Anatomy of a scouting- Jacob Serenius

Hiya bookies. I know I promised more frequent updates here, but life keeps intruding. One of the kids is returning to the nest while attending graduate school, necessitating a massive move of stuff from one room to the next. Yuck. Not what BBG had in mind for the summer.

Anyway, I am often asked how I come across the books that I sell. The simple answer is: there is no simple answer. But today we'll just at one book and how that came to be in my possession, some of the problems faced in researching it, pricing it and translating the title.

One Friday morning about five years ago I arrived an hour or so early for a private estate sale in the Memphis suburb of Germantown. The yard and house were a bit unkempt, reflecting the elderly nature of the previous tenants. I don't remember if it was a living estate sale or not, but the middle aged children were holding the sale and one of them was late. We stood around for an extra twenty minutes or so waiting for this son to arrive. Once inside one other bookseller and I rummaged through the books, most of which were hardback science fiction and fantasy.

The other seller was a local lady who is very knowledgeable in antiquarian books and such. She had perused one particular bookcase before I got there, but there was a book with a leather spine that she had missed somehow. I bought it, more or less without inspecting it. Once at home I did what I always do and began going through my purchases. But this one...I could not even make out what language it was in, at first, the only word that made sense was where the publisher information is usually placed at the bottom of the title page. It said "Stockholm, 1727."

It was immediately evident that this was the oldest book I had ever scouted up. But what was it? What language was it written in? Who was the author? To discover this required backtracking. I searched the net using the phrase 'Joh. Laur. Horrn. Stockholm', which lead to a number of books published by this printer. For the language, I assumed that it was either German or Swedish but online translators weren't much use; as it turns out, the language is Old Swedish, which is quite different from modern Swedish. Who knew? That lead to simply searching for the title itself, which I cut and pasted. In its native language, it is: Engelska aker-mannen och fara-herden, eller: Aker-bruks-konsten och far-skiotslen, sa wal efter philosophiske principer som sielfwa praxin, af de witraste engelske scribenter utdragen, med atskillige historiske och topographiske anmarkningar. To this moment I still don't have a good translation of this, although I know the first words are The English Farmer and Shepherd, and that the book is a treatise on contemporary English sheep-herding techniques. The book was written by Jacob Serenius, who went on to write the first English-Swedish dictionary in 1741.

This information lead to an old auction price on a really battered piece of the book of about $160. I finally contacted an auction house, who suggested a price of around $500 as being quite fair for what is a nice copy of a rare book. So that's what I did, priced it at $499.95, and here are the photos. All told I must have twelve or fourteen hours of research in this book.

Erich von Manstein

Groan...good morning bookies. Your friendly neighborhood bookseller is feeling his age today after taking all 4 of his dogs to a farm yesterday to let them run free. Of course, said bookseller had to make sure they didn't go off chasing a random deer or something, so he wound up walking and running about as much as they did. And today he's paying the price.

As many of you know, I recently bought a massive collection of graphic novels, which all tend to have a certain flavor to them. Sort of punk-combat. Anyway, the name Erich von Manstein would serve perfectly as the name of a hero (or villain) in such a book, wouldn't it?' Erich von Manstein and His Morningstar of Death', or some such. Of course, the real Manstein was a German general during WW2, one of the best of a rather illustrious pantheon of military masters. If this sounds like I am elevating Nazis, I'm not. But I'm a WW2 historian and making evaluations is part of the gig. The Germans had the best generals of the war and that's just how it was. And Manstein was in the top 3.

So it's surprising that he hasn't had a major biography, a situation that has now been rectified with Retired British General Mungo Melvins' new "Manstein: Hitler's Greatest General." The reviewer shows the general ineptitude you find among such people, criticizing the book for precisely what would make it interesting, an in-depth look at Manstein's military maneuvers. If the reviewer does not like such stuff then what qualifies him to review the book? He eats up the coverage and inferences of Manstein's involvement in the Holocaust, however, which is de rigeur for reviewers these days. Military history of Germany now has to include something about the persecution of minorities within the Third Reich.

Frankly, that's not why I would read a book about 'Hitler's Greatest General.' I want to know what made him great. I already knew that the German generals were complicit in the Holocaust. I've studied the Holocaust in minute detail, and if I want to continue my research in that direction, I will. But there are far too few strictly military books being published these days, and this one appears to have missed a great opportunity to fill in that gap. So maybe I'll get the book and read just the first half, about the military matters. Or, after reading Nagorski's review, maybe I won't read the book at all.