Quotulatiousness

September 6, 2021

Why the British Rail Modernisation Plan Failed

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 27 Feb 2021

Hello again! 😀

Back to trains, and for this week we discuss one of Britain’s most audacious but ultimately futile projects to revitalise the network in the wake of World War II. However, rather than undertaking a comprehensive rebuild of the network, British Railways was short-changed time and again, ultimately resulting in a facelifted but largely unchanged system that dated back to the Victorian era, though it was much smaller and crippled by far more debt than ever before.

This video was actually a suggestion from an American viewer, who was curious as to why British Rail had such a vast array of diesel locomotives during its early years. 🙂

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.

Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀

References:
– Railways Archive (and their respective sources)
– RMWeb (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)

August 16, 2021

HMS Glamorgan – Computer Ship Of The Future (1967)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014

English Channel.

Top shots of the guided missile destroyer battleship HMS Glamorgan at sea. In the control/computer room a man pulls out old-fashioned computer records [circuit packs, I believe] from a large control cupboard; officers on the bridge look at dials and through binoculars. Various shots in steering, control and engine rooms as the ship moves along. On the flight deck sailors play hockey while others watch and cheer them on. A navigator on deck looks through a sextant while another officer makes notes. A helicopter is moved from a hanger out onto the deck and prepared for takeoff; firemen in asbestos suits and helmets stand by with a hose; the chopper takes off.

Three young men play guitars and banjos before a television camera in a tiny studio; we hear that the ship has its own closed circuit TV station; good shots of the filming; tape recording machines going round; picture being adjusted. Men in a mess room watch the performance on the television while they have a pint. Several shots of the sailors getting their rum rations. Various shots in the kitchens show food being prepared and served into the sailors mess tins; good canteen and catering shots (most of the food looks pretty unappetising) [the person writing the description clearly has no idea just how unappetizing British food could be in the 1960s … this looks well above average for the time]. In the sick bay a sailor gets a shot in the arm from the Medical Officer.

Several shots of the radar antennae on the ship and the men looking at the radar scanner screens in the control room. Men in protective gloves and hoods load shells in the gun turret; M/Ss of the main guns on the ship being fired. Several shots show the countdown for Seaslug missiles to be fired; men at control panels look at dials and radar screens; an officer counts down into a microphone (mute). Complicated boards of buttons show the location of the missiles, intercut with shots of the missiles moving into position by electronic instruction. The missiles move into the launchers on deck and are fired; men watch their progress on a radar screen. Another launcher moves into position; L/S of the ship as the missiles are fired.

Note: on file is correspondence and information about HMS Glamorgan. Cuts exist – see separate record. FILM ID:419.04

A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/​

FOR LICENSING ENQUIRIES VISIT http://www.britishpathe.com/​

British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 136,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1984. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website. https://www.britishpathe.com/

August 6, 2021

Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck: Canada’s only domestically produced all-weather interceptor

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus Studios
Published 3 Oct 2017

Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios​

**I realize a few of you are having trouble with the way I talk and how I’ve done the sound mixing. Please note that this was my first video and I tried to get everything right as I learned to do it. That said, I obviously made some mistakes. I am just one guy making these things and I’m learning as I go. Feel free to check out my more recent videos where I have tried to correct the sound issues.**

The CF-100 is Canada’s only domestically designed jet fighter to reach service and to be built directly to RCAF specifications. In its day it was a competitive all-weather interceptor. The Canuck protected Canadian airspace from the threat of nuclear armed Soviet bombers for over a decade. This is the story of its development and deployment.

Aircraft mentioned:
Vampire F.3
CL-13 Sabre
CF-100 Canuck
CF-101 Voodoo
CF-105 Arrow

Research sources:
http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-d…​
https://www.bombercommandmuseum.ca/aircraft/cf-100/
http://www.canadianflight.org/content/avro-canada-cf-100-canuck
http://www.avroland.ca/al-cf100.html​
http://www.aviastar.org/air/canada/canada_canuck.php
http://www.rwrwalker.ca/caf_canucks.html​
http://image-bank.techno-science.ca/d…​
NORAD and the Soviet Nuclear Threat: Canada’s Secret Electronic Air War By Gordon A.A. Wilson

0:00​ Introduction
1:08​ Initial Development
2:38​ CF-100 Mk 1 and Mk 2
4:26​ CF-100 Mk 3
6:51​ CF-103 and Transonic Speeds
7:36​ CF-100 Mk 4
11:33​ CF-100 Mk 5
13:14​ Velvet Glove and Future Proposals
14:28​ Operational History
20:02​ Conclusion

