Tarragona’s Roman amphitheater is remarkable not only for its position overlooking the blue waters of the Balearic Sea but also for the fact that much of it was carved in situ out of the existing bedrock. The structure is 427 feet by 335 feet in size, and, at the time of its completion in the early second century CE, when the city was known as Tárraco, could accommodate an audience of some 12,000. In its early years, the amphitheater was the scene of the usual array of cruel Roman spectacles, and was renovated during the reign of Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (204-222).
Heliogabalus made quite a name for himself—briefly. According to historian Edward Gibbon, he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury” and was assassinated at the age of 18. So black was his reputation that he was then subjected to damnatio memoriae—the erasure of all references to his existence from the historical record. (The fact that such a practice actually had a recognized name tells us a lot about the time.) Nevertheless, archaeologists have discovered traces of his memory in the inscription celebrating the amphitheater’s renovation. It seems that they found key letters on scattered fragments of marble, allowing them to piece together what would have been a reference to the hated emperor.
Tarragona’s mayor asked modernista architect Josep Maria Jujol to undertake the amphitheater’s restoration in the mid-1920s, but nothing came of the project, and it would be the middle of the century before any serious work was done. Decades later, in 2000, the amphitheater was designated as one component of a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the Archaeological Ensemble of Tárraco.
When Maggie and I are in Tarragona, we stay in a small, family-run hotel a short bus ride up the coast from the amphitheater. After an afternoon of swimming on Savinosa Beach and a light dinner at a chiringuito (beach bar) called Pepe’s & Lugano Restaurant and Chill-out (that’s transcribed correctly, by the way), we can enjoy the view above from our hotel balcony.
William Banks Fortescue, The Fleet in the Harbour at St Ives
Grove Koger
Maggie and I visited St Ives with several of her relatives a decade ago.
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, St Ives is a civil parish and a one-time fishing port on the northwestern coast of Cornwall. It’s famous for having attracted a number of talented artists during World War II and afterward, and for being a sister city to Laguna Beach, California. It was the latter association that interested me initially, as I was working for Laguna Beach’s Art Patron Magazine—one of the most satisfying jobs I’ve ever had. The visit allowed me to write an article for the magazine, a version of which you can read here. I’ve also written about several of the port’s most famous artists and sculptors, and about a rewarding tour of the area’s impressive megaliths that we took with Martyn Jackson.
Alberto Ludovici, Jr., Fish Sale, St Ives
But to get back to St Ives (whose name is written, by the way, in what I’ve since learned is the standard British manner, without a period after the abbreviation) … The “looking back” I have in mind involves the painters who visited and painted the port in the nineteenth century. The figures include John Brett (1831-1902), Henry Moore (1831-1895), Edwin Ellis (1842-1895), William Banks Fortescue (1850-1924), Alberto Ludovici, Jr. (1852-1932), and John Mallard Bromley (1858-1939). They were attracted by the port’s light and its mild climate, as well as by the cheap accommodations and studios available. But it was only with the arrival of the railway in 1877—the St Ives Bay Line—that it became possible to travel easily and in relative comfort between London and St Ives and, equally important, to ship large canvases back to the capital and its myriad galleries.
And did they, I wonder, eat the same kind of meat pies—pasties (PASS teez)—that we did so many decades later? And did they enjoy the same refreshing brown ale?
John Mallard Bromley, St Ives Bay
An artists’ association of sorts was formed in St Ives in 1888. Among its members were Marianne Stokes, her husband Adrian Stokes, W.T. Titcomb, Sir John Arnesby Brown, and Sir Leslie Stephen. Others followed, and, over time, the port gained recognition as an important artists’ colony.
