Captain Paul

When I purchased the three Horatio Hornblower books last month, this book, Captain Paul, by Commander Edward Ellsberg, I put back. That bothered me, so the next week, I bought it. The week after that, the thrift store had a fire, and I assume all of the books were ruined as the sprinklers were going, and the fire was near the book section. So, this eighty-five-year-old book would have been ruined.

Speaking of ruined antique items, the ARC in Arvada put their price stickers on the face of old, paper/cardboard covers and packaging. What kind of person does this, knowing full well that the stickers are going to take the old, fragile paper artwork off when they are removed? They are clearly old, and… it’s just amazing how dense some people are, and how they just don’t care. I’ve seen this done to old books that have survived who-knows-what, but that thrift store pricing person? Nope.

Anyway. I just finished Captain Paul, and it was a good read. The language is different, as when I was reading the Count of Monte Cristo, but one adjusts. What really struck me is the politics, how people were chosen for really important roles, especially in a situation like the Revolution where you need everything you have working as best it can, and they kept bungling the simplest things. The logical things.

And the fact that John Paul Jones was incredibly good at what he did, but even he was derailed by chance, cowards, treachery, and incompetent subordinates. It actually was very difficult to find good help on sailing ships, I read a book about Magellan and I remember that they could only get criminals who needed to get away, loners and desperate people to man these ships as the work was hard, dangerous, and likely to be the end of you.

Still, John Paul Jones had enough success to land him in the history books, but he was right when multiple times, he exclaimed at how much they could accomplish if only the simple and logical choices were made by politicians, seamen, and others.

The book actually starts with a massive failure, the narrator of the story, who is telling it from his perspective as John Paul Jones’ friend and companion, Tom Folger, suffers a massive loss and almost dies in the books’ first adventure at sea. But that led him to Jones.

The writer of The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas, also wrote a book on John Paul Jones as well, so I’m going to be looking out for it.

I pulled some other nautical books (I’m calling them this, for lack of a better term. Seafaring?) from my annex and I now have a section of them. The two big Hornblower compilations both had the same problem with the cover separating from the book, so I fixed that with the correct glue. This Captain Paul was in great shape, and had that old paper smell and feel. A joy to read, and I got through the six hundred pages in about a week, which is good for me as I am a slow reader.

I have The Mutiny of the Eisinore by Jack London, The Bounty Trilogy, eight more of the Hornblower books (I’m missing two of them), and a book of stories in the same realm. I’m thinking I’m going to try and read them all, if I can read both the entire Brad Thor and Vince Flynn series, this should be easy!

I do need to finish The Count of Monte Cristo, I only made it a third of the way through and I’m going to have to start over as it has been too long. I would have to count this one as part of my nautical books, but it is in my deluxe book section as it is a Barnes & Noble Collectors Edition with gilded pages and fake leather and all. It costs $20-$30 new, which is a great deal considering what Easton Press, Folio Society, or any other high-quality publisher would charge, those books start at around $100 and up. They are worth it, but until I find a copy used for less than that…

LEGO Armada Galleon Esperanza

I like sailing battleships, always have. I also like LEGO. But I don’t collect LEGO, for several reasons, primarily because they cost a lot and I don’t have space… I can’t do everything. But I still very much like LEGO. There was a point in 1996 where I almost bought this big LEGO ship, and I was so very close to doing so, but I didn’t. That might have been what would have brought me into being an active LEGO fan, and not a passive one.

I am aware that there have been a few ships released overall, I don’t know how many exactly, but they are out there. A new one coming out, the “Armada Galleon Esperanza” looks to be one I would really like to get!

This video sold me on it! However, I am between jobs, and have a lot of things going on, so a treat like this really isn’t important. But, a few years down the road… who knows? Just a neat thing to have.

My history with LEGO is documented in the below six photos. I only ever had four sets of LEGOs, one of them was pretty small. But we make everything out of them!

The sailing ship in two of the photos above, was entered in a contest at Villa Italia Mall. The rules stated that you could not use any non-LEGO items in your creation, but the winner was a guy who made a huge Mile High Stadium, topped off with a… non-LEGO horse at the top! He got the free trip to Waco, Texas. My little ship was a genius build for me at the time, and I was pretty disappointed that this cheater won! In retrospect, there were a lot of great builds there.

The “Voyager” spaceship was given to me by my Aunt Ida, and it pretty much blew my mind as the pieces and concept were far different from the LEGOs that I had available to me.

