Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Open Media

  • Macmillan vs. Harris County Library (and every other public library).

    You may have already heard about how libraries really dislike the new pricing model of MacMillan’s publishing company.

    (more…)
  • Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    Silly me, I realized that I forgot to link to an annotated bibliography (AB) I made of US Civil War fiction a few years ago. I did this as an appendix to a story collection ebook by Jack Matthews I edited a few years ago. This ebook sells for $3 on Amazon and $1.50 on Smashwords. Actually though I had so much fun compiling this AB that I ended up writing a post about it on Teleread. Here is a verbatim reproduction of that same essay. Enjoy.

    Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    The older I become, the more I seem to enjoy reading about books than actually reading them. Why do people read about books?

    Books are plentiful, and our time on this earth is limited. People need some method for picking and prioritizing what they read (or in general what they do with free time). The youthful reader is inclined to read indiscriminately, favoring whatever was unavailable at libraries or forbidden by parents.

    By early adulthood it dawns on people that reading time (or time in general)  is a precious commodity. Even if you are lucky enough to find a career that requires a significant amount of reading, there never seems to be enough time to read what  you really want. If you spend too much time on books that are crap (a highly significant amount) there is less time to read great and powerful stuff.

    Some degree of serendipity is crucial for discovering good reading material¹, but at some point you have to  find some method that will keep exposing you to  great reading material.

    I’ll devote a series of blogposts to such methods. For this one, I shall discuss an overlooked resource when  trying to decide what to read:  the annotated bibliography (abbreviated as AB for this essay).

    Annotated Bibliographies (ABs)

    Despite my love for reading, I could never imagine reading an AB —much less writing one – except under duress in high school English class.

    A year ago, though, I decided to make an annotated bibliography (AB) about Civil War fiction as an afterward for a Jack Matthewsebook my company was publishing.  It turned out to be an all-consuming project; truthfully just proofreading everything turned out to be a nightmare.  Nonetheless, I think the result was an admirable (and useful) contribution to the genre.

    It’s important to distinguish between a bibliography (which is a mere listing of titles in alphabetical order) and an AB (which not only lists the items, but also describes  why each source is interesting or important). A good AB (and honestly, most of them are good!) is usually worth reading on its own.  A few days ago I read two print  annotated bibliographies of Texas history. Delightful and fascinating!  Frankly, these two books revealed new books that I never could have found by looking in library catalogs or checking   bibliographies of other history  books.

    Perhaps print bibliographies don’t translate well  to web browsing, but AB’s have been on the web for over 20 years. Starting from the 1990s, you would find them everywhere as Description Lists  or (DL) in HTML. That was back when Internet search was iffier and you relied on links pages maintained by human editors to help you find what you wanted. These pages were usually static HTML and more focused on creating paths to other helpful resources. (Alas, nowadays, it seems that most websites aim to trap you or force you to sign up for a newletter or give them  your credit card).

    Even today, the sort of bibliographies which you find on Wikipedia just list book titles and possibly web resources. Nothing is wrong with that of course, but in an age of excessive information, we don’t need to know every work on a topic; we would just like to know which works contain the best information or are ideal for beginners or have the best photographs (etc.) Let’s use  my Civil War bibliography to illustrate how ABs  work and what they offer for readers.

    Why annotated bibliographies are awesome

    First, ABs don’t try to cover everything in a field — just the most interesting things (or the most interesting things that the preparer has encountered). My Civil War fiction AB tried to hit the big landmarks, but there is no doubt that this list overlooks many worthy works. Often the selectivity of these resources make it more helpful to the reader.

    Second, I tried to subdivide the huge list into several smaller categories(containing no more than 20 titles). Also,  I ordered the categories in a way to give certain works more prominence (i.e., Critical Overview and Classics).

    Third, in addition to arranging works by category, I decided against listing them alphabetically.  For the most part, I arranged works by date of publication — although this perhaps can be somewhat disorienting. But it isn’t hard to search for the name of an author or a title in a web browser.