If you don’t recognize the names of any of the artists I’ve mentioned, don’t be embarrassed. Their paintings are carefully composed, but they themselves weren’t major figures, and, to my eye at least, they didn’t blaze any revolutionary artistic trails. But they did blaze a geographical one. They recorded how St Ives and the surrounding cliffs and shores and beaches looked, and, in turn, how it must have felt to be there. (J.M.W. Turner, a much more revolutionary painter, visited the area in 1811 and made some drawings, including one titled St Ives from above Porthminster Beach, but, sadly enough, he doesn’t seem to have produced any actual paintings.)
St Ives’ artistic importance was recognized in June 1993, when the famed Tate art gallery opened a branch in the port’s abandoned gasworks, thus cementing the port’s reputation.
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Photograph of white pelicans on the Henry’s Fork by Debra Vis
Grove Koger
Altogether, there are eight species of pelicans in the world, including the American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) and the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis). I’ll leave it at that, since those are the two Maggie and I are familiar with. But I might well have added the words “Pelicans Everywhere” to my title, since other members of the genus can be found in central Australia (at least intermittently), Southeastern Europe, South-Central and East Asia, and so on. So far, they’re absent from the Poles, but give them a few years …
Another photograph of white pelicans on the Henry’s Fork by Debra Vis
The first time I saw a white pelican, decades ago, it was flying along the Snake River, and I thought I was watching a small kit plane. These pelicans are among the largest birds in North America, and can weight up to 30 pounds.Their wingspan can reach nearly 10 feet (the largest of any North American bird), and their length 6 feet. We’ve seen them on Idaho’s Cascade Reservoir near the town of Cascade, and, most recently, on the far edge of Blacks Creek Reservoir, a 600-acre body of water near Boise that draws over 150 other species of birds as well.
My photograph of a brown pelican at rest in Apalachicola, Florida
Brown pelicans, on the other hand, can be found along the east and west coasts of the United States, and on down into the Caribbean, the northwest coast of South America, and the Galapagos Islands. They’re the state bird of Louisiana, and the national bird of several island nations in the West Indies. They’re also the smallest of the pelicans. We see dozens of them along the coast of the Florida panhandle—where they glide effortlessly along the edge of the thermals rising from the bridge causeway linking the mainland to St. George Island, and, in strings of three to six or so, over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.(By the way, that bridge causeway is known officially as the Bryant Patton Memorial Bridge, and dates from 2004.)
US stamp faturing a brown pelican and commemorating the centenary of the nation’s first federal bird refuge, on Florida’s east coast. It’s now a National Wildlife Refuge.
If you’ve never seen pelicans of any kind, I’ll mention that they have outlandishly long beaks and large throat pouches—features that tend to give them a slightly comical appearance, although, of course, those features work perfectly well in catching fish and then draining off water. However, white and brown pelicans fish in entirely different manners. White pelicans work in teams on the surface, herding fish into ever shallower water where the birds can simply scoop them up. Brown pelicans, on the other hand, dive sharply and swiftly from the air, wings pulled in tightly to their bodies, to capture their prey.
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Portrait of Korngold, reproduced courtesy of the Library of Congress
Grove Koger
There’s a story behind Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and that story itself is captivating, involving as it does a talented man overcoming considerable adversity. The man was Paul Wittgenstein, the older brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Prominent composers such as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were frequent visitors to the Wittgenstein household in Vienna, and Paul, who had been born in 1887, seemed well on his way to becoming a concert pianist. Fate, however, intervened during World War I, when Paul was shot in his right elbow—an injury that led to the amputation of his entire arm. He persevered, however, and managed to continue playing with his left hand, a decision that allowed him to resume concertizing. He eventually commissioned concertos for the left hand only from a number of highly talented composers, including Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, and … Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Portrait of Paul Wittgenstein, reproduced courtesy of Bernard Fleischer Moving Images and Wikimedia Commons
Of the resulting works, Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is the most famous, and deservedly so. But I would rank Korngold’s effort only slightly below it, and, over time, I’ve found it more rewarding.