#CF100​ #CanadianAerospace​ #PolyusStudios

July 10, 2021

The early growth of “Dianetics”, later known as Scientology

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, David S. Wills outlines the early years of L. Ron Hubbard’s quasi-religion that eventually turned into a full-fledged cult:

In the 21st century, Scientology has become a synonym for “cult”. Thanks to an array of investigative exposés and testimony from former members, few people in the Western world are unaware of at least some of the Church’s fantastical beliefs and more alarming behaviours. Sixty years ago, however, it was viewed quite differently. Scientology — or dianetics, as it was originally known — was an appealing idea to many intellectuals and creatives at a time when the world was rapidly changing and notions that had once been taken for granted were suddenly being tossed out of the window. In science, art, and philosophy, accepted norms were being turned on their heads, and in the 1950s and ’60s, L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas — peddled as an alternative to psychiatry — fit quite nicely among the emerging doctrines dreamed up by his contemporary thinkers.

Indeed, the original concepts that launched Hubbard’s movement were not as outrageous as those that define it today. Among these, the idea of “engrams” and the “reactive mind” were perhaps the most appealing. Hubbard theorised that humans are marked by unconscious traumas that essentially pre-determine “aberrant” behaviour. Naturally, he claimed that his organisation held the key to removing these traumas and freeing people from a great deal of suffering. Stripped down to its fundamentals, dianetics seemed to be no more implausible than the strange new ideas espoused by Freud and Jung, or even those previously espoused by Nietzsche.

Of course, there were always oddball beliefs bundled in as well, and as the years went by, these became more prominent. Hubbard — a science fiction author prior to his metamorphosis into quasi-religious guru — enjoyed adding new elements of fantasy to his central theories, layering sci-fi storylines on top of one another until his movement had become an extravagant sort of space opera. The more obvious cult-like elements would emerge in due course: charging adherents for advancement in the organisation; trapping them with manipulation and blackmail; the development of esoteric jargon known as “Scientologese” that made it almost impossible for real communication to take place between members and outsiders; and shocking campaigns of harassment against critics and apostates.

In the early days, however, none of this was particularly obvious. Hard as it is to believe now, many intelligent people were once drawn to Scientology out of an overabundance of curiosity, and its absurdities were generally perceived as harmless, affable eccentricities. Among those lured into the fold of this mysterious new organisation were two of the most important authors of the 20th century: Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs. Although Hubbard’s own novels elicit little more than derision from critics, his ideas wormed their way into some very influential books and left an indelible mark on American literature.

When people first hear about Huxley’s and Burroughs’s interest in Scientology, they typically express some degree of shock and/or scepticism. These men were highly intelligent thinkers famous for their insightful criticisms of the dominant culture. And both wrote extensively on the topic of coercion — Huxley was keenly aware of how humans could be manipulated into subservience by technodictators, and Burroughs was fascinated by the idea that language could be employed for the purposes of mind control. How then could they have fallen for the very thing they critiqued?

July 7, 2021

QotD: Bad language from Down Under

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Barry McKenzie, Australian at Large, made his debut in the 10 July 1964 issue of Private Eye. He was the creation of the comedian Barry Humphries, then, like a number of other creative Aussie expats, resident in London. Hero of a new strip cartoon, illustrations by Nicholas Garland, Bazza, as he would become known, was identified in this first outing as “a strapping young specimen of Australian manhood” and self-described as “an ordinary honest working-class bloke”. His first words “Excuse I, what’s gone flaming wrong?” informed readers that they were in the presence of an antipodean Candide, the classic hick, come to the big city and ready to surf on a tide of Foster’s lager into what within a year would be apostrophised as “Swinging London”.

Naive he surely was — and while over his nine-year career at the Eye he might increasingly turn the tables on the Brits, that innocence never wholly disappeared — in one respect he was omnipotent. His slang-laden, all-Australian language burst into the Eye reader’s consciousness fully-formed and quite astounding. By 1968 Bazza was offering freckle puncher, smell like an Abo’s armpit, bang like a shithouse door, dry as a nun’s nasty, point Percy at the porcelain, siphon the python and perhaps the most celebrated, the Technicolour yawn (aka the liquid laugh or the big spit).

[…]

It was also resolutely carnal: in its concentration on defecation and urination, drinking (and the seemingly inevitable vomiting it induced) and copulation (even if Bazza remains the eternal virgin), Humphries either created or collated a vocabulary that would not be rivalled until Viz magazine’s “swearing dictionary” Roger’s Profanisaurus began appearing in 1997.