    Fourth, this may not be obvious, but I don’t have any special expertise in the area of Civil War fiction. In fact, I have read surprisingly little Civil War fiction (though I will be correcting this deficiency soon).  Mostly I just did background reading, found some useful bibliographies (both in print and online) and then combined everything.  I found several notable critical studies of Civil War fiction and just listed most of the fiction titles discussed in them. In the 1990s there was a special award specifically for Civil War fiction, and so I list all those titles. By reading book reviews and comments on Amazon, I tried to include a fair summary as well as context (i.e., was this first of a series? Is there anything notable or unique about the author or the narrative angle? Did it win any awards? Was it made into a movie? )

    Fifth, I listed data about the books which might be useful for certain readers. I tried to identify which works were already in the public domain. I also indicated lexile scores for books geared toward younger readers. (Lexile is a method of measuring the relative difficulty of a text and is used by teachers).

    Sixth, online bibliographic resources can remain flexible in format. (This is something that the Wikihow article on ABs acknowledges).  I looked at various style guides  before making my AB. Then I realized that there was no need to give complete citations as required by MLA or Chicago Style Guide. (Besides, it would increase the prep time.) Generally, publication  data is reasonably easy to locate from Amazon.com and other places.

    Date of publication is relevant because it indicates which works are in the public domain (and can be downloaded for free). I debated whether to include links to Project Gutenberg (PG) or archive.org or Amazon.com or Wikipedia, but in the end I decided to keep  hyperlinks to a minimum. I did this mainly because I was making this bibliography for an ebook and worried that putting links here would just create  linkrot. It’s hard to predict how long Project Gutenberg or other web projects  will be able to maintain its URLs.

    This bibliography is (relatively) noncommercial. I stuck a small ad for a Jack Matthews title published by my company, but aside from that, it’s a static page unlikely to change (unless I forget to pay my hosting charges!) In contrast, you can find lots of listicles about Civil War fictionand Civil War books. All are interesting and helpful and written by people with interest or expertise on the subject.

    But listicles are a form of abbreviated journalism and  rarely  systematic. A good features writer can sniff out enough notable books in a field to make  a listicle, but often they are skewed towards newer books and books which are in the public eye (rather than books which are actually interesting or important). Sometimes publications can go offline or migrate to a different software platform — thus disrupting the continuity of URL addresses. Biblio-listicles  reside in an online world subject to various pressures (technical and commercial).

    It would be easy for a wiki site to facilitate the production of ABs. But such bibliographies are better produced by individuals (or small groups of like-minded individuals). I doubt that you can set  criteria for group editing  which are reasonably fair or neutral to all contributors. Wiki software helps in producing the ABs, but the neutral point of view (NPOV) philosophy  and notability criteria  used by Wikipedia isn’t really  compatible with the individual quirkiness which make annotated bibliographies so special and interesting.

    You would think that the proliferation of citation tools and content management systems would mean that ABs would be everywhere online. That is definitely not the case. Maybe in the 1990s when human editors cataloged web resources, this might have been true. Since then, Google Search and Wikipedia articles have taken over, worthy tools, but skewed in their own ways. Google Search can be gamed fairly easily while Wikipedia seems dedicated to  listing resources without trying to assess their value. (If you don’t believe me, try browsing through this top level category of Wiki bibliographies and try to find anything actually useful.)

    ABs are not easy to find using search engines. Every time I try Google to find a good annotated bibliography, the search results consist mainly of commercial products (some of whom are not even available for individuals!) When I try googling a more specific topic for an annotated bibliography, the pickings are usually slim.  Interestingly, it’s not as hard to locate ABs on abstract philosophical topics. Check out this   Chinese philosophy  AB or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see what I mean.

    chinese-book

    Online bibliographies have other problems. First, they tend to be database-driven, which means that the view in the browser is often truncated or chunked in an unusable way. Database-driven bibliographies offer advanced sorting and filtering capabilities and occasionally annotations, but their selection criteria might not match your own. For example, which resource in a list of 50 or 100  should you check first? Second, many of these tools cater to institutional customers and not  open to public surfing.

    Take for example the Oxford Bibliographies Online. Sounds and looks promising, but wait! You have to log in, and your institution has to subscribe. If your institution doesn’t subscribe to such a service or if you don’t even belong to an institution, you’re out of luck.

    Many of the best AB’s are in book appendices (i.e., not online).  Again, there is a lot of segregation between users who have institutional accounts (and better access to bibliographies and ebooks) and users who don’t.

    While I compiled material for my Civil War AB,  not having access to most of these academic services severely limited what I could find online.

    On the other hand, print versions of academic books from my city library often had ample  bibliographies in their appendices. (Perhaps they were not ABs, but they were still very useful.)

