Mark Your Place

Book marker, found in a second-hand book—

silver embossing on plastic film, c. early 1960s.

And a word from our sponsor:

Tiger of the Month Club: October

Time to harvest a fine crop, by the bushel full!

Frate Indovino: October Oracle

Cartoon: "Getting by, Italian art"

From this, we arrive at the timely theme, "Mi Rifuto" o "Mi Riciclo" ["I Refuse" or "I Recycle"]—

Remember the joke about the child who ran into the house: "Papa, Papa, the man with the garbage is here!"
- "Tell him we don't want any more, we already have plenty!" And we're filling up with more and more. The Tuscans say: "Pork fat was never clean," but it's true that waste from consumption has become so cumbersome and unwieldy that no one wants it, though, thanks to the Italian art of getting by, there is always someone who can profit from it. How hard it is to be like the sun, shining on the manure pit without getting dirty! Now the watchword is to recycle. Italy is starting to, but many are still upset and like Hamlet in our common dilemma: "To refuse or to recycle?" Others are playing the blame game so that many landfills are like the conscience: "clean, because unused." I come back to the bitter prophecy of Chief Seathl [Sealth; Seattle], of the Duwamish Indian tribe, contained in a letter written to the president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, in 1855: "You will die buried under your waste." We don't know whether the wise Seathl, were he living today, would refer only to landfills, or to other kinds of garbage, such as television, print media, politics, etc... but his words continue to hang over our heads like a sword of Damocles, as the sun continues to shine "on the human tragedies"

Now there's some food for thought... even if the writing style for this department is always a run-on bunch of "on the one hand/on the other hand" points, interspersed with quotes.

In one of the many small sidebar items, we find this piece of wisdom attributed to a later (naturalized) American—

L'alcool è un liquido prezioso; conserva tutto...tranne i segreti
- C. Grant

Alcohol is a precious liquid: it preserves everything... and keeps secrets

"One of the fairest monuments that America has raised"

Part of title page; published by New York Public Library, 1961.

This book commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Library's move to its Fifth Avenue location.

From the credits:

William K. Zinsser is a fourth-generation New Yorker who often writes about his home town. A former critic and editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune, he is the author of two books and many magazine articles.

That was a name I remembered from family copies of Life.

From my more recent reading, I recalled a jazz biographer's reference to a book by Zinsser, Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz. Its subjects are pianist Dwike Mitchell and bassist-French horn player Willie Ruff, and Zinsser seemed to be a writer who really got around.

Well, I see from his site: he is still around; Zinsser studied piano with Mitchell and in the 1990s did some performing in clubs.

That was only a small break from writing. Among other work during his long career, Zinsser wrote On Writing Well, "the classic guide to writing nonfiction," first published in 1976 and still in print. In 2005 he published Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past.

But getting back to 1961: the illustrator's name was not one I knew, although his style did look familiar—

Tom Funk, whose grandfather co-founded the New York publishing firm of Funk & Wagnalls, has been a free lance illustrator in the city since 1937. His fondness for its vistas is well known to readers of, appropriately, The New Yorker.

These are spot illustrations in classic New Yorker style. To get any decent detail I had to scan them as grayscale, but they actually are printed in a rich black, for a woodcut effect.

Zinsser opens with an anecdote from early in World War II, when the Library needed to consider whether some of its holdings should be removed for safekeeping.

When the curators met to discuss the prospect,

Each... spoke up for the items he thought most valuable: the Gutenberg Bible and the five First Folios of Shakespeare, the handwritten copy of George Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's early draft of the Declaration of Independence... and the illuminated copy of Ptolemy's Geography. The longer they talked, the longer the list stretched, for among the 7 million volumes are some of the rarest books and manuscripts in the heritage of mankind.

... Harry M. Lyndenberg, director of the Library, listened gravely and finally said, "But first I think we should evacuate all the pamphlets."

"Save the pamphlets" — now that's a director after my own heart!

Zinsser continues,

He meant that Gutenberg Bibles and Farewell addresses do at least exist in other copies, but that the pamphlets are unique. In thousands of cases the Library's edition is the only one that survives. The same thing is true of the countless old periodicals, broadsides, playbills, scrapbooks, popular songs and other fugitive documents that the Library — and nobody else — has bothered to keep. They are the routine archives of life. Trivial yesterday, they are priceless research tools today.

It is this passion for continuity, for collecting everything and discarding nothing that has made the New York Public Library a supreme reference source, one that extends backward in time to the Babylonian clay table and outward in space to every corner of the globe and many globes beyond...

Zinsser's text is accompanied by Funk's renderings of various building details, inside and out...



Along with those views are illustrations representing the varied collections to be found in the Library's "eighty miles of shelves."

Zinsser describes those extraordinary collections, and the experts who staff them.

I don't work in the library world, and wouldn't normally recognize its notables. But here I actually recognized two names—from this biography of Joseph Cornell.

Like many New York area artists, Cornell was a frequent visitor to the Library. Children's librarian Maria Cimino met him in 1945, when he first did research in her collection. After her 1950 invitation to collaborate on a children's presentation, Cornell loaned some of his boxes. Enthusiastic about his first exhibit for children, he would participate in others in the future.

