Callous Facebook advertisement for a Chernobyl air humidifer

I've seen and heard a lot in my 54½ years, so it's hard to shock me. But I did a disgusted double-take when advertisements for a Chernobyl nuclear power plant air humidifier began showing up in my Facebook feed. 

"Where history meets health," states one advertisement.

"From disaster to delight," states another.

In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in what is now Ukraine, exploded and caught fire during a routine test that went catastrophically wrong due to a critical reactor design flaw. Deaths eventually totaled in the thousands as radioactive contaminants spread across Europe and the Soviet Union.

How many thousands? That's a difficult question to answer, given the uniqueness of the disaster, the complication of tracking radiation across a vast area, and the reality of long-term health effects that take years to emerge. The conservative scientific estimate is that between 4,000 and 16,000 deaths can be directly attributed to Chernobyl. Other assessments that cannot be lightly dismissed put the death total as high as 90,000.

And those are just the human deaths. No one, to my knowledge, has attempted even a ballpark guess on the number of animal deaths.

But, hey, from disaster to delight, right?

Also, more than 300,000 residents across three countries were permanently displaced due to deadly radiation levels.

Here are passages about Chernobyl, then and now, from the 2021 book "Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape," by Cal Flyn:

• "In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident, there was a huge spike in ionizing radiation. But many of the radioactive elements released were highly unstable. They self-destruct, sometimes in seconds. Others over weeks. The most feared product of nuclear fission, in terms of its health impact, is iodine-131, which is easily absorbed by the body. Iodine-131 is stored in the thyroid, where is emits harmful beta radiation, damaging flesh in the immediate area or causing either the gland's destruction or, in lower doses, cancer. (At least four thousand cases of thyroid cancers among the children of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia have been attributed to the radionuclide's effect.)"
• "Seventy percent of the [Chernobyl exclusion] zone is now forest. Pripyat is the territory of the birch and the maple and the poplar, and their leaves lie in a thick litter on the tarmac, branches bare and colorless  but for the globes of green mistletoe and the mustard lichen that mists their bark. Matted shrubs crowd their lower reaches, flecked with the red points of rosehips gone soft. Ivy weaves between their legs. Apartment blocks rise like concrete islands from a sea of green. The trees are standing too close, crowding doors and blocking windows, growing in tight against the walls."
• "It is the most radioactive environment on Earth. These radioactive hinterlands are the consequences of human folly, hubris, of deaths made with the devil."

So, yeah, let's not support crap like this humidifier. We can be better.

Greye La Spina, "The Gargoyle" and Spinnerstown, Pennsylvania

Greye La Spina (1880 – 1969) is notable for being one of the relatively few women whose horror and fantasy writings were published in pulp magazines during the first half of the 20th century.

She wrote mostly short stories, but also serials, essays and a couple of novels. Her 1937 essay "On Scaring Oneself into Conniptions" was published in Science-Fantasy Correspondent, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. And I cite it today because it's the first-ever appearance of the word "conniptions" on Papergreat.

"[La Spina] published an incredible number of stories — as many as 100 in a bunch of different genres, including men’s adventure, horror, women’s magazines, etc. In her prime, she was more successful than H.P. Lovecraft, and was very important to the early years of Weird Tales magazine. Readers loved her and clamored for new stories by her. And then, after she stopped writing in the early 1950s, people started to forget her," Michael W. Phillips Jr. told Paul Semel for a 2023 interview posted on Semel's website. 

Phillips had just edited Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, a collection of La Spina's works. You should definitely check out all of Semel's interview with Phillips, which goes into great detail about La Spina's writing career.

Before 2023's Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, others tried to keep La Spina's work in the spotlight over the decades. A significant part of that effort was today's featured 1975 paperback, The Gargoyle. It includes the 1925 serial The Gargoyle and the 1932 novella The Devil's Pool. The book measures 5½ inches by 8½ inches and features a compelling cover illustration by Vincent Napoli (1907-1981).

If you're already intrigued, there are copies on eBay, as of today, for as low as $20. I'm holding onto my copy, because, despite my ongoing downsizing, it's too cool to give up for that low of a price.

This book's publication was the work of (and clearly a labor of love for) Robert Weinberg (1946-2016). According to Fancyclopedia 3, Weinberg was a member of the fanzine community with a huge interest in pulp magazines. That interest led to some big things: "In 1968, Bob began publishing readers guides to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, eventually expanding both to book length and publishing additional guides and books about the pulp magazines and the authors who wrote for them. 1973 saw his publication of WT50, an anniversary tribute to Weird Tales, a magazine to which Bob would acquire the rights in 1979 and help revive. He was editor-in-chief of Arkham House from 2009–16."

For Weinberg's publication of The Gargoyle, the copyright page notes that both of the included stories were reprinted with the permission of Celia La Spina (1900-1982). (She was born Celia Geissler, the daughter of Greye La Spina and Ralph Geissler. After Ralph Geissler died, Greye married Robert La Spina, Baron di Savuto, an Italian aristocrat. According to Geni, Celia married Eduardo La Spina, her stepfather's brother.)

