Bargain Bundle: Tumblers, Shakespeare, Abbott & Costello, Subway Cars & Scholarly Tomes

[post 181]

Here's a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on....

First clue: flash back to last spring. I'm on a crowded E train from JFK airport when a quartet of performers bound onto the train, loudly  announcing their act with no little modesty. More hip-hop popping I'm guessing, ho-hum, which is why I don't bother to whip out my Flip camera. Suddenly these guys burst across the length of the car in a flurry of handsprings and somersaults and some nifty partner moves, all dangerously close to their (truly) captive audience — "if I touch you, I'll give you a dollar." I especially like the peanut rolls (double forward roll holding each other's ankles) because they have to make precise, last-second detours to avoid impaling themselves on the car's vertical poles.

I really didn't think you could do any of that on a standing-room-only subway train bolting along at 40 mph. I was wrong. Unfortunately, at under two minutes, by the time I got my camera out, they were gone. A YouTube search turned up nothing, but inspired by the next act in this post, I searched again yesterday, this time successfully. I still don't know who they are, but this is definitely them.

Because camera angles are a challenge in a subway car, here are two views of the same act:







And then yesterday I noticed a NY Times article on two performers, Paul Marino and Fred Jones, who call themselves Popeye & Cloudy and who are no strangers to subway floors. They have been earning a reputation and a fair amount of loot by doing another form of action drama underground, casting the passengers as groundlings as they perform quick renditions of scenes from Shakespeare, favorites being Romeo's suicide and Macbeth's decapitation. Not only that, but they also throw in some Abbott & Costello as well; yes, Who's on First?

Read the whole article here.

"Not all subway lines are well suited to Shakespeare," writes a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in an earlier article. "The long cars of the N and R trains allow for a bigger audience per scene. And the J,M,Z trains, which cross the Williamsburg Bridge, give riders time to relax for a lengthy performance. Riders who frequent the 4,5 and 6 trains in Manhattan are out of luck: those lines are too crowded for a proper death scene or sword fight, the actors say."

Here's the Popeye & Cloudy website.
Here's that article from the Wall Street Journal and a short WSJ video.




If you want to see more, here's a 12-minute Vimeo video montage that includes some of the Who's on First.


Popeye & Cloudy from Paul Marino on Vimeo.


So speaking of Shakespeare, and hopefully bringing this post full circle, here's some more chapter two material, this time two complete public domain books on the fool characters in Shakespeare's plays.


Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama by Olive Mary Busby
Our first dusty, musty book answers that eternal question, "whence came this insistent demand of the English public for the buffooneries of the fool?" Okay, so I exaggerated; it was never published as a book, it's just a 1923 master's thesis. Hard to believe, but it cost money to publish books back in what is now known as the Pre-PDF Era. I'm guessing Olive Mary Busby went to her grave not knowing that this blogopedia would make her famous.

Fools Elizabeth an Drama



The Fools of Shakespeare by Frederick Warde
This 1913 work starts with a chapter on "the fool in life and literature," followed by individual chapters devoted to each of Shakespeare's principal fool characters, including: Yorick, Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Launcelot Gobbo, the grave-digger in Hamlet, and the fool in King Lear.
Fools of Shakespeare


That's all I got!

Complete Books: More Commedia (en français)

[post 173]

Let's give the French some credit!

They may tend to over-intellectualize, but historically they have been enthusiastic fans and loyal supporters of clowns, mime, and circus. Commedia troupes — la Comédie-Italienne — made their homes in Paris, and while the best clowns may have been from England, Italy, or Spain, often they had to come to the French capital to be fully appreciated.

The French also write (and even read!) books, so it's not surprising that some of the best works on this whole physical comedy tradition were written in French. My own Clowns book would have been significantly diminished had I not been able to read Rémy, Thétard, Strehly, Perrodil, Adrian, and many others. And if I'm a bit of a francophile, you'll have to forgive me, because the truth is I've been bought: in 1990 I had a Fulbright fellowship to France to study physical comedy, half of which was funded by the French government. I have, however, been dutifully repaying them ever since (with interest) in the form of regularly scheduled purchases of French wine, with a marked preference for the earthier Bordeaux reds.

