Turtle Men on the Moon!

So, one of the things that particularly struck me when looking through Major Warnie Lewis's diary for his fifty-day voyage home from Shanghia via America in 1930 was the reading he did over those fifty days. A detailed overview of this wd take another visit to the Wade to pull off, so for now I'll just note that he read an impressive mix of French drama (Moliere), English poetry (Thomson's The Seasons), Victorian novels (re-reading all six books in Trollope's 'Barsetshire' Chronicles), dipped into a borrowed* copy of Wells' Outline of History,** and made his way through a book on English lit. by Drinkwater (which Warnie faulted for overpraising Wordsworth, whom WHL disparages on account of the French daughter). And also, among the rest, what he described as a "Wellsian" romance about turtle-men on the moon, which he thought an inferior production.

Now this interested me, because while we know several of the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, and Warnie) were fond of science fiction, there's v. little record of specific titles and works they read beyond, say, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. So I did a little digging and think I've now identified both work and author: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON by Edmond Hamilton. I'd initially been thrown off by the assumption that, since all the other things the Major mentions reading were books, this 'turtle-men' story must have been published in book form. Instead, it now seems that he was reading an issue of the new Scientifiction magazine AMAZING STORIES,*** founded just four years before (1926) by Hugo Gernsback. I don't know if this is the first direct proof that the Inklings (or at least one among them, and a core member at that****) read AMAZING STORIES, but it's certainly the first such evidence I've come across. And, as such, I thought worth sharing.

As for the story itself, I've located a good synopsis of it available online, thanks to GoogleBooks, which quotes it from Bleiler & Bleiler's SCIENCE FICTION: THE GERNSBACK YEARS: A COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE GENRE [1998]; see the entry for book #549 on pages 161-162. Here's the link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=PbMdeizaCNcC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=turtle-men+of+the+moon&source=bl&ots=ODucnfGMPI&sig=YtNuFkNbWojl2h5bTrwizSBOflg&hl=en&ei=2dWnTY_bH4T0swOJ3OD5DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=turtle-men%20of%20the%20moon&f=false

I don't think I've ever read a book by Hamilton (who nowadays is better know as Leigh Brackett's husband than in his own right), though I'm sure I must have read some of his comic book work in reprint digests back in the day. I hope to soon remedy that lack, however, as a copy of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON shd now be on its way to me. We'll soon see how it holds up compared with, say, Gernsback's own RALPH 124C1+.

--JDR

current (re)reading: THE LAST HERO [2001] by Terry Pratchett

current audiobook: THE MOONSTONE (still)

*one question I'm still working on is whether most of the books he read during this trip were his own, as seems to be the case, or were borrowed from a ship's library (unlikely, but I'm not well enough informed about whether a passenger ship of the time wd have a misc. assortment of books for passengers to read or not). None of the books he mentions reading seem to be in the CSL Library Collection of books once belonging to CSL, WHL, their parents, & JDL now at the Wade, at least on a cursory check, but many of them are just the sort of books I wd have expected not to have survived in that collection. He does mention visiting the Shanghai Club just before his departure and returning the books he'd borrowed from its library, and shortly afterwards visits the library of the American Club, but apparently not to borrow any books from for the trip.

**v. sensibly reading the sections devoted to topics he knew a lot about, like the War, the era of Louis XIV, and the British colonial far east, and finding him wanting.

***specifically, AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, Fall 1929 issue

****technically, of course, Warnie was a pre-Inkling at this time, since the group hadn't started meeting yet.

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P.S.: And just this evening (Sunday Apr. 17th), Janice and I saw not one but two turtles in the lake while out for a walk this afternoon. Haven't seen any in the ten years we've been living in "the Lakes" development (of which Bayview is one of ten or so parts, almost all w. amusingly inappropriate names, like "Bayview" which is not on a bay, or "Cypress Cove" which is not on a cove). Hadn't been going that way on walks for quite a while, not since they cut the mimosa down (that having been my favorite tree in the neighborhood); now I've got a good reason to stretch my legs in that direction again.

Note to self: turtles don't like peanuts, even shelled ones. Good to know.

--JDR

Collectable Dinosaur Minis Game

So, one thing I did not include in my write-up of our visit to the Burpee involved their museum store, since it's a side-note.