Rooted, from Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University and chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary, focuses on this side of the Australian vocabulary. Rooted comes from root, a euphemism for fuck, both literally, in the context of sex, and figuratively, as in harm, destroy, and so on. It falls into what Laugesen is happy to term “bad language”, even if one might suspect that with her formidable knowledge it is a term she knows perfectly well is a construct of tabloid moralising and empty religiosity. (Perhaps I am hardened by proximity, but I find it sad she feels the need to warn readers they will encounter the language that is the subject of her work.)

Jonathon Green, “Fair dinkum dictionary”, The Critic, 2021-04-08.

June 25, 2021

L4: The Bren in 7.62mm NATO

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Mar 2021

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…​

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…​

When the British military transitioned from the .303 British cartridge to 7.62mm NATO in the 1950s, it replaced the Enfield rifles with the new L1A1 SLR (the FAL) but retained the Bren gun as a support weapon. The Bren was updated to use 7.62mm, in a process more complicated than most people would think. Ultimately, only a few thousand L4 series Brens were made, as they were rather quickly supplanted by the FN MAG as a belt-fed support weapon.

The four different patterns of L4 are:
L4A1 – the initial pattern, without magazine supports
L4A2 – the Bren MkIII in 7.62mm with magazine supports
L4A3 – the Bren MkII in 7.62mm with magazine supports
L4A4 – the A2 and A3 patterns with chrome-lined barrels

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

June 24, 2021

The Founder | Based on a True Story

Filed under: Business, Food, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 27 Jul 2017

This one is a contender for best historical film of 2016. The Founder is an amazing movie about the beginning of the McDonald’s food chain. Seriously, more films should take cues from this.
————————————————————
references:
http://www.historyvshollywood.com/ree…​

http://time.com/money/4602541/the-fou…​

http://content.time.com/time/magazine…​

https://www.bustle.com/p/how-accurate…​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert…​

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain…​

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/bu…​

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-24…​

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-real-…​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc​
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard…​
————————————————————
contribute to my Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian​

LET’S CONNECT:
https://twitter.com/Cynical_History​
————————————————————
Wiki:
The Founder is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by John Lee Hancock and written by Robert Siegel. The film stars Michael Keaton as businessman Ray Kroc, and portrays the story of his creation of the McDonald’s fast food chain. Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch co-star as McDonald’s founders Richard and Maurice McDonald.

The film premiered at Arclight Hollywood on December 7, 2016 and was released in the United States on January 20, 2017, by The Weinstein Company. It grossed $23 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for Keaton’s performance.
————————————————————
Hashtags: #History​ #TheFounder​ #McDonalds​ #Review​ #BasedOnATrueStory​ #RayKroc

June 19, 2021

Airfix Catalogue 1962 Page by Page — The Very First Catalogue

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

MOS6510 Models
Published 29 May 2020

Airfix Catalogue 1962 Page by Page — The Very First Catalogue

We turn back time and go through the very first Airfix Model kit Catalogue one page at a time. 1962 was the year of the first edition Catalogue of Airfix Constant Scale Construction Kits. Filled with 135 kits — planes, trains and automobiles the norm, with figures trackside OO/HO constant scale. There is lots in here to look at and enjoy.

As you flip through the pages of this Airfix Catalogue, you will see details of over 135 constant scale plastic construction kits. From the photographs and brief descriptions you will get an idea of the look and size of the finished models. Not until you begin to build them, however, will you feel the excitement and satisfaction of creating miniature exact scale models of famous fighter planes, tanks and ships. So put this video on HD 1080p and make it full screen … sit back and enjoy this catalogue page by page

If you liked the video you can buy me a coffee here
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mos6510​

Music credit : Music by @ikson -alive https://youtube.com/ikson

Find me on

Twitter : https://twitter.com/MOS6510YT​
instagram : https://www.instagram.com/mos6510yt/​
Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/Scalemodelclub/​
Discord : https://discord.gg/e8dp3SG​

Information on kits was researched using https://www.scalemates.com​ plus other websites and forums found on the internet

Links below are affiliated and i will get a small commission which help keep the channel in models

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June 16, 2021

QotD: The Shah of Iran

Filed under: History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Shah that emerges from these pages would be almost a tragic figure, if they gave us a better feel for him as a person, that is to say as a living being rather than a mere policy-maker. He was by nature a vacillator, thrust by inheritance and a destiny beyond his control into a position in which vacillation would eventually prove fatal. In addition to self-doubt, however, he was also inclined to vainglory, oscillating between the two, retreating from crises and ostentatiously parading himself, and boasting, when things seemed to be going well. He thought that he had both the right and the duty, genuinely for the sake of his country, to rule rather than reign, but while he had the ideas of an autocrat, he also had those of an ordinary decent person who baulked at the shedding of much blood, the only way, in the end, that he could have preserved his throne (and possibly not even then).

