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The other book I often take out from my book-shelf for consulting is Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.
This morning Pratik-sir wrote to me complimenting me (and himself) on the mention of Stradivarius Violin in my yesterday's post.
Well, I am not a music buff, nor a book-lover like him with a couple of thousand books born to, like him.
I read about this antique instrument in my Autocrat.
Like to buy one? Here is one for sale:
...Now you know very well that there are no less
than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are
strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to
make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in
harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were
a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona,
or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty
years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
tolerably dry and comparatively resonant..."
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The other book I often take out from my book-shelf for consulting is Oliver Wendell Holmes's 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.
This morning Pratik-sir wrote to me complimenting me (and himself) on the mention of Stradivarius Violin in my yesterday's post.
Well, I am not a music buff, nor a book-lover like him with a couple of thousand books born to, like him.
I read about this antique instrument in my Autocrat.
Like to buy one? Here is one for sale:
Here is some food for Napoleonic thoughts from:
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Stradivarius Violin Price
How does one set a price on a
genuine Stradivarius instrument? With only 650 in existence today, these
immaculate works of art are prized as much for their unique and supreme
craftsmanship and sound as they are for their rarity in quantity.
Stradivarius instruments hold the top five prices paid for any musical instrument. The most expensive Stradivarius violins are the ones crafted during what is considered his golden period from 1700 to 1720. These violins are estimated to bid at the starting auction price of millions of dollars.
In
1998, Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov purchased the 1727 Kreutzer for
nearly $1.6 million. He owns a total of four Stradivarius violins.
In
1990, the 1720 Red Mendelssohn was sold for $1.7 million. It was
purchased by violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn's grandfather, who gave it to
her on her 16th birthday.
In April of 2005, the 1699 Lady Tennant
was auctioned at Christie's for $2,032,000.
Sponsored by the Stradivari
Society of Chicago, the Lady Tennant was loaned to violinist Yang Liu
and in 2009 it was loaned to Yossif Ivanov.
In April of 2007, the 1729 Soloman ex-Lambert was sold at Christie's for $2.7 million to an anonymous bidder.
According
to Christie's auction reports, Antonio Stradivari's 1707 Hammer violin
was sold in May 2006 for $3,544,000, achieving a world record for any
musical instrument sold at that time.
Most recently however, that
record was broken when concert violinist Anne Akiko Meyers purchased the
1697 Molitor Stradivarius for a record $3.6 million. The Molitor was
previously thought to have been owned by Napoleon Bonaparte.
A Stradivarius instrument is a financial and emotional investment that is only going to rise in value.
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This is the context in which Stradivarius finds mention in the Autocrat:
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"...Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some
are good for nothing until they have been long kept and USED. Of the first, wine is the
illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name
three,--meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems....
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I have told the story of my infatuation with the Autocrat a dozen times, so one more last comprehensive time shouldn't hurt.
It was in 1960 I first saw the name: Oliver Wendell Holmes in print. His used to be the leading one-liner in the Quotable Quotes page of Readers Digest when the magazine was at the pinnacle of its Cold War Glory.
I then borrowed a copy of the Autocrat from a lending library at Vizagh and read it with difficulty; and paid a huge fine for not returning it in time. And then forgot about it.
A decade later, in 1970, I saw a frazzled paperback of this book in our fledgling Faculty Club Library, which was a one-rack affair with open access and no Librarian...the Accountant used to double as one (the so-called Library soon dissolved into thin air). The cover of the book had a cute picture of a shaded cup-and-saucer. The inscription inside was: P. C. S. Krishnaiah. I knew this connoisseur of life fairly well. He was in the EE Dept and was one of our few Ph D's then from Imperial College, London, where he went back. I don't know why he had gifted his copy to our Club Library...maybe because those days Air India was not allowing anything but a small suitcase in its hold.
On seeing it I recalled my younger decade and bargained with the 'Librarian' that I would gift 2 books in exchange for this one. He couldn't care less about the titles of his books and jumped at the doubling offer...I got rid of my copy of Emma and Great Expectations without any regret...I read the first one but not the second...and had no intention to do so.
And this time I enjoyed the book thoroughly and tried it on DB. He flipped through it and returned it saying it is too heavy for him and went back to his CG Coefficients of the Lorentz Group which he considered 'light'...one man's meat is...
I then tried it on many of my friends who used to borrow and lose my 50 PGWs...but they didn't even read the first half-page.