As I said, the gift shop turned out not to have more than a few general books, to my disappointment (if anybody does come across a good book on the discoveries in Niger, let me know). But I did pick up something called DINOMANIA, which is basically a little pack which you buy that has a random little dinosaur figure in it. Although, as is traditionally the case, they define 'dinosaur' rather loosely (this set even includes a brightly colored trilobite, wh. was actually the one I wanted).

This all took me back to the latter days at WotC/Hasbro. At one point when WotC announced a call for New Ideas for Games I tried in vain to convince somebody, anybody, that a collectable dinosaur minis game wd be a good idea. We were already doing gangbusters with the D&D minis line (wh. was actually doing far better than the rpg itself), which actually included dinosaurs among the monsters (for the Eberron setting). I argued that such a game would have an instant built-in market and the potential to reach new outlets, such as museum stores. And I completely failed to get anybody to express even the mildest interest.

Glad to see somebody else has succeeded, at least in the collectable dinosaur minis part (the person at the counter said they were v. popular with herself and her fellow employees at the museum store); suspect they'd have done even better w. a simple dino-to-dino combat game attached. Ah well; the good thing about missed opportunities is that sometimes someone else down the line takes advantage of them.

--JDR

--home again from the Midwest

I'm Not on Facebook . . .

. . . but I have a Facebook page, it turns out. Who knew?

My sister-in-law, in fact, who happened to mention it in passing this evening. Janice checked tonight and it's perfectly true: looks like someone created it using my Wikipedia entry as its basis.

How weird is that?

--JDR

A Day at Marquette

So, today we got out and about (relatively)* early and drove up to Milwaukee, where Janice went off to meet up with some friends for brunch and I headed into the Marquette Archives for a day's research in my old familiar stomping grounds. In addition to an enjoyable visit with Matt Blessing, the Archivist, I also got to see Susan the Secretary and later ran into Mark Thiel, whose specialty is their Indian Missions collection. After looking over their new books shelf, and jotting down the authors and titles on the ones I hadn't known about before (e.g., Ted Rogers', Lee Oser's, and F. MacDonald Kells' works), I set to work: first the relatively quick job of hunting down a piece in a fanzine for a friend. Success!

Then came the main task I'd set myself for this research trip: going through the notebooks of my friend the late Taum Santoski. Taum kept a series of notebooks from the years 1978 to his death in 1991, in which he made transcriptions from the LotR manuscripts, jotted down notes about his discoveries in the Marquette collection, drafted letters, and made elaborate transcriptions in tengwar which he had then phonetically translated into English characters. There's also a lot of material on Tolkien's invented languages, this being Taum's greatest interest as a Tolkien scholar, and notes for pieces he intended to write. He'd wanted these notebooks to go to Marquette, so as Taum's literary executor I'd deposited them there. But I'd never gone through them other than a brief skim just after he died -- after the traumatic year and a half of his terminal illness, during which time I saw him almost every day, I wasn't ready to face going through them at the time.

Now, almost twenty years later, it seemed high time to look in more detail at Taum's legacy. In addition to his early fanzines and his work helping Christopher Tolkien work out the manuscript sequence for the LotR holdings at Marquette for the HME volumes dealing w. LotR (VI, VII, VIII, & IXa), in which I helped to a lesser extent, I wanted to see if there was any unpublished material that might still hold up all these years later and not have been superseded by subsequent events -- as, for example, his work on Tolkien's artwork has been by Wayne & Christina's book and most, perhaps all, of his linguistic work by the multi-volume PARMA ELDALAMERON publications by the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship team. I know of one essay and one talk (which he delivered from notes rather than a draft, unfortunately) I'm going to be taking a good hard look at. But for now, on this first foray, what I saw in the early notebooks, written while Taum was still a student in Pennsylvania, were the classic first steps of a Tolkien scholar: bibliographies of articles on Tolkien in magazines and journals that he tracked down, correspondence with others involved in the world of Tolkien fanzines (of which Taum created several, most notably CHRONICLES OF THE KING and LENDARIN & DANIAN), notes sorting out various elements of Tolkien's mythology (e.g., the sequence of events for a "Chronology of the War of Wrath"). So far, on this trip at least, I didn't get into the main sequence; that'll have to wait till next year's visit. But it's a start.

Also, while in town, I got to get together with my friends Jim Pietrusz (Arthurian collector extraordinaire) and Jim Lowder (freelance book editor extraordinaire and a fellow ex-TSR) for an enjoyable two hours over at Miss Katie's Diner (formerly a favorite haunt of Chuck Elston, who was the longtime Archivist at Marquette and one of the dedicate-es of MR. BAGGINS) for an extended lunch. Then, after the afternoon session at the Archives, it was rendezvous with Janice and drive back down to Harvard for more family visiting with inlaws.

