A Book of Many Colors: Colored Sweaters in Book Titles

This is probably the silliest wandering I have done, but I got stuck on it after having finished reading The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow and then seeing a recommendation for The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World So, I had to find out how many color sweaters exist in English book titles that have nothing to do with knitting or making sweaters. The answer is: too many:

Ant and Bee Big Buy Bag

Wonderful news, Ant & Bee fans. I have found a copy of the Ant & Bee Big Buy Bag, via Interlibrary Loan and have take some pictures. Once you see it you realize why there may be none around--several pages are made to be cut up and others colored or played with. The overall "bag" measures 11 1/2" square and the interior pages are somewhat smaller.

There is almost no information about this, but you can see all the pages in this Google Photos album (click on slide show if you like).

Ant and Bee: The Mystery of the Disappearance of the Books and the Invisibility of Angela Banner

The Ant and Bee books which we came across when our children were young became a staple of our reading to them and their early reading. However, when you try to discover them today--in the real world or the virtual world--they are gone, and the scant information that I had found about their author Angela Banner is even more scant. I have Internet wandered a number of times over the years, but this time I will capture my wonderment:

[If you come here not knowing who Ant and Bee are, check out this one bookseller's nice page with pictures and story summaries of a few of the 13 books in the full series.]

Instead of Google, I start today with Wikipedia. Guess what? Angela Banner does not exist as an article at all! Not a single keystroke of biography. All that exists is a listing of the 13 Ant & Bee books with a very short introduction. Obviously, both of these can be easily remedied by editing but my focus today is rather on this search. So, on to Google.

First, do we go for finding Angela Banner or her books? I opt for the author, and luckily get a hit on someone's efforts--"The unOfficial Ant and Bee Homepage". Nothing about Angela Banner, but I do learn that Ant and Bee books are to be re-released in the UK. The note is dated January 28, 2008, but following the link to Amazon.co.uk they are taking orders for two books coming out in 2013! [In, US, you can preorder: Ant & Bee and More & More Ant & Bee.] [Caution: Added August 1, 2013: Read this!] Otherwise, this page has links to short personal memories of the books and to pictures and brief paragraphs on Ant, Bee, and Kind Dog, the principal animal characters in the books.

My Mother and Aryeh House School, Brighton

Visiting with my mother this past weekend, I came across a paper from her boarding school with its letterhead and decided to see what I could find on the Internet about it--the Aryeh House School. [I thought I had not known the name, but she did have it in her draft memoires.] So I actually have come across a fair amount and have decided, rather than my usual Internet Wandering/Wondering fashion of recounting my path as I took it, I am going to compile a "complete" Internet catalog of what I find and present it in chronological order. Some of the comments actually came in response to something my mother asked on a Brighton & Hove website.

Caption: Erected in 1903, this building was always used as a school. From 1903 until 1936 it was known as Belvedere Preparatory School. From then until its demolition it was a Jewish school, called Aryeh House. An estate of Regency style houses will be built on this and the neighbouring site. The two photographs above were taken from the east side of the Upper Drive.

From Karl May to Lloyd Price: Six Degrees of Internet Separation (or Just Five)

After my recent successful zero hits Google search [which, of course, now yields three hits, all to my blog posting], I was stunned to find that another random thought process which led me from "Karl May" to "Lloyd Price" was hugely unsuccessful, with a resounding "About 1,060 results." But given the popularity of Karl May books and movies in Germany and of Lloyd Price songs, I guess it should not be a surprise, especially since almost all of these Google hits are to sellers or resellers of CDs, DVDs, etc. [The only "substantive" hit I came across was a pairing of February 25: Karl May's birthday in 1842, and Lloyd Price being Number 1 on the U.S. singles chart in 1959 with Stagger Lee.]

But, how did I come to connect these two contributors to popular culture? What were my six steps?

Step 1: The New Yorker issue of April 9, 2012 and the article--"Why Karl May captivates Germany" by Rivka Galchen. In writing about how cowboys and Indians so captivate Germany, she refers to Karl May "whom most Americans have never heard of but whose stories of the American West are to this day better known to Germans than the works of Thomas Mann." Well, I am one of those Americans who have both heard of him and read at least one of his books (in translation). I was introduced to Karl May (and to the proper "pronounced 'my'" as Galchen writes) by my father, who was born in Germany in 1914, had grown up in a Karl May culture, but I cannot remember when, or in what context, but clearly many years ago.

Step 2: I tell my wife about the article and she jokes about how urbane I am. Well, I object and say, in any case, since I heard it from my father, his association with it could not be considered urbane. And, while my Internet wandering did not start there yet, I do believe that the Free Dictionary definition would bear me out--familiarity with Karl May--particularly in Germany--could not be considered "Polite, refined, and often elegant in manner."

Step 3: I make a joke. So in bantering about the urbane, I start singing a song about how "I got urbanality" to the tune of a song I could not remember the real words to. So first Internet wondering was did I just invent "urbanality"? Well, quick answer (9,380 results) is an even more resounding NO! It appears in a lot of different guises, but I must admit my favorite are the urBANALity t-shirts.

Step 4: Margaret starts sings the real words "`cause you got personality/ Walk, personality/ Talk, Personality/ Smile, Personality/ Charm, personality/ Love, personality" which, of course, I have to check to see if she knows the real lyrics, which, of course, she does!

Step 5: Oops, I dissemble, it only took 5 degrees of separation to find out who wrote and sang "Personality" and we have Lloyd Price.

Bathroom Literature, not Bathroom Reading

Today I head to the Internet for bathroom novels. I am on the quest, because I have almost, finally finished reading Clochemerle (translated in its most recent version as The Scandals of Clochemerle for some reason) by Gabriel Chevallier. I have been reading it in old Penguin edition that was my father's. Why I have been reading this so slowly, I do not know. However, one reason is that if for some reason became a bathroom book, for which my New Yorker usually takes precedence. More pertinent to this exercise is that the novel deals with the ramifications over plans to install a new urinal in the village square of the small French town of Clochemerle (based on the real village of Vaux- en-Beaujolais).

[I do need to put in an aside. Clochemerte is certainly not well known in the United States or, even in France if you believe this blogger. However, it is an entertaining read, and there was what appears to be a fairly memorable 1972 BBC production, which I am looking forward to watching. It could be worth its own essay at some point.]

Among other books that I have read during the long reading of this book was Sanitary Centennial: And Selected Short Stories (Texas Pan American Series) by the Argentinian Fernando Sorrentino. A collection of shorter fiction, the title piece is a novella about an advertising copywriter who is assigned to write stirring hype trumpeting a toilet manufacturer's centennial. Thus, the connection--bathroom facilities.

Curious to know if anyone else has connected these two books and, if so, whether there are others that I should be reading in this "genre" of bathroom fiction, I began my Google search for "sanitary centennial" and clochemerle and, behold, ZERO hits! Enough to get the internet wanderlust moving!!

Hakone Maru II

In response to a comment to my earlier post from a reader about whether there are passenger lists, I looked some more and sure enough one can access passenger list. In particular, I need to find the one for my father's trip, which, according to the UK National Archives, landed in Liverpool on 17 February 1940. Looks like Ancestry.co.uk has all the passenger lists. Also, check out lists here