Stolen Books

 At a sad time when readership is down, this blog is about people who would steal for a book!

There was a time when wealthy men saw books as a measure of their success.  Their homes often included an impressive library with hundreds, if not thousands, of books.  Andrew Carnegie was one of those men.  He is known for the public libraries he created, but his own personal library included rare books, especially books printed during the 15th century, the first century of printing with "movable type."  Such books are rarely stolen, since their rarity makes them immediately recognizable to reputable book dealers and knowledgeable collectors.  

The Carnegie Library has such books, as well as other valuable books and old maps so well known that they would be quickly recognized.  Such books require care, and when the Carnegie Library Officials decided to hire a person capable of protecting their rare books, they were grateful to have such a man already in their employ.    He was made responsible for the Oliver Room Collection, working with a preservation specialist to make sure the climate control and proper shelving, to avoid the leaching that wooden shelving can cause, were installed.  For years, all seemed well.

 In 2016 library officials decided it was time to audit the collection, which led to the dreadful discovery that the man paid to protect the valuable collection was a thief, working with a man thought to be a respectable book dealer. These men knew that the books themselves were too well known to be sold, so they cut individual pages from the books to sell.  Because these books were so valuable, as well as being heavy, they were kept on the top shelves for safety, almost never viewed, their thick book covers concealing the missing pages. To further conceal the identity of the books, the dishonest book dealer  stamped some of the books "Withdrawn from Library."  

When the thieves were discovered, attempts were made to find innocent purchasers to ask if they would  return the stolen pages and books.  The destruction and disappearances were nearly impossible to make right. The value of the lost and destroyed books were estimated to be more than $8 million, but the irreplaceable value was impossible to determine.  Unfortunately, the judge who heard the case did not seem to consider the historic, irreplaceable damage of the thefts, ordering only house arrest and probation as punishment for what the men had done.  Furthermore, the Judge seemed not to take into account the damage to the reputation of the Carnegie Library, including possible reluctance of future donations to the library collection.  Perhaps the laws did not provide the judge the true legal punishment adequate for the crime.  

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A Different case also caught my eye.  Since 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian rare books have been stolen from libraries in Estonia, Latvia, Berlin, Bavaria, Germany, Finland, and France.  The thieves pretend to be researching Russian books, sometimes returning over several days, and then taking the actual books but replacing them with sophisticated reproductions that only experts could distinguish from the originals.  Books by Pushkin are particular favorites.  There is a thriving market in Russia for books by Pushkin, a revered author.  Some suggest that the thefts might be  sanctioned to bring Russian Treasures home.

I find it ironic that new book sales in America are declining, while there is a market for stolen books from the past.

Enjoying Mother Nature

 Those of you who follow my blog may have the assumption that I spend my time indoors, reading, researching, and drawing.  While those pastimes are accurate, I also extend my curiosity to nature.  Even while typing this blog, I am regularly looking out the window, catching sight of birds and squirls and broken tree limbs from the strong winds this spring.  However, I do not spend all of my nature- watching through the windows.  This week's blog will share some of my recent nature experiences.

Snake skin from eyes & nose to tip of tail

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, Bull Snakes are welcome in our yard.  My husband had alerted me to the possibility of a bull snake around our volunteer onion patch, but I wasn't really paying much attention as I pulled weeds around the patch...until a snake glided out of the patch about 6 inches from my hand and gracefully slipped into the hole I had not noticed.  Despite my friendly feelings for bull snakes, my heart was pounding as I quickly pulled my hand away from his hole, watching him gracefully slip inside.  A day or two later, my husband called to me to see what he had discovered.  Mr. Snake had left a beautiful snakeskin for us, intact from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail, about 6 feet in length.  I had found snake skins before, but none so long and perfectly intact.  Notice especially the eye shields in the nose of the skin.

What is this plant?

Earlier in the spring, when I was cleaning out the iris bed, I found a weed that I did not recognize, waving high about the iris.  I estimated it to be about 4 feet tall or slightly more, and the seed pod at the top resembled a dandelion on super steroids.  I decided to wait for it to open before pulling it up, curious to see what it would look like, but hoping to catch it before unwanted seeds scattered.  I was lucky, and not a single seed escaped, and I carefully cut off the stim and carried it to the house before returning to pull up the plant's roots.  I have enjoyed the display of delicate seeds for several weeks, but I have not been able to identify what it is.  Do you know?

