Books: I read 'em

Some notes on recent bookish activity at Casa Jaquandor, since I've had lots of reading time lately (about the only good thing about lengthy hospital stays):

:: Every week at the library I carefully inspect the "New Nonfiction" shelf, and often times I'll check out a selection or two from there pretty much on a whim. One such case was Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart's Masterpiece, by Lorraine Diehl and Marianne Hardart. I saw the word "recipes" and that's all it took, since I'm always a sucker for new cookbooks, and after about five seconds of thumbing through the book, I surmised that it was apparently a celebration of a long-vanished New York City restaurant. I almost always enjoy food writing, so home it came.

What I discovered is that it wasn't a book about one restaurant, but about a whole chain of them, a chain that launched in the 1880s and only finally closed for good in early 1991. The short version of the tale is that two guys, one named Horn and the other named Hardart, got together to open first a lunch counter and then a series of them, eventually spawning a chain of Automat restaurants in New York City and in Philadelphia. The automat concept was that food would be distributed not by servers, but through a wall of coin-operated compartments: insert coins, and then open the little window to take the food out. And then someone in the kitchen, behind the wall of food compartments, would come along and "reload" the thing.

Apparently these places were extremely popular in their day, in pre-WWII New York and Philly; their decline began with the post-war exodus of the middle class to suburbia. The Automat concept sounds a little weird at first glance, but looking at the photos in this book makes me wish there was one still around somewhere, with the art-deco styling and the stained glass windows along the front. This is a slice of bygone-Americana that I never knew existed.

(After a little Googling, here's a new Automat-concept place in NYC. It doesn't look at all like the Horn & Hardart Automats; rather, this looks like something you'd see on a streetcorner in Tokyo or Hong Kong. I wonder if they have Automats in those cities?)

:: Words Words Words by David Crystal is just that: a book about words. Crystal is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, and he turns out to be extremely prolific on the subject. Even though Crystal is a professional academic linguist, this book isn't an academic tome. It's more of an introduction to the kinds of things linguists study, as well as a general rumination on the kinds of linguistic matters that are likely to perplex people who think about language on the level of the intrigued amateur. Crystal ruminates briefly on issues such as: Is the English language deteriorating? What makes a word beautiful or ugly? How is it that words change meaning over time? Why can't language stay the way it is, forever? And why does everybody but me speak with such outlandish accents?

:: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is one of those single-volume discussions of just about everything in the world of science as it is today, similar in focus to Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot and Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way. I love a well-written popularization of science, and this is a good one. It's particularly notable for two features. First is Bryson's focus on a lot of the personalities of science responsible for the things we now know (or don't know) about our world. Science doesn't progress in the straight line everyone likes to think it does, and often scientific progress is held up decades or longer by oddities of personality. The other notable feature of the book is its fairly bleak outlook: if Carl Sagan's theme in Cosmos is what a wonderful and amazing thing the Universe is, Bryson's theme is that the Universe doesn't care one whit about us and is set up such that any number of things can happen at any moment to wipe us out forever: a giant pulse of gamma rays from a supernova we don't know happened yet, an eruption of the giant volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park, Earth being struck by any of the likely thousands of meteors and asteroids we don't know are aimed at our planet because we're too dumb to spend the money to look for them, and so on.

So there's my recent reading (along with several others that I'll blog about later on or review for GMR)!