Stamp of a Writer: Louisa May Alcott

Most of the quotes below have been compiled from Louisa May Alcott's books including Little Women, Jo's Boys, Work: A Story of Experience, Moods, and Behind A Mask (or A Woman's Power) which was originally published in 1866 under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard.

"Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable." 

"I am she; come in, friend; I am glad to see thee," said the old lady, smiling placidly, as she led the way into a room whose principal furniture seemed to be books, flowers, and sunshine."

"A pleasant little scene. Bella working busily, and near her in a low chair, with the light falling on her fair hair and delicate profile, sat Miss Muir, reading aloud. "Novels!" thought Sir John, and smiled at them for a pair of romantic girls. But pausing to listen a moment before he spoke, he found it was no novel, but history, read with a fluency which made every fact interesting, every sketch of character memorable, by the dramatic effect given to it. Sir John was fond of history, and failing eyesight often curtailed his favorite amusement. He had tried readers, but none suited him, and he had given up the plan. Now as he listened, he thought how pleasantly the smoothly flowing voice would wile away his evenings, and he envied Bella her new acquisition."

"I like good strong words that mean something."

"I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous, that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream."

"That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit." 

"If all literary women had such thoughtful angels for husbands, they would live longer and write more. Perhaps that wouldn't be such a blessing to the world though, as most of us write too much now."

"I strolled about, enjoying myself, till I got into the library, and there I rummaged, for it was a charming place, and I was happy as only those are who love books, and feel their influence in the silence of a room whose finest ornaments they are."

"Christie loved books; and the attic next her own was full of them. To this store she found her way by a sort of instinct as sure as that which leads a fly to a honey-pot, and, finding many novels, she read her fill. This amusement lightened many heavy hours, peopled the silent house with troops of friends, and, for a time, was the joy of her life."

"Some stories are so familiar its like going home." 

Note: For 22 previous Celebrity Stamps, look under Labels.

BOOK REVIEW

The Penguin Book of Comics (1967)
by George Perry and Alan Aldrige

For the new year’s first Forgotten Books at Todd Mason's blog Sweet Freedom and Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase, a glimpse into the magic world of comic books.

“We think in pictures; we dream in pictures.” 

I can recollect every single comic book I have purchased over more than three decades. Some more than others because those are the ones I am especially fond of. I had to wait a long time before acquiring them. Collecting comics is like collecting stamps: you have to be patient. You don’t have to find them, they will find you.

For a long time, I wanted to own The Penguin Book of Comics that I had heard so much about. If I wanted to, I could have arranged for the purchase of the volume. I didn't because I knew it was waiting for me, somewhere, not very far from home. And it was, one day, under a dusty and used pile of books and magazines on a footpath in downtown Mumbai, once famous for secondhand books. I bent down and picked up one of the finest specimens of used comic books I had ever come across. It cost me only Rs.100 ($2). A good number of years had passed between my desire to own the book and the time I actually owned it, but it was worth the long wait.

Published in 1967 by Penguin Books, the 272-page soft volume was the most creative, imaginative, and authoritative chronicle of British and American comic books of its time. Forty-five years and countless number of comics and compendiums later, this Penguin continues to hold its head high. The “slight history” of comic books has been devised by two Englishmen: writer and editor George Perry who wrote the text and artist and graphic designer Alan Aldrige who did the amazing cover art and illustrations.

The Penguin Book of Comics begins with a fine essay on the evolution of comics from the Paleolithic or stone age and what they can give us, looks at the tradition in Britain and the revolution in America, analyses the rise and fall of comics in the mid-20th century in context of Dr. Frederic Wertham’s damning thesis and the comics code, and the influence of comic strips and comic books on other popular culture and entertainment like art, films, and television.

The essays are interspersed with hundreds of images and illustrations starting with the first known pictures by man some 30,000 years ago to all the comic-strips, illustrated newspapers and magazines, and comic-books known to you and me, right up to 1967. I don’t think the authors left out even a single picture or comic-strip between the two extremities of time. Immense study and research has gone into the making of this book.

If I were to mention some of the comic strips and comic books, I wouldn't know where to begin or when to stop. Nonetheless, I will refer to some of the rare and forgotten ones, such as, The Yellow Kid, Katzenjammers, Alphonse and Gaston, Happy Hooligan, The Two Pickles, Chuckles, The Funny Wonder, The Firefly, Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, Chips, Thunderbirds, Puck, Buster Brown, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Barney Google, Gasoline Alley, Tillie the Toiler, Betty Boop, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon, Skippy, Jane’s Journal, Buck Ryan, Flook, Tiffany Jones, and Male Call. Ring bells?

