Thieving Canadians versus Elon Musk

A recent analysis puts the cost of launching 1kg into low Earth orbit (LEO), on Elon Musk's Falcon 9 rocket, to approximately USD1500 per kg.

Musk is developing his Starship launch vehicle in the hope of significantly reducing this cost of launching mass to orbit. He has stated that his target is about USD10.00 per kilogram to LEO, which assumes full and rapid reusability and a very high launch cadence for Starship. But this is an aspirational long-term operating cost; it seems that more conservative estimates put Starship launch costs at about USD100–200 per kilo.

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The above Coronet edition of John Wyndham's Stowaway to Mars of 1972 weighs 110 grams. If we add 90 grams for minimal packaging (to reach a total of 200g), it seems that Elon Musk would presently charge approximately USD300 to launch a copy of this book into LEO, but he expects to be able to eventually be able launch a copy into LEO for USD2.00 (while more conservative estimates put it at USD20). This is good news for LEO book collectors.

As you can see below, one thieving bastard bookseller (JMCbooksonline, of Cheverie, NS, Canada) is presently asking USD140 [A$196] to launch, I mean post, this book to Australia (see listing here). For the record, I can post 250g to Canada for A$23.05—less than one eighth of this.

This postal charge is the equivalent of USD700 per kilo—more than double the present cost of launching Wyndham's Stowaway to Mars into orbit via a Falcon 9, soon to be thirty-five times the cost of launching it into LEO via Starship, and, if Musk's dreams are realised, three hundred and fifty times the cost of launching it into orbit.

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Anyone in Australia who buys books from overseas soon learns that postage from Canada is extremely slow and extremely expensive—possibly the slowest and most expensive postal service in the world, but certainly the slowest and most expensive postal service I am familiar with.

When buying from Canada, there are no bargins to be had, and few books are rare enough to justify stuffing the pockets of either Canadian postal services or Candian Booksellers.

I wonder how long it will be before Musk realises that international parcel post represents an arbitrage opportunity, and that he can use Starfall—the uncrewed reusable re-entry/cargo capsule being developed by SpaceX—to massively reduce the cost of postage of 1970s paperbacks from Canada (or the US) to Australia?

The Drunken Druggist and a Shanghai Reading Room

The book below is an odd volume from Harrison and Co.'s The Novelist's Magazine series, which has a particularly interesting provenance, spending time in the UK, China, the US, and Australia.

The Novelist's Magazine (ESTC p6358) reprinted sixty novels, broken up into weekly parts, from 1780 to 1788. Each novel has a separate title page, and each of the 23 volumes has an engraved general title page. While some of the novels stretched over more than one volume (Sir Charles Grandison occupies vols. 14–15; Clarissa occupies vols. 10–11), most volumes contain multiple novels (for example, vols. 9 and 23 both contain six novels each).

I am interested in the series primarily because it contains Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and The Invisible Spy (in vols. 13, 17, and 23); but I have this volume (vol. 7) because it contains some Haywoodiana: Charles De Fieux Mouhy's The Fortunate Country Maid (1740), an anonymous translation of La Paysanne Parvenue, ou les Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de L. V. (1735–36). Haywood's own translation of this French work, The Virtuous Villager, appeared in 1741, by which time The Fortunate Country Maid had gone through four editions and a Dublin reprint—pretty much running away with the market for the book.

I have had my copy of vol. 7 of The Novelist's Magazine for more than two decades. It is in pretty woeful condition (the spine is broken in three places), but it was cheap (USD10) and I haven't bothered to upgrade it because I liked the bookplate (below) on the front (fixed) endpaper: "James Watson | Manchester." This morning I was able to identify this previous owner as James Watson (1775–1820), an eccentric young druggist known in Manchester as "Doctor Watson."

Watson (below) was apprenticed to a fustian (heavy cotton) manufacturer; when that apprenticeship ended, he worked as a bookkeeper for a cotton merchant, until his father's death obliged him to take over the family's apothecary business. Apparently, "Doctor Watson" was a theatre fanatic: he was a collector of printed theatre ephemera (1799–1800) and, from 1803 onwards, produced a periodical, The Townsman. He became the first librarian of the Manchester’s Portico Library in 1806.

