A Publisher's Notice

 On the page with copyright, ISBN, and so forth of a book fished out of a Little Free Library, the following paragraph appears at the top:

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In this case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

Indeed. Bookstores always were able to return unsold stock to publishers for credit. In the case of paperbacks, they could strip the front covers of unsold copies, and send those back, saving themselves on shipping costs, and the publisher on storage. Going on fifty years ago, I worked for a department store that set out the "stripped books" in an area open only to staff. As I recall, I read Play It As It Lays and all or most of The Peter Principle in stripped paperbacks. Whether it was the chain's policy to offer the copies to staff or it was just the decision of the store management, I can't say. I suppose that every copy the staff took was one that the store didn't have to pay to dispose of.

 That was about it for my stripped book reading. A few steps from me there is a copy of  Beyond the Hundredth Meridian missing its front cover, but that cover was loosened by reading. I don't know whether in the age of Amazon retailers still strip covers. For one thing, computerized analysis has given the big wholesalers much better control of their inventory. For another, a publisher might require some daring to demand the covers of its unsold paperbacks back from Amazon.

The notice was not on the first page one would see were the cover gone. In fact, it is on a verso page, where it will be noticed only by chance, or because some went went in search of publication data.

Source Found

 When I read The Radetzky March, it occurred to me that I had read a disparaging remark on the Sunday dinner of District Captain Herr von Trotta und Sipolje, something to the effect that Tafelspitz was not what someone would have consumed on a Sunday. I don't know why this bothered me: however little Joseph Roth knew of the lives of the Hapsburg bureaucrats, it was far more that I know or wish to know. Still, I looked for the reference. It was not in Stephen Brook's The Double Eagle: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, which seemed a reasonable place to look. It was nowhere in Milosz's To Begin Where I Am or Milosz's ABCs, which no longer seem reasonable places to look--what would his friends have had to do with Moravia? I may have looked in Peter Demetz's Prague in Black and Gold. Nothing yielded the information I wanted.

 Then last week, looking for something quite different in Victor Klemper's diaries, I Will Bear Witness: 1933-1941, I found the passage that I must have remembered, in an entry for February 13, 1935. The Radetzky March has just been removed from the public library:

... Roth, the Austrian officer novel from Solferino to the World War--I can't remember the name. Maria Lazar made an amusing remark about this work. She said: The man knows his Galician ghetto, but he does not have a clue about Austrian aristocrats and officers. Proof: The General has beef for his Sunday roast. But that is an almost plebeian everyday meal and never a Sunday dish.

Maria Lazar was then living in Copenhagen, but I suppose her sources of information were sound. Klemperer makes no indication of doubt.

Being Followed

 Earlier in the month, I was reading a technical posting, of interest to one who develops web applications with Oracle Application Express (APEX), and needs to do something unusual in the processing of interactive grids. (In other words, not of really general interest.)  As I scrolled down the page, the text was interrupted by an image of models wearing clothing with black and white stripes. Now, the post I was reading had nothing to do with fashion, in fact it gave as an example a database of cricket matches, so for an instant I was surprised. But I immediately saw that the left-most model had on a dress I had recently purchased as a present.

I did not purchase the present on-line--apparently it was enough to have inspected it in December. Everyone understands, or should, the thoroughness and refinement of surveillance of on-line activities, yet still a reminder can surprise. I hope that the blog's author gets a cut of whatever advertising money wordpress.com collects.

Lost and Found

 While walking this morning, I noticed a child's Superman output, perhaps a pajama set hung up on a post a few blocks from here. It appears to be for a child of about four, and I can think of a neighborhood boy with a taste for superhero outfits. But it would be a hike for a four-year-old. And how does one lose an item like this outside in cold weather?

Over the last few weeks I have found

• A child's knit glove. I picked it up from the street, posted a notice to the neighborhood listserv, and heard nothing back.
• A child's mitten. This I placed on a stake used to guy up a tree. It stayed there for a while.
• A baby blanket, found while shoveling snow. This I was able to return, for the family that had dropped it on leaving the Orthodox Christmas Vigil liturgy parked a few houses down on Sunday.

There is also a child's boot at about eye level in the branches of a small tree down the street. I have the notion that I've seen it before, may even have suggested to someone that the tree was a good place for it. But I don't know this is so.

  As a child, I certainly lost plenty of objects. As a parent, I was astonished at the quantity of lost items the first time I dug through a school's lost-and-found box. I wish I could say that the experience reformed me, but I have certainly gone through some pairs of gloves since. I don't think I lose them outside, though.

Adjusting the Numbers

 In the chapter "The Army" of The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, W.H. Lewis writes of Louvois's vigorous efforts to suppress a fraud commonly practiced by officers of the army:

.... the most intelligent contented themselves with the profit to be made out of passe volants. Under this system, the captain who was receiving pay for a hundred men, would in fact pay and maintain perhaps sixty, annexing the money of the imaginary forty. Inspections were few and far between, commissioners of war were conveniently blind, and their visits well advertised beforehand; on the day of the muster a collection of valets, grooms, and beggars would be issued with musket and bandolier, and would shuffle along behind the real soldiers. The commissioner would sign the muster roll, the stage soldiers would be dismissed with a pourboire, and the captain could put the whole matter out of his mind for another twelve months...

The military aspect of the passe volant abuse was an even more serious matter than the financial, for it meant that a commander took the field in complete ignorance of the effective strength of his army. To be sure, he had the daily strength returns; but what percentage of the men inscribed thereon really existed? It follows from this state of affairs that we must be very cautious in accepting battle casualty figures in the earlier part of the century; for the captain whose company had a nominal strength of a hundred and an effective strength of seventy would undoubtedly, if he could manage to get his men under fire at all, report that he had lost thirty men in action when perhaps he had had no losses at all.

Near the end of The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom,  Don Worcester describes accounting as it was managed in the Montana of the 1880s:

Northern ranch managers consistently wrote optimistic reports to stockholders or owners, playing down winter losses at "probably one or two percent." Experienced cowmen in Montana considered 10 percent a normal annual mortality. After herds purchased on the tally book counts had been ranged in the North four or five years, owners were beginning to inquire why beef shipments were not larger.

The severe winter of 1886-1887 helped to resolve the accounting:

There is, however, another side to the Big Die-up, as Colonel Samuel Gordon of the Yellowstone Journal pointed out many years later. "It is comforting," he wrote, "to reflect on the number of reputations that were saved by the 'hard winter' of 1886-87. It was a hard winter--the latter end of it--and the worst of it came when the cattle were weak and thin and unable to stand grief, but it never killed half the cattle that were charged to it. It came as a God-sent deliverance to the managers who had for four or five years past been reporting 'One percent losses,' and they seized the opportunity bravely, and comprehensively charged off in one lump the accumulated mortality of four or five years. Sixty percent loss was the popular estimate. Some had to run it up higher to get even, and it is told of one truthful manager in an adjoining county that he reported a loss of 125%, 50% steers and 75% cows. The actual loss in cattle was probably thirty to fifty percent, according to localities and conditions."