Benn Books

This is the only English biography of Gerard de Nerval except for the book by Solomon A. Rhodes. Having recently read the Rhodes biography, this book was merely a rehash of the same information including virtually identical anecdotes. However, it does feature some rare photos including the street where Nerval hanged himself.

Nerval is an interesting French poet because he was known as a distracted soul. He was always lost in "supernaturalist reverie" and was drawn to mysticism. Nerval yearned for the ideal which he personified as various women. I do not believe that he was truly infatuated with these women as his biographers clearly believed him to be. Rather, I suspect he gave the enchantress of his mind a female form. The femme fatale was in fact the genius of his imagination which had him bewitched. I base this observation on the fact that Nerval was exceptionally self-absorbed and his phrase "supernaturalist reverie" is highly suggestive of this phenomenon of which I am quite familiar.

This is not a single book it is a set of 3 hardbacks:

Vol 1 is 504 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1891 to 1893. Vol II is 547 pages and consists Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1894 to 1898. Vol III is 666 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers in the published Electrician of 1900 to 1912. It also contains papers published in Nature during this same interval. Additionally there are 140 pages of unpublished notes discovered after Heaviside's death.

Heaviside evidently published a lot of material and was a very influential engineer both in his time and subsequently. His views on Electromagnetic Theory, and in particular on transmission line theory, shaped the whole development of the subject. His arguments with the influential "experts" of his day are made public in these republished papers. Not all of his criticisms were polite and this certainly comes across in these papers!

Heaviside was a man of very limited financial resources and yet still managed to achieve scientific greatness and esteem from the great men of his time. The other men of great influence, but little ability, with whom he crossed swords, all seem to have fallen by the wayside, leaving Heaviside's viewpoint as dominant. Somehow Heaviside never translated his intellectual and scientific ability and contributions into enough finances to support him. He was desperately poor throughout his life, even having the gas supply to his home cut off during winter months due to non-payment of bills. It is therefore fitting that these volumes be read and appreciated by future generations as his reward. You may of course have heard of the Heaviside operator in calculus, the Heaviside step function, the Kennelly-Heaviside layer in the ionosphere, the Heaviside-Feynman formula for the radiated field of a moving charged particle. There is a lot of other stuff which did not get Heaviside's name on it, such as the telegrapher's equation.

Throughout, Heaviside tries to explain things in easy to understand terms using simple notation. He hated the wretched gothic fonts used by Maxwell in the famous treatise (and on this point anyone who has ever read Maxwell will easily agree!) and he introduced the bold faced fonts for the D, E, B and H vector fields that are still used today.

This collection of papers is an honest and non-pompous piece of work. It is actually pleasurable to read and to compare against more modern writers on the same subject. The reader will perhaps forgive Heaviside for his lack of (false) modesty. After all, this fame is evidently the greater part of what he personally received from his publications by way of a reward.

After almost 40 years in the earthwork estimating business, we have looked at at least a dozen "estimating" books --- this one is by far the best.

We are ordering copies for all of our earthwork estimators --- the single copy which I have had for years is worn out after being passed from hand to hand for decades

This is a brief book, under 60 pages, dedicated to just one topic: visual spacing of type. Within that field, it addresses mostly the visual spacing of body text. It's not a wide range to cover, but Dowding covers it in detail, with many instructive examples.

Just about everything in this booklet derives from one principle: obeying the visual mass of the letterforms. That usually means, for example, spacing the letter T as if it were narrower than the spindly arms at the top. When justifying columns of text, it means that periods, commas, and single-quotes may extend beyond the normal border of the text block. Those sorts have so much white in the piece of the line they occupy, that they have almost no visual mass all.

The biggest part of the discussion centers on word spacing and letter spacing. Dowding is adamant about tight spacing within words and even, narrow spacing between words. Given the vagaries of word length and line length, this means that the typographer should be able to choose whether to use contractions or not, to choose '&' instead of 'and', and so on as needed to adjust the line density.

Dowding presents a number of bad examples, not all of them intentionally. On p.17 near the bottom, for example, a few consecutive lines end in punctuation, justified with the text. That unintended indentation looks a little like a car with a dented fender. P.35 shows an ambiguity between the running titles and a section title - the kind of ambiguity that typography should resolve. And repeatedly, p.5 for example, it may take a few moments to realize that one is reading sample text, not the exposition itself. There are typographic clues in the sample that set it off from the flow of the text, but they're so delicate that only a typographic master (not me) would respond to them as a conspicuous detour sign.

Unfortunately, much of his advice can only be applied using very indirect means, within common word processing software. Still, these are good skills to know when the appearance of text really matters, because even balky tools can usually be forced to do the right thing when the effort is warranted.

//wiredweird

As a document of 10 years in the political history of the United Kingdom this book is of the first importance. By 1991 the evolution of the young Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Viscount Stansgate, into the populist Tony Benn was long complete, and his career as a Labour cabinet minister was long behind him. I would guess he has done more for posterity by his high-profile stance as an independent radical thinker than he ever did, or was ever likely to do, in his various ministerial posts.