But enough about moi. Google tells me a lot of my blog fans come from la France, and je sais for a fact that more than a few of my Anglophone readers also lisent French. The least I can do is include a few free books en français.

Holy vache, I see que this blog post se transforme progressivement into français.... ça is becoming vachement dif. Tant pis, car maintenant vous devez souffrir mon français maladroit!

Okay, eau quais.... allons-y!

Masques et Bouffons de Maurice Sand (1860)
Commençons par Masques et Bouffons de Maurice Sand, mon introduction et la traduction anglaise de laquelle j'ai déjà publié dans ce précédent post.

Tome 1:

Masques_et_Bouffons_vol01

Tome 2:

Masques Et Bouffons Vol02



Mémoires de Carlo Gozzi (1797)
Mon introduction et la traduction anglaise se trouvent aussi dans ce précédent post.

MémoirsDeGozzi



Mimes et Pierrots: Notes et Documents de Paul Hugounet  (1889)
Le dernier, mais non le moindre, c'est le plus tôt importante étude scientifique de la pantomime, celle de Paul Hugounet (né 1859), un contemporain de Charles Deburau. Après les trois premiers chapitres, ce livre se concentre sur la pantomime française du 19ème siècle.

Mimes Et Pierrots



Prochainement: des livres en français sur le Théâtre des Funambules.

Complete Book: "Masks and Marionettes" by Joseph Kennard

[post 167]

When I was writing Clowns, these were the books I consulted the most for my section on commedia dell'arte:
• Masks, Mimes & Miracles by Alardyce Nicoll
• The World of Harlequin by Alardyce Nicoll
• The Italian Comedy by Pierre Duchartre
• The History of the Harlequinade by Maurice Sand
• Scenarios of the Commedia Dell'Arte by Flaminio Scala
• The Commedia Dell'Arte by Giacomo Oreglia

I did not read Masks and Marionettes by Joseph Kennard, nor have I since then, but browsing through it now it seems to be a reasonable overview of the subject, and one that touches on the closely related puppet theatre of the time. And since the above-mentioned books are not available for free and this one is, I though it worth including here.

Masks and Marionettes

Complete Book: "The Commedia Dell'Arte" by Winifred Smith

[post 165]

Because the essence of commedia dell arte was improvisation, recreating it for the modern reader has always been a tough task for scholars, and because it never pretended to be great dramatic literature, it didn't get much interest from theatre historians or practitioners until the early 20th century. This started to change with directors like Copeau and Meyerhold, who took commedia as inspiration for a new approach to actor training, and modern art movements such as dada, futurism, and surrealism, that were less interested in literature than in the spontaneous theatrical event. Winifred Smith, one of the first commedia scholars from this period, was also a translator of futurist plays, and apparently quite a pioneer in her day. Here's her bio from the web site of her alma mater, Vassar College, a prestigious women's college that didn't go co-educational until 1969:


Winifred Smith (1897-1967) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the daughter of Henry Preserved Smith, a leading Biblical scholar, and the sister of Preserved Smith, noted historian of the Reformation. After graduating from Vassar in 1904 and spending a year as a tutor at Mt. Holyoke College, and a year of student at the Sorbonne, Winifred Smith earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1912.


In 1911 Miss Smith came to Vassar as an instructor in English, rising to the rank of professor. In 1916 she started a theatrical museum at Vassar and, with Emmeline Moore, a Shakespeare Garden to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Winifred Smith's scholarly interest was in dramatic literature. She wrote books on The Commedia dell-Arte and Italian Actors in the Renaissance and numerous articles and reviews for periodicals such as The Nation and The Dial. She also translated many futurist plays from the French and Italian. When the Division of Drama was organized in 1938, she became its chairman, working closely with Hallie Flanagan Davis during the years of the Experimental Theatre.


Professor Smith was also active in the suffrage movement and participated in local civic activities, including the Community Theatre, the Women’s City and County Club, and the Citizens Better Housing League. She was the first president of the Dutchess County local of the American Federation of Teachers. She was interested in such social issues as disarmament and child labor.


