The Spring Palace

Back in 1967, I had a front row seat while the city of San Antonio built itself a world’s fair, called Hemisfair ’68.  I remember being told that the event “would put the city on the map” and that it would “allow Texas to showcase its products and services”.  Basically, it was going to bring jobs and money to San Antonio.

In the decades since, I have learned that when a politician talks to me about ‘putting a place on the map’, the flagpole is about to be shoved through my wallet.  Whether it’s about building a Spaceport, a sports complex, or 750-foot tower in the middle of a fair, the politicians promise jobs and wealth that never really appear and the whole shooting match costs a bundle, raising property (and other) taxes for decades to come.

Back when I ran a hotel on Galveston Island, the city spent a fortune on a study of tourism.  Conducted by a high-priced consultant (a consultant is someone with an advanced degree who lives out of town) to see if the city could increase our revenue from tourism.  I’ll skip all the details, but it turned out that the residents of the city lost money on tourism since demand for city services went up while the meager trickle of increased revenue went to hotels and restaurants with out-of-state ownership.  While the tourist business brought new jobs, it also brought more low-income people looking for jobs.

In the words of one of the more astute city fathers, “The average tourist comes to the island with a five-dollar bill and a screaming kid with a dirty diaper.  By the time they leave, neither has been changed.”

By the time Hemisfair ’68 was over, the town had a few new buildings, the hotels and restaurants had made a small fortune, and the taxpayers were left to pay off millions of dollars.  The real winners were the various construction companies and banks that had financed the affair.  

The problem, of course, is than the novelty of such fairs and exhibitions has long since worn off.  The most famous of the world’s fairs, at least in the United States, was the 1964 fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.  As big as that fair was, the bondholders received less than $0.20 on the dollar for their investments.

The first truly “world’s fair” was the event organized by Prince Albert in 1851.  Called the Great Exhibition, it was showcased in The Crystal Palace, attracting six million visitors.  As the first of its kind, it was spectacularly successful.  It also set off a mania for such fairs in cities around the world.  I would be willing to bet that very few people know that this year’s fair is being held in Dubai.  Have you bought your tickets yet?

After the success of the Crystal Palace, there were seven more such fairs by the end of the decade.  In the 1860’s, there were twenty-eight more fairs scattered from Paris to Jakarta, in  the 1870’s, there were forty-three, and by the 1880’s, there were an astounding eighty-two such fairs.  Everybody had to have their own version, so I guess it is not all that surprising that the citizens of Fort Worth, Texas threw their ten-gallon hats into the ring, too.

The Texas Spring Palace was built to showcase Texas agricultural projects and more importantly, to attract immigrants.  Following the tradition established by Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace, the fair was housed in a single large building approximately three blocks wide and featuring the second largest dome in America—only slightly smaller than the dome on the nation’s capital. 

Built for only $35,000, the Palace was completed in only thirty-one days and was constructed using as many Texas agricultural products as possible.  The tarred roof, for example was not covered with gravel, but with kernels of Texas corn embedded into the tar.  The exterior also showcased animal hides, skulls, coal, wheat, seashells, and an impressive collection of horns and antlers.  

The general belief at the time was that visitors would be attracted by building something huge—something larger and more outlandish than anything anyone had ever seen.  Unfortunately, Texas was doomed to come in second best in this endeavor, since right about the time that Texas was building its exhibit hall, a guy named Eiffel was building an iron tower in Paris.  

Visitors could wander through the building and watch silkworms at work, or visit a log cabin, or a tipi, or watch waterfowl swim around in the fountain, or gaze upon Sam Houston’s walking stick.  And the livestock—there were a lot of various kinds of livestock.  (I can’t help but wonder what this non-air-conditioned building smelled like on a hot day.)

Incredibly, the fair was something of a success, attracting a surprising number of visitors, a full third of which came from outside of Texas, and the fair was very successful in attracting new businesses.  Hoping to cash in on a second season, the city fathers began work to double the size of the building in preparation for the 1891 exhibition.