So, now that it's winding down, I can say that it was a highly successful and most enjoyable trip. I had a great time at the Wade and Marquette and we got to see almost all of Janice's family.*** Plus, I got to see Indian Mounds, African dinosaurs, and walk around parts of the Lake Geneva shoreline (in Fontana & Wms Bay) that were new to me, while Janice got to see Mummies of the World and we both got to enjoy some time with old friends.

And now, for the journey home.

--JDR

current e-book: GKC's WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

current book: DLS's LETTERS TO A DIMINISHED CHURCH

currently thinking about: Distributism -- and not in a good way.

................................

(*)for me**

(**)when on vacation

***aside from her youngest brother's side of the family and one great-neice

-------------------

P.S.: I forgot to add that I figure in, fleetingly, in Taum's papers -- e.g. in a December 1981 letter to a fellow Tolkien fanzine editor, three month after I'd met Taum, in which he refers to me as "a fellow-Tolkien scholar here . . . I know his first name is John but can't remember his last name".

Ha!

Carcharodontosaurus

So, on Monday we did something different: picked up my father-in-law and drove over to Rockford to the Burpee Museum (just on the far side of the Rock River), where we spent the afternoon wandering around looking at their Dinosaurs of Africa exhibit. These were all creatures I'd never heard of before, excavated either in Morocco or Niger. I didn't write down the various names, because I thought I'd buy the book that inevitably accompanies such a visit in the museum bookstore afterwards. Turns out there is no such book, or if there is the museum store didn't have it. Alas.

But that doesn't distract from the exhibit itself , wh. was v. well done. The dinosaurs weren't too crowded, and most of the displays were real skeletons, rather than "casts" (fakes) -- they were even careful to note on the accompanying signs which bones were original and which were replicas to fill the missing whole. The strangest looking creature was a hippo-faced fern-eater w. v. unusual teeth; this moderate-sized brontosaurus-style dinosaur had hollow bones -- which make sense in a pteradon (the display also having a partial fossil of an African pteradon as well) but is rather odd in a large plant-eater. And the only one whose name I can remember (partly because I liked the sound of it, partly because it's on the little flyer I picked up at the hotel through which I learned about the exhibit) is Carcharodontosaurus -- wh. had apparently been discovered circa early in the 1900s but all existing fossils lost in the bombing of Berlin, only to be re-discovered through new fossils quite recently. It's basically an African T-Rex.

The gem of their display, however, was not part of the travelling African Dinosaurs exhibit but one of their permanent displays: Jane, the most complete T-Rex skeleton in the world. Only about eleven when she died (and hence a juvenile, Tyranosauruses living to about thirty), "Jane" is still pretty fearsome looking. And in the basement, in addition to the big plate windows where you cd see workers separating fossils from the matrix, was "Homer", one of a pair of Triceratops fossils, young adults found jumbled together and still in the process of being separated and sorted out and mounted. Also in this room, I think, was a little cayman-like dinosaur said to have survived the Great Extinction by a few million years; I'll have to try to find out what this one is called and find out more about it.

Once we'd seen enough of the dinosaurs (for one visit), we went up to the top floor to look at the Native American exhibit, and then the stuffed birds (esp. owls) &c. next to this. I was amused to see that the explanatory posters talked about the notorious "Ice-Free Corridor" as the "old theory", setting it alongside the "new theory" of coastal migration into the New World. Amused to watch a spider busy w. its web on the outside of a fourth-floor window, going about its business quite unconcerned by the vast drop for a creature its size dangling beneath it.

Finally, once we reached the parking lot I begged Janice's and Mr. Coulter's patience while I walked a few blocks south to see something I'd just learned about in the museum: the existence of Beattie Park, in which were preserved several Indian Mounds. Most of the original Mound Builders complex had been destroyed over the years, but there was a distinct barrow (the classic "Indian Mound" of the sort found all over Arkansas), a long ridge of a linear mound, and the remnants of an effigy mound that they claimed was shaped like a turtle. I cdn't see the turtle-shape, just a somewhat worn-down linear mound with some outliers. Still, glad to see it and walk around what's now simply a pleasant little city park w. a lot of history around it. Here's a link to a brief description of the place ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beattie_Park_Mound_Group ): if you click on the link near the bottom of that entry about the Rohrbough report ( http://gis.hpa.state.il.us/hargis/PDFs/200833.pdf ) and page down a bit you can see some drawings of the various mounds as they appeared in better days.