    This leads to my final question: If many academic books contain ample and carefully crafted  ABs in the appendix, why don’t more authors simply repost the appendix online?

    2025 Update. To my surprise and delight, making annotated lists seems to be something that AI engines excel in doing. It can gather and summarize in a line or two the apparent subject and the critical response. The main problem is that it swipes books from bestseller lists and misses a lot of interesting works which are not as widely known. Here is a prompt I used with Gemini:

    Give me an annotated list of 100 fiction titles written and published in English about the U.S. civil war. This can also include fiction about plantation life, slavery, reconstruction period and fiction taking place at a time near the time of the US Civil War (but not necessarily depicting it). Include graphic novels, YA novels and fictionalized versions of historical events, but exclude memoirs, biographies and historical correspondence. If any title has won or been nominated for a literary prize, mention it in the annotation. These fiction titles must be novellas or novels and must be published between 1930 and 2020.

    NOTES

    1  I actually think contemporary readers need to be more adventurous about what they read, even if it means having to struggle through crap once in a while. Indie publishing is flooded with perfectly interesting books which don’t win awards or get reviewed in notable places. This tendency to seek only books by award winners or books  have been widely praised  is perfectly understandable (and results in a higher probability that you will read a  winner),  but it also eliminates the thrill of discovery and also keeps hidden many remarkable literary works. It also lets you read with auto-pilot turned on; you are not really trusting your own judgment but instead simply trying to validate whether your opinions match what the critics have said.  My solution is to  download  and read a lot of first chapters and later abandon a lot of books after that. Sure, you can’t judge every book by a single  chapter, but at least I’m giving a lot of unknown authors a chance to enter my brain.

    (If you know of any annotated bibliographies online to recommend, feel free to list them in the comments). 

  • Copyright Ghosts of 1923 Come Alive Tomorrow!

    (I originally posted this on Teleread in 2007. The horrifying decision to freeze the public domain for 20 extra years has increased costs to libraries, schools, students and scholars. The works below would have gone into the public domain in 1999; instead, they will go into the public domain tomorrow! The openculture blog has more).

    “You are all a lost generation”
    Gertrude Stein, quoted in preface to Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises (1926)

    See also: Welcome to 1922! (Introduction), Ghosts of 1924. For Texas readers, see my tirade about why Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind isn’t in the public domain.

    All the works listed below were scheduled to go into the U.S. public domain in 1999–except that a 1998 law mandated a 20 year delay–causing higher prices for students, teachers and libraries. Instead of 1999, these works will become part of the U.S. public domain only in 2019.

    Caveat: This is a work in progress. It may not be accurate. However, it will be updated over time (and hopefully made more accurate). Some of the works listed below might be very well be in the public domain or special arrangements might have been made to make them available in digitalized form. Always google to be sure. If you have edits/additions, send them to me here: idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net .

    How I Compiled This List

    First, let me explain how I located works specific to each year. I’m no expert on that decade, and frankly I did nothing that no other savvy Net Surfer could do using google and well-known resources.

