Cat people

My 2025–2026 reading cycle has ended. On the last day, I finished reading six books. I came up three books short. (The final tally was fifty-seven.)

I thank Karin for her tolerance.

I caught Samuel trying to put one of my books on its shelf. He couldn’t slide it into the space; he was jamming it in. I stopped him before he could wrinkle the cover.

He’d brought the book downstairs from his play-room.

“Why did you take my book upstairs?” I asked.

He said: “I just wanted to copy out some of the text.”

I didn’t object to that answer. Indeed, I was rather pleased.

We have a new cat in our house: a young “queen” that Karin rescued from a gang of “toms.” We’re keeping her in our bathroom. The plan is to get her spayed ASAP; we’ll then consider whether to give her up or keep her. She’s starved but friendly, a year or so old. She may be the offspring of the winsome, irresponsible cat that lives across the street.

The “toms” have been prowling outside our house all day. I just saw them have their way with another “queen.” One can’t save them all.

Jasper and Ziva are none too pleased, perhaps because a new cat is in the house, perhaps because Karin medicated all three cats against fleas.

Body-text fonts, pt. 50: Baskerville (metal type, mid-20th c.); Baskerville 10 (digitization)

My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).

This, too, is representative:

Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:

There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.

It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”

(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)

Daniel, cont.

By now, many readers will have met Daniel or seen photos of him. For those who have not, here are a few images.

(A) Minutes after his birth:

(B) A day later. For scale, he is next to a book (a New York Review of Books Classic, the same size as a Penguin Classic):

Compare with the newly born Samuel.

This time, I tried not to take very many books to the hospital. I ended up taking seventeen, not counting the books of the Bible.

(C) At home. Daniel meets Samuel and my mother:

(D) Daniel sleeps:

Fictitious history

The air has cooled, what with the arrival of September; and our finances, while tight, are being loosed ever so slightly. This last week, I even bought a new book – The Glory of the Empire by Jean D’Ormesson – the “history” of a fictitious realm.

There is a whiff of Tacitus in its first paragraph:

The Empire never knew peace. First it had to be built, then defended. From the depths of its history there arose the clang of axes, the hiss of javelins, the cries of dying at evening after battle. Neither the forests to the north and east nor the high mountains in the south were proof against attack and invasion. In the great fertile plains at the foot of the volcanoes, massacre succeeded massacre. To the west, the sea too brought its share of dangers: suddenly threatening sails, pirates, surprise assaults at dawn. On the Empire’s borders night never came without its escorts of dread and death. Even within, both in the country and in the towns, interest and passion raised up rival bands to fight for power with violence and arson. The Empire grew up on a foundation of flames and blood. … And peril came not only from men. Unbridled nature exacted a high price … Imagination hardly needed to improve on the horrors of the real.

(The last sentence is like when Agatha Christie has her characters say: “This murder is as shocking as a detective novel, but this is real life.”)

D’Ormesson is commenting on historiography’s patterns and pitfalls. Is there any other sustained work that does so by way of recording the “history” of an imaginary yet this-worldly realm? Le Guin’s Orsinia, perhaps? I’d be grateful to be told.