My husband tolerates my protective sharing of the farm with a variety of creatures, but he isn't pleased when birds choose porches for their nests instead of trees.  However, since the upstairs porch off my office is rarely seen by anyone but me, he ignores the seasonal mess of mud nests on the light fixture.  It isn't easy to build a mud nest on a smooth brass fixture, but once again a determined couple returned to accept the challenge.  The eggs hatched, the parents kept busy feeding the greedy babies, and now they have departed.  I took this picture of a food delivery, just the parent's tail visible. For me, watching that annual family cycle is worth the mess I will need to clean up later, when the babies "fly the nest"!

  

After years of city life -- which I also loved, --  I am happy to be back on the farm, where Mother Nature provides the constant entertainment!

What is Propaganda?

There are all kinds of Posters, and a poster inspired this blog.  No, not the Women's Suffrage Meeting poster from 1894, nor Movie posters or Art Reproduction posters that may have come to mind, nor the W.W. I posters many collectors seek.  The poster that inspired this blog came from worldpress.com/' titled The Nine Fundamental Principles of Propaganda, warning, "Propaganda is the backdoor hack into your mind."  

We are living in a time when we are bombarded by misleading information.  I have blogged before about using fact checking sources to attempt to avoid being misled.  I have blogged about the change in news casters, no longer adhering to the standards of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, by 'reporting' more like commentators rather than following a strict adherence to news. I posted a blog about the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the failed attempt in 2007 to reinstate it.     In fact, if you scroll through my blogs you may find other examples of ways we are misled.

 Obviously, I find it very important that we have access to information that is the truth, whether it is truthfulness about medicine, news events, health supplements, politics, or many other things.  I have also blogged about the tendency to stretch the truth, whether just to make a better story, to avoid embarrassment, or to intentionally mislead.  The sad fact is that doing business on a handshake or believing everything you hear or read is no longer wise.  That is why I thought it was worth it to share the Principles of Propaganda posted by Word Press.  What follows are the Propaganda Techniques to guard against.  These are the 9 tricks to watch out for!

1.  BIG LIE - Always choose the big lie over the small; the masses will believe it more readily.

2.  FOCUS - Use only one or at most two selling points.

3.  REPEAT - Use them over and over until even your enemies know them by heart.

4.  BLAME - Never waver, acknowledge no doubt; always blame, never credit the other side.  Debase, defame, dehumanize.

5.  PROVOKE - First attract attention, then appeal to emotions.  

6.  CRISIS - Shades of gray don't work:  Issues must be life/death, good/evil, freedom/slavery, love/hate.

7.  EMOTHINAL SYMBOLS - Good slogans have no literal meaning, only a strong emotional appeal.

8.  PANDER - Ignore intellectuals and reasonable arguments; target the unthinking masses with powerful emotional pitches.

9.  NO LIMITS - Ignore all moral limits whenever you deem it useful.

Now that you have this list of propaganda techniques, it might be fun to pick a program and see how many of these techniques you can identify.  If your family is watching television together, perhaps you can turn it into a game, to see who can be the first one to identify a propaganda technique, and which technique was used.  

 With this explanation of the techniques used to mislead us, we are better prepared to avoid falling for those tricks!

    

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Memories of Growing up

 On May 22, 2024, I posted a blog titled Making Childhood Memories.  In that blog I wrote about the fun I had, admitting that some of my adventures may have been a little dangerous.  My brother was older than I was, and the year I entered 1st grade, he entered High School.  Growing up on the farm, we did not rely on finding entertainment by going somewhere.  We played games as a family--pitching horseshoes, playing croquet, setting up a volleyball net, and in the winter playing cards and board games, and clamping a home-made ping-pong table onto our dinner table in the dining room for serious matches.  The ping-pong table took up most of the room, but we squeezed our way around it much of the winter.  We almost always won when we played guests, because my father had made the ping-pong table out of a single sheet of plywood, and it was just a little short of regulation length.  Visitors accustomed to playing on a regulation table would often over- shoot the length of the homemade table.  When we retired to the farm decades later, the old horseshoes pictured above were still at the base of a tree, waiting for us to pitch a game of horseshoes!   