Unfortunately, all those agricultural products used to create the building had dried out during the hot Texas summer.  On May 30, 1890, a fire started in the building, spreading so quickly that the visitors on the second floor were forced to jump from windows.   The huge building was completely destroyed in less than fifteen minutes.  Ironically, the same fate would later befall the Crystal Palace.  

The newspapers reported that the fire was started when a young boy stepped on a wooden kitchen match (commonly called a “Lucifer “ at the time) and the flame spread to an alfalfa-covered column, which in turn ignited painted canvas signs.

While there are no plaques or memorials in Fort Worth today to commemorate the Spring Palace, there is a statue honoring Al Hayne, a civil engineer, who lost his life while making sure that women and children safely escaped from the building.  Of the 5000 visitors present, Hayne was the only casualty.  Two years later, the city of Fort Worth organized a professional firefighting force.

Over the years to come, the city fathers tried repeatedly to organize a new exhibit, but were never able to get enough popular support.  After Dallas began holding an annual State Fair, Fort Worth changed its plans slightly, turning the plans for a renewed Spring Palace into the annual Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, (which eventually became the more health-conscious  Fort Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo).

The Battle of Newark Bay

Perhaps one of the strangest naval battles ever recorded involved the USS New Mexico (BB-40), yet this is not only a battle that almost no one in New Mexico has heard of:  almost no military historians have ever heard of it, either.  

I wouldn’t know about this battle if I wasn’t abnormally attracted to the obscure, a trait that the reader probably shares or they wouldn’t be reading my blog.

Years ago, I was a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, I was a non-traditional student (that translates as old fart) that spent a lot of time reading for classes.  On good days, I could sit outside of Zimmerman Library and read in the sunlight.  I may have mentioned it before, but I like libraries very much and visit them frequently.

Near the library was a bell tower containing a brass bell, and the plaque on the tower explained that the bell was from the battleship USS New Mexico.  Besides a brief history of the ship, there was a mention that the bell was a gift from the Lipsett Corporation.  Who the hell were they?

The USS New Mexico was the lead ship of a new class of three battleships built during World War I.  Commissioned too late to take part in the battles of the Great War, she escorted President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference.  After the war, the New Mexico served as the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, her role in the fleet slowly being replaced by more modern battleships that were larger and faster. 

Transferred to the Atlantic Fleet shortly before Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II, the New Mexico escorted convoys across the Atlantic.  Transferred back to the Pacific Fleet, the New Mexico took part in the Navy’s numerous shore bombardments, her 14-inch guns helping to destroy coastal defenses before the landing crafts hit the beaches.  During these engagements, the ship was repeatedly attacked by Kamikaze planes, one of which struck her bridge, killing the commanding officer, Captain Robert Walton Fleming and killing or wounding 85 other sailors.  Among the killed was Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, the British representative to General MacArthur.  General Lumsden was the highest-ranking British Officer killed in combat during the war.

The USS New Mexico was part of the American fleet in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.  Leaving Japan a week later, the ship sailed back to Boston while the Navy figured out what to do with their superannuated battleships.  The photo at right shows the New Mexico with Mount Fuji in the background.

And this is where Morris Lipsett comes into the picture.  Lipsett was only 23 years old and was working as a salesman in a men’s wear shop when he bought a condemned hotel in Jamestown, New York.  Demolishing the building and selling off the contents and wreckage for salvage, Lipsett began a long career in salvage operations.  Though Lipsett had no formal engineering training, his company became one of the largest ‘wreckers’ in the world.

Over the next six decades, Lipsett demolished houses, commercial buildings, bridges, dams, New York’s Second Avenue El, the old Madison Square Garden, the Third Avenue El, and the old Penn Station, and cleared most of the land necessary to build the Chase Manhattan Bank.  Branching out, Lipsett began scrapping surplus ships after the war, including the SS Normandie—perhaps the greatest ocean liner ever launched—and the first aircraft carrier named Enterprise.

