balance if whisky cannot be procured, and whisky of good quality.” Druggists, the editorial concluded, “should put behind them their fear of being ‘identified with the liquor traffic.’”

As might be expected, counterfit and forged prescriptions flooded the city. The government limited physicians to one book of 100 blank whiskey prescriptions every 90 days, each prescription good for a pint. Patients were limited to one prescription every 10 days.

An apparently tongue-in-cheek Time article from April 1933 notes that Congress lifted practically all restrictions on medicinal liquors that month following a long bout of lobbying by the American Medical Association.

The victory outmodes many a sorry practice of the past decade. John Doctor need no longer risk prison by selling his prescription blanks to druggists. The amateur cellarer need no longer cut a pint of genuine, drugstore rye with alcohol, water and sherry to get a gallon of drink with a palatable rye flavor. The druggist may cast off his furtiveness, again function as a respectable businessman.

And by the end of the year, Prohibition had ended.

I.
What kind of bug was Gregor Samsa, the guy who wakes up one morning and finds himself turned into...what, exactly?

It depends on how one translates author Franz Kafka’s German. I learned it as either “monstrous insect,” which is vague (Mothra? An angry ladybug?) or “giant cockroach,” which was quaint until I moved to New York City (the Midwest has a low cockroach population).

Vladimir Nabokov, in a talk collected in “Lectures on Literature,” thought Gregor was a beetle that looked like this:

He explains:

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown.

....

In the original German text, the old charwoman calls him Mistkafer, a “dung beetle.” It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle.”

Not everyone agrees with this insect-assessment, Nabokov himself admitted.

II.
In my apartment’s kitchen, I’ve been having a slight issue with cockroaches. I have been committing acts of insecticide with Raid Max roach spray, which comes in a dark blue aerosol can, the subtitle of which is Mata Cucarachas. Once dispensed, it smells sweetly toxic, like lawn fertilizer, and as it settles, it smells of kerosene. I keep my kitchen clean, so it’s a mystery where these bugs are coming from. (Although, as noted above, I do live in New York City.) I seal all shelf-stable food in glass jars, Ziploc bags or plastic containers. I empty my trash and recyclable bins and bags often. I’ve kept the floors swept free of crumbs. I wash my dishes and don’t let them languish in the sink.

At work, in the sixth-floor kitchenette, people leave dishes in the sink even though there’s a small dishwasher right there that the kind folks from Office Services run every evening. Long ago, Office Services taped up a sign above the sink. It reads:

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

Also, do not take kitchen utensils that don’t belong to you.¹

The sign was ignored. Today, someone taped up a sign, which I suspect was not sanctioned by Office Services, right next to the other sign. I appreciate the grammatical errors and the black-and-white cockroach photos included for illustration and emphasis:

Maybe I will name the cockroaches in my kitchen “Gregor.” Better yet, I will name them “Vladimir.”

III.
There’s a featured section on corn in the September issue of Food & Wine magazine, which I got in the mail yesterday. Most field corn in the U.S.—37 percent of the nearly 86.5 million acres planted (in 2009)—is grown to feed livestock. And the raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to this Observer article from last week, which also proposes a solution to the “meat crisis”—eating insects.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at a university in the Netherlands and author of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper on the subejct, lays out what he sees as the advantages:

“The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out.² “It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”³

Yes, insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and farming them produces far less greenhouse gas, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia than livestock. But what red-blooded American would eat insects, except on a dare? We’d sooner eat our dogs.

I thought this especially after I glanced at insect sushi. One of the varieties mentioned in the original Telegraph article notes that the Argentine Cockroach recipe (“Cut open shell, scoop out meat and fry with butter. Replace in shell to serve on top of salad.”) “has no smell at all, but the texture of tender fish.”

Why should eating bugs be any weirder than eating fish, or a cow for that matter? Maybe because bugs are seen mostly as a nuisance, as noted above. (See also: mosquitos, midges, gnats, wasps and hornets, bedbugs, houseflies, lice, ticks, fruit flies, those parasitic worms that enter humans via their eyeball, etc.) I have never heard of a cow infestation, although clearly that’d be equal parts amusing and disgusting. I’m going to forgo eating bugs and stick with eating less meat.

¹ Yes, I work with some assholes. [back]
² Willingly, that is. 80 percent of the world’s nations, even. [back]
³ One of several reasons I don’t eat shrimp anymore. This is one of the others. [back]

These Airequipt slide boxes are from 1959/1960. Each contains one metal tray that holds 36 35mm slides. A friend of mine gave them to me from an estate sale on Long Island. I like the design and typography.