I still have all of these LEGOs in storage, and like my Star Wars collection, they are priceless to me. Material possessions I shouldn’t be so attached to, but I am. Too many good times.

The Lost “Rydberg Construction” Cap

This was my favorite cap when I was a kid. “Rydberg Construction” was the company of my Dad’s cousin, but I thought it was cool because it was a construction company owned by someone in the family, and to a kid, that is a big deal.

I was walking home after a piano lesson, and this older kid on a BMX bike came up behind me and just took it off of my head. I’ll never forget the way he slapped it onto his head with one hand, like it was not a big deal, and lazily rode off as I ran after him, unable to keep up.

So, I get home, and as luck would have it, my big brother and his big friend were there and I was crying. They took off in my brother’s cool Camaro to find this BMX jerk. That’s what good big brothers and their friends do.

Unfortunately, they never found the guy. I suspect that years later I rode the same bus with him as this happened in the same area as the Drake Jr. High bus stop, and there were a lot of jerks on that bus, too. Or, perhaps the world is simply full of jerks.

Anyway. I got the bright idea to recreate the logo, which only took a few minutes, and when I find employment (I’m between jobs right now, http://randyrydberg.com) I’ll be ready-to-go to have a new cap made. Maybe more than one in case someone else gets the bright idea to steal it again.

I did get a new “Jedi” cap for Christmas later that year though, which I still have. There’s a famous photo of George Lucas wearing the same hat, which makes me quite fashionable.

As it turns out, the original logo had two different fonts, but I just went with the secondary font for the entire thing.

Three 1937 Horatio Hornblower Books

I just finished Captain Horatio Hornblower: Beat to Quarters… and it was really good! I bought three original 1937 editions for under five dollars, and they don’t go for much more online. These should have had a slip-case, but I’ll take them anyway. I’ve been wanting the Easton Press editions of all eleven books, but as you can see from the screen shot below, they aren’t cheap!

There is something nice about reading a good old book from 1937, and these were in great shape although I wouldn’t subject them to much abuse. This series is reprinted mostly in paperback, so I don’t think I’m going to read the entire run until I get the Easton Press set. Until then, I have these three, and a volume that has three other books in one volume, so I have six to read in the meantime. Along with all of the other books I have going.

These volumes remind me of the original Hardy Boys books I read in second and third grade, which were published in 1927, because of the similar word count on each page, the size of the books, and the depths of the stories. The original Hardy Boys, before they were heavily edited/rewritten entirely and republished in the classic blue hardback covers, were stories with more depth and real adventure that they share with these Hornblower books.

The Hornblower mini-series from about twenty years ago is fantastic, as well, and that is what got me into these books, besides my interest in sailing battleships that goes back to kindergarten and through high school. I drew a LOT of them at school for more than a decade. Nothing better than ships with three decks of guns blowing each other up! As long as I’m not there, of course.

There is this terrible, awful Gina Davis / Renny Harlin movie called Cutthroat Island, of which the only redeeming thing it offers is a great ship battle at the end. Neat stuff.

050226 • Thrift Store Finds

Found a few things for next-to-nothing that were very new, such as three expensive, recent books, and two newer classical cds… usually classical cds are rare after the year 2000, but today I found two of them, one was 2011 and the other, 2019! I don’t think I’ve ever found a classical cd that new, and it was also a double-cd, and of a very appealing nature, Bach transcriptions for piano! Amazing that I was able to find it.

I have three general kinds of cd categories when I go to thrifts:
1 – The older, cheap, generic collections or releases.
2 – The big, or boutique labels up to the year 2000.
3 – Any non-generic post 2000. (The most rare to find at a thrift)

If one goes to Amazon, most of the cds there are exactly what doesn’t make the thrifts, and never will. Anything new isn’t out in enough volume anymore to be found. I’m thinking it is a better use of time to get box sets, that package cds into more compact forms of storage, are far cheaper as a box set per cd, and are all new and clean. Plus, you know what you are going to find, wheras thrift stores, the case could be broken, most are scuffed up or have cracks in them, and the cds could be immaculate, but easily, not immaculate. And you never know what you are going to get. Trying to piece together an entire set, or artist’s complete work… that is an ongoing task that is often never completed.

The John Williams collection is from 2011, and has three discs for the price of one! For one dollar!

But, if I’m at a thrift, it doesn’t hurt to pick out the few gems that might be there. At a dollar apiece, the price is right!