    1. Wikipedia uses year pages as a central reference point to events, people and creative works particular to the time period. If you go to Wikipedia’s entry to 1923, you will find links to Literature and Film. I’ve found a lot of discrepancies about dates on wikipedia, so you shouldn’t take for granted that dates are absolutely correct (you should probably verify these dates elsewhere). However, they are usually in the ballpark. One of the problems with this dating system on Wikipedia is that it based on self-reporting by wikipedia posters; many well-known works probably haven’t been listed yet. Still, it’s enough to get a person started.
    2. University of Pennsylvania has a great listing of prize winners by year. Obviously not all great works were prize winners, but this helps you to be sure you haven’t overlooked any prize-winning works. This site links to digital copies when available. Sometimes it happens that post-1922 works have made it in the public domain for one reason or another. Also, because copyright law in Australia is Death + 50 Years, Project Gutenberg in Australia, they are sometimes able to carry certain works not yet available in the U.S. (Suddenly my heart is surging with a feeling of Australian nationalism).
    3. For general reference information about copyright, check University of Pennsylvania’s listing of copyright laws by country and Cornell U.’s reference guide to U.S. copyright law.
    4. Google Book Search tends to be pretty conservative about which books it allows full text for, but on the other hand, the best two things about it are 1)easy access to the copyright page to verify date (regardless of whether it’s in public domain) and 2)google-produced PDFs which are just a collection of screenshots of scans. I haven’t tried it, but now Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreader’s Project is using these PDF’s to OCR these works, saving individuals and libraries a lot of time and effort (horray Google!) .
    5. Here’s a list of copyright renewals by year. For example in 1923, works needed to be renewed in 1950, 1951 or 1952. This table provides a gigantic page of 1923 works which were not renewedand a list of works which were renewed (zip). I can’t really say how accurate or complete this information is (and by the way, I generally did not consult it when listing works below).
    6. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is the only literary source that lets you narrow by year. Its purpose seems to be sci fi/fantasy, but for now the database lists lots of general works as well. It also lists short stories and essays printed in a particular year–particularly useful. This website is still buggy and lists incomplete/unedited information. Also, the dates may contain second editions, so some might already be in the public domain. Still a good resource, and likely to improve with time.
    7. Project Gutenberg lists a lot of works that are post-1922 but are not put in the public domain by virtue of publication date. Maybe they have made alternate arrangements. The PG Clearance team is pretty sharp; I seriously doubt they would make a mistake.
    8. The Golden Age of Detection wiki lists detective novels from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, period between the 1920s and 1930s in England and (to a limited extent) the U.S. There are many ways to find detective novels in a certain time period. The most direct seems to be to enter “1923” as a search term in its search box.
    9. The IMDB database offers lots of ways to browse films by date. The problem is that even in 1923 there were 2099 listings. This is a cumbersome way to search. However, links on the left side allow you to list by total votes and by average vote. These two links have further links to the 100 top links in that category. However, I’ve observed discrepancies in dates. Also, many of these films are foreign, and you can’t tell the release date of these films in the US. I’m limiting myself to American releases (generally). Don’t forget to click on the Review link for individual films. BTW, make sure to check whether the film has a link to an External Review; some of the notable ones do.
    10. In archive.org you can do search by Date Ranges. You have to use Advanced Search, and it’s a bit cumbersome, but it works; . Also Openflix is distributing early public domain works. You can’t neatly search by year, but often entering the year into the Search box produces tidy search results. They used to provide p2p links, but now they provide links to streaming videos and cheap editions you can find on amazon.
    11. See also the National Registry of Films list. You can list films by date, and pretty much see which films that historians and archivists deemed notable/significant for a particular year.
    12. Other Categories: I am generally not listing literary works originally other than English here. For English-speaking audiences, we care about the copyright date of translations (although it is true that a person living today could write their own free translation from the original and post it online). Also, I haven’t listed much in the way of history/nonfiction/essays simply because I have no way of finding out what’s out there.

    The Ghosts of 1923–A Synopsis

    1923 was a great year. The country was suffering under an incompetent U.S. president, and in midyear another took office to fix the mess he’d created. William Butler Yeatswon the Nobel prize. Both Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings produced their first major collections of poetry (so did Wallace Stevens, but luckily it contained previously published works now in the public domain). W.C. Williams wrote two volumes of poetry; curiously even his pre-1923 works haven’t made it onto Gutenberg. A female sci fi writer named Gertrude Atherton published a sensational, semi-autobiographical novel Black Oxen, about a middle-aged woman who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. It was made into a well-received film a year later. Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer created Cane, a series of poems and short stories considered to be an important work of high modernism. English writer (and friend of Rosetti) Hall Caine wrote an anti-war novel of a romance between a German POW and an English girl; it was made into a film in 1927. Feminist dramatist/fiction writer Zona Gale wrote another love story that satirized life in a small town. Edwin Lefèvre wrote a classic novel describing the life of a professional stock-trader on Wall Street (akin to a 1920’s Bonfire of the Vanities). Elmer Rice wrote Adding Machine, widely considered an early expressionist classic of American theater. P.G. Wodehouse had another Jeeves book out; G.B. Shaw had another play; Willa Cather had two novels; H.G. Wells had one, and adventure writer H. Rider Haggard had one too. Arnold Bennett had his last great masterpiece Riceyman Steps (now on Gutenberg).

