Saturday's postcard: Bucolic Valldemossa on bucolic Mallorca

Nearly 13 years ago, I did a "Saturday's postcard" post on Mallorca. Here's another. Part of the beautiful village of Valldemossa is pictured on this mid-century postcard, which appears to be hand-colored. "Foto Casa Planas" is listed in the publisher's spot on the back of the card, and the caption indicates that we're looking at "La Cartuja y Palacio del Rey Sancho." To us, it's the Valldemossa Charterhouse, which, as Wikipedia explains "is a palace in Valldemossa, Mallorca that was royal residence of the king Sancho of Majorca and later Royal Charterhouse (15th century) of the Carthusians." It's also known, I believe, as the Royal Charterhouse of Jesus of Nazareth.

The postcard was mailed to Union (probably Union Township), New Jersey, in mid-October 1957, shortly after Lew Burdette, Hank Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series, 4 games to 3.

The cursive note is dated October 15, 1957, in Palma de Mallorca and states*:

Hello Folks

Left Barcelona by ship, took 14 hours to get here. The Valents and I are enjoying the excursions to all points. This is the monastery where Chopin spent many years composing. It is way up in the mountains near the shore. Most beautiful view, but then this whole island is wonderful. It is 100 kilometers from point to point in any direction. Loads of tourists: English, German, French, few Americans. 

Love, Cecilia

*The handwritten message contained a frustrating lack of capital letters and periods, so I did some light fixing.

When H.R. Haldeman essentially predicted the world of today

One of my bedtime browsing books these days is 1980's The Book of Lists #2. It's amazing how much of it I remember from the early 1980s afternoons when I read page after page in the attic of the house on Willow Street in Montoursville. I'm also coming across things that meant little to me then, but are pretty cool now, such as Grace Kelly listing Marie Dressler as the greatest actress of all time, or Susan Kelz Sperling advocating for words such as bedswerver, bellytimber, merry-go-sorry, mubblefubbles and smellsmock to return to our daily lexicon.

Anyway, I was a bit gobsmacked when I read the passage pictured above in the David Wallechinsky-penned list "6 Outrageous Plans That Didn't Happen."

Citing the 1979 book The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides, by Michael Medved, the passage discusses an early 1970s idea by H.R. Haldeman (President Richard Nixon's chief of staff) to create something remarkably similar to the internet as we know it today by linking up all the homes in the United States. "There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events," Haldeman is quoted as stating.

Wallechinsky adds speculatively: "One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers."

Of course it was newspapers, most notably The Washington Post, that brought them down.

It wasn’t until a quarter-century after Haldeman’s early 1970s notion of an interconnected digital world that those ideas began to come to fruition. Haldeman died of cancer in 1993 and, near the end, he may well have been aware of the early 1990s rise of dial-up internet and web browsers and those soon-to-be-ubiquitous AOL CDs. The transformation was underway. A decade later, newspapers began to feel the deeply unfortunate pain of the internet's rise ...

Obscure occult book: "Ghost Detectives"

• Title: Ghost Detectives
• Subtitle: Crime and the Psychic World
• About the subtitle and this edition: I think that was the original title, and that this book was issued twice. First came Crime and the Psychic World, which was published in 1969 by William Morrow and Company. And then Ghost Detectives, with the subtitle Crime and the Psychic World, was published in 1970 in the United Kingdom by The Anchor Press for W.H. Allen and Company.
• Author: Fred Archer. First off, this is not, not, not the Fred Archer who wrote many respected books about history and rural England. This Fred Archer was for 16 years the editor of Psychic News. He also wrote the 1966 book Ghost Writer: A Chronicle of Psychic Experiences. Archer also once went ghost hunting in London with Boris Karloff, according to this 2020 post by Paul Gallagher on Flashbak.
• Cover design: Stanley Glazer
• Pages: 176
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: 30 shillings (I think that's about $25 today in U.S. dollars, adjusted for foreign currency and inflation, but someone feel free to check me.) 
• Dust jacket excerpt: "In the cases cited, methods best described as supernormal have solved crimes, have foreseen and sometimes prevented crimes, or on occasion have revealed crimes that no one except the perpetrators knew had been committed."
• Dedication: "To Valerie who likes a corpse in every chapter"
• Epigraph: "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, William Shakespeare)
• Excerpt #1: "I have no dogmatic zeal to overturn convictions that crows are black, and it is far from being the purpose of this book to do so. If the reader finds a number of puzzling grey birds ... well, he can suspect, if he wishes, a white raven lurking somewhere around. Tracking him down is the most fascinating detective quest of any."
• Excerpt #2: "Like other writers and criminologists one of the first things I did when I went to live in London was to search for the scenes of the Jack the Ripper murders. Some of the street names were changed — another tribute to the Ripper! — and the whole locality has vastly altered, slum clearance being the only benefit derived from Hitler's bombing."
• What even? "Holy shit," was my reaction to the callousness of Excerpt #2, too. I figured I'd include it so there can be no question of what you might be getting yourself into with this book, in terms of tone and writing style. It is far from the only example I might have selected.
• Excerpt #3: "Algernon Blackwood told me of an occasion when the Moody half of the celebrated evangelical partnership, Moody and Sankey, had his life saved by an inexplicable warning."
• Excerpt #4: "Today even the governments of America and Russia are taking extra-sensory perception seriously enough to experiment with a view to its possible usefulness in war and espionage. If psychic abilities can be conceivably be employed for such purposes then why not in the battle against crime, which every country is perpetually waging?"
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.6 stars (out of 5), for Crime and the Psychic World. There are no reviews.
• Kirkus review of Crime and the Psychic World (the only review I could find online for either of the book's titles): "Mr. Archer certainly does trot out a lot of evidence in his case for psychic sleuths. The editor of London's Psychic News for sixteen years, he has some startling documented stories — including a fascinating look at the man who may have found Jack the Ripper (substantiated by some recently revealed Scotland Yard reports). There are hundreds of other cases in which a third eye of justice has intervened by solving and even preventing crime. They range from horror to farce as in the story of the famous French Inspector who solved a murder only to discover that he was the guilty party in a crime he committed while sleepwalking. (His sentence must be one of the most unusual in history — he was locked up only at night until the day he died.) Mr. Archer is himself occasionally amusing. As in his comments on reincarnation and the spiritualists who claim to be possessed only by the very best — 'Sitting Bull at every seance? One shudders at the thought.' And his contention that the police should start using psychic bloodhounds may well be heaven scent."