All in all, a most enjoyable and interesting outing!

--John R.

Wheaton -- Aftermath

So, one unfinished bit of business from my week at the Wade that I thought was interesting was finding out more about their College Archives & Special Collections.

As I noted in one of my posts this week (http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2011/04/wheaton-day-two.html),

"In the old college library, before the Wade got its own building, the two used to be housed in the same wing of the same floor, so that a door opened into a shared anteroom/ display area with the Wade Collection on the left and the Special Collections on the right (which led to A. N. Wilson's accidentally conflating the two side-by-side collections into one in a passing referenced in his CSL biography, which got him a lot of grief)."

To this, David Bratman -- who at one point had an extended research trip to the Wade (in which among other things he made good use of the Charles Wms holdings, esp. the extensive unpublished correspondence) -- commented

"As I remember it, it wasn't a shared display area. Both Special Collections and the Wade were accessed by a back staircase in the library. You went up to the top landing, and there were two identical (and unmarked, I believe) doors. The one on the left was the Wade. The one on the right was Special Collections.

On my first visit to the Wade, I was also taken across the hall to the Special Collections display room too, and there in a case was Muggeridge's typewriter, the one mentioned by Wilson which his critics have so heatedly declared does not exist. Obviously he was taken there too, and was merely not clear that the room across the hall didn't belong to the Wade too.

Wilson has plenty of problems, but some of this critics owe him a retraction."

Seeing the divergence between out recollections, I bethought myself of an easy way to resolve the discrepancy: I asked Marj Mead, who was at the Wade before, during, and after both mine and David's visits in the old library. Turns out we're both right: I'm remembering the collection as it was when I first visited it, and his is from a little later. Later yet the Wade apparently took over both areas. Now that the Wade has its own building, the area is given over to Technical Services and library administrative offices, while the Special Collections have moved over to the Billy Graham Center on the south-east side of campus.

So, hope that clears things up; sorry for the confusion.

In any case, one good effect of it was that it led me to make a side-trip on my way to the dining hall that last lunchtime, during which when leaving I spotted a display of several rows of little tri-folded flyers or leaflets, each describing one of the college's Special Collections. I started picking out a few of the more interesting looking ones, then decided instead to try to get one of each, the better to be able to take away a good idea of their range.

Of the leaflets, the one that immediately caught my eye was CLYDE S. KILBY PAPERS -- oddly enough, while the collection he established based on his own correspondence with C. S. Lewis formed the original core of what is now the Wade collection, Kilby's own papers aren't in the Wade itself, it turns out, but the Graham Center: the final paragraph of his informational leaflet reads

"Material related to the seven British authors is located at the Wade Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. However, Clyde Kilby's papers, published and unpublished, are housed separately in the college's Special Collections in the Billy Graham Center. All material is available to researchers."

In addition to Kilby, which came as something of a surprise, the other authors I'd seen on the Wheaton College Bookstore's "Special Collections" shelves alongside the Wade Center authors -- Muggeridge* and L'Engle and Buechner -- were all represented, along with a wide array of authors and personalities: Calvin Miller (author of THE SINGER trilogy**) I can see, but Red Grange? Oswald Chambers fits in pretty well w. Wheaton's ministry, from what v. little I know about him, but I was surprised to find Margaret Landon here, author of ANNA & THE KING OF SIAM (better known by its musical adaptation, THE KING & I). Her book I've read, albeit years and years ago, but I've never even heard of others: Jacques Ellul, Ken Taylor (creator, it turns out, of THE LIVING BIBLE), Jim Wallis, Coleman Luck, Leanne Payne, and Luci Shaw. Unfortunately it looks like Dennis Hastert's papers are here too -- but then consulting the "Holdings Information" leaflet, I see that C. Everett Koop's are as well, so perhaps that balances that out a bit. Joe McClathey, who taught Tolkien and fantasy at Wheaton for years after Kilby retired, is also represented. The remaining handful ranged from JONATHAN BLANCHARD PAPERS (it's only right that Wheaton shd have a holding dedicated to the college's founder), papers and records relating to the NAE (Nat'l Assoc. of Evangelicals) and the Sojourners, one on their Fourth Folio copy of Shakespeare's HENRY IV (both parts), and finally one describing not a Special Collection but the College Archive -- old college catalogues, a century's worth of yearbooks, thousands of photos, correspondence (official & otherwise), scrapbooks, &c.