    IMDB shows a mere 2099 movies produced in 1923 (a good percentage, we may assume are not American). Everything is still silent (obviously), but still there’s a wide variety of productions. Laurel and Hardy released 19 new films; Buster Keatonproduced three; Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies started appearing with 19 in 1923; so did the classic Harold Lloyd‘s Safety Last (where he hangs off a clock on a building). Cecil de Mille produced two more epics. We also see an early work of Fay Wray (who starred in King Kong 10 years later). Alla Nazimova produced the controversial and lavish avante-garde Salome version of Oscar Wilde’s play, replete with “bare-chested boys, blond Nubian slaves, metallic potted palms, art nouveau floral patterns, and birdcage dungeons (wrote a Village Voice critic recently). There was Covered Wagon, a Western with a giant budget and other films with various plots about orphans, Irish immigrants, woman heading off to Hollywood to be a star (Hollywood was big even then).

    Of course, I have only scratched the surface. Obviously there are many more books, plays and movies and paintings I haven’t had time to describe here. Now, thanks to 1998 legislation passed by your congressmen, these and other works will have to wait an extra 20 years for Americans to have easy access to them. You have 12 years of waiting to go.

    Literary Works of 1923–Poems/Drama

    • E. E. Cummings – Tulips & Chimneys
    • Robert Frost – New Hampshire (won Pulitzer)
    • William Carlos Williams: Go Go, Spring and All
    • Elmer Rice – The Adding Machine
    • George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
    • John Masefield — Dauber And the Daffodil Fields
    • Wallace Stevens – Harmonium
    • Owen Davis, Icebound (won Pulitzer for drama)

    Literary Works of 1923–Fiction

    • Gertrude Atherton – Black Oxen (racy sci fi later made into 1924 film). Update: Expired copyright.
    • Sherwood Anderson – Many Marriages
    • Max Brand – Seven Trails (writer of Westerns/pulps)
    • Hall Caine – The Woman of Knockaloe
    • Willa Cather – A Lost Lady; One of Ours
    • Marie Corelli – Love and the Philosopher
    • Zona Gale – Faint Perfume
    • Georgette Heyer – The Great Roxhythe (Heyer wrote historical romances/detective novels)
    • Dark Frigate by Charles Boardman Hawes (Children, Newberry)
    • A. A. Milne – The House at Pooh Corner
    • Jules Romains – Knock
    • Felix Salten – Bambi, A Life in the Woods
    • Dorothy L. Sayers – Whose Body? (expired copyright)
    • James Stephens – Deirdre
    • Jean Toomer – Cane
    • H. G. Wells – Men Like Gods
    • Margaret Wilson -The Able McLaughlins (Pulitzer) . Wully McLaughlin, a member of a Scots community in frontier Iowa, is alarmed by the behavior of his sweetheart when he returns from battle in the Civil War.
    • Edwin Lefèvre – Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (free on the net)
    • H. Rider Haggard – Wisdom’s Daughter
    • Arnold Bennett – Riceyman Steps (now at PG)
    • Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley, First published in 1923, Weeds is set amid the tobacco tenant farms of rural Kentucky. This pioneering naturalist novel tells the story of a hard-working, spirited young woman who finds herself in a soul-destroying battle with the imprisoning duties of motherhood and of managing an impoverished household. The novel is particularly noteworthy for its heartbreaking depiction of a woman who suffers not from a lack of love, but from an unrequited longing for self-expression and freedom
    • Novels by Anzia Yezierska : Salome of the Tenements and Children of Loneliness

    Films of 1923

    • Gasoline Love (early film with Fay Wray)
    • Burning Brazier (surreal French/Russian detective ) Ivan Mozzhukhin
    • Little Old New York, comedy of Irish female immigrant who comes to USA starring Marion Davies), dir. Sidney Olcott
    • Zaza, story of French music star battling with her rival
    • The Extra Girl, actress wins a contest to become a star
    • Our Hospitality & Balloonatic, Three Ages, Love Nest (1923) Buster Keaton classic
    • Covered Wagon, Western with giant budget
    • The Daring Years, starring Mildred Harris, Charles Emmett Mack and Clara Bow
    • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney
    • The Purple Highway, starring Madge Kennedy, Monte Blue, Vincent Coleman and Pedro de Cordoba
    • Safety Last!, starring Harold Lloyd. In one scene, Lloyd is seen climbing around and hanging off the side of a tall building, including a very famous scene where he hangs off a clock. Lloyd did all of his own stunts, and worked without a safety net. Also in the same year, Why Worry?, silent comedy about hypochondriac millionaire
    • Salomé, starring Alla Nazimova; directed by Charles Bryant, stylized avante-garde version of Oscar Wilde’s play (deemed a “culturally significant film by the National Film Registry).
    • Souls for Sale, starring Richard Dix and Eleanor Boardman; look at gliterati of Hollywood
    • A Woman of Paris & Pilgrim , starring Edna Purviance; directed by Charles Chaplin
    • It’s a Gift & 18 other Our Gang films (written by Hal Roach )
    • White Rose, D.W. Griffith tale of an orphan girl who goes out into the world.
    • Bright Shawl, adventure/political/spy thriller Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, William Powell
    • Adam’s Rib & 10 Commandments Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
    • Laurel & Hardy: 19 videos (!!!)

