Warning to thieves

I came across this bad rhyme in a bookplate in a book I'm cataloguing today,

"Steal not this book, for fear of shame, For in it is the Owner's name; And when you're dead the Lord will say "Where is that book you stole away?"

Fear of damnation being used to protect books! I laughed!

Scholars to avoid..

Cataloguing a horrendous book which attempts to use philiogy to "prove" the bible. (Well the recent existence of man). Fortunately another copy doesn't seem to be around anymore. But it's a total nightmare. He talks of two scholars Adelung and Sir William Jones who "quite discredit the suppossed antiquity of the Chinese Empire", because Marco Polo didn't write about the Great Wall as well as saying that, "the infantine character of their language, a feature in which the Chinese are inferior to the wildest American tribes, as forming in itself a proof of the absence of a high culture"

What a bunch of horse shit!

It pains me to have to put this under linguistics and not crazy christian bullshit!

H G Wells Mind at the end of its tether

Not all the books to catalogue at work today have been bad. I found this lovely first edition 91945) in perfect condition of Wells' last essay. He died a very pessimistic and embittered man. But I still love him, or perhaps that's why. Even the paper is perfect, grainy wood pulp that appears to show a society on the brink of destruction.

There's a lot of interesting doom and gloom in here. It's odd the way that after so many years of writing in the first person here it's always "he" or "the writer", interesting that at the end of his life he feels the need for this detachment. But there's still some great passages of Wells' prose...

It is claimed by various religious bodies that they protect "the institution of the family". They do nothing of the sort. The family has existed since animals bred and mated and went apart to protect and rear their young. But priestly intervention has degraded this clean and simple relationship by damning unborn children with the idea that they were "conceived in sin", making illegitimacy mysteriously shameful, and keeping all the fundamental facts and possibilities of family life from young people unit it is too late for them to benefit by their knowledge".

As well as..

In spite of the vehement denials of the pious, no rational mind can question the invincible nature of the evolutionary case