At one point, Lipsett even salvaged a tunnel through a mountain in Pennsylvania.  I would love to have more information about that—how do you scrap a tunnel?  If you dig a tunnel out of a mountain—doesn’t it just leave a bigger tunnel?

In 1946, Lipsett bought the decommissioned battleships New Mexico, Wyoming, and Idaho, with plans to tow the three ships, one at a time, to Newark and begin the long process of cutting them up.  The first ship to be moved was the New Mexico, with two tugs towing her to the docks at Newark.  Unfortunately, during heavy seas, the tugs were forced to cut the lines, setting the 624-foot dreadnaught adrift with a crew of three very worried men who briefly had the largest private navy in the world.

Surprisingly, it took a whole day for the ship to be relocated.  A Coast Guard plane spotted the abandoned vessel 58 miles off the coast of New York.  With the help of a Coast Guard cutter, the tugs were finally able to tow the ship towards Newark, where the city had mobilized its own private navy to block her entrance to the bay.

Well, it wasn’t much of a navy—just two fire fighting vessels—but both were armed with high-volume fire hoses that could pump enough water to potentially swamp a vessel.  And in case you are wondering, yes, the New Mexico still had her guns, just no ammunition.  The aerial photo at left was taken while the ship was being towed to Newark.

The city of Newark had just budgeted $70,000,000 to a new ‘Beautify Newark’ project, hoping to change the harbor’s image from that of a junkyard to something more attractive to new investors.  Effectively, the City of Newark was declaring war on the New Mexico.

The standoff, which the newspapers called the Battle of Newark Bay, lasted for only a couple of days.  Both Lipsett and the mayor of Newark made frantic phone calls to Washington to intervene and force their opponent to surrender.  Even the governor of New Mexico got involved in the public argument, claiming that the honor of the state was being insulted by Newark.

The Coast Guard wisely took no side, just standing by to make sure that there were no unintended nautical accidents.  What the Coast Guard could have done if there had been any intentional incidents is still open for debate, for Washington mediated a peace treaty:  Lipsett would be allowed to scrap the three battleships in Newark, but he had to promise to pay a hefty daily penalty if the scrapping process took longer than nine months.

Lipsett met the deadlines.  While dismantling the ships, he recovered the two ship’s bells, the larger of which is on display in a museum in Santa Fe, while the slightly smaller bell still stands in front of the UNM library in Albuquerque.  

Nearby is a nice bench—it’s a great place to read a book.

Freddy the Pig

When I spotted the yellowing paperback in the stack of used books for sale, I knew I had to buy it.  It felt like being reunited with an old friend.

A half century ago, there were a couple of regular events that I always looked forward to.  Twice a month, the Fort Worth Library sent its bookmobile west to our little town for a whole Saturday, turning the red dust of an empty lot into a magic portal where I could lose myself in books.  I still rank the invention of the bookmobile as one of the most important in human history, above the invention of penicillin and only slightly below the development of the seed drill.

Note.  Why aren’t there more bookmobiles?  I checked and there are only three in all of New Mexico.  The state’s central planners ignore the Southern end of the state, evidently because we’re the red-haired stepchild of regions as far as our overlords in Santa Fe are concerned.  For the price of what we have spent on never-to-be-used Chinese electric buses or tourist trains to nowhere, the state could operate a fleet of a thousand bookmobiles.  

The second eagerly awaited event was the once a month distribution of the Scholastic Press book catalog at school.  The little 8-page catalog described all the books that could be ordered though the school and bought at modest prices—most selling for 35 and 50 cents each.  My parents would graciously submit to a reasonable amount of begging and could be counted on to purchase a couple of the books, to which I could augment by scrounging through sofa cushions and car seats for loose coins.  If all else failed, I could skip eating lunch, buying only cartons of milk at the state subsidized price of two cents a half-pint, and saving the rest of the lunch money for books.  (Forced to make a choice, I’d still prefer books to lunch.)