Written for a large orchestra, including celesta and xylophone, Korngold’s concerto (which you can listen to here, played by Howard Shelley with Matthias Bamert and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra) lasts over half an hour. In her 1996 study Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Phaidon), Jessica Duchen points out that the work “looks ahead to the bitter, dramatic terseness of [the composer’s] Symphony in F Sharp,” and it’s that touch of the bitter and the dramatic that makes it so intriguing. According to Duchen, a program note writer has described it as “one of the most peculiar instrumental works to have been written during the twentieth century.” Duchen herself remarks that its “extended form bridges a gap between symphonic structure and pure soundworld impressionism.” Its three main sections— Mässiges Zeitmass [Moderate Tempo], Heldisch[Heroic], and Mit Feuer und Kraft[With Fire and Power]—proceed without a pause. As it nears its conclusion, the concerto seems to be moving toward a powerful affirmation, but Korngold ends instead with a troublingly ambiguous chord.
Wittgenstein gave the concerto its world premier in Vienna on September 22, 1924, with Korngold himself conducting. However, I can’t find a mention of the actual venue.
Wittgenstein, by the way, had a notoriously prickly personality, but his relationship with Korngold seems to have been untroubled. He even commissioned another work from the composer, the Suite for Left Hand Piano and Strings, Op. 23.
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The other day, a friend happened to mention a 1926 book by one Réné Juta, Concerning Corsica.
Maggie and I visited Corsica in 2008, so I was curious to know what a visitor more than three-quarters of a century before had to say about the French island. What’s more, the author’s last name rang a bell, and, after some thought, I remembered that my 1999 Penguin paperback copy of D.H. Lawrence’s classic 1921 travel account Sea and Sardinia bore a cover illustration by someone named Juta. And, as it turned out, that someone was Réné’s younger brother, Jan.
Facsimile of the original dust jacket of D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, with a cover image, Foni, by Jan Juta
Since Corsica lies directly north of the Italian island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea, it wasn’t exactly surprising that one or the other of the Jutas had visited both islands and written about and/or painted what they’d seen.
Jan Juta’s 1920 portrait of Lawrence
Further research revealed the fact that Jan was a close friend of D.H. Lawrence, whom he had met in 1920, and that he had painted a portrait of the famous writer, now on display in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. He also contributed eight stylized illustrations to Sea and Sardinia, one of which appears on the cover of my copy.
Jan Juta’s painting of Calvi, from Concerning Corsica
Jan and Réné were the children of Sir Henry and Lady Juta. They were both born in Cape Town, Réné in 1877 and Jan in 1895. Réné (whose name was often spelled René or Rene) wrote The Cape Peninsula (1910) and Cannes and the Hills (1928), the latter of which Jan illustrated, as well as the book which my friend had mention, Concerning Corsica, which included, once again, illustrations by her brother. She was also the author of several novels, including The Masque of the Silver Trees (1909) and Jack in the Green (1935). She died in the south of France in 1940, shortly before the German invasion.
Maggie’s 2008 photograph of Calvi
Jan himself studied art at South Africa College in Cape Town, and continued his studies at Christchurch College, Oxford; Slade School of Fine Art, London; the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; and the British School, Rome. He painted murals for the American South African Line’s cargo liners African Comet, African Meteor, and African Planet, and wrote a memoir, Background in Sunshine: Memories of South Africa (New York: Scribner, 1972). In later life, he divided his time between London and Mendham, New Jersey, and served as the president of the Society of Mural Painters from 1949 to 1952 and again in the late 1970s. He died in Mendham in late December 1990.
The Jutas and, of course, Lawrence were immensely talented people, and we feel privileged to have followed in at least a few of their footsteps.
Jan Juta’s painting of Bonifacio, from Concerning Corsica
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Photograph by Sydney Dragon, reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Grove Koger
On our most recent visit to the Florida Panhandle, Maggie and I once again encountered quite a few of the small lizards known as anoles. Now lizards may seem inconsequential to you, but they’re an integral part of the ecosystems in which they live, and, in this case, are an important check on the region’s insect population.