Apparently, Watson soon lost that position because of his drinking habits and neglect of duty, and went on to lose another as a boarding school usher at Altrincham, for the same reason; after which he became homeless and dependent upon charity. After a lengthy period of destitution, he drowned (or drowned himself) in the River Mersey on 28 June 1820 and was buried at Didsbury.

(The portrait and most of the above information about Watson, is taken from a The Spirit of the Doctor: Comprising Many Interesting Poems Selected from the Original Manuscript of the Late Mr. James Watson (Manchester, 1820), online here; and Simon Beattie, Short List 6 (March 2014), online here.)

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I took a few photos of my battered odd-volume this morning. When I was filing these, after I had returned the book itself to my "hopital for battered books," I noticed something I had missed in all my previous examinations of the book over the last two decades: there was a very faint blind stamp visible on the title leaf—so faint, that it was really only clear enough to notice on the recto. (Look again at the first photograph in this post, above, showing the whole title-page to this volume. Did you notice the blind stamp?)

I retrieved the book once again, and re-photographed the title page in strong raking light using a macro lense. While it is still the case that—even in these favourable conditions—only part of the blind stamp is visible on the title page (above), the negative on the verso is much clearer. Having reversed (flipped) my photographs of the verso using some image software, I was able to clearly make out a surprising ownership stamp (below): "Astor House Hotel | Shanghai"!

Astor House Hotel, Shanghai, has a lengthy Wikipedia page dedicated to it (here). If you read this page you will see that the Shanghai Astor had a "Reading Room." Peter Felix Richards (1846–1859), a Scottish merchant, opened the first Western hotel in China. In August 1850, Richards advertised that a reading room for shipmasters had been established in his hotel. The advertisement (here) reads: "NOTICE. SHIPMASTERS are respectfully informed that the undersigned have opened a READING ROOM in their Establishment especialy for their accommodation. P. F. RICHARDS [and] Co. Shanghae, 1th August, 1851."

Skipping ahead a half-century, a 1908 real-photo postcard (below; here), captioned "Shanghai——Astor House Hotel Co. Ltd: Lounge," shows (in the photograph) a signboard that reads "Reading and Writing Room." In 1911, when the Astor House Hotel had a grand re-opening, it was described as having "a reading room with several comfortable sofas and easy chairs upholstered in leather"—a description that nicely matches this 1908 postcard image.

Skipping ahead another half-century, the scene is rather different: the Shanghai Astor was bombed and occupied during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War and WW2 (1937–45); thereafter it went into a spiral of decline, and on 19 April 1954 the Hotel was confiscated by the CCP; much of the furniture and interior decoration was destroyed or stolen during the Cultural Revolution. After extensive renovations in the early 2000s, the hotel was bought out, and the hotel closed on 1 January 2018. The building was converted to the China Securities Museum, and the renovated premises are now once again accessible to the public (according to this site).

Pulling together the threads, it seems that my odd volume of The Novelist's Magazine was purchased, early in its existance, by the convivial Mancunian James Watson, who probably pawned it soon after. The enterprising Peter Richards picked up this volume on his travels, whether in Manchester or elsewhere, and transported it to Shanghai, included it in his 1850 Reading Room for Shipmasters. If the volume remained in situ, then it was likely looted from the Shanghai Astor by an American GI during WW2, who took it back to the states. When I bought it two decades ago, it was transported back past Asia, to Australia.

I have been unable to find any other remnant of either the James Watson library or the Astor House Shanghai library or Reading Room, and so, no images of either his book label or this blind stamp. I have also been unable to find any real information about whatever library may have at one time existed in the first Western hotels in China, and possibly one of the earliest English-language libraries in China—which is surprising. I hope that, by the time I dig this volume out of my "hospital"—for a team of book-binding robots to properly repair—more information will be available. But until then, it is time for it to return to rest.

Eliza Haywood's Henry Goring Identified

The subject of Eliza Haywood's "Jacobite literary fabrication," A Letter from H---- G----g, Esq; One of the Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber to the Young Chevalier (1749), is Charles Edward Stuart (1720–88), son of James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), son of James II (ruled 1685–88), who was overthrown as King of England because of his Catholicism in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), I opened my entry on this 64-page pamphlet almost exactly as stated above. Although I filled in the dashes ("H[enry] G[orin]g") whenever I used the full title of the pamphlet, and titled my entry (actually, entries) for it A Letter from Henry Goring, and cross-referenced both "'G—g, H—' (i.e. Goring, Henry)" and "Goring, Henry" to my entries for "A Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g (Ab.66, Da.9)," I nowhere say anything whatsoever about the putative author of Haywood's Letter.