About two weeks later, the books would be delivered to school and parceled out to the students.  Over the next week or two, a few of the books would be swapped with my friends for other books, and the favorites read and reread until the cheap pulp paper began to wear out.  Even with access to the beloved bookmobile, I owe a sizeable debt for my early education to the wonderful people at Scholastic Press.  And since Scholastic Press published the Harry Potter series of books, my sons can probably claim the same thing.

All these memories came flooding back to me while I stood there staring at a dogeared copy of Freddy the Detective by Walter R. Brooks.  Using the excuse of buying it for one of my grandchildren, I purchased the book for several times the original cover price of half-a-dollar, and reread the book cover-to-cover that same day, some fifty-eight years after I had read the original.  And tomorrow, I’m going to mail it to my granddaughter.

There is no way of ever being completely sure, but I think this might be the first detective story I ever read.  I obviously enjoyed it, as I am still addicted to reading mystery stories.

Starting in 1927, Brooks wrote twenty-six books about Freddy, a remarkable pig that walked on his hind feet, could talk, read and write, and though a domestic animal on the Bean family farm in upstate New York, still managed to travel extensively and have exotic adventures, usually accompanied by a wide variety of other farm animals.  Over time, Freddy traveled to the North Pole, wrote poetry, became a pilot, and in a volume that mocked the hysteria of the Cold War Space Race, even built a rocket ship.

The books are significant for several reasons:  the author never talked down to his readers, he used a rich vocabulary and humor that are still relevant to address universal themes, and the books were obvious serious influences on later prominent authors.  It is impossible to read any of the books in the series without noticing the similarities between Brook’s books and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web that was written decades later.

The most obvious parallel is with George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Written between November 1943 and February 1944, the book is a satire on the events leading up to the 1917 Russian revolution and the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin.  In particular, Orwell—himself a socialist—satirizes the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals of the revolution.

In 1939, Brooks released the sixth book in his series, Freddy the Politician, in which the animals of the Bean farm set up a republic and elect a president to lead them.  Through crooked deals and the use of force, the election is overturned and Grover, a woodpecker named after President Grover Cleveland, seizes control of the farm.  Written just before the start of World War II, Brooks is rather obviously satirizing the rise of fascism through legal elections that ultimately turned into brutal dictatorships.

In many ways, Brooks’ book is the better read of the two volumes as it contains humor, and instead of the corrupting forces’ triumph in the end, as in Orwell’s book, Brooks has Freddy victorious, eventually forcing out the evil hummingbirds.  And surprisingly, the Freddy version is longer, more descriptive, and (in my opinion, at least) contains better written dialogue than Orwell’s version.

There is little doubt that Orwell knew of Brook’s series of books, as the series was extremely popular before the war.  Not only were the American books frequently reviewed in the British press but Freddy the Politician was favorably reviewed in the London Times while Orwell resided in London and worked as a writer.  That a London based writer did not follow the literature section of the London Times is highly improbable.

Happily, while some of the books of the series are rather hard to locate today, Amazon has the more popular editions available for the Kindle.  I would suggest you start, as I hope my granddaughter does, with Freddie The Detective.

By the way, Walter R. Brooks had another series featuring a talking animal—one that you are probably more familiar with than Freddy the Pig.  Starting in 1937, Brooks wrote more than two dozen stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Argosy about a slightly alcoholic writer and his talking horse.  When CBS turned these stories into a weekly television show, it was called Mr. Ed.

Cows Make Crappy Sailors

Safely transporting animals at sea has been a difficult problem ever since Noah accidentally penned the lions next to the unicorns.   For livestock at sea, voyages have pretty much always been dangerous, even if lions stayed on their side of the boat.