Anoles (ah NO leez or AH nols) can be found throughout the Southeastern United States, and we’ve seen them in Apalachicola, on St. George Island, and in the Wakulla Springs area. There are actually several species of anoles, but the ones we see are green anoles, Anolis carolinensis. True to their name, they tend to be green, with pale bellies, although they can switch their color to brown, possibly as a means of controlling their temperature or disguising themselves against a dark background.
Maggie’s photograph of an anole on the dock, Wakulla Springs
Green anoles range in size from 5 to 9 inches in length, have long tails, and sport a throat fan, or dewlap, which males extend periodically, either in a display of strength directed against other males, or as a sexual enticement directed toward females. The fans we have seen have always been pinkish-orange, but apparently other colors are also common. The males also tend to bob their heads up and down when extending their dewlaps.
As far as I know, anoles are mute. They’re exclusively insectivorous, and flies, ants, aphids, and mosquitos are high on their list of preferred prey.
Maggie’s photograph of 2 more anoles on the dock, Wakulla Springs
If you live in the Southeastern United States, you’re probably familiar with anoles. But for us, they’re unusual, and we look forward to seeing them. If and when they see us, they tend to slip back into the crevice in which they’re been hiding.
Should you be interested in learning more about anoles, or even raising them (which I understand can be difficult), there are a surprising number of guides available. One is Edward E. Rotsh’s Green Anole Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Green Anoles’ Care, Behavior, Ecology, Natural History, and Conservation, Featuring Expert Insights, Practical Tips, and Fascinating Discoveries from 2024. However, we’re happy letting them live and thrive in the wild.
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Maggie seated in front of the Hôtel Stella Mare in Algajola
Grove Koger
Today’s post is a reprint of an article I wrote for the Spring 2010 issue of the late-lamented magazine Boise.
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If you’re so inclined, you can fly to Corsica from any one of several airports in mainland France. But Corsica is an island—the fourth largest in the Mediterranean—and islands deserve to be approached by water, the element that determines their character more than any other.
Because we were catching an early-morning ferry from Toulon, Maggie and I skipped breakfast at our hotel and enjoyed coffee and fresh croissants in a snug bakery near the quay. The streets were still deserted when we moved on, and the salt air was clear and cool. The rigging of the yachts in the marina slapped crisply in the breeze as we made our way along the water’s edge.
We were heading for the port of Ile Rousse, its name a reference to the red porphyry islets guarding its harbor. The breeze that had been so pleasant in Toulon had freshened to a gale by the time our ferry docked four hours later, and we took shelter in a bar to wait for the little train that makes regular transits of the island’s northwest coast. It was Ile Rousse, we knew from our guidebooks, that Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli had established in the mid-eighteenth century to compete with much larger Calvi, then under the control of the Italian city of Genoa. Calvi was on our itinerary, but we planned to spend several days at the little village of Algajola along the way.
Our train turned out to be a pokey affair that made periodic stops—an easy-going introduction to Corsica’s rugged northwest coast, pocked as it is with tiny bays and punctuated by rocky headlands. Fields alternated with hillsides of macchia (aromatic scrub) and stands of handsome umbrella pine, while here and there clusters of cottages and villas tumbled down steep slopes to the sea.
2008 Penguin ed.
Algajola’s pebbly sand beach is normally popular with swimmers and wind-surfers, but the gale that had arrived with us took several days to blow out. As luck would have it, however, our hotel sat on a hillside in a sunny, sheltered garden, so we dipped into our collection of travel books for Prosper Mérimée and Dorothy Carrington. Although Mérimée hadn’t actually visited Corsica when he wrote them in the first half of the nineteenth century, Colomba and “Mateo Falcone” have been praised for their insights into the island’s culture. Corsicans, it seems, once lived and died by a code of honor and revenge as cruel as the granite massif that forms their island’s backbone. By the time Carrington wrote The Dream-Hunters of Corsica a century and a half later, that code had faded into an uneasy memory.