The reason for this silence is because I was unable—up until (*looks at watch*) today(!)—to identify the Goring concerned. It occurred to me this morning that I might now—with the amount of material online, and AI-powered searches now able to sift almost all of this material—make more progress than I did using the resources at my disposal in the pre-internet era. I was right. Although Google’s Gemini struggled, ChatGPT bought home the gold.

Henry Goring (1707–1755)

It seems that the Gorings were an old Catholic-leaning Sussex family. According to The Westminster School archive (**), Henry Goring was born 11 April 1707, the son of Sir Henry Goring, 4th Baronet (1679–1731; Wikipedia entry here) and Elizabeth Mathew. The archive identifies him specifically as the Henry Goring who became a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Young Pretender.

Henry’s elder brother, Charles Mathew Goring, inherited the baronetcy to become Sir Charles Mathew Goring, 5th Baronet (1706–1769; details here).

Henry pursued a military career on the Continent. He appears to have joined Charles Edward's circle in the 1730s, being with the Prince in Italy around 1737. He subsequently served in the Austrian army, and this military background was probably one reason he was useful to Charles. Later, Goring became one of the Prince's most trusted personal attendants and accompanied him during his clandestine wanderings after the collapse of the 1745 enterprise.

Haywood’s pamphlet pretends to be a genuine account of Goring accompanying Charles from Avignon through Germany and elsewhere. By 1752–54, Charles's private life and increasingly erratic behaviour were causing serious alarm among his remaining supporters. One particularly damaging episode involved Charles’s mistress Clementina Walkinshaw (1720–1802) (below).

Charles sent Goring to Dunkirk to bring Clementina to him. Goring apparently regarded her very unfavourably and bitterly complained that Charles was treating him as little more than a pimp! Although there is no entry for “our” Henry Goring on Wikipedia, an account of this incident does appear under the entry for Clementina (here).

The never-failing Andrew Lang offers an historical account of Goring, partly based on genuine contemporary reports from a government spy—"Pickle" (the traitor Alastair MacDonnell, ca. 1725–1761)—as being the Prince's loyal servant who eventually abandoned his service. (See, Pickle the Spy: Or, The Incognito of Prince Charles (1897) and the sequel The Companions of Pickle (1898).) Goring was concerned about Charles's mistress, his treatment of loyal adherents, his increasing suspiciousness, his financial difficulties, and what Goring regarded as his ingratitude and political irresponsibility.

Charles effectively dismissed Goring at Liège in May 1754. Goring then went to Berlin, where he entered Prussian service. According to Lang, in Pickle the Spy, he "went to Berlin, and presently died in Prussian service" (here) and in The Companions of Pickle, "The Earl [George Keith, 10th Earl Marischal] left Paris in the end of June (carrying with him to Berlin poor Henry Goring, who was near death)" (here).

What happened next is unclear. The Westminster School archive (based on a 1928 publication) claims that—although Lang represents Goring as being near death in 1754—he went on to become a General in the Prussian Army and that, in 1755, he married a Susan, daughter of Prince Stanever, Transylvania.

I suspect this last claim is an error, and possibly a confusion of Goring with Earl Marischal, who joined the Prussian Army, became a close confidant of Frederick the Great, and served as the Prussian ambassador to Spain, France and Great Britain. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything definitive regarding this since the evidence points in all directions.

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A Prince Stanever is mentioned in an early nineteenth-century historical and genealogical work. In James Dallaway's A History of the Western Division of the County of Sussex, Vol. 2, Pt 2 (1830), 133, on the Goring family tree, Dallaway notes (as seen, at right, above) that "Henry, a general in the Prussian service" married "Susan, dau[ghter]. of … [sic, elipsis] Stanever, a prince of Transylvania, living in London in 1781" (here).