Her retirement in 1947 was marked by an only slightly slower pace in a career outstanding for her willingness to act on a broad range of social concerns and scholarly interests. In a faculty memorial minute, Winifred Smith was named "one of Vassar’s great teachers” and “one of its great rebels."

And here's her complete book, The Commedia Dell 'Arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy (1912).

The Commedia Dell Arte

Complete Book: The Mimes of Herodas

[post 164]

Histories of ancient theatre tend to leave the impression that comedy began with Aristophanes, but Greece already had a rich tradition of commedia-style performance — the Dorian mimes (image, above). As I wrote in chapter two of Clowns...

These Dorian clowns— as well as the short plays they performed —came to be known as 

mimes (mimos). Today mime is usually equated with pantomime, the art of silent acting, but originally the word meant “to imitate” and referred to the performer’s talent for caricature; the ancient mimes were in fact quite talkative. Much of the dialogue apparently was improvised, and since the actors saw little need to preserve in writing what was said on stage, these comic dramas never became dramatic literature.

There is, however, one manuscript unearthed in 1890 that gives us some sense of these ancient skits: the mimes of Herodas. Obviously this text is not improvised, but rather the work of a poet adapting a popular form. This is what the Encyclopædia Britannica says:

Herodas, also called Herondas  (flourished 3rd century bc), Greek poet, probably of the Aegean island of Cos, author of mimes—short dramatic scenes in verse of a world of low life similar to that portrayed in the New Comedy. His work was discovered in a papyrus in 1890 and is the largest collection of the genre. It is written in rough iambic metre and in the vigorous, rather earthy language of the common people. His characters use vehement exclamations, emphatic turns of speech, and proverbs. In pieces of about 100 lines Herodas portrays vivid and entertaining scenes with the characters clearly drawn. The themes cover a range of city life: a procuress attempts to arrange a tryst for a respectable matron while her husband is away; a jealous woman accuses her favourite slave of infidelity and has him bound and sent to receive 2,000 lashes; a desperate mother drags a truant urchin to the schoolmaster. It is thought that these mimes were recited with considerable improvisation by an actor who took the various roles.

Wikipedia offers the following summary of the pieces:

Mime I
In Mime I the old nurse, now the professional go-between or bawd, calls on Metriche, whose husband has been long away in Egypt, and endeavours to excite her interest in a most desirable young man, fallen deeply in love with her at first sight. After hearing all the arguments Metriche declines with dignity, but consoles the old woman with an ample glass of wine, this kind being always represented with the taste of Mrs Gamp.
Mime II
This is a monologue by the "whoremonger" prosecuting a merchant-trader for breaking into his establishment at night and attempting to carry off one of the inmates, who is produced in court. The vulgar blackguard, who is a stranger to any sort of shame, remarking that he has no evidence to call, proceeds to a peroration in the regular oratorical style, appealing to the Coan judges not to be unworthy of their traditional glories. In fact, the whole oration is also a burlesque in every detail of an Attic speech at law; and in this case we have the material from which to estimate the excellence of the parody.
Mime III
Metrotimé, a desperate mother, brings to the schoolmaster Lampriscos her truant son, Cottalos, with whom neither she nor his incapable old father can do anything. In a voluble stream of interminable sentences she narrates his misdeeds and implores the schoolmaster to flog him. The boy accordingly is hoisted on another's back and flogged; but his spirit does not appear to be subdued, and the mother resorts to the old man after all.
Mime IV
This is a visit of two poor women with an offering to the temple of Asclepius at Cos. While the humble cock is being sacrificed, they turn, like the women in the Ion of Euripides, to admire the works of art; among them a small boy strangling a vulpanser – doubtless the work of Boethus that we knowand a sacrificial procession by Apelles, "the Ephesian," of whom we have an interesting piece of contemporary eulogy. The oily sacristan is admirably painted in a few slight strokes.
Mime V
This brings us very close to some unpleasant facts of ancient life. The jealous woman accuses one of her slaves, whom she has made her favourite, of infidelity; has him bound and sent degraded through the town to receive 2000 lashes; no sooner is he out of sight than she recalls him to be branded "at one job." The only pleasing person in the piece is the little maidservant permitted liberties as a verna brought up in the house whose ready tact suggests to her mistress an excuse for postponing execution of a threat made in ungovernable fury.
Mime VI
A friendly chat or a private conversation. The subject is an ugly one, Metro has arrived at Koritto's house to ask her where she acquired a dildo, but the dialogue is as clever and amusing as the rest, with some delightful touches. Our interest is engaged here in a certain Kerdon, the maker of the dildo and who hides this trade by the front of being a cobbler. On acquiring the information she desired, Metro leaves to seek him out.
Mime VII
The same Kerdon and Metro whom we see in VI appear, Metro bringing some friends to Kerdon's shoe shop, (his name, which means "profiteer", had already become generic for the shoemaker as the typical representative of retail trade) he is a little bald man with a fluent tongue, complaining of hard times, who bluffs and wheedles by turns. The sexual undertones which we have come to expect from his involvement in VI are only realized at the end when Metro's friends have left the shop.
Mime VIII
Opens with the poet waking up his servants to listen to his dream; but we have only the beginning, and the other fragments are very short. Within the limits of 100 lines or less Herodas presents us with a highly entertaining scene and with characters definitely drawn.