So, all in all an interesting sideline, which I thought I'd share.

--JDR

current reading: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD by GKC (on Kindle); LETTERS TO A DIMINISHED CHURCH by DLS (actual book).

*and yes, I shd confirm that like David and Wilson I too was shown Muggeridge's typewriter, which wd have made more of an impression on me if at the time I'd had more than a vague impression of who he was.

**and who, amazingly enough, seems not to have an entry on wikipedia.

WHEATON -- Day Five

DAY FIVE

Friday, April 8th 2011

Today being my last day in the Wade, I first had to get my things together, get breakfast, and get checked out from the hotel in Lisle -- all of which I accomplished in more or less timely fashion (i.e., I wasn't v. late, for me).

Once in the Wade, I did a little more work with Warnie's diaries, going back and looking at his preparations for departure from Hong Kong in 1930. Didn't definitively find the answer I was looking for to the question that'd occurred to me last night, but found that my guess is the more probable of several options. After that, devoted myself to finishing up the Sayers WILKIE COLLINS book -- which was enjoyable enough: if no lost masterpiece, then certainly worth bringing back into print, which I hope some group such as the Sayers society, the Mythopoeic Press, or the Wade itself does at some point.

Also got to see Chris Mitchell briefly, who just swung by to say goodbye, and pay a brief visit to Rachel Mink (co-ordinator for VII) and Marj Mead (assistant director), talking about the piece I did for their forthcoming issue and how it came out and suggesting a follow-up piece; Marj was also able to answer a question about Wade history that confirmed my memory from years ago but added some crucial missing information I'd either forgotten or conflated. So that was both enjoyable and helpful. At lunchtime I took a detour on my way over to the union and took a quick turn through the college Library instead, to take that once-familiar long walk down the length of the building and up the stairs to where the Wade Center was when I first starting coming here, way back in 1983 (if having taken roughly two years after my arrival at Marquette to have been able to afford a trip as far away as Wheaton, what with my not having a car and not being able to afford a hotel room). Saw some flyers about the various Special Collections (not part of the Wade, but a parallel program of the college itself), about which more later.

After that, walked over to the union, where I had soup (two kinds) and tea (two cups) while looking over some of the Special Collections flyers I'd picked up. Then back for one last afternoon's session in the Wade, where after finishing up the Collins I spent the last hour or so of the day looking through some unpublished material, taking notes at a furious rate as the last minutes before closing time ticked by -- as is usual w. my visits to the Wade. All in all, when my research trip ended at four o'clock, I was quite pleased with my progress: one continuing project finished, a new side-project begun and ended, another continuing project progressing nicely, though still w. a long, long way to go, and a serendipitous discovery having led to some interesting if unedifying information I hadn't known before. Plus I'd gotten to see people I like, both in and out of the Wade, met a Tolkien scholar I hadn't known before, & had a pleasant stay in a town I like (always nice, after all the years I spent in college & grad school pursuing those three degrees back-to-back, to be back on a campus for a while).

A nice added bonus at the very end of the week was my getting to attend the organizational meeting of the new Wheaton College Tolkien Society, exactly the sort of group I'd have loved to have joined had such existed at any of the three colleges I attended. I counted fourteen people, which seems a good turn-out, and in Laura the archivist they have someone who shd be a great faculty supervisor. I'll certainly be following their future career w. considerable interest, as Bertie Wooster says, and look forward to joining in if any of their meetings co-incide w. any of my future visits to the Wade.

But all good things come to an end; after a half-hour, I had to leave the meeting to get going on the drive to Rockford so that I cd reach it before dark. To make a story short, the new route I tried worked wonderfully well: less scenic and interesting (and more expensive) than the one I tried the last two times, but much quicker too, so that I got to Rockford in just 1 hr 20 minutes. Nice. Rendez-vous'd with Janice* (YAY) and got to see not just my father-in-law but The Rockford Coulters (the senior generation of which, anyway) and Janice's brother's wife's nephew & his fiance: all people I like and enjoy spending time with.

And so, another research trip to Wheaton comes to a conclusion.

--JDR

*whose own flight had gone smoothly, other than a delay before departure and a hurry-up once in the air because, or so they were told, a human kidney (presumably for transplant) was on board and needed to be rushed to its destination. Haven't heard that reason for a shift in schedule before.