From 1711, Transylvania was under the direct rule of the Austrian Habsburgs, meaning that a title of Prince of Transylvania only might apply to a Habsburg prince in 1755 (when Susan and Henry are supposed to have married), or 1781 (when the prince was supposedly in London), but there were no Habsburg princes of this name. Likewise, none of the pre-1711 princes of Transylvanian have this name.

The only Prince named in the London newspapers between 1745 and 1781 in relation to Transylvania is Prince Sulkowski, seemingly a member of the Sułkowski family of Poland (see here), who was campaigning on the boarder of Transylvania, and is an unlikely candidate for a "Prince Stanever."

In a strange hallucination (I think!) ChatGPT claims that "Prince Stanever of Transylvania" appears as a character name in a 1755 Westminster School Archive theatrical play, but I am unable to find any such play.

It did occur to me that, since Earl Marischal really did join the Prussian Army and achieve some seniority, there might be some confusion of Goring with the Earl, but Earl Marischal did not marry (it seems), and I find nothing to link him to either a Susan or a Prince Stanever of Transylvania.

(**) the Westminster School archive is based on material concerning Goring, including his marriage to Susan etc., that was first printed in The Record of Old Westminsters: A Biographical List of All Those who are Known to Have Been Educated at Westminster School from the Earliest Times to 1927, vol. 1 (1928), 386 (here).

AI is not eating antique books

It seems that the latest injection of disinformation, or "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), into discussions about AI is that AI companies are "eating" physical copies of rare and antique books in the same way that data-centres are believed to be "drinking" water. (I asked Nano Banana to generate an appropriate image of this imagnined process—using the same starting prompt I used previously—to help my readers visualise this action. Please enjoy the result!)

This, somewhat alarmist, 25 July article by Frank Landymore, for instance, suggests that AI companies are purchasing antique books in large volumes (this is in the article title: "AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books…") to use as high-quality training data, as these texts are free from modern digital AI content. Because it is cheaper, destructive, high-speed automated scanning processes are being used to digitize the books (i.e., book spines are guillotined off, the covers removed, page-stacks are fed into scanner hoppers, then thrown away). The practice is facilitated by book database services that keep the tech company buyers anonymous. Rare booksellers have ethical concerns about selling books to these services, warning that it permanently destroys some of the last surviving copies of historic literature.

The FUD here is the "antique books" and "historic literature" claim. Once you read through the parent and grandparent linked articles (3 April essay by Val Giordano, promoting the practice, here; 25 June [anonymous] essay on the NL Times, reporting concerns of European book dealers, here; a 26 June article by Benj Edwards here; a solid, 21 July essay by Emanuel Maiberg here) it becomes clear that the books being hoovered up by Anthropic (and possibly others) all post-date 1969 (when ISBNs were introduced) and most, it seems likely, post-date 2006 (when ISBN barcodes became ubiquitous)—about the same time, coincidently, that the arrival of modern smart-phones ended civilisation as we knew it.

That the AI-company proxies are exclusively interested in books with an ISBN is made very clear from the following anecdote reported by Maiberg:

The seller told me that … Bulk purchases … usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. (emphasis added)

That the bulk-purchase companies are likely to prefer later, bar-coded books, seems probable from the scale they are working on—it is simply easier and cheaper to scan the bar codes of hundreds of thousands of books, than it is to key in the ISBN (and then check for errors) on the same number.

From the articles I mention above, it seems that second-hand book dealers are getting what I take to be in-fill requests, for any ISBN that has not shown up in the literal truck-loads of books donated to charities, that are sold off to bulk-book dealers / waste-paper merchants (on this, see my post here concerning Mubin and Raza Ahmed's "Wrap Ltd."—a "printed matter," "waste and scrap paper" import/export business with an annual turnover of £6.5M "or more.")

It simply wouldn’t be economical to buy a book via ABE, Alibris etc. if you could buy the same book at a fraction of the price from parasites, excuse me, erm … paper-dealers like Mubin and Raza Ahmed. I.e., you'd start with whatever your local large-scale charity can wring from a well-meaning public, checked-off against a master-list of ISBNs via bar-code scanning, and then back-fill the gaps in that master-list via ABE, Alibris etc.

For me, this is where it gets interesting. Anthropic et al. have more money than they know what to do with, and have just been stung to the tune of USD3K per book, for all the digital books they stole, and then got sued for stealing. That being the case, the following observation should come as no surprise:

there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.