Every one of these comic strips and comic books were created before my time and yet I can identify with many of them, thanks in part to my enthusiasm for this delightful medium and in main to copyright-free content on the internet. The Penguin Book of Comics is an absolute must for any comics buff. You won’t find a better comic book encyclopedia. 

I started this post by recalling how I came to possess a near-mint copy of this book and I will end it by recounting a similar experience with another book—the 256-page hardback DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favourite Comic Book Heroes (Bulfinch, October 1995) by the late Les Daniels, a renowned historian of comic books.

Some years ago, I discovered the DC book in a swanky new bookstore, selling at a discounted price of Rs.450 ($9). I resisted the urge to buy it mainly because I could put the money to better use. Two months later, I bought it from a roadside seller not far from where I had purchased The Penguin Book of Comics, for Rs.125 ($2.5) and in mint condition.

The spooky art of Ronald Clyne 

The first thing that caught my eye about Witch House (1945) was the dust-jacket. I have never read anything by Evangeline Walton (1907-1996), the pen name of Evangeline Wilna Ensley, an American author of fantasy fiction.

The dust-jacket has an illustration by Ronald Clyne (1925-2006), an American freelance designer and graphic artist who earned his reputation by creating more than 500 LP covers for Folkways Records. In fact, Clyne defined the style and look of most of the covers of the music company, which was founded by Moses Asch and which mainly recorded folk, world, and children’s music. In 1987, Folkways Records was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.

Witch House, an occult horror story set in New England, was published by Arkham House, a publishing enterprise founded by American writer and anthologist August Derleth. He popularised several categories of books, especially fantasy and supernatural, horror, and science fiction. He gave good friend H.P. Lovecraft his first big break. 

Evangeline Walton with the first edition of
The Virgin and the Swine, 1936, republished as
The Island of the Mighty by Ballantine's Adult
Fantasy series in 1970. © Wikimedia Commons

Ronald Clyne was a regular at Arkham House and his art is stamped on the covers of a number of books published by the company. Among the many things I learned while compiling this piece is that Witch House was the first full-length novel published by Arkham House and it was one of the earliest books listed in the Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror. 

Evangeline Walton has written many novels and short stories and is best known for her Welsh Mabinogi tales. According to Wikipedia, “The Mabinogion is the title given to a collection of 11 prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts. The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions.” Sounds interesting.

Note: For more book covers, see under Labels.

‘He’ll be back for his daughter’

In the days between Christmas cake and marzipan and New Year's hangover, I saw reruns of two father-daughter films with a common theme: the daughter is kidnapped and her kick-ass father sets out to nail the abductors and rescue his girl.

Commando (1985) and Taken (2008) has two very angry men, John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), beat the crap out of the bad guys who dared to harm their little girls. To “beat the crap” in the cocooned world of the former head of a special forces unit and the retired special intelligence agent is to “seek and kill” the enemy. No questions, no authorisation, just bloodletting. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alyssa Milano
in Commando

The murderous rage that Matrix and Mills experience may be compared to how a doting father might feel when some brainless twit woos his precious daughter, sweeps her off her feet, marries her, and whisks her away to some far-off place. What does the idiot know about taking care of daddy’s girl?

The father of the bride (there’s another one for you) would love to do to the groom what Mills vows to do, and in fact does, to the men who abduct his daughter in Paris.

“I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you,” Mills tells the leader of a gang of Albanian human traffickers in Taken.

Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace in Taken

If fathers are beaming proud and insanely protective of their daughters, their girls are no less so. In Commando, when an out-of-power dictator kidnaps Matrix’s teenage daughter, to force him into helping him regain power, and tells her, “Your father appears to be cooperating. You will be back with him soon. Won’t that be nice?” she gives him an unwavering look and retorts, “Not nearly as nice as watching him smash your face in.”

In many ways Commando and Taken epitomise the father-daughter relationship, in spite of the serious nature of the two movies. Commando is a comedy in action. Taken is a relentless thriller. I guess John Matrix and Bryan Mills would make fathers proud and, I suspect, envious too. A daughter, vulnerable as she comes, will remain daddy’s little girl. A son, well, now he can grow up to be a man.

Happy New Year!

May 2013 bring laughter, fun, peace, joy, bliss, and contentment in your life.

"You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead."

― Stan Laurel ―

“Laughter is the stubborn reward of grim times.” 

― Buster Keaton ―

In the end, everything is a gag."

― Charlie Chaplin ―

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, 

I go into the other room and read a book."

― Groucho Marx ―

"Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk!" "Nyaaaaaahhhhhhh!" "La-la-la, la-la-la..." 

"HRRRRRRMPH!""Rrrowf! Rrrowf!"