Spoiler Alert: This is not necessarily a laugh riot, but if you bring some theatrical imagination to it, the anthropologist in you will get some idea of this early form of comedy.

You're actually getting two translations for the price of one.  The first is a 1906 verse translation by Hugo Sharpley, the second a 1921 prose version by M. S. Buck.

A Realist of the Aegean


Herodas Prose

Tech Note: Complete Books

[post 163]

I'm about to overwhelm you with a slew of free, complete books related to the history of clowns in the theatre — and, yes, I expect you to read every single word of every single book —but for now I'll be happy if you just read the next paragraph:

They are not the first to do so, but Google is scanning tons of books that are in the public domain and putting them on the web for free download. A scan is simply a digital image of each successive page of the book. Think of it as a snapshot you might take with your camera. The computer does not initially recognize the text as characters and words, only as random pixels on the page. This may be fine, you can still read the book, but what you can't do is search for specific names or copy text from the book into a separate document. Which kind of book you're getting is not necessarily advertised, so you may need to use the word search feature in programs such as Adobe Acrobat to see if it can find a word on the first page; if not, all you have is an image of the book.  They have to use OCR (optical character recognition) software to turn that image into a searchable text document but, depending on the quality of the source material, the accuracy level will vary. If this paragraph were 99% accurate, it would still have 11 errors in it! So in reality, once these scans are converted to text, the results need to be carefully proofread by human eyes — knot just run threw spelt Czech — and you can bet Google ain't doing that. When I post a Google book, I do run it through OCR for you if it needs it, so it is searchable. I do not, however, have the time to spell check and proofread the book for you. Sorry...

Okay, you can stop reading now.  If, however, this kind of tech stuff interests you, perhaps you're planning to convert some books or magazines of your own, then read on... A few more things to know:

Public Domain
Copyright laws vary from country to country and are of course subject to rulings by individual judges as to what constitutes "fair use." Basically material before 1923 is pre-copyright law and therefore in the public domain, but more recent material may be public as well because the copyright holders failed to renew their copyright. It is not necessarily easy to find out a book's copyright status, as the Library of Congress charges an arm and a leg, though I did hear of a new web site, currently in beta, designed to help in the process: www.durationator.com.

Google is also putting large portions of copyrighted texts online as what they call "previews," claiming this is fair use because they are only excerpting it. This is frankly a dubious argument, given the size of their "excerpts," but they are a powerful organization and have managed to strong arm many publishers into going along. I have mixed feelings about this. As a reader / researcher, I love the access. As a writer /creator, I want to be paid for my work.

Scanning a Book
Old books are old. The pages yellow, type flecks off, the paper disintegrates. People write in them, adding notes or underlining key phrases. Stick the book on a scanner and it won't lay flat, giving you scanned text that is seriously curved. Scanning is done by humans, and some Google Books are comically off-kilter. In other words, the poor image quality of many scans makes accurate OCR problematic, to put it mildly. Yes, you can take each page into Photoshop and make adjustments to alignment, color and contrast, even erase what doesn't belong (see below), but like I said, you can bet Google ain't doing that.