From the earliest day, sailing ships frequently carried caged animals to provide food for the crew.  Sheep, chickens, and pigs were the most common, but by the 17th century, merchant ships were larger and more efficient, providing enough space for even cattle.  Ships of the line needed large crews and didn’t have much space, but still managed to haul just enough livestock to supplement the meals of the officers.  The rest of the crew ate salted meat or did without.

Still, there were difficulties—the animals died frequently, succumbing to diseases brought on by tainted water, rough treatment, and lack of exercise, but the most common reason for the livestock perishing prematurely was because the ships ran out of proper forage for the animals.  The exception to this were the pigs, who frequently were fed the same daily rations as the crew. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the crew wasn’t very happy to learn they were only fed as well as the pigs.

Among the host of reasons why the United States was victorious in its revolution against the British was the near impossibility of Great Britain’s supplying its Army with enough food to mount an offensive against the rebel army.   In 1775, the British mounted the largest attempt to supply an army in a foreign land until the African campaign of World War II.  A fleet of cargo ships carried hundreds of tons of food and 4,000 head of sheep and pigs.  It was a magnificent attempt and a tragic failure.

After a storm delayed the fleet, only 148 animals reached the Americas alive.  The only food stocks to survive the trip were sauerkraut and porter, the latter greatly diminished by a thirsty crew.  (No mean feat when you consider that each of the crew was already rationed a gallon of beer a day.)    

For decades, the cattle that ranged across the Argentine pampas were only consumed locally, with just their hides and tallow being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe.  This changed dramatically in the years 1876-77 when the fist refrigerated ships began shipping hard frozen beef to France.  Ten years later, there were more than four dozen such ships operating between Buenos Aires and Great Britain and merely a decade later, there were almost 300 such ships.  (Railroads largely killed off the American cowboys, but in Argentina, the gauchos were the victims of refrigerated ships.)

Today, with flash frozen food processes and high-tech refrigerated cargo ships, you would think that such problems are exclusively the interest of retired historians with an overly eclectic taste in reading material.  Unfortunately, animal losses while being transported at sea is not only still a problem, but losses happen more frequently than in the eighteenth century.

Last December, the Elbenik set sail for Turkey from Spain loaded with 1800 bulls bound for special slaughterhouses where the cattle would be killed, butchered, and prepared as halal to meet the dietary requirements of Muslims.  The ship should have made the journey in only 11 days, but the Covid pandemic closed ports and left the ship stranded at sea for 90 days.  Despite humanitarian efforts by the Greek navy, the Elbenik ran out of fodder for its cargo and the bulls slowly starved to death, their bodies being thrown overboard and left to rot in the coastal waters off Turkey.  By the time the ship finally made her way back to Spain, the 1,600 bulls still clinging to life were so sick that authorities were forced to euthanize all of them.

Today, the live animal trade is a $18 billion a year industry, transporting an estimated 2 billion cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens.  Far more often than you would think or wish, those animals die in transit.  To be fair, in any large group of animals, a few would die under the best of circumstances.  Australia, whose regulations are pretty much the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to setting up animal safety guidelines, requires adequate food and water, safe and sanitary enclosures, and the presence of a veterinarian on long voyages.  While Australia tries to keep animal losses to 0.05%, they actually average 0.11%.  For other countries, the averages are much, much higher.

Outside of Australia, there are almost no requirements for safely shipping livestock.  To put this bluntly, a shipload of sheep and a shipload of wool sweaters have exactly the same international shipping regulations.  

While any delay in a ship’s completing a voyage—whether it is due to an overcrowded port or an engine failure—can result in a ship’s running out of food for the animals it carries, this is not the only way animals can perish at sea.  Unless the animals are shipped from Australia, the animals are likely to be caged in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and with inadequate ventilation.  One UN health agency reported that the average conditions on such ships were “ideally suited for spreading disease.”—some of which diseases can be transferred to humans.

