The Loeb Classical Library in World War II

From Harvard's brief history of the Loeb Classical Library:

In 1939 World War II broke out in Europe. Although the ambitious Loeb Classical Library publishing schedule continued, the war hindered efforts to import books from England, making new editions difficult to obtain in America. While 38 new volumes were published from 1939 to 1945, they were not always available in the United States, particularly as the war dragged on. Only 10 of these 38 new volumes were published in the last three years of the war, an average of about three a year (considerably fewer than the approximately 10 per year average in the early and mid-1930s). In 1944 there were no new volumes added to the Loeb Classical Library, making it the first year without a new edition since the Library’s founding.

The war also had a direct impact on Loeb Classical Library stock. In the late spring of 1940, approximately 200,000 volumes sat in the London warehouse of J. Burn & Company. Until this time, shipments to the United States had been made in small batches of several thousand at a time, but as prospects for England looked increasingly grim, William Smith (then Business Manager at Harvard University Press) placed a substantial order of 122,675 volumes to be shipped to the United States. On the treacherous trip across the Atlantic, one ship with over 9,000 volumes on board was sunk by a German U-boat. The rest arrived safely, adding 113,032 volumes to Harvard University Press’s stock.

This Loeb Classical Library shipment arrived just in time. On July 10, 1940, the Germans began a protracted air attack on Britain and in the autumn of 1940, a bomb hit the J. Burn & Company warehouse, destroying nearly half the Loeb volumes housed there. In 1941 another German bomb hit the same spot, destroying the remaining volumes and leaving Heinemann’s stock nearly depleted. Meanwhile, in the United States, Harvard University Press continued to sell the volumes that William Smith had rescued and sales actually increased during the war. By the war’s end, however, Harvard had also run out of stock on 158 of the 369 volumes that had been published to date, with no way to reprint or restock from England.

That's a hell of a vivid image, isn't it? Imagine working to translate, publish, manufacture, and ship our inheritance from ancient western civilization while the barbarians' bombs fall around you, and the future of western civilization doesn't look anywhere near certain.

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away

NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, who recently had the City's term limit laws changed so that he could run a third time, on his position in the world:

"I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.


Whoa there!

Good lord, aren't we already deep enough in the Roman metaphor already? I did not wake up this morning thinking I needed images of NYPD battalions alea-iacta-esting their way across the Potomac.

Technologah

We now have pet rats. They're the cutest things ever, et cetera. Seriously, domesticated rats are like tiny dogs. They're the anti-hamsters. Their names are Duncan, Malcolm, and Banquo.

On an unrelated note, I still use a small, keyboardless folding phone, and rely on T9 text prediction for text messaging.

T9 does not know the word "Banquo." This isn't surprising; it's not exactly a standard dictionary word. What is surprising is that its suggested alternative is "Aborto." Which I'm pretty sure is Jhonen Vasquez's new superhero comic.

Kids and guns

In Idaho, Toys For Tots (a Marine Corps Reserve program that collects Christmas gifts for needy children) holds a fundraising turkey shoot (which doesn't actually involve shooting turkeys).

A prominent* anti-gun blogger links to the story at Democratic Underground, trying to play the kids-and-guns card...

And is overwhelmingly (it looks like unanimously) dismissed by the lefty commenters, who soon switch tracks into comparing the guns they were given for Christmas as kids.

...

There are times I'm very pessimistic about the future of my country; there's a hell of a lot to be pessimistic about. It can get a bit overwhelming now and then. But every once in a while I see something like this, mentally compare it with the usual responses to anti-gun rhetoric in European forums, and get the tiniest glimmer of hope.

More Like This Please.



[* - Relatively speaking, of course. He probably gets the most traffic of any anti-gun blog, which means he's less widely read than any mid-tier gun blogger. And by the looks of things, most of his traffic comes from gun rights advocates who want to argue with him.]

[h/t to Bob S.]

Is love. Is not safe.

Over at Facebook, Erin Pallette muses:

I have a strange desire to write a fanfic involving an ill-fated romance between Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Simo Häyhä. Perhaps call it "Love in the Crosshairs."

This is awesome and terrifying. It's terrifawesome.

...And you know I think that's adorable...

And over at Kotaku, some interesting set-fail.

The topic is on feminism and stereotypes and patriarchy and oppression, et cetera, so I won't be discussing the rightness or wrongness of any of the underlying viewpoints involved. That way lies the void. The comment thread on that article is exactly what you'd expect: an unreadable pissing match between the offended, the offended that others are offended, and the offended that others are offended that others are offended.

In the specific, there's just one little tangential detail that struck me as interesting:

Critic Tom Bissell:
"If you have no idea what the Elder Scrolls franchise is, you are probably either (a) an adult woman, or (b) the sort of person who once beat up the sort of person who likes the Elder Scrolls franchise...

Aggrieved Facebook commenter Jessica Price:
Between this and the NYT "Game of Thrones is for boys" article, I'm curious as to what, as an adult woman, I *am* allowed to like.

Facetious conflation of trends with permission aside, there's an odd bit of misinterpretation here: the critic didn't say the set of "adult women" doesn't know what Skyrim is. He said the set of "people who don't know what Skyrim is" is made up mostly of adult women and let's-call-them-jocks. His "joke" didn't carry any particular claim about what Ms. Price or any woman thinks about the game; it's consistent with a hypothetical world in which four people haven't heard of it--two adult women and two jocks.

I wouldn't bet that's what the critic meant to say; given the quality of the joke, I doubt much thought went into it at all. I just similarly doubt much thought goes into the majority of righteous identity-indignation.

[Full disclosure: I am an adult man who's seen about 90% of the episodes of all Star Trek series and plays tabletop RPGs now and then, and until last week I had only the vaguest idea what the Elder Scrolls series was. I probably would have guessed it was an MMO. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.]

Today is a good day...

io9 speculates on Star trek 2 casting:

As for the other big rumored addition to the cast, Benicio del Toro is reportedly still in serious talks for the role, and it seems likely that he will be end up being cast, but his deal is still pending. He's thought to be in line for a villainous character that will be familiar to Trek fans, which many are interpreting as meaning either Khan or a Klingon of some sort, and the majority of recent reports suggest Klingons will be involved. Since sources seem to be saying it's the character, not the character's race, that will be familiar, this might mean we'll see del Toro playing a particular Klingon, the leading candidates for which would probably be the "Blood Oath" trio: Kang, Kor, and Koloth.

A familiar Klingon character of the Kirk era?

Colonel Worf, obviously.