Other maybe than birdsongs in spring, I can't think of an animal sound more tied to a particular season than cicadas in summer. In Ohio as kids, we called them locusts and marveled at the nearly intact dried skins they shed during molting and left clinging to trees, often willows or walnuts .

In Latin, cicada means “buzzer” and they buzz by vibrating membranes on their abdomens, which are mostly hollow and work as amplifiers. They modulate the buzz by angling it off the tree they’re perched on. Each species has its own song.

(image via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

“We are,” says novelist Norman Mailer, speaking, with his customary candor, of the ticket upon which he is presently [1969] running for mayor of New York, “incompetent, innocent, and of unsavory reputation.” But, points out his running mate Jimmy Breslin, a New York journalist, “If you think we’re crazy, look at the other candidates. You wanna die.”

I love it when this happens. I want to collect all of the instances. I think I first noticed a writer running for high office when I read about popular novelist Mario Vargas Llosa running for president of Peru in 1990 against Alberto Fujimori, who won and ruled like a crazy person for the next decade.

And then there’s New York crazy. The Mailer-Breslin ticket drank a lot. They were frequently angry. Many of their sound bites were unprintable, on account of the cursing. Their platform? Satehood for the city. In other words, a New York City secession. (It’s actually an old idea.) Here’s a campaign poster illustrating the theoretical 51st state, a groovy place where each neighborhood would wield town-like power. (Click the image for a bigger view.)

Note the “Free Bikes” icon in Lower Manhattan and the “Clean Air” and “No Smog” promises blowing-in from New Jersey. Mailer-Breslin also promoted ideas that since have been adapted and embraced by our current mayor, a big fan of green space, bicycles and busting-up congestion.

Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan, a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or air space altogether.

Well, in 1969, nuts to those ideas. Mailer got 5 percent of the vote; Breslin got 11 percent. They returned to writing. Incumbent mayor John Lindsay won his second term.

(first quote via “A Literary Ticket for the 51st State” by Richard Woodley, Life, May 30, 1969; second quote via “Podcast: Remembering Mailer for Mayor” by Sam Roberts, November 11, 2007; poster scan via frumination)

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Stephen Hawking, from his book A Brief History of Time (1988)

(postcard scan via Flickr)

Now that New York City has reached 90° with nearly 50% humidity, a young man’s thoughts turn to tropical cocktails such as the Mai Tai. But for those, one requires a proper receptacle, and I’ve found the cheapest place to get Tiki mugs is Bowery Restaurant Supply. Lately, in fact, I buy most of my cheap and sturdy kitchen equipment there, namely utensils, pots, pans, bowls and boards.

I’m not talking about Bowery Kitchen which, despite its name, is located in Chelsea. That place has its draw, too, with deals on certain generics (cookie sheets leap to mind). But it skews toward brand-name equipment and supplies for the typically higher-grade clientèle of Chelsea Market.

Bowery Restaurant Supply, on the other hand, is located just off the Bowery, steps from the J/M subway station and the Bowery Ballroom, as storied as it is grubby.

You can glean at least three facts from this receipt: I planned ahead for my dog days with a Tiki mug-run in snowy February. Stuff is incredibly cheap at Bowery Restaurant by New York standards (and possibly the standards of other locales)—$2.50 each for the mugs! A heavy pint glass (now acting as my primary cocktail shaker) for $2.25! Really cheap plastic squeeze-bottles, perfect for dressings, syrups and condiments!

And they’re super oldschool: they have a cash box, not a register, and a gnarled Asian man handwrites your receipt. I am happy that fame, in the form of Mark Bittman’s prominent ode to them three years back, has not seemed to have affected their thrifty, low-key style.

Sounds delicious.

Purchasing Sloane Closley’s essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake at the Strand, the best bookstore in the world, the cashier absent-mindedly handed me the flyer I’ve scanned above, which reports the store’s Financial District offshoot, the Strand Annex, is closing on August 31st. According to a blurb in The Real Deal about a month ago, it’s because “construction in the area has decreased foot traffic around the store, lowering profits,” although the flyer notes it’s because the store lost its lease. Whichever reason, it’s a bummer; I hate to see any bookstore bite it, especially the kin of one of my favorites.

More talk of mixtapes. Here’s a newer one for the Love Is A Mix Tape set (and from the guy who started Found magazine) called Cassette From My Ex. And although they’re not set up for casual browsing, I also like Mixwit (design your own custom cassette-tape graphic!) and Muxtape (mysterious, easy-to-use interface!).

