In Holderness

 

A few days ago I tooted a link about ghostly goings on in Holderness, the wild windswept flatlands to the east of Hull in England.

At the time of my toot, I was interested in the fact that  Martinmas coincided with the time around Halloween, and that many of the features of traditional Martinmas celebrations in Germany – turnip lanterns for one – are the same as I remember as part of Halloween, when I was a child on the east coast Scotland, and before Halloween became the homogenised Americanised thing it is today.

Today, Martinmas is celebrated on 11 November, which is of course Remembrance day, something that seems strangely appropriate with its associations with the dead and with ghostly goings on.

Not the cartoon ghosts going ‘woo-woo’, but ghosts as the Romans understood them, those who had died an unquiet death and still walked the earth.

Holderness is itself a strange lonely place, and somewhere I vaguely know.

When I was doing research at Hull University in the very early nineteen eighties, I would sometimes ride my bicycle east from the city to a landscape of windswept fields running down to small coastal villages and old medieval churches hidden away in country lanes and the ruins of abandoned monasteries, left behind after the English Reformation.

At other times, I would get a bus to somewhere on the coast (at that time country buses were still cheap and plentiful, even on a Sunday) and walk along the cliff top path to somewhere else before catching the bus back to Hull.

Marvellous for clearing the mind.

Later on when we lived in York, we would tend to drive to Flamborough and Whitby rather than Holderness for our coast walks, but sometimes we would drive south towards Withernsea, notable for having a lighthouse in the middle of the town – not as daft as it sounds, at the time the lighthouse was built it was surrounded by sand dunes, and the lighthouse was built set back from the coast to protect it from the risk of erosion.

Later, the development of tourism meant that the town crept east to the new promenade, with its railings strangely reminiscent in design of those used at Bondi Beach, leaving the lighthouse in the middle of the town.

Withernsea Lighthouse - geograph.co.uk via wikimedia commons

The other thing, and the reason why we would make the detour to Withernsea was that Withernsea had an excellent fish and chip shop which then, twenty five years ago, bizarrely had a NSW Maritime Services fish identification chart on the wall.

In winter, when the clouds scudded and the wind blew it was a wild and atmospheric place, somehow still strangely isolated

Eve, by S Baring Gould

 Sabine Baring Gould was a priest, a collector of folk songs and a prolific late nineteenth century novelist.

His books are mostly forgotten now, but one of his books was undoubtedly the star of today's cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum

simply because it was published and printed by George  Robertson and company in Australia in 1888.

Quite a few of S Baring Gould's novels were published by Chatto and Windus in London, and I've previously found evidence that George Robertson was producing yellowbacks in Australia using the stereogrphs of the Chatto and Windus yellowback editions - the stereograph being a papier mache squeeze of the plates for the original book from which new plates could be made. (incidentally Rawlinson used the same squeeze method to copy monumental cuneiform inscriptions carved into cliffs in Iran).

Unfortunately our edition of Eve has been rebound, so it is impossible to tell what the original binding was, but the paper is reasonably good quality suggesting that while it might have been reprinted via a squeeze, it was something more than a yellowback.

Other than that it was mosly 1950's romance novels today, along with one or two nineteen thirties crime and mystery novels, but we have even more proof that hygenic libraries were still a thing in the nineteen fifties

The Melbourne Mudies...

 

I was quite intrigued by the use of the phrase The Melbourne Mudie's.

Half an hour searching through Trove not only revealed that Mullen's used the phrase in their own advertising, but that it had entered common parlance. A number of articles used the phrase in contexts such as groups of ladies outside the Melbourne Mudies, suggesting that it was in common use and used as an alternative to Mullen's...

Friday at the Athenaeum...

 

Well it's been an interesting morning up at the Athenaeum.

As I've established, the Athenaeum was buying books second hand from Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne.

Mostly the circulating library labels look like this

and cover the top third of the book. However, this book was different with the label covering most of the front of the book, and the text was different, and said it came from Mullen's Select library.

I need to do a little more digging but it looks like Mullen's, as well as a circulating business were sending out pre selected boxes of books to subscribers to the Select Library living in the country far from any bookseller or circulating library

Also note that in this advert Mullen's was styling itself "The Melbourne Mudie's". Nothing like trading on brand recognition.

The other real find of the day was not part of the historic book collection.

Someone clearing out their father's old shed walked in with some old handwritten ledgers and an 1874 copy of Philips Handy General Atlas of the World, complete with the original coloured maps produced by John Bartholemew, the well known Edinburgh map publishers.

That would be interesting enough in itself, but on the backs of some of the maps there are various notes in longhand.

Now, I have not really looked at the notes, but it looks as if they could be tracking a journey from the UK to Australia, which would be rather interesting, especially if there was a connection with someone's family migration story.

At the moment this is all hand waving, and until we photograph and transcribe the notes we won't really know.

Short term, our major concern has been to find a mylar bag big enough for it - the atlas is a bit bigger than B4, and then enough space in a freezer somewhere to store it for a couple of weeks to make sure that any lurking bugs or other nasties have been killed off...

A little story about technology

 

This is a Lenovo Essentials Smartclock, and it's part of the Google Home ecology.

It's a simple Linux powered device that tells the time, shows the current temperature at the nearest weather station and displays a little glyph to show if it's sunny, cloudy, rainy etc.

