botanizing

New collections

Despite prowling around used and antiquarian bookshops in Chicago this week, I didn’t turn-up anything old and interesting for the library.  I did get a remaindered copy of Tom Chaffin’s Pathfinder:  John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire.  During his expeditions in the American West, Fremont collected many species of plants that were unknown to the botanical community at the time.  While I was in Savvy Traveler on Michigan Avenue, I picked-up paperback copies of Freya Stark’s The Valley of Assassins and Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life—both reflect my urge to travel in central and western Asia.  The Stark--about her travels in what is now southeastern Iraq and southwestern Iran--is often available used, and I’ve pulled it frequently from those shelves and replaced it.  It must be one of those books that is packaged well and gets bought, but then doesn’t get read or remain on shelves.  I read the first chapter on my return flight and was somewhat shocked by narrative of grave-robbing.  The preface—with its thoughts on the lure of travel—was more interesting than the travel narrative.  My final acquisition for the week was Universal Experience:  Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye, the catalog for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  The exhibit was advertised as the first major American contemporary art show about travel and tourism. The catalog looks more interesting than the exhibit.  The first chapter title is “How to use this book,”which beckons thoughts on its implications--a day could be easily lost there.

New collections

Old and new arrived for the library. 

The old came in the mail from London; it’s Marie Stopes’s A Journal from Japan, which was published in 1910.  Although Stopes is best know for her ‘marriage manuals’ and advocacy of birth control, she began as a paleobotanist and published research papers as well as books on fossil plants. A Journal from Japan is her record of fieldwork that she conducted in Japan to search for fossils of flowers, which were largely unknown early in the 20th century. 

The new I picked-up in Grand Junction, Colorado, while on the road earlier this week.  It’s Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet:  Bangalore Stories.  Sankaran is interested in the contrast between traditional and transformed culture in Bangalore, a southern Indian city that has received considerable attention as a locus of high tech industry.  The first story, which I read while camped on Tuesday night, was wonderful, and I’ll pack the stories for the next trip.

New collections

The end of semester work this week has driven me toward escape.  By Thursday I wanted to slip into a novel, and on my way home on Friday I stopped in the campus bookstore to pick-up something.  That something was Lily Tuck’s National Book Award winning The News from Paraguay.  I ended-up reading other things, working on notes, and booking a flight on Friday evening—only after lunch today did I begin to read the novel, and then I quickly fell asleep.

New collections

The new collections for the library this week come from the used shelves:

Roy Chapman Andrews, Heart of Asia (1951).  This is a collection of magazine articles about his travels in Asia.  Andrews is one of the great characters in the history of natural history museums in North America.  Charles Gallenkamp’s 2001 biography of Andrews, published as Dragon Hunter, focuses on not only the paleontological significance but also the organization, funding, and personal dynamics of scientific expeditions, which in the case of Andrews were the Central Asiatic Expeditions “produced” by the American Museum of Natural History.

William Beebe, The Book of Naturalists (1945).  This is a volume of short selections from the writings of travelers, naturalists, and scientists.  I’d like to find some good, hard-backed copies of Beebe’s own personal history and travel books.

William O. Douglas, Of Men and Mountains (1950).  This was the first of these new collections that I noticed on the shelves.  I’ve wanted a copy of Of Men and Mountains for several years.  It’s one of the few books of “personal history on the landscape” devoted to the inland Northwest where I live.  I first read a library copy several years ago when I was beginning to write material that could be used as part of my work to provide educational outreach on the natural history of the Northwest through the Ownbey Herbarium’s website.

A. Starker Leopold, Wildlife of Mexico (1959).  This is primarily about game animals and how they are managed, but it includes good natural history on Mexico and distribution maps for and drawings of the animals.

Haniel Long, Piñon Country (1941).  This is a new title and author for me. It’s the sort of book about place—in this case Arizona and New Mexico—that has a certain popularity in its time, then quietly disappears.  I plan to explore over the next year more intensively than in the past the Four Corners area that includes northern New Mexico and Arizona, and I’ll look forward to reflecting on this earlier personal view of the area as I travel.

Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America (1959).  What a great find!  This appears to be a first edition and has a dust jacket (albeit a worn one).  This early Matthiessen is a classic discussion of the animals of the U.S. written with skill and with sensitivity to science.

David Culross Peattie, The Road of a Naturalist (1941).  This is collection of Peattie’s essays of personal history on the road as a naturalist.  I’ll look forward to reading this as I travel this summer.

David Culross Peattie, Journey into America (1943).  Perhaps this is not the best of Peattie—it is too far removed from natural history; it is a volume written amid World War II to retell of the stories of bravery and heroism, exploration and expansion that lie that the core of what we might now call the American Myth.