1996 Phoenix ed.
The wind also gave us an excuse to concentrate on Corsica’s traditional cuisine. Carrington had called an earlier book The Granite Island, but I’ve come to think of Corsica as the Chestnut Island. Forests of the trees are common, and chestnut flour was the basis for baking until flour imported from the mainland supplanted it. Our breakfast had included chestnut confit, and we quickly developed a routine of drinking Pietra, a pleasantly bitter chestnut beer, each afternoon at an open-air bar built over the rocks near the pier. Later we bought a dark, sweet (make that doubly sweet) torta castagnina made with chestnut flour and pine nuts. I’ve since learned that there’s even a chestnut liqueur, but it’s going to have to wait for our next trip.
One evening after our Pietra aperitif we splurged on a dinner of suppa corsa, a vegetable soup made with meat stock, and a big platter of charcuterie. Corsica’s wild pigs fatten up in the forests on chestnuts and acorns, and the resulting prisuttu, figatellu and lonzu—ham, liver sausage and fillet, all heavily smoked—are melt-in-your mouth rich. With the meats came creamy brocciu, cheese made from the whey of sheep’s and goats’ milk.
Calvi
By the time we left Algajola, the gale had blown itself out, and we were ready to enjoy the sea. Those in the know claim that Corsica’s 200 beaches are the best in France, and that the Gulf of Calvi’s is the best of the lot. Broad and sandy, backed by dense stands of pine, it follows the voluptuous curve of the gulf’s shoreline for almost four miles, and, like the gulf itself, is dominated by the 13th-century Genoese citadelle that overlooks the city. Our hotel was only a few minutes’ walk from the beach, and between the two stood a little open-air market, so when the afternoons grew too hot we shopped for dinner before taking our siesta. Out front, tubs of olives and golden lupini beans glistened in the sun like jewels, while inside was a tantalizing array of individual focaccias and pizzas. Coolers at the back held white wines and, of course, a generous supply of Pietra.
One of the high points of any trip to Corsica is a visit to Scandola, a nature reserve on the island’s northwest coast. Access to the reserve is limited, so the only practical means of seeing the area is by boat. Our excursion started early one morning in Calvi’s harbor and took us for a long cruise down a coastline that grew progressively wilder and more desolate. Here and there stone Genoese watchtowers stared mutely out to sea. Eventually we found ourselves passing along dark grottoes and rusty red volcanic pinnacles that towered dizzyingly, frighteningly overhead. Gulls shrieked resentfully at our intrusion. The trip had started so early, we now realized, so that the little boat could take its time weaving in and out of the phantasmagoria.
After a long, lazy lunch at the tiny fishing village of Girolata, we returned to the boat for a quick trip back to Calvi, where we made a stop at “our” market before settling in for the evening. The spectacular, inhuman beauty of Scandola loomed large in our minds, but we knew that another, reassuringly unspectacular pleasure awaited us. Our room lay at the back of the hotel, and while the immediate prospect from our balcony wasn’t especially noteworthy—a patch of lawn and a pine grove sheltering a campground—we had learned that a canal along the edge of the property was home to dozens and dozens of frogs. That evening, as the light faded and we ate our dinner, we were serenaded by a throaty, sonorous chorus warming up for the busy night of love that lay ahead.
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Today I’m reprinting a post that originally appeared on January 12, 2022.
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Jack London’s daring attempt to sail around the world with a small crew aboard a forty-three-foot ketch, the Snark, began with great fanfare in April 1907 in San Francisco harbor. But it ended when London, who had become seriously ill, abandoned the project in the Melanesian archipelago of the Solomon Islands near the end of 1908. However disastrous, the trip provided the writer with material for The Cruise of the Snark, which I described in my post for January 12, 2020, as well as a number of stories and novels.