― Curly Howard ―

Books I read in 2012

I read fewer than 50 books in 2012. Slow reading, personal and professional preoccupations, lack of discipline, and too much non-fiction, including current affairs and political commentary, both print and online, is no excuse for not reading more novels this year.

The 50 books include physical books and ebooks but not the many short stories, comic-books, poetry, anthologies, and journals and magazines I read.

Again, of the 50 books I reviewed less than 20, most of them for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog, Pattinase, in what was an informative and fun-filled challenge. It is with renewed enthusiasm that I look forward to participating in FFB and Tuesday’s Overlooked Films at Todd Mason’s blog, Sweet Freedom, in 2013.

Looking back, there were quite a few books I enjoyed reading, though I didn't review all of them. I have put together a list of 20 books that I liked for various reasons including cover and originality.

Western
01. Saddle on a Cloud, 1952, by Frank C. Robertson
02. The Lone Deputy, 1960, by Wayne D. Overholser
03. Gun Man, 1985, by Loren D. Estleman

Mystery
04. The Doctor, His Wife, and the Clock, 1895, by Anna Katharine Green
05. The Secret Adversary, 1922, by Agatha Christie
06. The Murder on the Links, 1923, by Agatha Christie
07. The Case of the Gilded Lily, 1959, Erle Stanley Gardner

Thriller
08. Cape Fear (The Executioners), 1957, by John D. MacDonald
09. Run, Mann, Run!, 1975, by James Keenan
10. The Ninth Configuration, 1978, by William Peter Blatty

Espionage 
11. A Fine Night for Dying, 1969, by Jack Higgins
12. A Prayer for the Dying, 1973, by Jack Higgins
13. The Payoff, 1973, by Don Smith
14. Atlantic Scramble, 1982, by Don Pendleton and Gar Wilson
15. Journey Toward Death, 1983, by Amos Aricha
16. Black Dice: Mack Bolan, The Executioner, 1987, by Don Pendleton

Drama
17. A Prairie Infanta, 1904, by Eva Wilder Brodhead
18. Beyond the Black Stump, 1956, by Nevil Shute
19. The Summer Man, 1967, by Jory Sherman

SF & Fantasy
20. Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, 1929, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My reading of western, mystery, and sf/fantasy is badly in need of overhaul. I simply need to read more books in these spellbinding genres. Apart from this I have only one other challenge, one other resolution, for 2013: to read a hundred books which, hopefully, will include fiction by non-Western authors. About this time, next year, I’ll do a similar post and let you know whether I breasted the finish line and set a new record. Fingers crossed. 

Atlantic Scramble by Don Pendleton and Gar Wilson, 1982

For the last Friday’s Forgotten Books of 2012 at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase, a look at an action-packed novel about a small band of combatants fighting America’s dirty war.  
“The US Navy is carrying contraband for Jeddah.” 

In Atlantic Scramble, the third Phoenix Force novel and a spin-off of the Executioner series, a five-man anti-terrorist squad takes on Libyan terrorist Khader Ghazawi and his mercenaries who steal America’s super-weapon, the Dessler Laser Submachine Gun, and make off with it in a recommissioned subchaser, the U.S.S. Beaumont.

The terrorists, who belong to an outfit called Red Anvil, incapacitate the Pentagon’s Red Bluff Arsenal (a secret installation at Odessa, Texas), drug its personnel into zombies, kill dozens of soldiers, and escape with the deadly weapon with inside help.

The Phoenix Force led by Yakov Katzenelenbogen, a French-Israeli commando, lose no time in zeroing in on the US vessel cruising at high speeds through the Atlantic in the dead of night and later taking a fight to an old Russian diesel U-boat.

Yakov and his four men—Gary Manning, the Canadian explosives engineer; Keio Ohara, the unusually tall Japanese martial arts expert; David McCarter, a former SAS operator and pilot; and Rafael Encizo, a survivor of Castro's regime and an expert in underwater warfare—make short shrift of the mission.

The Phoenix Force, first introduced in Argentine Deadline, work for Stony Man, a secret anti-terrorist organisation formed by Mack Bolan and run by Hal Brognola, its project director, with the occasional involvement of ace pilot Jack Grimaldi. Phoenix Force and Able Team are spin-offs of The Executioner series created by American writer Don Pendleton. These books have been published by Gold Eagle since 1982.

The Phoenix Force and Able Team novels have been written by various authors under the collective pseudonym of Gar Wilson.

Author Thomas P. Ramirez © Allied Authors

The initial Phoenix Force novels, including Atlantic Scramble, were written by Thomas P. Ramirez who authored over 100 erotic novels and contributed stories for several magazines such as Boy’s Life, American Mercury and American Heritage. Ramirez, a master storyteller of the Executioner series, had a distinct and engaging style of his own.

I will be going back for more.