A decade later I re-read it and enjoyed it even more. And in 1984 my friend NP was traveling to Delhi and was scheduled to visit my IAS B-i-L for an hour at his home. I then requested him to carry my (PCSK's) copy and hand it over to him with best wishes thinking that a compulsive reader like him would enjoy it. After 5 more years his wife and their Class XI son were visiting us at KGP for a week...so I rang him up (@ Rs 50) asking him to send my copy of the Autocrat via his family...and he asked:
"What Autocrat? Never heard of him"
When my nephew reached KGP, I asked him about the book and he replied that his dad has no recollection of any such book at all. So I recalled RKN's lines too late:
"All of us love to keep our books, and also share the delight of good reading with others. This is an impossible combination and turns out to be a painful experiment. If you love your book, don't lend it anyone on earth. This really ought to be one's guiding principle. You cannot lend your books and yet have them just as you cannot have your cake and eat it."
The news that my copy of the Autocrat has been lost forever was a shock to me. And it was nearing a decade since I read it last and I was pining to re-read it. So, in 1990 I went to our Central Library and found from the catalog cabinets that it indeed has one copy of the book. I took down the Call and Accession numbers and requested Banga Babu, our Assistant Librarian par excellence, to tell me if it had been issued to anyone. He took two days and went through the huge Registers and announced that it is not issued to anyone, so it must be in the racks. And for a whole month I was diligently searching all the Humanities shelves for it, with despair and disgust.
And gave it up.
Then there was this Physic Topper, PL, who was doing his GR Project with me. He was a millionaire's son from Bombay and I begged him to get me a copy of the book whatever it cost from the Bombay Bookshops, or xerox the whole book for me from any Library in Bombay at my expense. In return I simply got a letter from him asking me to kindly collect all his gold and silver medals and checks from the Exam Section and send them to him by Regd Post immediately, at my expense, of course. Which I did the very next day...showing I am not vindictive, to students at least.
Meanwhile Edwin Taylor from MIT became a close friend of mine and I was doing a good turn to him popularizing his Spacetime Software at KGP and also showing him how his software can be used to solve and demonstrate 2-dimensional Relativity problems. And he was egging me on to tell him more about what I was doing with it. So, I thought I had him in my pocket and requested him to send me a copy of the Autocrat whatever it costs. (Both Edwin and Oliver Wendell Holmes hail from Boston, a century apart).
And he started talking of his forthcoming GR book with John A Wheeler.
At last I tried good old arm-twisting on him. By then my longest-ever paper in AJP (with my Project Student TRR) on Spacetime Software's Applications was ready for submission to AJP. I told Edwin that I would gladly send him a preprint if and only if he sends me a copy of the Autocrat soonest. It worked like a charm. Apparently he drove to Harvard Square at once and scoured all the bookshops there only to find that it had been out of print for a long while (Internet and Amazon were yet to get popular in Boston). So, he took the trouble of going to the used-book-stores there and finally got a copy circa 1885. And he sent it to me by express mail as a gift, of course.
When I opened the envelope my joy knew no bounds...it was a gilt-edged had-cover golden book, fairly well-preserved. I read it to my heart's content and kept it safely aside.
I asked Edwin if he read that book before sending it to me and he said:
"I tried the first couple of pages...I don't like authors who pontificate"
And in 1994, I went to Madras for a day's visit to my IAS B-i-L's place where he was posted back from Delhi. As soon as I reached there, my nephew (then in MBBS) came in holding my copy of the Autocrat in his hands high above his head, saying:
"Here is your Autocrat, Uncle, which I discovered deep inside my dad's bookrack while packing up his belongings"
And I hugged my good old copy like a lost and recovered baby.
Back at KGP I was in the CL one morning and Banga Babu greeted me:
"Here is the copy you wanted, Prof Sastry....Prof GB returned it on his retirement saying he couldn't finish it"
So, I got it issued...
You see, I then suddenly had 3 copies of the book at various stages of disintegration. I read the CL's copy a couple of times before returning it when I myself retired in 2005. And by then DB's dot-product finished her MA (English) and was gifting me many books like RKN's 'A Story-Teller's World' and a 'Collection of Poe Stories'. And I had to give her a return gift...so I gave her my (PCSK's) copy of the Autocrat. And after a month asked her how she liked it. And she replied:
"Started reading it a fortnight back...finished two pages with difficulty"
So, I was left with the gilt-edged 150-year-old copy from Harvard Square...and like every other of my books it went to Nellore where it stayed unopened as junk before my son brought it to Hyderabad 3 years later.
By then its pages had become brittle and I was afraid they would crumble . So, I took it delicately to my book-binder to xerox the whole book and get a copy hard-bound. He flipped it delicately and returned it to me saying it can't be xeroxed because the pages would come apart and break like papads and I would end up without either the original or a copy. I grabbed it at once from him and it is now in my book-shelf.
Whenever I open it, which is often, I see the inscription on its first page:
"Jennie B Joy, Dec 25th 1885"
in black ink and Cyrillic font.
And I lapse into a reverie wondering who this Jennie Joy could be, what she looked like, why she bought this unreadable book, did she try it out, who she bequeathed it to, who sold it away to a used-book shop and why...was he or she in dire need of urgent cash...so sorry and so glad...
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