And you may not believe this, but no life preservers or lifeboats are built to meet the needs of a 1,700-pound steer.  For livestock, every maritime emergency is a reenactment of the sinking of the Titanic.

Last year, 6,000 cattle and 40 crew members perished when a cargo ship sank off the coast of Japan.  The year before, 14,000 sheep were lost when a docked ship caught fire.  Far more regular, however, are the losses due to mechanical breakdowns that delay a ship’s arrival in port, thus starving the animals.  If a ship’s water-making system breaks down, if there’s a water leak in the fodder storage area, or if a ship’s engine develops a problem that forces the ship to travel at a slower rate—any of these relatively “normal malfunctions” can result in the livestock dying..

In 2015, a livestock carrier capsized off the coast of Brazil, causing loss of all 5,000 cows loaded aboard.  As the photo to the right shows, many of the drowned cattle washed up on shore.  

Most present-day livestock carriers were converted from aging container ships and are no longer able to compete with newer and much larger ships.  The Elbenik, for example, was 53 years old when the bulls perished and the vessel had failed several safety inspections in recent years.  According to one study, due to age and lack of maintenance, livestock carriers were twice as likely to sink compared to the average cargo ships.

The problem is extremely difficult to regulate as the animals usually die in International Waters and few international bodies like the UN or the EU want to deal with the problem as many of their constituent nations are engaged in either the export or the import of livestock.  Australia, the only nation to tackle the problem, has established strict guidelines and regulations to insure animal safety, but the cost of implementing these reforms has made it cheaper for their customers to buy from those competing nations with fewer restrictions and a larger appetite for profits.  The only nation currently considering similar regulations is New Zealand.

Perhaps it is time that all the developing nations act together. Banning the import or export of livestock for human consumption would be a good start.  Transporting livestock for breeding purposes, racing, and for other commercial purposes could continue.  A century and a half after the invention of refrigerated ships, there is no longer a real need for continuing the cruelty of shipping live animals on unsafe ships.

There is a simple reason the problem still exists—a cargo hold full of sheep are just not very photogenic.  Take another look at that photo of the beach covered with dead cows, but this time imagine them standing up in a crowded cargo hold.  That image is not very photogenic, it is not the kind of thing that Greenpeace will show on a commercial begging for your donation.  You might donate money to save the whales, do you care if 14,000 sheep drown?

Back Through the Looking Glass

Having just finished reading the latest scholarly article proving definitively that the protagonist in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not Alice Liddell, I pulled my rather well-worn copy of Lewis Carroll’s book from the shelf and spent a few minutes enjoying the clever verses.

The author of the scholarly piece had presented numerous well-reasoned arguments, including statements from both Carroll and Alice, and I suspect that the piece was part of the author’s tenure packet at her university.  The article was (and as I suspect the author realized) completely wrong.  There is a hell of a problem coming up with a new topic if you are writing about 19th century English Literature.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a close friend of the Liddell family and a frequent guest in their home.  The Liddell children (including Alice), were enchanted with his magical ability to tell long stories involving animals and make-believe places and frequently begged him for more stories.  Because Dodgson/Carroll kept meticulous diaries, we know exactly when his most famous story was invented.  On July 4, 1862, while on a boating holiday, he told the Liddell children the story that would eventually make him famous.

Alice Liddell was enchanted with the story and begged Carroll to write the story down for her.  After a long delay, he obliged, presenting her with a hand lettered copy of the manuscript.  A second copy was delivered to an editor, and the so-called ‘Alice’ books (of which Through the Looking Glass was a sequel to the original novel) became a world-wide phenomenon.  

There is little doubt that the story was created for Alice Liddell, Carroll’s own diaries document this.  Alice kept her original copy of the tales until late in life, when pressing financial needs forced its sale to an American collector for what today would be more than a million dollars.  Following World War II, a fund was raised in America, the book was purchased and given to the people of Great Britain in admiration for the country’s resistance to the aims of Adolf Hitler before the United States.  Today it is on display at the British Library.