Photograph of London and his wife, Charmian, aboard the Snark at Apia, Samoa, taken by A.J. Tattersall
Several of those stories are set in Hawaii, the northernmost archipelago in Polynesia, and, given their complexity, they deserve a post of their own. But two other collections—South Sea Tales and A Son of the Sun—reflect London’s experiences in other parts of the Pacific and complement each other nicely in terms of treatment and attitude. (If your knowledge of geography is a bit rusty, the islands of the Pacific are usually divided into several geographical and cultural regions, including Polynesia, in the eastern and central Pacific, and Melanesia, in the western Pacific.)
Map of the Pacific based on United Nations geoscheme M49 coding classification, the work of Tintazul as modified by Cruickshanks
South Sea Tales (1911) is made up of eight stories, five of which—“The Whale Tooth,” “Mauki,” “’Yah! Yah! Yah!,” “The Terrible Solomons,” and “The Inevitable White Man”—dramatize the conflicts between cultures in Melanesia. On the whole, these are likely to strike most readers as shockingly, almost numbingly brutal, although it’s difficult to fault their honesty. After all, they reflect what London saw in Melanesia, a region once infamous for cannibalism and, in London’s own day, for “blackbirding,” or slave trading, on the part of European and American interlopers. However, the fifth of these stories, “The Terrible Solomons” actually satirizes the islands’ “savage” reputation.
The remaining stories in South Sea Tales are set in Polynesia. “The House of Mapuhi” dramatizes the frightening impact of a hurricane on an atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago (in eastern French Polynesia), while “The Heathen” is a celebration of brotherly love between a Polynesian and a Caucasian. The best of the stories in the collection, and one of the best that London ever wrote, is “The Seed of McCoy,” in which a descendant of one of the Bounty mutineers pilots a ship whose cargo is on fire through the Tuamotu Islands. A long chain of 78 atolls and low-lying islands stretched across waters notorious for their strong currents, the Tuamotus were once known, with good reason, as the Dangerous Archipelago. Despite his descent from a notably violent man, the pilot manages to calm the ship’s panic-stricken captain and crew through his innate gentleness, and, thanks to his knowledge, saves them all.
Photograph of Hirifa Beach on Fakarava Atoll, the second largest of the Tuamotu atolls, by Julius Silver
The story is closely based on the plight of a real ship, a four-masted barque named the Pyrenees, which underwent a similar ordeal in the same archipelago in late 1900. Like the ship in London’s story, also named the Pyrenees, the actual one initially made for Pitcairn Island when the fire was discovered, but as there was no anchorage there, the captain took on a pilot named James “Big Hunty” McCoy who managed to pilot the burning vessel on to Mangareva, about 260 miles west of Pitcairn. However, the ship in London’s story is forced to sail past Mangareva and finally beach on Fakarava, an atoll even farther west.
Looking back over the past few years, I realize that I’ve written about the Tuamotus before in World Enough. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall set their fine 1936 novel The Hurricanethere, and Thor Heyerdahl’s raft Kon-Tiki fetched up on a reef in the Tuamotus after its famous 101-day voyage. It’s a small world …
Pyramid paperback ed., early 1960s
“The Seed of McCoy” also recalls Joseph Conrad’s autobiographical story “Youth,” which dramatizes a similar situation and which I wrote about in my post for December 3, 2018. London read and admired Conrad, but while Conrad’s almost aristocratic language and attitude are those of an officer, London’s plainer language and attitude are very much those of a sailor, even though the sailor was for a time the captain of the Snark.
A Son of the Sun (1912) has since been republished as Captain David Grief, as its eight stories all involve a larger-than-life character by that name. If the stories in South Sea Tales really are “tales,” which William Harmon and Hugh Holman define in the ninth (2003) edition of A Handbook to Literature as “relatively simple” narratives, then the stories in this collection are even simpler. I’m tempted to call them yarns. Having reread them after a number of years, I can recommend only the story that opens the collection, also named “A Son of the Sun,” and the one that closes it, “The Pearls of Parlay.” In the latter, an embittered French settler plans to auction off a fortune in pearls. But soon after potential buyers have reached Parlay’s atoll on their ships, a hurricane of unimaginable intensity strikes. As the mortally injured Parlay reminds them, “Don’t forget … the auction … at ten o’clock … in hell.”