I never remember fiddling much with mixtapes, either giving or receiving. I got one in college from a girl with nothing but Smiths songs on side A and nothing buy Morrissey solo-carreer songs on side B which was personally responsible for “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” being my favorite Moz song. I made one in college that I’m pretty sure had a Toad the Wet Sprocket song on it; better that one stay lost. In fact, rooting through my boxes of junk, I was only able to find one. The song selections prove its 1997 vintage. I got this one from my friend/then-coworker who was also named Jason and who at the time worked part-time in the neighborhood used record store. He used a found "passport" from the ’30s as the booklet art and hand-typed the tracklist. I’m unfortunately missing the cassette itself but regardless no longer have anything to play it on. Oh, technology.

You’ll be pleased to see that your own computer area at home is not as depressing as you may have suspected.

I found this Polaroid today in the street near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 17th Street.

An ATM receipt, strangely lacking, from a bodega on Prince Street near Mulberry.

I found this handwritten flashcard on the floor of the A train last night. There’s not an answer on the back and the suspense is killing me: anyone know which valve has the lowest transvalvular velocity?

As I foretold, Allison staged the first installment tonight of the Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, BKLYN #1, a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme. It went down at the Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy apartment of her and her boyfriend, Jovito. I love this part: the building used to be a Tootsie Roll factory.

The dinner party included Allison and Jovito, my friend Beth and I, Allison’s friend Angela, and her sister Laura. Also present were the resident tabby, Ra, who warily shares space with the resident shelter-mutt, Manute. He’s a blend of black Lab, Great Dane and black German Shepherd named after Manute Bol because both are long-legged shot-blockers who like having their bellies scratched.

We started with three New York state sheep’s milk cheeses, Berkshire pork prosciutto and membrillo (quince paste), purple grapes and candied walnuts. For "local" drinks, we drank rye-stiffened Brooklyns throughout the evening, inspired by a recipe Allison procured in an entertaining fashion. On Tuesday, she and Jovito attended a reading featuring Brooklyn-based cocktail authority David Wondrich, whom I’ve written about before. As he signed her copy of Imbibe!, she mentioned the upcoming dinner and her consideration of serving locally invented cocktails, namely Manhattans and Jack Roses, the latter a classic New Jersey drink in honor of Jovito’s home state.

Wondrich concurred then rattled off the ingredients for a Brooklyn, a cocktail curiously absent from his book. Realizing the recipe would be a tall order to remember, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled it down. Meanwhile, Allison told him I’d wanted to attend the reading but couldn’t, then blurted that I had a man-crush on him, so after laughing nervously, he autographed the recipe as a sort-of-wish-you-were-here keepsake.

The man-crush thing is true. What human wouldn’t lovingly admire another who can mingle alcohols to their tastiest and most potent permutations? Although I had to tell Allison that men will not often admit a man-crush to one another. Regardless, it netted me a scrap of cocktail ephemera that I’ll treasure always until I spill bitters on it. Here’s a scan of it. You’ll notice Wondrich spelled liqueur wrong, unless liquer is an archaic cocktail-maven spelling.

After the first round, shaken with ice and served in old-school coupes, Allison deviated from the handwritten version of the recipe to the one I’ve reproduced below. I must say that rye in its 100-proof form is excellent for clouding one’s mind in the best way possible.

Ah, and for the food. Beth made butternut squash soup with a plain-yogurt and cilantro topping. Laura made a shredded carrot and toasted almond salad. Angela made a Sicilian-style potato gratin with capers and Parmesan. Allison made tender, braised short ribs with chocolate and rosemary. We also had baguettes with Brooklyn-made butter. The dessert course brought out ice cream sandwiches made from oatmeal toffee-chip cookies and almond/English-toffee ice cream from the Adirondacks. I supplied my Gâteau Aux Pommes apple cake, made with apples and eggs from upstate New York. In short, great good, great drinks, great music, and great company.

Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner

• Meal 12 of 52: a heap of delicious food, home-cooked by friends.

I found this note recently on the sidewalk on my way to the 190th Street station of the A train.

I don’t know the correlation between strange doodles and real estate conferences, but like at least twice before, I happened upon another odd scribbling at a real estate conference today in Orlando. It resembles a demented Homer Simpson.

This flyer, posted on my A train home from work tonight, reminds me that the world needs more tract-style advertisements.

Reminiscent of another strange sketch I found earlier this year is this “snappy” doodle I found on a table after a real estate conference here in New York today.