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Since I was born before ISBNs were a thing, it is hard for me to think of books after 1970 as "antique" or "historic" ("rare," especially, "rare on market" is another matter completely). Perhaps, this is easier for Frank Landymore—who seems to be in his early 30s. In any event, I asked one of the water-guzzling, book-eating monsters (ChatGPT) to estimate how many books have been published since 1970 (and 2006) and the answer should be reassuring.

It seems likely that something like 80 million English-language ISBN editions have been released, or which approximately 60 million editions were printed with a barcode. The number of unique works (i.e., with Pride and Prejudice counting once) is obviously much smaller—perhaps 10–20 million, but the number of physical copies printed is much larger, likely "well over 100 billion copies since the 1980s."

So, it seems Anthropic is attempting to gobble up millions of recent books (emphatically-not antique you baby-faced ageists!), mostly comprised of unwanted donations, fenced by the likes of Messers Ahmed, and otherwise unsold obscuriana, laying heavily on the hands of dealers who once supplied libraries, out of a pool of something like 100 billion copies printed.

If it were possible to pile this 100-billion copies one atop the other, it seems that the pile would likely extend 2.5 million kilometres, or about 6.5 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Indeed, only 14.5 billion books would be need to reach the moon, or 14.5% of all books printed with an ISBN.

I would wager as many books as I could carry, that far, far more than this 14.5%—perhaps 80% of these 100 billion books—have already been pulped, without once raising the interest of Landymore et al., making this story a pretty good parallel to widely-disseminated concerns about the water consumption of data centres. (Which is mostly FUD too, since most new data centres consume no water—they use closed-loop cooling—and the water usage of older AI data centres that do use evaporative cooling etc., is dwarfed by the water consumption of golf-course and intensive cattle farms. I.e., this is a gnat on the arse of a flee in the grand scheme of things.)

And while most AI tokens will doubless go to things like generating fake security footage of President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe in flagrante delicto, or self-insert versions of Terminator or Twilight, it is already clear that AI can, and probably soon will, cure every disease known to man and put a complete stop to the death and mutilation caused by badly-driven cars on the road—to name but two of life’s miseries. If they need to guillotine a copy of each my books to do this (**), they are welcome to do so.

(**) if AI can also restore my use of AdobeCaslonExpert in the later versions of Word, they can have all my essays too.

Bookplate of Thomas Story Spedding

Above and below are images of the heraldic exlibris bookplate of Thomas Story Spedding (1800–1870). The bookplate appears in a bound volume of various parts of the Library of Useful Knowledge (1827–38). Three more volumes of this broken set, each containing one of these bookplates, are presently available here. There is also a copy of Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823) for sale online for USD666(!) (here).

Thomas Story Spedding was an English barrister who lived at the famous Mirehouse estate in Keswick, a historic manor house in Cumberland on an estate that had been left to the Spedding family by Thomas Story in 1802. Thomas served as magistrate and High Sheriff of Cumberland in 1855, but he is much better known for his literary connections.

Thomas’s younger brother James Spedding (1808–1881) was famous for his edition of the works of Francis Bacon. Because of his family's standing, James’ literary connections, and the location of Mirehouse in the Lake District, the Speddings were especially close friends with various “Lake District” writers.

Thomas was close friends with Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)—who wrote movingly of Thomas after his death—and frequently hosted William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald (author of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám).

The Mirehouse estate quotes the recollection of Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (here), which describes the convivial atmosphere of the library at the Spedding family’s Mirehouse estate:

There are those who would fain have that library filled again with the voices of old time. Tennyson’s deep-chested tones, FitzGerald’s laugh, Monckton-Milne’s wit. Carlyle’s strong Northern brogue, James Spedding’s dignified speech, and Tom Spedding’s humour.

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There are no images online (that I can find) of this Thomas Spedding ex libris bookplate—one of the few Speddings to dignify their books with a bookplate—and below are most of the tiny number of photos I could find of the library at Mirehouse, either from the estate website or from the Mirehouse Facebook page (here). Since Mirehouse is regularly open to the public I expected to find many more images, but the main attraction seems to be outdoors: the stunning gardens and area generally.