Thursday, May 19, 2011
Middlemarched again
Having done the serial, we are both moved to have a read of the thing itself. But it is rather a long book and having only the one copy is a trifle inconvenient. We clearly needed another - while thinking at the same time that buying another new was a trifle extravagant. So off to Epsom library where I find three copies of 'The Mill on the Floss' but none of 'Middlemarch'. What is going on? And none of the four charity shops in Epsom High Street had any George Eliot at all. Off to Bourne Hall library where I find another copy of 'The Mill on the Floss', plus sundry other works from the oeuvre, but still no 'Middlemarch'. But then to the charity shop in Ewell Village which I find to have two copies, one hard and one paper. The hard was only some book club reprint, but at £1.45 fitted the bill. Persistence is all. BH and I sitting up in bed this morning, each reading our own copy. First time I recall such a thing happening.
From the same sort of place, but rather different in tone are my two atlases of Great Britain. One is a book club reprint of an OS atlas and the other an AZ road atlas. Very different from each other they are too. The OS is A4, hard back and big. The AZ is slightly less than A4, soft cover, rather thinner and generally much smaller seeming than the small actual difference in size would seem to warrant. It looks convenient.
AZ around 3.5 miles to the inch, a certain amount of physical geography, some tourist features but essentially a road map. Helpful set of town maps at the end. Just the ticket for long range driving. For some reason it reminded me of the folding Michelin maps of France of just about the same scale - but when I get one out not so sure. They are meeting the same need; but the colouring schemes are quite different.
OS much more old-fashioned. Not so brash looking. A geographer's atlas of Great Britain. The main maps are done on a scale a bit smaller than that of Michelin at 250,000 rather than 200,000. Much better job than either Michelin or AZ at indicating relief. And then there is the issue of reference. Michelin does not have an index so does not need it, but OS and AZ both do. OS relies on the National Grid, the thing which we learned all about in geography at school. No doubt of great interest and importance to a geographer, but which means in this context that a reference consists of a page number, two letters (to give you the general area) and four digits (to give you the position in that general area). All rather complicated and one has to try to remember whether the first two digits mean up and down or left to right. A complication which is much reduced in AZ where the reference consists of a page number, one digit and one letter. And it is made clear on each map that digit does up and down and letter does left to right. Less precise but much easier to use. Otherwise, the content of all three sets of maps much the same, despite their rather different colouring schemes.
But OS has much more wrapping. Much more stuff that might come in useful in pub quizzes or in arcane disputes at TB. Little essays about the geography of Great Britain. Maps of rainfall and temperature. A historical geography section with a series of one page maps with accompanying essays, starting with one covering the period up to but not including the Roman exit. Moving onto economic geography in the same sort of format. You can see where the coal is and where the pumpkins/marrows are grown. And including helpful maps of administrative Great Britain, before and after the great reorganisation of 1974, a reorganisation which caused much statistical grief at a time when I was supposed to know about such things. Not sure where else one might find such a thing. All in all, much better as an arm-chair read than AZ. But not so convenient for a car-seat navigation. I wonder which made the more money? This being something which the formerly public service OS did not used to have to bother about too much.
PS: not impressed yesterday by the huge amount of fuss that appears to have been generated by Mr. Clarke suggesting that some rapes were worse than others. Everyone seems to have jumped on him and he will be made to perform humble pie. For saying something which strikes me as self-evident. Although I grant that rape is not a crime which we are very good at and Mr. Clarke is clearly suspected of being, or at least appearing all too like one of those gents who say 'well she asked for it dressed like that'. A line which I understand still runs in the bars of say, Uganda, Not to say Paris. All in all, we have not managed to make very good use of the gifts of evolution when we manage to get in such a mess about things. Recreational drugs and euthanasia being two more examples. Issues which one might of thought were amenable to rational solution in this day and age, at least in the free world.
# posted by Jim @ 11:00 PM 