OCR
Optical character recognition software used to cost $800 (OmniPage), but now it's built into Adobe Acrobat Pro. The results usually look good at first, and as a bonus it does "deskew" the pages for you, but if you export the .pdf file as a text document and run it through spell check, you may be in for a rude surprise. Yes, tons of errors — and those are just the ones spell check catches. Thus the need for a human proofreader.

Copying and Pasting Text
It is not necessarily easy to copy and paste large sections of text from a pdf into a text document. The workaround is to use Adobe Acrobat or another program that can export the entire document to plain text, html, rtf, and/or a Word doc file.

How to Do It
(Yep, this has zero to do with physical comedy!)
The vast majority of complete books on this blog were not converted by me, but when I do digitize books, this is how I do it; other tips more than welcome!
• I usually scan at 600 dpi for greater accuracy, though this also picks up more schmutz, so I'm not sure it's necessarily better than 300 dpi.
• Unless you actually rip the pages out of the original book (some libraries frown on this), your pages will probably not come out properly aligned. In Photoshop, I use the ruler tool to trace a line I know should be horizontal of vertical (e.g., the baseline of a line of text), and then realign the page by clicking on the IMAGE pull-down menu, then IMAGE ROTATION, then ARBITRARY, then OK.
• I convert to black & white (IMAGE / MODE / GRAYSCALE) and then improve the contrast with first an auto levels adjustment ((IMAGE / ADJUSTMENTS / LEVELS /AUTO), followed by a custom curves adjustment (IMAGE / ADJUSTMENTS / CURVES) that usually looks something like the graph you see to the right (depending on the scan).
• I crop each page to the same size: marquee select at fixed dimensions, then IMAGE / CROP.
• I save the file as a flattened jpeg at maximum resolution.
• In Adobe Acrobat Pro, from the FILE pull-down menu I choose CREATE PDF / MERGE FILES INTO A SINGLE PDF. You drag your jpegs into a window, put them into the exact order you want, and once you click on COMBINE FILES it creates the pdf document for you.
• Finally, to convert it into a searchable text document, click on DOCUMENT / OCR TEXT RECOGNITION / RECOGNIZE TEXT USING OCR
• You then might want to export it as an .rtf (rich text) document and run it through a spell check program.

Complete Book: Fous et Bouffons (1885)

[post 075]
Fous et Bouffons: un Etude Physiologique, Psychologique et Historique (Fools & Buffoons: A Physiological, Psychological, and Historical Study)
by Dr. Paul Moreau

You have to hand it to the French. They have an appetite for historical research and writing, as well as a keen interest in circus and clowning. Put the two together and the happy result is a lot of good books on the variety arts. When I somehow ended up as a French major in my undergrad years at NYU, I had no real idea how or if I would ever use my meager language skills. Four years later I found myself writing a book about clowns, the research for which would have been impossible had I not been able to read French.

So as we near the end of my posting public domain books about fools and jesters, I throw in a book in French on the subject. I figure there are enough of you gringos who read French, and the blog is getting a lot of visitors from francophile countries, so it may be of use to someone out there. And as I may have mentioned, it is free.

Moreau was a member of the Paris Medical Psychology Association and his approach aspires to be scientific. He was in fact the author of over a dozen books that bridge the gap between medical and psychological issues, tackling such subjects as suicide, childhood madness, and jealous insanity. One contemporary review of the book I found questioned Moreau's science and opined that "the historical section of the book contains many anecdotes which may amuse those who have nothing better to do than to read them." Zing!

I doubt H.G. Wells knew of Moreau when he wrote Island of Dr. Moreau, but Wells' mad scientist is none other than Dr. Paul Moreau, played by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls. But I digress.

Fous et Bouffons by Dr. Paul Moreau

Complete Book: Erasmus' In Praise of Folly

[post 073]

It turns out Erasmus is not just the name of a high school in New York City. Apparently before he was a high school — about 500 years before — he was also a famous philosopher.

Hey, I'm just kiddin' ya. I went to graduate school, I know everything there is to know about Erasmus that's on his Wikipedia page. Like his full name was Desiderius Erasmus, though his friends called him Razzmatazz, that he was born in Rotterdam some time between 1466 and 1469, died in 1536, and in between established quite a reputation for himself as a Dutch Renaissance humanist. See?