The copyright page also notes that the front cover illustration (Napoli) and lettering (Andrew Brosnatch) are from "the collection of Robert Weinberg." Officially titled The Gargoyle and One Other, this was #3 in Weinberg's series of "Lost Fantasies" and sold for $5 in 1975.

Here's a passage from "The Gargoyle" that perhaps helps to explain why it's subtitled "A Tale of Devil Worship":

"Against this background stood, at irregular intervals, great white crosses before which were sculptured figures in black, figures that made him shudder with uncontrollable horror at their repulsive and abhorrent ugliness. It seemed as if the human imagination had here attained the climax of revolting, horrific distortion and deformity in sculpture and pictorial art. Not a statue, not a painting, but showed the human face and form in such revolting deformity as to send sickly shudders through the observer's sinking frame. The purpose of this ghastly place was obvious ...

"The red light shining everywhere now attracted Luke's attention. It originated in a crystal sphere, hung on almost invisible chains in a shrine just back of the altar."

* * *

One of the niftiest things I came across is that Greye La Spina spent a signficant portion of her life in rural Pennsylvania! An article in the March 10, 1946, edition of Allentown's Sunday Call-Chronicle is headlined "Greye la Spina, Weaves Weird Tales And Tapestries, Finds Life Is 'Fun' Amidst Solitudes of Spinnerstown."

Spinnerstown (new to me!) is a census-designated place in northwest Bucks County. It has a hotel that's been in operation since 1811, and one of the notable (and regrettable) incidents in the hamlet's history is that a massive, 400-year-old chestnut tree was blown up with dynamite in 1919. 

According to the Sunday Call-Chronicle article, La Spina moved to Spinnerstown around 1926, "seeking solitude and peace in the Pennsylvania countryside after the turmoil of life in Brooklyn." 

I love the article's summary of how La Spina's writing career began: "[In 1920] she suddenly got the urge to write down some of her observations on the occult. 'I decided to write a werewolf story, so I sat down, dashed it off and sent it to Street and Smith. They liked it, and wrote me asking for more.'"

She told that newspaper that she planned to remain in Spinnerstown, despite concerns regarding a theory that the East Coast could be turned into a swamp by rising oceans. (My thought: She may have been reading too much Edgar Cayce.)

She also planned to stay there because, in her words, "I have a one-legged cat-bird who comes and sings in the garden. I don't know what happened to his other leg, but I should hate to leave him."

No animals left behind is a sentiment I can get behind, too.

Stubby seemed like the best housecat to pair with this book. It should be known, though, 

that this particular black cat likes belly rubs and purrs very loudly at meal time.

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."

From 1929: Buy your mom a canary for Mother's Day

This advertisment from the May 3, 1929, edition of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer Journal urges folks to buy a $4.95 canary from Keystone Furniture Company as a Mother's Day gift. 

There are many guarantees, including that the birds are "Guaranteed Genuine Imported, Male Hartz Mt. and St. Andreasburg Rollers." That refers to Harz Rollers (from the mountains of Germany), and St. Andreasberg Rollers, which are a substrain of that canary. 

That $4.95 pricetag (payable in installments of 50 cents per week) would be a whopping $92 today. And of course Keystone Furniture was happy to also sell you a cage and stand to go with your pricey songbird.

From roughly the 1880s through the mid-1930s, hundreds of thousands of German canaries were shipped to the United States each year. It was quite the prosperous trade, though all I can think about are the birds being shipped across the Atlantic and then across the United States.

According to an article by Robert Francis on the website US Bird History, "These birds mostly came from Germany, where there were entire villages whose primary industry was breeding and selling canaries. Shipping these birds was an exhausting, treacherous work that rested on the backs – sometimes literally – of traveling merchants."

Merchants might carry 200 hundreds birds on their back to reach market. The best birds were saved for German buyers, who would pay exhorbitant prices, Francis explains. After that, sellers focused more on the hardiness of the birds, rather than their singing ability, in deciding which ones to send across the Atlantic.

"If Fritz could make it to New York with 85 percent of his canaries still breathing, both he and his employer would be happy," Francis writes, citing the 1888 book Canaries and Cage-Birds by George Holden.

It would have been far more humane in 1929 to just buy Mom some flowers or chocolate, either of which would most likely have been produced domestically. (That's not necessarily the case today, when the great majority of Mother's Day flowers and chocolates and imported and there are real concerns about the labor practices in the countries providing them to us.)

A Confederate bill under the bed

After my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, died in the summer of 2003, we began the gradual, yearslong process of cleaning out the house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford. So it was probably late 2003 or early 2004 that Mom and I first came across a box of miscellanous papers under my grandmother's bed. I'm fairly certain the City of Wilmington scrip I wrote about last month was in the box. Probably some old wills or deeds, too.