Romana Javitz was also a friend of Cornell's, as she was of other artists who used the Picture Collection. I first read of her in the same Cornell biography, but have since come across her name in other books about the New York art scene—of the 1930s and beyond.

NYPL's site has this interesting article about the Picture Collection, and Ms. Javitz's role in expanding it into the important archive it became.

She originally studied art, then headed the Picture Collection from 1929 to her retirement in 1968. Among her accomplishments at the Library, she encouraged Arturo Schomburg in developing archives that became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

With many friends and contacts among artists, Ms. Javitz became very active in New Deal arts projects. She was a driving force behind creating the Index of American Design, as well as being involved with Farm Security Administration photography and its preservation.

Zinsser ends his 1961 tour of the collections with this vision, worth quoting at length—

The quality that makes The New York Public Library great is one that runs deeper than men and books. It is the quality of freedom. This is a building that takes no sides because it presents all sides. It grants its visitors the dignity of free access to information. It does not hide the ugly or censor the injurious. These guarantees are woven through every division, and often they take extraordinary form. The Jewish Division owns the biggest known mass of anti-Semitic material; the Picture Collection has hundreds of racist cartoons; the Current Periodicals Room subscribes to subversive magazines.

At first glance such a policy might seem at least unsavory, at most perilous to the very freedoms that it is trying to protect. Rare is the library, in fact, that does not defer in these sensitive areas to the government, the institution or the trustees that control it. The New York Public Library makes no such surrenders. It operates on the belief that free men will find the truth, however devious the route by which they approach it, or at least that they should have the fullest opportunity to try. Enacting this belief every day of the year for fifty years, it is an ornament to democracy, one of the fairest monuments that America has raised.

Metropolitan Cook Book

1957 pamphlet published by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; front cover—
Full of happy '50s food!

Period cookbook cliché it may be, but the food here is just... so darned happy!

Foodstuffs are happy on the title page:

Kitchen equipment shares the joy:


Lively food children are full of pep and wholesome hijinks:

Yes, it certainly is the 50s: Cake Mom has done her bit for the Baby [Cake] Boom!

... She does seem a bit overwhelmed: home all day with the cupcakes, while Cake Dad is away at the office...

There are merry mischief-makers:



After all, who would have expected the apple
to pie...

...a pie!

Tiger of the Month Club: September

Sure, there's more centerpiece here than table.

But when you can gaze on these beauties, who needs mere surface?

Frate Indovino: September Sage

Gli affari sono affari! - "Business is business!"

No further comment needed there...

So instead: this month we look at the Frate's fine print.

The calendar is crammed full of miscellaneous items—in assorted fonts that don't scan legibly. So I've only been able to do quick selections for typing into the translator.

I hadn't looked closely at the monthly list of saints and saints-in-waiting [the latter are names preceded by "B." for "Beato"—beatified]. I just assumed the line of text below each name must explain the religious meaning of that day.

But this section is actually where the almanac-style material is placed, on one line per date.

There are weather forecasts:

Settembre 1 Ultimo Quarto... Prime piogge abbondanti mitgano la tempuratura estiva.
September 1 Last quarter... the first heavy rains moderate the summer temperatures

Rhyming proverbs with religious morals:

A chi crede - Dio provvede
To those who believe - God provides

Beato chi vede con l'occhio della Fede
Blessed are those who see with the eye of faith

And general philosophizing, mostly expressed in rhyme:

Chi spreca ogni risorsa - non termina la corsa
Who squandered every resource - does not finish the race

There are proverbs that seem equivalent to some in English:

Dove sta la rana - l'acqua non è lontano
Where is the frog - water is not far
["Where there's smoke there's fire"]

Non dire mai "gatto!" - se non l'hai nel sacco
Never say "cat" - if you have not in the bag
["Don’t count your chickens..."; but with disturbing imagery]

Like the messages inside chocolate baci wrappers, there are lovely-sounding Italian rhymes that fall flat in English:

Amor perso in un momento - non si riacquista in anni cento
Love lost in a moment – will not return in one hundred years

Quando soffia Madam Fortuna- i granelli fan presto una duna
When it blows Madam Fortuna soon fans grains into a dune

Awkward translation grammar isn't too hard to clean up, but idioms that stump the translator have me stumped, too:

Di ogni altro amore è perno - il sincero amor materno
Each pin is another love - the true maternal love

Non c'è mucca così netta - che non abbia una macchietta
There is no clear-cut cow - which has not a speck

There are even weather and agricultural reports in rhyme:

Se piove il quattro di Settembre - si sta a bagno fino a Dicembre
If it rains on the 4th of September - it will soak until December

Settembre amico - apre mandorla e fico
September friend - opens [start of harvesting?] almond and fig

And, were truer words ever written?

Bolli, scartoffie e fogli - il mondo è pieno d'imbrogli
Stamps, paperwork and spreadsheets - the world is full of tricks

And in a world full of managers like the guy in the sheepskin: one can only try to look absorbed in the spreadsheets, while praying the boss takes note and walks on by...