There are other obvious clues.  The book is dedicated to Alice Liddell, both the real and literary Alice are the same age and share the same birthday, and the last 21 lines of the book contain an acrostic.  Reading down, the first letter of each line spells out Alice’s full name:  Alice Pleasance Liddell.  Carroll was also a prolific photographer and took several pictures of Alice.  There is even speculation that the six-month rift in Carroll’s friendship with the Liddell family in 1863 may be because the author asked the family to arrange a marriage with the eleven-year-old Alice.  Exactly what happened will remain a mystery since the relevant pages in Carroll’s diaries were cut out by one of Carroll’s descendants.  An alternate theory suggests that Carroll was romantically interested in the family’s nanny.

If arranging a marriage with a pre-teen sounds….strange…, remember that this was the Victorian era and such arrangements were common, though the actual marriage would normally be delayed until the bride was a more suitable age.  Carroll’s brother became engaged to a girl of fourteen, with the marriage delayed for six years.

Carroll was an academic, more interested in math and logic than in writing fiction.  There is a great story, possibly apocryphal, that Queen Victoria was fan of the Alice books and asked the author for a copy of his next work, so he promptly mailed her a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equation.

Less well known are Carroll’s many inventions, most of which involved the written word, perhaps because Carroll suffered from stammering and found writing more comfortable than speaking.  He invented a nyctograph, a device that allowed the user to write notes in the dark, an improved postal money order, a device for the bedridden to more easily read books, and several ciphers.  Carroll also invented a ranked voting system similar to what is currently befuddling voters in New York City mayoral election.

Carroll had a fondness for word games, inventing a precursor to the game Scrabble.  Even his pen name is a complicated word play on his real name translated into Latin.  Newspapers still regularly published a puzzle that Carroll invented, that the author called a Word Ladder.  You’ve seen these, you start with a word and by changing one letter at a time, you end with a different word in a stated number of steps.  For example, HEAD becomes TAIL in five steps: HEAD, HEAL, TEAL, TELL TALL, TAIL.  The game is known by a variety of names, and though it is played in many languages, few today remember the inventor’s name.

There is one invention by Carroll that I am particularly fond of:  his postage stamp case.  Carroll was a prolific letter writer, sending and receiving tens of thousands of letters in his life, each carefully recorded in a journal system he invented.   The case, called the Wonderland Postage Stamp Case, was illustrated with scenes from his novel and included 12 slots for various sized stamps.  Since a first edition is worth well over $8,000, and I would love to own one, it is not really the case that intrigues me:  Included inside the case is a small pamphlet titled, Eight or Nine Words About Letter Writing.  It is fascinating reading.

The Internet seems to have killed off the art of writing letters.  Rarely do I receive an actual letter in my mailbox unless it is one of the infrequent missives from one of my granddaughters.  This is a shame since a letter from a friend is a cherished item and a courtesy we should not let die out.  As Emily Dickinson said, “A letter is a joy of Earth—it is denied the Gods.”

Here is one of his rules, one that should be required reading before anyone is allowed to open an account with Facebook:

My sixth Rule (and my last remark about controversial correspondence) is, don’t try to have the last word! How many a controversy would be nipped in the bud, if each was anxious to let the other have the last word! Never mind how telling a rejoinder you leave unuttered: never mind your friend’s supposing that you are silent from lack of anything to say: let the thing drop, as soon as it is possible without discourtesy: remember ‘speech is silvern, but silence is golden’! (N.B.—If you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this Rule is superfluous: you won’t get the last word!)

I think we would all be better off if we wrote more letters and posted on social media less.  The rules and advice that Carroll gives in this small pamphlet reflect a courtesy that we need to recapture.  Fortunately, you can read the pamphlet without paying the $8,000 a first edition would set you back.  You can read it here for free.

And you can write me and tell me what you think of his rules.