He was intelligent and wily, and his achievements were not negligible. He managed to wrest control of Iran’s oil first from the British and then from the international oil consortium that succeeded them. He played the oil market with great skill. He instituted an important land reform that genuinely benefitted the peasantry, expanded education, and had a full understanding of the importance of technology in the modernization of Iran necessary if it were to be anything other than a dependent state. His foreign policy was flexible, pragmatic, and shrewd. He needed the Americans but did not trust them (or anybody else, for that matter), realising that in politics there were no friendships, only common interests. This was to be borne out in the most terrible and tragic way during his last few years of exile, with which this book does not deal. Where there is no friendship, there is no gratitude for services rendered.

His failures were at least as great as his successes, and in the end more important from the point of view of his personal destiny. He so hollowed out political life in Iran, in order to exercise power as a true autocrat, that it came to have two poles: sycophancy and plotting against him. Sycophancy is a terribly addictive drug, no doubt a permanent temptation of the powerful (and therefore a good reason to restrict political terms of office); you can never have enough of it, nor can it ever be outrageous enough.

Unfortunately for the Shah, no one is sycophantic from principle, indeed sycophants tend (rightly) to despise themselves, fully aware that they are acting from the most naked of self-interest. There is no rat that leaves a sinking ship faster than a sycophant deserting a lost cause. A sycophant will take a risk to preserve his skin, but not to preserve his master.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Downfall of the House of Pahlavi”, The Iconoclast, 2021-03-03.

June 3, 2021

John McWhorter on Affirmative Action

Filed under: Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest post at It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter outlines the history of Affirmative Action in American schooling and explains why it’s no longer doing anything useful and should be re-oriented to actually help disadvantaged students of all races:

John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image

I do not oppose Affirmative Action. I simply think it should be based on disadvantage, not melanin. It made sense – logical as well as moral – to adjust standards in the wake of the implacable oppression of black people until the mid-1960s.

When Affirmative Action began in the 1960s, largely with black people in mind, the overlap between blackness and disadvantage was so large that the racialized intent of the policy made sense. Most black people lived at or below the poverty line. Being black and middle class was, as one used to term it, “fortunate”. Plus, black people suffered open discrimination regardless of socioeconomic status, in ways for more concrete than microaggressions and things only identifiable via Implicit Association Testing and the like. In a sense, black people were all in the same boat.

Luckily, Affirmative Action worked. By the 1980s, it was no longer unusual or “fortunate” to be black and middle class. I would argue that by that time, it was time to reevaluate the idea that anyone black should be admitted to schools with lowered standards. I think Affirmative Action today should be robustly practiced — but on the basis of socioeconomics.

A common objection is that this would help too many poor whites (as if that’s a bad thing?). But actually, brilliant and non-partisan persons have argued that basing preferences on socioeconomics would actually bring numbers of black people into the net that almost anyone would be satisfied with.

I’m no odd duck on my sense that Affirmative Action being about race had passed its sell-by date after about a generation. At this very time, it had become clear, to anyone really looking, that the black people benefitting from Affirmative Action were no longer mostly poor – as well as that simply plopping truly poor black people into college who had gone to awful schools had tended not to work out anyway. It was no accident that in 1978 came the Bakke decision, where Justice Lewis Powell inaugurated the new idea that Affirmative Action would serve to foster “diversity”, the idea being that diversity in the classroom made for better learning.

I highly suspect that most people have always had to make a slight mental adjustment to get comfortable with this idea, as standard as it now is in enlightened discussion. Do students in classes with a certain mixture of races learn better? Really? Not that there might not be benefits to students of different races being together for other reasons. But does diversity make for better learning? Has that been proven?

As you might expect, it has not – and in fact the idea has been disproven, again and again. No one will tell you this when the next round of opining on racial preferences comes about. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

June 1, 2021

Undoing Dr. Beeching’s cuts

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Brice Stratford looks at the British government’s “nationalization if necessary, but not necessarily nationalization” scheme to once again reform Britain’s passenger railway network:

Astonishing scenes this week, whereby the Tory government announces a White Paper to re-nationalise the railways. The union bosses and Guardianistas who have called for such policy for decades immediately decided that actually it’s a terrible idea, or that this doesn’t count as re-nationalising because it’s the Conservatives doing it, or that calling the new entity “Great British Railways” just because it will run Great Britain’s railways is so offensive that the entire project should be called off. It’s all very tribal, and very silly, and very 2021, alas.

