Some Advice Regarding the Economy
"The saddest hour in any man's career is that wherein he, for the first time, fancies there is an easier was of gaining a dollar than by squarely earning it." --Horace Greeley
If you agree with the above sentiment, and think that it might have some pertinence to the world's current economic woes, than you will surely wish to read "Elements of Success in Business," first published in 1889.
Some New Lists
It takes a brave man to make a list - or, at least, to make a list and publish it on the worldwide web, where everyone can disagree with it. Nevertheless, since lists can be handy, and since most of our readers tend to be a good-natured lot, we've added two new lists that we hope will be helpful when choosing items for your CD and DVD collections. See what you think about our list of 100 Greatest Country Songs (yes, Ghost Riders in the Sky made the list), and our even more daring list of 100 Greatest Movies. (It was hard leaving out those Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser, because we really do like them, but such are the responsibilities of a website editor.)
Some
New Recommendations
Let's say you're a Zen cowboy. Well then, pardner, you're going to like two of our new web pages. The first deals with finding the Best Boot-Cut Jeans for Men (great for wearing most of the time, but not recommended when you're in a full lotus position), and the second lists some Recommended Zen Books. Happy and enlightened trails, buckaroo!
Literature
If you like reading about what other people like reading, then you'll love reading William Dean Howell's My Literary Passions. Can men be allowed to be so passionate about literature now as he was then? It's an interesting question.
Leather Bindings, and All That
Is leather dressing good for your leather bindings? You can
find an answer to that question on our webpage about
Leather Dressing for Books, and you
can find lots of other helpful information on our webpage about
Caring for Your Book Collection.
Sell a Book?! And You Call Yourself a Man?!
According
to Kenneth Grahame, "No man—no human, masculine, natural man—ever sells a book.
Men have been known in moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary
necessity, to rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not,
to 'wince and relent and refrain' from what they should: these things, howbeit
regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of us. But amateur
bookselling is foul and unnatural; and it is noteworthy that our language, so
capable of particularity, contains no distinctive name for the crime." All
this, and more, can be found in Grahame's essay.
Forty Centuries of Ink
Recently added: Forty Centuries of
Ink (a lot of information here), plus On
Books and the Housing of Them, by William Ewart Gladstone.
Gladstone, of course, was a politician who loved books, and the wisdom contained
therein. Politeness causes us to refrain from drawing any comparisons to
today's crop of political leaders . . .
Literary Taste, Famous Books, and Self-Culture
And what have we been working on recently? We've added Arnold
Bennett's Literary Taste: How to Form It,
and Andrew Lang's
The Library. Having already published
excerpts from Samuel Smiles' Self Help,
we've now gone ahead and made the full text of this wonderful work available to our readers.
We've also added Recreations of a Country
Parson. Wouldn't it be pleasant to have a comfortable cottage that
somehow had space for a good-sized library? And maybe a nice fireplace, a
mug of tea always at hand, some cookies.... But we digress.
Website Round-Up
Fans of our demonology page (we hesitate to say they are legion) will no doubt be interested to learn that we have now added Thomas Alfred Spalding's 1880 work on Elizabethan Demonology to our website, which will hold special appeal for both demonologists and fans of Shakespeare. We're working semi-diligently on John D. Baldwin's Ancient America.
Thanks to the nice folks at Google, you can search our site for a particular term or phrase:
Our e-mail address is djmcadam@gmail.com