Found in Books February 2022

 Our Found in Books collection this time features a vaccination card circa 1971.  "Mike" a red Irish Setter received his rabies vaccine.  

Why yes, I do have a restless urge to write.

And someone cut out the images of Tarzan book covers from a calendar - more muscles and tan skin, please.

A poor drawing of a fancy chandelier, photo booth strip, and map of an Indian temple are some of the other found ephemera in the past few months.

Found In Books - Spring Edition

Once again it's time to show off some of the things we've found in books that have crossed our desks here at Pistil Books. 

Our treasures this time include pressed flowers and leaves, lottery ticket, "Lighter of the Month Club" stickers from Bic, bookmarks (of course), a sheet on the "Seven Factors of Awakening", a Christmas gift card from France, a sheet on drying flowers, a French publisher's advertisement for books on "Esoterisme", an entry form for a drawing, a boarding pass, something written with a fountain pen and a flourish and a penny stamp, a Book-of-the-Month Club invoice, lyrics to a song: "It's time to get us a clue / It's time to take off the mask / It's time to turn it around / It's time to learn to relax....", a chart of emotions having to do with anger, disgust, sad, happy, surprise, and fear; someone's collection of clippings on Max Ernst, some artwork including a slightly racy drawing and one of rose paintings, a form for bindery instructions for a library, and some patterns for Captain Ludlow's jacket.

There's a tiny pointing arrow captioned, "Ass for Cash."

Found in Books

It's been a while since I've posted photos of some of the ephemera found in books, and the envelope holding such objects has grown fat.  

Included this time are the usual bookmarks (from bookstores and torn from handy sheets of paper), gift tags, drawings, tickets, and personal notes.  In one card someone writes, "Now that I know from the medical examiner's report the severity of her AVM condition, I wonder if M--- knew or at least had a premonition of fatality.  Just after her first MRI she intensified her study of Buddhism which focuses on preparing in this life for one's next life."

Remember phone bills?  Spanking, cirque & sensuality, oh my!

Bookmarks from shops, The Ten Commandments (from St. Jude's Ranch for Children), and Legend of the Raven are just a few of the ways people keep their place between pages.

Cards from card catalogs... as rare as phone bills now.

Making an Orchestra

This week, your correspondent cut up a first edition signed copy of 1931's Making an Orchestra by Dorothy Berliner Commins.  How could he do it? Only because someone in the 30's had already begun the cutting!  He was simply completing a work in progress.  And what a work-- kind of a cross between an obsessive-compulsive disorder (not that there is anything wrong with that) and a Kafka novel (ditto).

Printed on good-quality paper that hasn't been seen since the war, this book features drawings of all the members of a standard symphony orchestra, and a few outliers, meant to be cut out and pasted onto a diagram, where they stand up with the maestro at their head.

Delightfully, every string section is made up entirely of clones.  Also, there is only one horn player, though even Haydn used two, and Mahler generally required eight.  But, there is one of every percussion instrument.  There is even a basset horn, which apparently is an alto clarinet, and is certainly arcane by today's standards.  But then, so is the orchestra getting to be.

Noteworthy is that there is not one woman, not even playing harp (a notoriously feminine instrument-- or perhaps of undetermined gender, like the angels that traditionally play it).

Ms. Commins was a pianist and the author of several books.  She lived until the ripe age of 102. Times may have changed since the 1930's, but Making an Orchestra lives on, now in 3 dimensions.

--written by Kam