And so was an envelope with "P E R S O N A L" and "CONFEDERATE $100 BILL" typed on it.

As advertised, inside the envelope was a taped and tattered piece of Confederacy currency, a $100 bill. It features an image of Lucy Pickens (1832-1899), aka "Queen of the Confederacy," in the center, bears an issue date of February 17, 1864, and states that it is redeemable "two years after the ratification of a treaty of peace." It would not turn out to be redeemable. After the Confederates surrendered to conclude the American Civil War in 1865, the more than $1 billion in currency they had issued became utterly worthless. It holds modern-day value only for collectors. 

I have no idea why members of my family held onto this Confederate $100 bill. I do know that my great-grandfather, in particular, was a Civil War buff and had numerous books on the topic. Occam's Razor suggests someone simply found it an interesting collectible and/or it was forgotten about for decades at a time. 

I don't think anyone in that part of my family tree — most of whom lived in Delaware, Pennsylvania or Maryland — was a Confederate supporter or sympathizer, but of course I have no way of knowing what may have been in their hearts and minds. My grandmother did extensive family genealogical research, and I still have many of the papers and documents she tracked down. (No one else wanted them, really.) I haven't examined closely what my distant ancestors' specific relationship with slavery was, but even if there was nothing direct, we know that nearly all white Americans, North and South, benefited from the long existence of that hateful, dehumanizing, institutionalized oppression.

I'm not going to keep this bill. I feel no need to be the person in the family line who passes it down to another generation, even further removed from any original rationale for keeping it. It's interesting as ephemera, of course, but I don't need it residing in a drawer or envelope. 

"Inventions Wanted" in November 1968 Popular Electronics

I still enjoy looking through classified advertisements in old magazines.¹ Physical media, so little of it digitized, remains a portal into the past and a valuable archive. For my first look at the November 1968 issue of Popular Electronics, I'm checking out some of the Inventions Wanted portion of the classified advertisements at the back of the magazine.² 

• The Wall Street Invention Brokerage, which claimed "10 years proven performances," offered to develop and help sell ideas and inventions, patented or unpatented. "Our national manufacturer clients are urgently seeking new items for outright cash sale or royalties."
• Pioneer Invention Service, located on Broadway in New York City, offered inventors "free expert analysis" and, whoa, a "free invention certificate," whatever that means. Everything was "strictly confidential."
• Voron Electronics, located on East Mermaid Lane in Philadelphia, was seeking electronic or electrical inventions. The George Voron Company was, among other things, involved with "piped-in music," according to this article on Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia.
• Gilbert Adams, Invention Broker, of New York City urged inventors to "sell your invention for cash or royalties! Our client manufacturers eagerly seek new items. ... Financial assistance if needed. 25 years proven performances."

The Federal Trade Commission (which has been targeted this year by the Trump administration) has worked over the decades to protect inventors from those who might use deceptive or unfair practices to acquire their work and ideas. A 1980 synopsis of FTC decisions over the years states, "It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice for a seller of idea or invention promotion or development services to misrepresent, directly or indirectly, that potential purchasers will be provided with evaluations or appraisals of the patentability, merit or marketability of ideas or inventions."

In 1997, the FTC set up Project Mousetrap, which was aimed at identifying, prosecuting and fining firms that engaged in fraudulent or deceptive practices aimed at inventors. In a news release, 

"It is a fact that less than one percent of all new product concepts succeed in the marketplace," Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, stated that year. "Yet the fraudulent firms in this industry conclude, after a 'professional' evaluation, that virtually every new idea or product crossing their desks is patentable and has 'tremendous market potential.' They promise enthusiastic inventors that they can provide professional assistance in getting a patent and securing licensing and manufacturing agreements with manufacturers. Time after time, however, these firms lie to consumers about the sincerity of their belief in an idea and its marketability. Mark Twain once said that the name of the greatest inventor is accident. But it is no accident that these firms profit while the dreams of their customers die. That is their plan, and up to now, they have been very successful in perpetrating that plan. Virtually no consumers have even made back their investment, let alone any profit, from these companies' services."

We should be very thankful for the FTC.

Footnotes

1. See, for example:

• Classified ads from 1974 issue of The Monster Times
• "Fate" classifieds, August 1975
• 30 classified ads from the June 1971 issue of "Fate" magazine
• Some 1965 Amazing Stories ads were too amazing to be true

2. The rest of the Electronics Market Place classifieds include For Sale, Plans and Kits, High Fidelity, Shortwave Listening, Wanted, Tubes, Tape and Recorders, Repair and Services, Instruction, Personals, Government Surplus, Books, Authors' Services, Music, Musical Instruments, Rubber Stamps, Magnets, Photography — Film, Equipment, Services, Records, Hypnotism, Plastics, Educational Opportunities, Printing, Remailing Service, Business Opportunities, Real Estate, Stamps, Taxidermy, and Miscellaneous. Yes, taxidermy.