Obviously these diaries are political annals first and foremost. It is as a politician and political theorist that we know him from his speeches and media appearances, but this volume of the diaries gives more insight into the man himself. Early on he recounts the death of his mother, and towards the end there were tears standing in my eyes as I read his laconic and restrained account of the death of his much-loved American wife after a long and courageous battle with cancer. He has more to say about his family than about the dissident Labour party figures with whom he is usually associated, and his reticence makes this a fascinating issue for me. Some he admires quite obviously, but I got no sense of personal closeness whether because there is none or because he is simply reticent in such matters. What comes across clearly is what independent figures these are and how un-cohesive as some supposed left-wing grouping or movement. It is pretty clear - all the more so for his terseness - who he doesn't like (Neil Kinnock the `modernising' and `reforming' leader of the party very obviously indeed), but the tone is always calm and controlled. His perfect civility, which I have never seen desert him in public, only once or twice falls victim to his exasperation and disgust in the course of these diaries. He tells us what we would have inferred anyway, that he greatly prefers to be on friendly terms with everyone whatever the political differences, and the real tone of personal warmth appears in relation to such political opponents as John Major, Ian Paisley the demagogic leader of the Democratic Ulster Unionists and, intriguingly, the ostensible right-wing bogeyman Norman Tebbitt, whom he characterises as being personally a softie. This is a man people talked to, and that gives his diaries all the more significance.

His Achilles heel, it seems to me, is his sentimental view of radical history, in particular Labour party history. Time and again he criticises the current Labour junta for their disregard of the traditions of the Labour movement. That's all very well, but what did he learn from the party's experience when led by dear old Michael Foot, loved by one and all but generally viewed as a 19th-century survival and a thundering disaster in electoral terms? I sympathise strongly with his revulsion at the question-begging and deceitful inanities mouthed by the Blair troupe about adapting traditional values to the modern world. That they are in practice largely abandoning the values and the people they are supposed to represent I am in no doubt at all, but at least they have found a constituency. Nor am I in any doubt that Mrs Thatcher inflicted a vicious defeat not only on supposed radicals and militants but on the working class generally and on the disadvantaged generally, and that all kinds of unsavoury enterprises and their managements now get a pretty easy ride. The Labour party as a whole, and the trade unions in particular were largely the architects of their own misfortunes through naivety, pigheadedness and arrogance, and they have fallen foul of what Galbraith calls the Culture of Contentment, sc enough of us are happy enough with the status quo to object more to anyone rocking the boat than to injustice. A return to old Labour ways does not seem much of an answer all the same.

It may be that with some supposed communist threat now behind us people will begin to see the sheer ugliness of capitalism. Socialism to me is a mentality, not a system, and it is a collective mentality. Whatever its virtues in theory, it has a lot to live down in practice, a lot of unpleasant associations to shed and a lot of skeletons to clear out of various cupboards. If more socialists resembled Tony Benn the task would be a lot easier.

The book is readable to the point of compulsiveness. He dislikes personal invective and bad language. When this is used by Harold Pinter, Benn finds it `quite unnecessary' and he startles himself on the one occasion when sheer frustration drives him to the point of using a naughty word. He clucks disapprovingly at a mildly risque joke told by the Prime Minister, but oddly seems very amused by a similar witticism, which I myself first heard about 45 years ago, told by the Rev Mr Paisley. I would really have liked more of an insight into his sense of humour, but mostly we have to make do with his summary of friendly discussions as `very jolly'. But the main point of this book is its stern prophetic quality, and I for one take it - how shall I say -- jolly seriously.

It is always edifying to have the good fortune to be able to listen to (or read) this wise and kind man. Tony Benn has always been the contradiction in terms of a "sincere politician". He has been a steadfast champion of justice and an honest voice in the British House of Commons. He gave up his peerage and all the priveleges that accompanied it to devote his life to speaking the truth and fighting for the weak, the forgotten, the abused and those without a voice. Often this has been a fight that he has had to undertake alone. It is undoubtedly the greatest tragedy not only for Britain but for the world that Tony Benn did not challenge the leadership of the 'Labour'party (if this party still deserves this name). He would have been the greatest British prime minister in history. There would also have been much more justice, decency and fair play in the world. Even though it is perhaps too late for this meek, wise and slightly ageing man to ever become the leader of his country, what he says is still of great value.

I've read quite a few of Machen's books and short stories and this one is my favorite. The writing style is beautiful and poetic and there's a sense of sinister mystery pervading the whole thing. It gave me a lovely, spine-tingling feeling. A truly great read!

I found a copy of this book in a secondhand bookshop in Petersfield, Hampshire.

It is, as the title suggests a book about the secret weapons of history or rather, the failed secret weapons of history. Kurt Halbritter is sadly no longer with us but can be best described as a Spike Milligan with better drawings.

The weapons illustrated were usually more dangerous to the bearer than the one being attacked.

Its a fun book that Ive gone back to many times just for the drawings. It mocks war which can never be a bad thing.

A beautiful book with beautiful words

I remember this children's book from when I was little. Actually it was one of my little sister's books then but I loved reading picture books, so I remember reading it out loud to myself. A city makes a hill with a pile of dirt and it snows and all the kids have fun! After reading that, I wanted my own hill that would grow!