1st ed., Doubleday, Page
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My parents and I lived on a small farm in rural Ada County, Idaho—which was then nearly as rural as you can get. Two dozen trees grew around our house and in the little abandoned orchard that lay south of it, across a pair of irrigation ditches from which my father watered our lawn and the fields of crops he grew.
I was free to wander much of the time, which is ideal when you’re young, and, fortunately, I survived the process. But to get to Cicely Mary Barker …
Barker, The Honeysuckle Fairy
Barker was born in 1895 in Croydon, Surrey, England, and, although ill for much of her life, was active as an artist from 1911 through 1962. Croydon is a district in Greater London, and, by the time Barker was growing up, had become an important industrial area—a fact I find surprising, as the world the Barker posits in her work is distinctly rural if not backward-looking.
Reproduced courtesy of the site Flower Fairies
I understand that during her childhood, Barker spent much of her time alone, drawing and reading—circumstances which, once again, remind me of my own childhood. But when she was 13, Barker began attending the Croydon Art Society, and, thanks to her outstanding talent, became a life member of the Croydon Art Society. Her first works appeared on greeting cards, after which she began selling to other card publishers as well as magazines. Her breakthrough came in 1923, when Blackie & Son published her book Flower Fairies of the Spring. A number of books followed, with those picturing fairies (and providing accompanying rhymes) proving to be the most popular. Among her influences were the Bible and the works of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Barker, The Acorn Fairy
Barker combined accurately painted flowers (and leaves and branches), often with the help of employees of London’s Kew Gardens, who gladly supplied her with specimens. As she wrote, “I have drawn all the plants and flowers very carefully, from real ones; and everything that I have said about them is as true as I could make it.” She added, however, that she had “never seen a fairy; the fairies and all about them are just ‘pretend.’”
I admit to being suspicious about that latter statement. I suspect that most if not all children begin life as pagans, although most eventually forget that stage of their lives—or pretend to. Although I have no proof, I suspect that Barker grew up as a pagan, and that a sliver of that paganism survived in her art. She lived during a period that saw a decline in formal religion but a growing interest in fairies and fairy lore. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had lived for a time in Croydon, famously wrote in support of the authenticity of a series of photographs of fairies, the notorious “Cottingley Fairies,” which were later revealed to be a hoax. This from the creator of the supremely rational detective Sherlock Holmes! A sliver of paganism had survived within his heart as well.
Barker, The Ribwort Plantain Fairy
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Today I’m reprinting an updated version of a post that originally appeared in World Enough on January 15, 2018.
If you have an interest in older genre fiction, you may have run across a series of books published by Juniper Press of Long Island City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Appearing in oversize paperback editions, they shared a distinctive red and black cover design—an image of a menacing gentleman holding up a cape on which the book’s title and contents were printed. The first four volumes were published as “The Forgotten Classics of Mystery”—a designation shortened to “The Classics of Mystery” for the remaining six.
I’ve owned a couple of Juniper Press books for decades, having discovered them on the back shelves of the Book Shop, a one-time mainstay Boise institution managed at the time by Nancy Stringfellow. One was The Strange World of Arthur Machen, my introduction to the marvelous Welsh writer who remains a favorite to this day. Another was Part 1 of An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries, the second part of which I’ve since purchased online. Several of the books, like the Machen, are by writers regarded as standards in their genre or even in the wider world of literary fiction. The omnibus volumes, however, include a number of long-forgotten figures as well. All the works in the series were in the public domain, and derived from times in which the term “mystery” apparently covered a pretty wide range of dark fiction. Several of the longer ones were abridged.
Information about Juniper Press is scarce, but I’ve tracked down an old column by critic John Barkham that provides some details. The piece, which I assume was syndicated, appeared in an Illinois newspaper, the Freeport Journal-Standard, for June 16, 1960.