As for the books, one of them was from last year and sold for thirty dollars new! There are no bad selections here, as usual. The Diary of Vikenty Angarov is the oldest book I bought, and one I’m never going to see in the wild again; these memoirs of former Gulag or other death camps are always of intense interest. The Endurance is a true story recommended to me about a year ago, and this book has a lot of really good photos, of which I am surprised they survived considering what all of those explorers went through.

Hero of Two Worlds is about Lafayette, a guy who is always overlooked when I read about the American Revolution. It looks to be a smooth and very interesting read.

The Proud Tower

I stole these two books from my Dad when I reorganized and cataloged his library a few months back, because they aren’t topics he’s interested in, while I am very much so into World War I. So, I “procured” them. And today, I finished reading “The Proud Tower”, after finishing “Mr. Wilson’s War” last month. These aren’t the smoothest books to read, and “The Proud Tower” did a deep dive into very detailed events that helped form the cataclysm which was The Great War.

The title of the book is derived from the 1845 Edgar Allan Poe poem “The City in the Sea”. Two lines of the poem are used as the epigraph for the book: “While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.”

Coincidentally, I had purchased a paperback of “The Proud Tower” not long before I found the hardback in my Dad’s possession, and was already a hundred pages into it. I prefer hardbacks, and while I have three of Barbara Tuchman’s other books in that format already, I didn’t have this one. I was close to buying it off of Amazon, but didn’t. Just days later I just happened to run across it as mentioned.

Another neat thing about this adventure is that these two hardback books are from the same personal library of someone I don’t know. Maybe Dad picked these up at the annual Jefferson County Library Sale, but otherwise, who knows.

And for being sixty-five year old books, they are in PRISTINE condition. Like-new, maybe a few minor bends in the dust jackets, and a very slight fading in the paper. But they are great to hold while reading.

In any case, they will be together on my shelf from now on, due to this experience.

I’ll be reading the book Tuchman is most known for soon: “The Guns of August”, which covers the Great War specifically. “The Proud Tower” is the prequel to that one. My copy is the Easton Press, leather-bound edition, quite exquisite.

I’m Thankful For: Optical Character Recognition

My Dad, when reading books, uses highlighters on passages that he likes and wants to remember. This frustrates me when buying books: I’ll come across a great book, open it up, and someone has crudely underlined paragraphs all over the place. Often, at a thrift store, all of the books are pretty much common or not of a great topic, except one… and when I open that one special volume? Its pages are all marked up with underlining or markers.

Quite frustrating.

My way of noting special passages is different: I take a photo of the page with my phone, and use Adobe Acrobat’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to turn the text into editable text, as if it were typed in and not just part of a photo of a page. Adobe’s OCR isn’t bad, and I appreciate what it does considering I grew up writing everything with pens, pencils, and manual typewriters. Correction ribbons… ugh.

So, this is how I do things. I have a big file with all sorts of interesting excerpts from books that I’ve read.

But today, I found out about a better way to do this. I was taking a photo of some pages with my phone, when I accidentally discovered that the iPhone now automatically OCR’s text without even asking!

Even better, when I’m on my Mac Mini, to use the built-in OCR, all I have to use is the Preview app to open the photograph of the page, go to Tools > Text Selection (or even better, Automatic Selection), and the OCR goes to work! I just click on the page and after a few seconds, the cursor changes and I can select all of the text! The Automatic Selection option stays selected so I don’t have to do that every time.

Apple’s OCR (I can’t speak for any Windows OCR features) in my experience, works better than Adobe’s OCR, where lack of contrast and warped text due to pages not being completely flat, causes a lot of static junk text.

I just wanted to share that because this is one of those many useful features our phones and computers can do, but most of us miss it. If you would have told me back in the day that something like this was going to be possible, I would have had a tough time believing it. We take a lot of things for granted, and this is one of them. Also, being able to take unlimited high-quality videos and photos with a computer-phone that fits in a pocket. Some of us remember having to:

1 – Go to store, buy film.

2 – Load film correctly, pick shots carefully because there are only 24-36 to a roll.

3 – Unload film correctly.

4 – Take film to store.

5 – Return to store to buy prints.

So, two trips to the store, one opportunity to ruin the film. And, one was limited to how many shots were on a roll. Now, it is unlimited, with many options and features, and no trips to the store.

Anyway. There are more important things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but this is still something to be appreciated: useful technology that keeps innovating and bringing us more ways to be productive.