Of course, the Department for Transport (DfT) is still afraid of admitting that this is in fact renationalisation, as to do so would be to rile up certain elements of the Right, and to admit what we all know: that their generations-long experiment in railway privatisation has been a failure. Today we have a service which is overpriced, unreliable, and generally an unpleasant and ineffective experience from start to finish.

The postwar Labour government included railway nationalization in its many, many reforms to the economic life of Britain and in 1948 the remaining railway systems were unified as British Railways. By the 1960s, the system was losing money at a high rate of speed, so Dr. Beeching was called upon to recommend how to put the railway if not into profit then at least into a much more acceptable rate of loss:

Maps originally from Losing Track by Kerry Hamilton and Stephen Potter (1985), by way of Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, 2012-12-31.
https://isyourjourneyreallynecessary.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/nice-work-if-you-can-get-there/
Click map to enlarge.

The aim of the Beeching cuts, which followed on from a pair of reports written by Dr Richard Beeching in 1963 and 1965 for the British Railway Board (of which he was Chair), was to turn the loss-making British railways network into a profitable enterprise. Prioritising this profitability over all else, he proposed axing about a third of Britain’s then 7000 railway stations, removing passenger service from around 5000 route miles, and cutting 70,000 jobs over three years. The moves were highly controversial, and though they certainly saved money, the social consequences were extensive and the scars remain visible today.

As a consequence of the cuts, Britain became over-reliant on car travel, and over the 1970s and 80s town planners gutted the experientially human-scale city centres in service of this newly favoured road transport. We still very much feel the consequences of the Beeching axe today, whereby a rail journey between neighbouring cities is often only possible by zigzagging up to London and back down again, and public transport between rural communities is limited to one bus service every hour or two in the morning and mid-afternoon, which crawls along at a testudinian pace, further isolating and atrophying the scattered settlements that once were happy, thriving homes.

The Avengers – Must See TV

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Billy Rees
Published 19 Aug 2015

ITV programme from 2005 presented by Joan Collins.

May 19, 2021

Why Did We Stop Wearing Hats?

Filed under: Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Karolina Żebrowska
Published 28 Apr 2020

should we bring hats back? what do you think?
_____________
My Instagram: https://bit.ly/2Qo9rrI​
My nudes: https://bit.ly/2UHHY6N​
My merch: bit.ly/2CCq5jE

May 1, 2021

When the libraries failed

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In another of a series of book reviews by Astral Codex Ten readers, Scott Alexander posted this review of Double Fold by Nicholson Baker, which helps to indicate just when libraries — and librarians — lost their mojo:

“Nottingham central library” by JuliaC2006 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York “World”, odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you’ll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable.

The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.

When Double Fold by Nicholson Baker came out in 2001, it was described as The Jungle of the American library system. After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians. The reason for their belligerence is that Baker publicly revealed a decades-long policy of destruction of primary materials from the 19th and 20th centuries, based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust, coupled with a misguided futuristic desire to do away with outdated paper-based media. As a consequence, perfectly well preserved books with centuries of life still ahead of them were hastily replaced with an inferior medium which has, at the moment that I am writing this review, already mostly gone the way of the dodo. Despite its notoriety among librarians, however, Double Fold is little-known among the general public, even compared to Baker’s other non-fiction and his novels.

This is a shame, since the mass destruction of books and newspapers by libraries in the post-war era deserves to be better known as one of the most egregious failures of High Modernism, comparable with the wackiest plans of Le Corbusier. The story combines an excessive reliance on simplistic mathematical models, wilful ignorance to the desires of actual library-users and scholars, embracement of miniaturization and modernization as terminal values, and an almost complete disregard of 19th century books as historical artefacts. Unlike industrial farms, which can be broken up, and Brasília-style skyscrapers, which can be torn down and replaced with something else, the losses caused by the mass deaccessioning of books and newspapers from libraries were often irreplaceable.

As part of the uproar that followed the book’s publication, the Association of Research Libraries published an online anti-Baker FAQ, and in 2002, the book Vandals in the Stacks? by Richard J. Cox came out, presenting an attempted refutation of Baker’s theses. I have read both of these and discuss Cox’s arguments later on, but I must admit in advance that I was mostly convinced by Baker’s argumentation much more than by that of his opponents. Nonetheless, it is uncommon to have a polemical book receive a book-length response, and anyone interested in Baker’s thesis is advised to check out Cox as well.

March 5, 2021

The Way We Live – A Railwayman’s Film Darlington 1960

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anthony Alexandrovic
Published 24 Jul 2015

[Originally from] Tyne Tees TV

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