Despite our age differences, my brother and I found ways to play games together.  One of those games involved my going up on the roof of our 2-story house while my brother would see if he could kick a football over the house.  My challenge was to knock it down, if I could.  I believe my parents decided that game was a little too dangerous and put a stop to it.

In the "Making Childhood Memories" blog, I described our fun on a sack swing, but at the time I posted the blog, I could not find a photograph.  Recently, I found one, so now I can better explain that sack swing.  This is what I wrote in the earlier blog:  "I grabbed an old rope thrown up to me by my older brother and leaped out into space to wrap my legs around an old gunny sack with a little straw inside to soar through the air, never worrying about whether the strength of an old cottonwood tree limb could hold me."  Here is a better description of what our sack swing was really like.  There I am, bare foot, of course.  You can see the sagging gunny sack with a little straw inside, and the knotted rope to which I held onto for the ride.  However, what I need to describe is in the upper left corner of the picture.  Look closely, and you can see the wheels and the corner of the bed of the truck.  On the truck bed was the wooden picnic table, and on the table was an empty barrel of some kind.  Farms always had barrels around.  On top of that barrel was a smaller barrel, which I climbed upon.  Then my brother had to throw the sack swing up to me.  That was the hardest part--reaching out to catch the rope without tipping over the barrel.  Then, I got a good grip on the knot of the rope, launched myself out in space while trying to get my legs around the straw-filled gunny sack, and enjoying the thrill of the ride.  The second hardest thing I remember about the game was how difficult it was for me to throw the sack all the way up to my brother, waiting on top of the truck bead, picnic table, and barrels, so far above me, when it was his turn to ride. 

My childhood was a time to learn--what I could do and what I could not.  It was a time to develop imagination balanced with common sense.  It was a time when the family came together, to do chores and to play.  It was a time when reading fueled my imagination and my knowledge.  It was a time when I could see how hard my parents worked, helping me to accept my own responsibilities--to make my bed, to set the table and wash dishes and learn how to cook, to accept responsibilities, to share, and to learn that the world did not revolve around me.  I understand that our world has changed since then, but perhaps we need to find ways to give kids more of the learning opportunities I once had...even without a sack swing!  

Remembering Summer Holidays

Remembering the reasons for Memorial Day & the 4th of July

Many of my childhood memories relate to Memorial Day and the 4th of July, but as a child I thought more about family dinners at the farm after we decorated family graves at the cemetery, and fireworks with my parents' friends, the Curtis family on the 4th of July, alternating which family hosted the celebration each year.  I am sure that my husband's time in the Air Force made me more aware of the reasons for those two holidays, but Law School certainly gave me a deeper respect for those that we honor and celebrate on those two summer holidays.  Our Constitution gradually became more and more important to me, motivating the books I have published and deepening my respect for those who wrote the Constitution and those who have preserved it.

I confess, I am one of those nerdy people that watches televised hearings and trials, and I may pay more attention to what is going on in Washington and state houses across the nation than most people do.  Currently, more seems to be happening than usual.  However, I am not only interested in current events, but also in history, from which we can learn a lot.  

Having just researched our revered Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, the 4th Chief Justice on the Supreme Court, I recalled one of his statements:  "What are the maxima of Democracy?  A strict observance of justice and public faith, and a steady adherence to virtue."  One of the things Marshall found so important in deciding cases, especially cases of great importance, was to arrive at a decision with a strong majority of the court in agreement.    A split of the justices' decisions leaves people less likely to accept the court's decision.  

When the American Constitution was drafted, it required the acceptance by the states.  A series of 85 essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were published, initially printed on broadsheets to be distributed to help citizens better understand the constitution the Founding Fathers had written.  Today it can be found in book form, and many historians consider the essays as the third most important political document of our history, just behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

These documents have guided us for generations and have made us admired by other nations.  That is what I celebrate on the 4th of July.  The parades and fireworks are great, but if you happen to have a copy of the Constitution, you might consider reading it.  It really is what makes America remarkable, and perhaps right now all of us need to be reminded of how that old Constitution has protected and how it has kept us strong for so many years, not by changing it so much as by respecting those who protected and defended it.