    Essays/History/Autobiography/Nonfiction

    • Studies in Classic American Literature, by DH Lawrence; famous litcrit.
    • Robert Henri – The Art Spirit (essays and conversations about art by artist/teacher who led Ashcan Art movement of realistic American art).

    Detective Fiction

    (I haven’t verified these titles, but a commenter to the original article referred me to the Golden Age of Detection Fiction  )

    • Baroque (1923)
    • Behind Locked Doors (1923)
    • Black, White and Brindled (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • Bones of the River (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Captains of Souls (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Cheri-bibi and Cecily aka Missing Men (1923) by Gaston Leroux
    • Chick (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Children of the Wind (1923) by MP Shiel
    • Cole, GDH & M – The Brooklyn Murders – (1923)
    • Contact and Other Stories (1923) by Frances Noyes Hart
    • Craig Kennedy Listens In (1923) by Arthur Reeve
    • Days to Remember (1923) by John Buchan
    • Dorothée, danseuse de corde (1923)
    • Dr Thorndyke’s Casebook aka The Blue Scarab (1923)
    • Feathers Left Around (1923)
    • Hounded Down (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • Impromptu (1923) by Elliot Paul
    • Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923) by Octavus Roy Cohen
    • Jim Maitland (1923)
    • John Dighton, Mystery Millionaire (1923)
    • Klondyke Kit’s Revenge (1923) by George Goodchild
    • La poupée sanglante & La machine à assassiner (1923)
    • Many Engagements {short stories} (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • Michael’s Evil Deeds (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • Midwinter (1923) by John Buchan
    • Monsieur Jonquelle (1923) by Melville Davisson Post
    • More Lives Than One (1923)
    • Mr Fortune’s Practice (1923) by HC Bailey
    • Once In A Red Moon (1923) by Joel Townsley Rogers
    • Secret Service Smith (1923)
    • Spooky Hollow (1923)
    • That Fellow Macarthur (1923) by Selwyn Jepson
    • The Affair at Flower Acres (1923)
    • The Ambitious Lady (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith (1923) by Patricia Wentworth
    • The Big Heart (1923)
    • The Blackguard (1923)
    • The Books of Bart (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Brooklyn Murders (1923); by GDH Cole
    • The Call Box Mystery (1923) by John Ironside
    • The Cartwright Gardens Murder (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Cat’s Eye (1923) by R Austin Freeman
    • The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Clue of the New Pin (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Copper Box (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923) by Ernest Bramah
    • The Flaming Spectre of Cloome (1923)
    • The Four Stragglers (1923)
    • The Green Archer (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Green Eyes (1923)
    • The Groote Park Murder (1923) by Freeman Wills Crofts
    • The House at Waterloo (1923)
    • The Inevitable Millionaires (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The King’s Red-Haired Girl (1923) by Selwyn Jepson
    • The Last Secrets {essays and articles} (1923) by John Buchan
    • The Lone Wolf Returns (1923) by Louis Joseph Vance
    • The Mazaroff Murder {aka The Mazaroff Mystery} (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Million-Dollar Diamond (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Missing Million (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Moth-Woman (1923) by Fergus Hume
    • The Murder on the Links (1923) by Agatha Christie
    • The Mysterious Chinaman (1923) {aka The Rippling Ruby}
    • The Mysterious Mr Garland (1923) by Wyndham Martin
    • The Mystery of Glyn Castle (1923)
    • The Mystery Road (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The Nature of a Crime (1923), with Ford Madox Ford by Joseph Conrad
    • The Orange Divan (1923) by Valentine Williams
    • The Other Story, and Other Stories, (1923) by Henry Kitchell Webster
    • The Red Redmaynes (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • The Return of Anthony Trent (1923) by Wyndham Martin
    • The Rover (1923) by Joseph Conrad
    • The Secret of the Sandhills (1923) by Arthur Gask
    • The Secret of Thurlestone Towers (1923)
    • The Seven Conundrums (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The Sinister Mark (1923)
    • The Step on the Stair (1923) by Anna Katherine Green
    • The Thing at Their Heels (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • The Valley of Lies (1923) by George Goodchild
    • The Veiled Prisoner (1923) by Gaston Leroux
    • The Vengeance of Henry Jarroman (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • The Whipping Girl (1923) by Ralph Rodd
    • The Wild Bird (1923) by Hulbert Footner
    • The Woman Accused (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • The Yard (1923) by Horace Annesley Vachell
    • Tut Tut Mr Tutt (1923) by Arthur Train
    • Wheels Within Wheels (1923)
    • Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L Sayers
    • Why They Married (1923) by Mrs Belloc Lowndes