You can say 'hey Google' to it and issue voice commands like 'wake me tomorrow at 7am' or 'play ABC news radio'.

Basically it uses a slightly silly amount of software and compute to provide an updated experience of what you used to get from a clock radio,

We have three of these which I picked up cheap from Telstra when they were selling off unsold stock, and we have them in bedroom, the spare bedroom, and on J's desk in the study, and until about six weeks ago they have been utterly reliable, and just sat there doing their job, just as you would expect a well behaved IoT device to do - do one job and do it well.

Then, about six weeks ago, one by one, they stopped showing the weather glyph and the temperature - something which was strangely annoying.

Obviously the server that aggregated the weather data had died.

And it wasn't just us, a web search brought up a load of reddit posts from all over the planet complaining that the temperature and weather glyph had mysteriously stopped displaying.

Well we thought it would be back in a day or two.

It wasn't. It actually took six weeks for the temperature and weather glyphs to start re displaying.

I can't tell you exactly when they came back as we were down in Melbourne earlier this week, and they weren't displaying when we left, but were when we arrived home this afternoon.

Now, let's face it, displaying the weather glyph is not super important in itself. The fact it took six weeks to fix also shows that whoever provides the aggregation service is not deeply invested in maintaining a service for what is now a legacy device.

Software packages come and go. Look at Pocket. Incredibly useful and killed off as it no longer aligned with Mozilla's company plan, despite having zillions of active users, including yours truly. Or X (formerly Twitter) one the global conversation and now something slightly distasteful.

Hardware's different. You expect it to last for years.

I've owned three clock radios in my life - one a WH Smith branded generic device, and two quite slick Sony clock radios, and each of them lasted between ten and fifteen years.

So, similarly, I expect subconsciously, my little Lenovo smart clocks to stay working for ten or so years, just as I expect my smart TV to last as long as our previous TV that notched up fifteen years.

And I won't start about my car - it probably has more in the way of onboard computing power that Apollo 11...

And as our lives become more dependent on devices that themselves depend on external systems and services, we need to ask about life cycle and support expectations.

Sure, not displaying the weather glyph is no bid deal. But our car, our TV, our solar power system, well, that could be different...

Catching up

 Last week was one of the more absurd public holidays we have here in Victoria.

Not content with giving us a day off for the Melbourne Cup in November, the powers that be give us a day off for the AFL Grand Final - actually they don't, as the Grand Final is played on a Saturday, we get the Friday before off in lieu.

As the Athenaeum is technically a council facility, we were officially closed, which of course meant no cataloguing.

However, today we were open, on a morning when in rained with a capital 'R'.

And I can say that H. Rider Haggard was incredibly popular with the late Victorian and Edwardian readers of Stanley.

As well as early editions of the works he's best remembered for today, King Solomon's Mines, She, Ayesha, all of which have been almost read to death - in fact in a couple of cases we have newer editions as well as the old original editions, and editions of a lot of his less popular novels. Originally seen as boy's own tales of derring do, more modern critics take a more nuanced view with some suggesting that both She and Ayesha can be read as tales of female empowerment.

If you want to make your own mind up, almost all his books are available via Project Gutenberg as ebooks, or if you prefer a paper copy, second hand copies of his main novels can be picked up for a few dollars.

Otherwise it was a fairly standard day's cataloguing, though I did find a 1950's romance novel which the Athenaeum had clearly acquired second hand from a commercial circulating library that still had the date stamps from the previous owner inside, suggesting that hygenic circulating libraries that regularly fumigated their books persisted into the mid 1950's in Melbourne

However, it's not all been cataloguing - J has been helping put together the opening art exhibition of the newly formed Indigo Shire Creatives

and I've been doing some support role stuff - registering and labelling the artworks, fetching cases of wine for the opening night party,  and so on, and last night we had the opening night

which was incredibly well attended for a drizzly Thursday night ...

A little bit of Australian publishing history ...

 E W Cole was of the greats of the early Australian book trade.

As well as running Coles Book Arcade - possibly the largest bookstore in late Victorian and Edwardian Melbourne, he imported and resold second hand books from England, as well as new books, produced children's annuals and published cheap editions of popular books. 

Today, while working on the historic book collection at the Athenaeum, I came across this rather  nice example of one of EW Coles discount editions

A copy of Helen's Babies by the American author John Habberton.

Intended as a humourous novel and popular in its time, it tells the story of a confirmed bachelor, who is persuaded by his sister to come and look after her children while she goes off on holiday with her husband.

The book is printed as part of Coles Favourite Library.

Unfortunately the book is undated and I've been unable (so far) to trace when it was published, but I'd guess somewhere between 1890 and 1910. 

Neither the NLA or the SLV hold a copy, and while there is a copy in the NSW State Library's collection, it too is listed as undated.

The book is printed in England on good quality if thin paper and has a decent binding and an embossed cardboard and cloth cover. Perhaps not quite so well made as some of the books produced by mainstream publishers, but definitely better produced than the yellowbacks of the time.

I'd guess that Cole had discovered that he could get his cheap editions produced more cheaply in England than Australia, despite the cost of shipping, which may explain the slow growth of the Australian publishing industry in the early twentieth century...