New collections

While at the Rocky Mountain Herbarium in Laramie, I purchased two of Robert Dorn’s floras, including the third edition of Vascular Plants of Wyoming and his much earlier Flora of the Black Hills.  Both books are dichotomous keys for the identification of species.  I have the two earlier editions of Vascular Plants of Wyoming and hope that fieldwork this summer will provide the opportunity to use the third edition.

New collections

In Boulder, on the road, I've picked-up a remaindered copy of Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men in Boulder Books.  There is a botanical connection in the book; Erasmus Darwin, one of the Lunar Men, wrote The Botanical Garden, Loves of Plants, Economy of Vegetation, and Phytologia among others.

New collections

Polio was in the news last year when it seemed the virus might finally be completely eradicated.  In the time, it seemed, it would take Dorothy in Oz to click her heels, the news turned from optimism about eradication to new outbreaks in Africa and continuation of the disease in India.  The virus, its control, and the epidemiology of the disease are well understood; it is largely skepticism of mass vaccination and lack knowledge about prevention of the disease—both tied no doubt to economic poverty—that allow polio to persist. 

For several years now I’ve wanted to read about polio, both as a disease and as a social phenomenon during its epidemic phase in North America in the first half of the 20th century.  My new collections, which arrived in the mail this week, are two books on polio:

David M. Oshinsky, 2005.  Polio:  An American Story.

Naomi Rogers, 1992.  Dirt and Disease:  Polio Before FDR. 

New collections

In search at the campus bookstore for a chocolate bar, I came away with both the chocolate and Joseph Amato’s On Foot:  A History of Walking.  It looks more staid than the relatively imaginative Wanderlust:  A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, which I read several years ago.

Patchouli Whodunit

Patchouli is Gondwanan; that is, the mint genus Pogostemon, from which patchouli oil is derived, is native to Africa and Indomalaya, regions massed-together until nearly 130 million years ago as a supercontinent known as Gondwana. I’m surprised Pogostemon includes food plants, but the starchy tubers of P. mutamba are eaten in Africa and P. parviflorus is an important honey plant in Asia.  The patchouli oil that is used in insecticides and leech repellant as well as in fragrances is from P. cablin.  I’m not fond of the fragrance; it strikes my sinuses like a drill bit, and it came in the mail today.

There were three packages in the mail at work.  Two were boxes of herbarium specimens that sat on the counter, and the third, octavo-sized and brown paper-wrapped, was in my mailbox.  The small package was a book I had ordered from New Zealand.  I began to smell something odd as I walked back to the herbarium, where I dropped-off the boxes of specimens.  In my office, I held the book package on end to slit an opening with my pocketknife—the smell, distinctly of patchouli, was intense.  I began to hope that an employee of the bookseller had worn patchouli while she packaged my book for the mail.  The smell intensified as I opened the package—I pulled-out the book, threw the paper in the trash, and flipped the pages of the book before my nose; they stank of mustiness.  The patchouli remained in my office so I emptied the trash and thoroughly washed my hands.  I again picked-up the book and could smell then the patchouli saturated cover.

The book—E. J. H. Cox’s Plant Hunting in China—is in poor shape.  It’s a paperback edition, thoroughly worn, with a slanted, much-cracked spine.  I imagine a young woman purchasing the book to read while traveling, and, jammed in a backpack, the spine gets twisted and the cover and page margins are banged and blunted.  She has long, thick brown hair, pulled loosely back, and wears long, flowing brown skirts, big hoop earrings, many delightful bangles, and patchouli.  As she reads, patchouli oil rubs from her hands and wrists onto the book, impregnating the cover.  After her travels, she drops the book in a box, piled on other volumes that she didn’t really like and puts the box in her moist basement.  A few months ago, many years after those travels, many years after the box went into the basement, she found the books and took them to a local used bookseller in New Zealand.  The beat, musty, patchouli-scented copy of Plant Hunting in China is now mine.

When I order from secondhand booksellers, I nearly always ask whether the book has any odors.  The institutionalized shorthand used by booksellers to convey the physical quality of used books doesn’t encompass smells.  I neglected to ask about odors when I ordered Plant Hunting in China via the internet from New Zealand.

There was also a book in my mailbox at home.  This was Frank Smythe’s Valley of  Flowers, a mountaineering and botanizing narrative set in the Himalaya.   I had called Whodunit, a bookseller in Philadelphia, to order it.  The older gentleman on the telephone pulled the book from his shelves while I waited.  He confirmed the quality of the volume—very good, badly sunned, once green or blue hard cover, no dust jacket.  “The fold-out map is taped-in and the page it’s taped to has a small tear,” he said. “Does it smell?” I asked.  He was taken aback.  “Sometimes there’s mustiness,” I explained.  I could hear his sniff.  “No smell,” he said.  Indeed, Frank Smythe’s Valley of  Flowers in my hands has no smell, or maybe just the pleasing smell of old pages held by a well sunned spine.