  • Holiday lethargy (Smashword edition)

    My first installment of Robert’s Roundup Smashwords edition is scheduled for Saturday. Might be a stretch — although I’ll certainly try.  Holiday frivolity is keeping me away from my goal; it might not go live until Sunday.  Stay tuned! 

    Monday Update: I feel that I’ll do the weekly roundup on Wednesday (tomorrow) and the Smashwords update on Wednesday/Thursday — stay tuned!

  • Why does Fort Bend public library sanitize Pulitzer Prize winners?

    June 25 Update. I emailed this message a month ago to one of the library branch managers. After receiving no reply, I forwarded the message to Clara Russell, the Fort Bend library director.  Below is the note I included with my original letter and then the original letter itself. 

    Letter to Ms. Russell

    Dear Ms. Russell:

    On May 6 I wrote a complaint letter to the branch manager of the library I regularly visit (Cinco Ranch) without receiving a reply. The complaint was about buying “clean versions” of music CDs.

    Just recently I checked out a Grammy-nominated best-selling music CD, “Rainbow” by Kesha. Kesha is not only a critically acclaimed pop singer, she was also embroiled in a recent dispute with her music producer over sexual harassment. Regardless of what you think about this dispute, it is indisputable that  Kesha is in touch with the cultural zeitgeist, the “Me too” movement and youth culture. She uses a moderate amount of profanity in her songs, but in one or two songs of the “Rainbow” album,  she uses profanity pointedly as a form of cultural reappropriation. Indeed, the nation’s leading music magazine “Rolling Stone” published a long essay about her song “Woman” where Kesha explains that in the context of this “female empowerment song,” she had earned the right to use swear words:

    That day in particular I felt like I had earned the right call myself a motherfucking woman. I have always been a feminist, but for much of my life I felt like a little girl trying to figure things out. In the past few years, I have felt like a woman more than ever. I just feel the strength and awesomeness and power of being female. We hold the key to humanity. We decide if we populate the Earth, and if so, with whom. We could just decide not to have any more kids and the human race would be over. That is power. I just really fucking love being a woman and I wanted an anthem for anyone else who wants to yell about being self-sufficient and strong. (Yes, men, this song can be for you too.).

    Here’s what the Fort Bend library version of this song sounds like:. In effect, the Fort Bend version of the song ruins the effect of the lyrics  and undermines the very empowerment message embedded inside the song.

    Here’s how the artist intended the song to sound:

    This is not a selected instance of censorship. To me, this seems to be an institutional effort to systematically remove musical examples of vulgar language in its collection — while making no such effort in prose or cinema.

    If this were the 1980s, perhaps you can justify the removal by pointing to examples of misogyny or hate speech in the rap music genre. But now Fort Bend is censoring songs across the spectrum, including a well-known album described by critics as embodying female empowerment.

    If your acquisitions department didn’t have enough funds to buy the album or if it thought that buying other items were more culturally important, I could at least respect your decision. But here your library has decided as an institution and as a matter of policy to refrain from buying an entire category of  material simply because of word choice.   That is unfortunate and harmful in the long run.

    Original Letter (sent 1 month ago)

    Dear Fort Bend Library Manager:

    I am writing about the music CD collection both at your branch and the Fort Bend library system.

    Thank you for maintaining a  growing collection of music in CD media form. I realize that library systems experience pressure to stream/digitalize their collection, but CD media are more permanent and can be repurposed for a variety of platforms. They also are not encrypted in any way and do not depend on Internet access.