But why was he praising folly?

As the forward to this edition says, "under the pleasing mask of Folly our author has uttered truths which are indeed sublime, and in the witty language of the Jester he has exposed the fallacies of ...." Well, the fallacies he exposes are a bit esoteric to us today, having to do with religious controversies raging over the Protestant Reformation. (Good thing we don't have religious controversies any more.) Erasmus was a Catholic but at one point an ally of Martin Luther and quite critical of the Catholic establishment. Erasmus speaks to us through a voice of his creation, the Greek Goddess of Folly, a personification of folly and a vehicle for launching satirical attacks on his favorite targets.

In Praise of Folly

Okay, so I made up that part about Razzmatazz.

Complete Book: Robert Armin's "Foole upon Foole" and "A Nest of Ninnies"

[post 071]

The standard entry on fools and jesters usually makes mention of Shakespeare's jester characters, especially the fool in King Lear. It was Robert Armin (c. 1563 – 1615) who first acted the role as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, as well as such similar roles as Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well, and perhaps Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, as well as comic parts in other Elizabethan dramas. In fact, Armin's joining the company around 1600 is credited by some with Shakespeare's increased interest in witty jesters.

Armin was not just a leading actor of his day, but also a scholar with a keen interest in the ancient lineage of fools. He was one of the first to chronicle their history at length in his Foole upon Foole (1605) and his A Nest of Ninnies (1608), where he made a clear distinction between the natural fool and the "licensed fool," a performer sanctioned to play the role of the fool for money. It would be a logical assumption that, working as closely together as he and Shakespeare did for so many years, Armin shared his historical knowledge with the ever-curious bard.

Even though the text is short (56 pp.), it is rough sledding, given the wacky way they wrote and spelled back in those days. But it is historically significant and, once again, it is free...


Armin Foole Upon Foole

Complete Book: The History of Court Fools

[post 070]

The History of Court Fools by John Doran

This is a 389-page monster of a book written by Dr. John Doran (1807-1878) and published in 1858. Doran was a prolific writer of popular social histories. No illustrations, not even the one to the right.

I used this book when researching chapter one of Clowns, but it should come with a warning: it's heavily anecdotal, with nothing in the way of footnotes or bibliography. Like a lot of books about fools and jesters, it tends to romanticize its subject and rarely questions the accuracy of a story so long as it's a good one.

It was republished just last year by Cornell University Library in book form — you know, with double-sided printing, a cover, a binding and all that. Your choice: buy it for $27 on Amazon or download and print it right here.

John Doran's History of Court Fools

Complete Book: The Delight Makers

[post 069]

The Delight Makers by Adolf F. Bandelier (1890)
A novel about Pueblo Indian koshare clowns

Last month I launched this Complete Book series with the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The idea is that books more than about a century old are not covered by copyright law and are therefore in the "public domain." Project Gutenberg was the first major effort to make these available in digital format, but there are now many such undertakings, the best known being Google Books, the least known being my Epson scanner.

Since I am also publishing my old Clowns book on this blog a chapter at a time (I know, I know, I've only done chapters 1 and 5 so far), I thought it would make sense to match up the chapters from my book with any relevant public domain books. In other words, since I recently published chapter one and some supplemental material on it, I am now about to bless you with several free books that have to do with chapter one content: tricksters, fools, and jesters. And no, I don't expect everyone to run out and read all these massive tomes — I've only read about half, and this ain't one of 'em — but I thought it would be nice to have them all in one place. Did I mention they're free?

So... onto The Delight Makers, which comes to you courtesy of the bright folks and scanners at Google.

Adolf Bandelier (1840 —1914) was a pioneering explorer and archaeologist who spent eight years among the Pueblo tribes of the Southwest, and there is even a Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico named after him. The Delight Makers is a novel based on these experiences, centered around the koshare clowns and including 17 photographs.