I found this handcrafted advertisement on the sidewalk near my apartment building after work tonight. You can click the scan above to view an extra-large version in a separate pop-up window. Here’s a transcription of the text:

Scarlett Peña          7/18/06

Class 205 will have a
cup cake sail. At the in door
gym. Come to my cup
cake sail.

[drawing of a cupcake?]

At 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Itis so good because itis a
chocoleat cup cake. For ¢50

So if I’m understanding the marketing message here correctly, these cupcakes are superior because they are inexpensive, they feature chocolate icing topped with sprinkles, and they have a miniature rainbow baked inside. Well, I’m sold.

My mom mailed me some brittle pages from the Sunday Magazine of the Toledo Blade dated August 18, 1974 that she found in a dresser drawer. Check out these Holly Hill summer fashions in Easy-Care Polyester available at Lion, a local department store chain. For only $16 apiece, you could sashay among Ohio society in the Skimmer with self-flip-tie on the left or the “Fit and Flare” princess dress on the right.

Here’s a doodle I found at a real estate conference in Philadelphia today.

A girl I know who lives in Jersey near the Passaic Falls had never heard of William Carlos Williams’ poetic ode to the city they’re in, Paterson, so I offered to lend her my copy. Tonight, while paging through it, I found this bookmark.

What an awesome bookstore that was. It was located in my college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, on Main Street, sandwiched between a bar frequented by underclassmen and the 24-hour diner they’d stumble to afterhours for alcohol-absorbing hamburgers. As a creative writing and journalism major at BGSU in the early-’90s, and because the Wood County Public Library was located conveniently just across the street, I spent entirely too much time at Pauper’s. I was surprised to learn years later that the place was still whisperingly referred to as an anarchist shop. I’ve been in anarchist bookstores before; they need an anarchist name (“Viva la Books!”), prints of Che hanging all over the place, and a battered card table in the back where subversives can meet, drink too much coffee and write manifestos. Now maybe Pauper’s sold a few rabble-rousing rags, but it had no additional anarchic features other than a sense of organization. We’re talking literally piles of books. That “drive you simply nuts” slogan on the Pauper’s bookmark isn’t only a cheesy clipart pun. Far in the back of the store, there was stack upon toppling stack of boxes and those flat boxes grapes are wholesold in, filled with books and reaching the ceiling.

You can get a small sense of this disarray looking at these photos I took during a trip back to Bowling Green in September 2002, although they don’t represent the store as packed as it once was. That day, as you can see from a sign in one of the photos, the merchandise was 50% off. The store was struggling to stay open then and was to close for good a year later.

For a journalism class assignment, I had to write a business-related article and I chose to interview Pauper’s owner, Leo Schifferli, a skinny, gray-bearded fellow with Le Corbusier-like spectacles. He spoke slowly and with care and seemed to know everything about any book. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t have an inventory management system for his thousands of books. Not only that, he had only recently upgraded to the computerized version of Books in Print from microfilm, although I frequently saw his 386 on but unused and him still squinting at projected pieces of film that he shifted expertly under glass. But he didn’t need an inventory management system. He remembered where everything was in the store and he was willing to go the extra yard to seal a deal. When I asked him for that copy of Paterson he knew there wasn’t one in the store but offered to bring in the spare copy from his home collection, a handsome New Directions paperback edition from 1963.

He’s the one who told me about Amazons, the infamous faux-memoir Don DeLillo wrote pretending to be the first female NHL player. He offered to sell me a hardcover copy for a reasonable sum and I wish now I would have bought it, if not only because it’s been wholly out of print since its original run in 1980 and is considered one of the great contemporary books written under a pseudonym—in fact, Keith Gessen wrote an article about it in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Leo was a well-read gentleman who could make recommendations of new writers or classics books based solely on the last few books you had read. Learning what I liked, he introduced me to Richard Yates, selling me Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for $4.75. It remains one of my favorite short story collections.

My college roommate Scott and I were surprised to find Leo at the door of our apartment late one night, moonlighting as a deliveryman for our favorite pizza parlor, Pisanello’s. He was wearing the same gray knit watchman’s cap he always wore in his unheated store and was making his way across town for his deliveries on his beat-up 10-speed. Was he delivering pizzas because his store wasn’t making enough money or because he wanted to get out and about more? With Leo, it was probably a bit of both; he had a weird, absent-minded sense of humor. He’s the one who told me, “Pocket Books are called that for a reason” and would sometimes have fire-sales of moldy pulp-fiction paperbacks from a tall metal spinner rack he’d put out on the sidewalk on sunny days. He was kind of hoping people entranced by the cool retro covers would steal them and he wouldn’t have to regret throwing them in the trash.