    This may sound counterintuitive, but having access to streaming music and music CDs through the library makes it MORE likely for patrons like me to spend money on music. No matter how much a library tries, the amount of albums it has in its collection will remain only a small fraction of what recordings have been made and sold.  The chance to hear library copies of one or two albums by an artist increases the likelihood that I will support the artist (through concert tickets and purchasing downloadable music).

    But I am concerned that the Fort Bend Library system has a clear preference for purchasing  “clean” or “edited” music CDs over the normal commercial versions.

    I don’t normally listen to rap music with explicit lyrics; on the other hand, I would expect that a library collection not to exclude the explicit version of these albums.

    I recently checked out two albums from Cinco Ranch: “Damn” by Kendrick Lamar and “Beautiful Trauma” by Pink. Both are extremely popular albums and have mainstream appeal. Neither is particularly known for using vulgar or derogatory lyrics. I have taken the time personally to check the uncensored lyrics for both albums. The profanity on both albums is very mild.

    Unfortunately, Fort Bend bought the “edited” music CD of both the Kendrick Lamar and the Pink album. This library system chose NOT to buy the original unedited version of either album.

    Kendrick Lamar’s album won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music. This actually was historic because it is the first time ever that a popular music album has won this prestigious award.

    As I explore Fort Bend’s collection of music CDs, I keep noticing that a huge number of rap albums CDs are available from Fort Bend only in “edited” versions. Indeed, just to satisfy my curiosity (and to waste maybe 15 minutes), I went to Cinco Ranch branch’s music section, pulled all the rap music CDs and checked the online catalog. My spot check of rap music CDs at Cinco Ranch branch library  is that about 80 percent of the albums at the branch are marked “clean”, and probably ZERO of the albums with clean versions have explicit versions circulating in the library system. Further study would be required, but I am guessing that this trend is true not just as this branch but the entire music collection in the system.

    Hoopla carries original versions for SOME of these albums, but not all and certainly not the older albums.

    I am not a huge fan of rap music or or profanity in general. I can understand how in some contexts (at school or on the radio), it may be necessary to restrict the playing of songs with explicit lyrics. On the other hand, I value being able to hear the work as the artist originally intended. The Pulitzer judges apparently decided that the profanity on the Kendrick Lamar didn’t detract from its cultural importance; why should Fort Bend library decide otherwise?

    We are not in middle school. I  am 52 years old!  Presumably, someone who checks out a music CD is playing it for private use, and social mores have changed to a point where teenagers today listen and watch material with a lot more explicit language than during the years of my youth.

    During my last visit to Cinco Ranch branch’s DVD section, I noticed    Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and  Seven. All three are lauded R-rated  movies with explicit and highly provocative content. It would not occur to most people or libraries to ask that the Hollywood Studios which made these movies to  sell a “sanitized” version of these movies.  Why then should public libraries have different rules about music albums?

    Having only edited versions of albums sends an unfortunate message to patrons that individuals are not entitled to experience art works the way the artist intended. Also, by making only edited versions available, you are trying the hide the coarseness that the musician wished to convey.

    I don’t particularly object to libraries deciding not to purchase works with too much vulgarity; but if you think that an item is worth purchasing, you should buy the version that is closest to what the creator wanted.

    As much as I enjoy checking out music CDs and appreciate what resources you offer to the patrons in your county, I recognize that fairly soon it will make more sense for the library to focus on investing in its streaming collection.

    Regardless of how this library develops their music collection, I would like to see the library system commit itself to no longer buying “clean versions” of music. Doing so strikes me as culturally retrograde.

    Sincerely,

    Robert Nagle

    PS, One other thing is that although the metadata in the catalog discloses that a CD is edited, the physical CDs show no such indication, making it practically impossible for patrons to know whether the music CD is the original version or a sanitized version.

    2021 Update. I forgot to mention the outcome. A few weeks after sending the letter, I eventually received a reply from the Fort Bend library director. The reply (implicitly) reaffirmed the no curse word policy on music CDs while at the same time mentioning that the streaming music services (Hoopla and freegal) offered “uncensored versions” of songs. I should add that I wasn’t sure that Hoopla and freegal offered streaming version of every censored albums. Indeed, I recently checked out Reclassified by Iggy Azalea music CD (which is not available for streaming) and was unpleasantly surprised again to learn that most of the songs were edited to remove the occasional profanity.