"Unique in nineteenth-century American literature for its blend of historical romance and scientific observation, The Delight Makers provides in fictional form an invaluable reconstruction of prehistoric Indian culture of the Southwest... It tells the story of the ancestors of the modern Pueblos, the Queres, who are dominated by a powerful secret society called the Koshare or Delight Makers. Rivalry between clans and a conspiracy to accuse a woman of sorcery touch off war with a neighboring tribe, the Tehuas, and lead to the destruction of the Queres settlement." (Prehistoric Fiction Bibliography)

If this subject matter is of particular interest to you, check out the novels of Tony Hillerman, especially Sacred Clowns, as well as some non-fiction books on this topic discussed in this post.


Bandelier — The Delight Makers

Complete Book: Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, edited by Charles Dickens

[post 059]

Today I introduce yet another new feature to this blog, a complete book in the form of a pdf file suitable for reading online, downloading, or printing. Because of legal issues, most if not all books presented here will be from the pre-copyright era, roughly a century or more ago, and therefore of a historical nature.

We start off with a classic, the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, edited by none other than Charles Dickens (pseudonym Boz). Grimaldi (1779–1837) was perhaps the most celebrated clown who ever lived, the clown credited with elevating the craft to an art form, the man from whom latter-day clowns derived the nickname "joey." If you want a quick introduction to Grimaldi, go to post 002 on this blog and take a look at chapter five (pp.8–14) from my book Clowns.

How these memoirs apparently came about is its own story, here summed up by our good friend Dr. Wikipedia:

The book's accuracy is not entirely clear, since it went through a number of revisions, not all with Grimaldi's input. Grimaldi's original manuscript, which he mostly dictated, was about 400 pages; he completed it in December 1836. The original "excessively voluminous" version was apparently not good enough for publication, and in early 1837 he signed a contract with a collaborator, the obscure Grub Street writer Thomas Egerton Wilks, to "rewrite, revise, and correct" the manuscript. However, two months after signing the contract, Grimaldi died, and Wilks finished the job on his own, not only cutting and condensing the original but introducing extra material based on his conversations with Grimaldi. Wilks made no indication which parts of his production were actually written by Grimaldi and which parts were original to Wilks. He also chose to change Grimaldi's first-person narration to the third person.

In September 1837, Wilks offered the Memoirs to Richard Bentley, publisher of the magazine Bentley's Miscellany. Bentley bought it, after securing the copyright from Grimaldi's estate, but he thought it was still too long and also badly edited, so he asked one of his favorite young writers, the novelist Charles Dickens, then twenty-five years old, to re-edit and re-write it. At first Dickens was not inclined to take the job, and he wrote to Bentley in October 1837:

"I have thought the matter over, and looked it over, too. It is very badly done, and is so redolent of twaddle that I fear I cannot take it up on any conditions to which you would be disposed to accede. I should require to be assured three hundred pounds in the first instance without any reference to the sale -- and as I should be bound to stipulate in addition that the book should not be published in numbers I think it would scarcely serve your purpose."

However, Bentley agreed to Dickens' terms (a guarantee of three hundred pounds and an agreement to publish the book all at once, and not in monthly numbers.) Dickens signed a contract in November 1837, and completed the job in January 1838, mostly by dictation. Dickens seems never to have seen Grimaldi's original manuscript (which remained in the hands of the executor), but only worked from Wilks' version, which he heavily edited and re-wrote. Bentley published it in two octavo volumes in February 1838.

How faithful this twice-edited, twice-rewritten version is to the original cannot now be determined, since the original manuscript was sold at an estate sale in 1874 and has never been seen since.

Tech Note: The scan of this book is by Google, which you may have heard is ruffling a lot of feathers by trying to digitize every book they can get their hands on, copyright be damned. As far as I can tell, what they do is scan the book as an image, that's all, nothing but a bunch of dumb pixels that don't even know they're banding together to form language. Google makes no attempt to perform OCR (optical character recognition), which would translate the image of text into individual letters and words a computer can recognize separate from one another, thus allowing for searching topics, copying & pasting, editing, etc. The reason they don't do this is that OCR software is not 100% accurate, especially when applied to old books, so for it to come out right someone would have to spend hours.... and hours... and hours of proofreading the entire book. Unfortunately, an old scanned book is harder on the eyes than one converted to crisp, clear text but — you know what they say — you get what you pay for.

GrimaldiMemoirs