Barkham reports that the books were published by one Mircho Smrikarov, a Bulgarian refugee who had brought out translations of prominent mainstream American authors in his native country before fleeing in the early 1950s. Barkham credits Smrikarov with handling the entire Juniper Press operation, including the typesetting, but other individuals are credited as editors in the books themselves. The volumes I own include short introductions and were printed by the Marray Printing Company of Forge Village, Massachusetts.
Here, according to the invaluable WorldCat online union catalog, are Juniper Press’s ten mysteries:
Wilkie Collins, The Best of Wilkie Collins. Ed. George Bisserov. 1959.
An Omnibus of American Mysteries. Ed. Michael Eenhoorn. 1959.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The Diabolical Genius. Sheridan La [sic] Fanu. Ed. Michael Eenhoom. 1959.
Robert Louis Stevenson. R.L. Stevenson: The Fabulous Raconteur. Ed. Arno Eckberg. 1959.
An Omnibus of British Mysteries. Ed. George Bisserov. 1959.
Arthur Machen. The Strange World of Arthur Machen. Ed. Arno Eckberg. 1959.
Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Michael Eenhoorn. 1960.
An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries. Part 1. Ed. George Bisserov. 1960.
An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries. Part 2. Ed. Arno Eckberg. 1960.
Honoré de Balzac, The Mysteries of Honoré de Balzac. Ed. Boyan Choukanoff. 1960.
Smrikarov, 1974
Digging more deeply, I’ve gained partial access to a 1955 article from Publishers Weekly, “Juniper Press, New Firm, to Publish Balzac.” This appears to be a reference to the two early Juniper titles that I find in WorldCat—César Birotteau (1955) and The Bachelor’s House (1956)—rather than the Balzac collection I list above. The 1960 edition of Literary Market Place identifies Smrikarov as the firm’s President and Choukanoff as its “Pub. Dir.”
Barkham mentions that Juniper had another series of mysteries “in active preparation,” but, alas, the volumes never appeared. As for Smrikarov himself, I find that he or his namesake died in Hudson, New Jersey, in 1986.
A July 20, 2023, entry in Wormwoodiana by Douglas A. Anderson covered much the same ground that I did in my original post, but also carried the photograph of Smrikarov which I’ve inserted in today’s redux version.
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It’s not really a “bat column,” not quite, but, given the small bronze bat atop its spire, Maggie and I call it that. We’ve visited it every time we’ve found ourselves in Palma de Mallorca.
The column in question is known formally as the Font de les Tortugues, or the Fuente de las Tortugas—a reference to the four bronze turtles on which its corners rest. The obelisk’s base rises from a small circular pool, and stands at the north end of the Passeig des Born in the Plaça rei Joan Carles I, near the center of old Palma. Appropriately enough, the area is also known as the Plaça de les Tortugues.
Vintage postcard
The obelisk, made from locally quarried Santanyi sandstone, was erected in 1833 in honor of the Princess of Asturias (who was also Isabella of Aragon), and the bat at its top is a symbol of the kings of Aragon. That kingdom had seized control of the island in late December, 1229, when some 15,000 troops under the command of James I of Aragon had defeated its Muslim ruler. James went on to reign as the island’s king until his death in 1276.
Palma’s coat of arms features a bat above a shield, and it’s been suggested that its presence is a reference to some event involving a bat during James’ campaign. But I’ve also read that the creature was originally a vibria, or winged dragon. Turtles are regarded as a symbol of longevity, but then the base of the obelisk does sit above a fountain. What’s more, the Passeig des Born was once a watercourse. As if bats and turtles weren’t enough, four small spouts in the form of lions’ heads splash water into the pool—at least on some days.
The obelisk was erected at about the same time that Palma’s famous sphinxes were placed at the ends of the Passeig des Born. Together, the features comprise some of what we think of as the city’s landmarks, although it’s a purely personal selection.
Palma’s coat of arms
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