reading (Poor Richard's Almanack)

I started this book during the summer, when we were at the beach. The fact I didn't finish it while at the beach implies how hard a time I had getting through it. Yes, many of the famous sayings were in here, but short little sayings do not make for 300 pages of reading at a go. It was probably much better to get doses over the course of decades as it was originally released. There is a lot of repetition. After reading year after year I felt the themes were limited and the longer poetry blurred into one big lump. Franklin claimed to be neither a poet or a great philosopher. I can't dispute his claims. I don't think the content translates particularly well into this new format or into this time. But he does make a kickin' stove.

Now a word about the edition: The print I have is a "Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading" edition. The typesetting and proofreading don't qualify as awful, they qualify as non-existent. It looks a lot like they took a scan of the pages, ran it through an OCR program, then sent it straight to the printer. The mistakes in formatting are convincing examples of the artifacts of conversion to electronic media. Either that or they took a copy of the text off Project Gutenberg before the distributed proofreading team had a chance to clean it up. A poem of some lines will end with one line from a separate couplet, with the other line sitting lonely by itself further down the page. Poems and sayings are clumped together or split apart at random. Whether the spelling mistakes are represented in the original or artifacts of just this version is impossible for me to tell, but they are irritating. In short, don't buy this edition and I'd avoid anything in this series.

50. Benjamin Franklin "Poor Richard's Almanack"

reading (The World of Charles Adams)

I picked up "The World of Charles Adams" at a booksale a few weeks ago. My copy is in pretty good shape with just a few pages that have the enthusiastic scribblings of a young child with marker. Amazingly, the child in question stuck to the margins and didn't put a single mark on the drawings. Well, maybe that isn't amazing, because even someone who's still eating the crayons more than drawing with then can enjoy Adams' work.

This is a large book printed on what appears to be good quality paper. The drawings come out large and lovely, with all the little details Adams provided. It is eye candy and balm for the soul. I had to stop myself from going through the whole thing in one night, howling, chuckling, and chortling all the way. I hope I remember to come back to this one often.

51. "The World of Charles Adams"