Interesting Book Finds

At a garage sale a couple of weeks ago, I was pawing through a table full of books when I chanced to look down at a box beneath the table ...

Yes, that's a swastika on the spine.

No, it's not a book by, or about, Nazis.

It's eight of the ten volumes of the "Sahib Edition" of the works of Rudyard Kipling, published circa 1909. Back then, the swastika was a non-controversial Indian symbol.

I'm not a trained book appraiser, which is fine because I don't buy books with an eye toward resale. But I'd personally grade the condition as ranging from "poor" to "fair," and I feel like the $4 I paid for the lot was a sweet deal (in a few cursory online searches, I have yet to find a single volume from the collection, let alone eight of them, in any condition, for a price that low). Since the works are long out of copyright, I may scan some of the frontispiece illustrations and use them here and there.

At the same sale, I paid 50 cents for a 1918 edition of the Oxford Edition of the Poems of Tennyson. The front cover has been torn off, but I couldn't resist it because of the hand-written inscription inside:

Lake Lodge School
Senior Composition Prize
Kenneth Joyner
Presented by Mrs. Daw
June 1921

The only Lake Lodge School I've been able to track down was a private school in Grimsby, Ontario, which was indeed operating at the time in question. I haven't been able to find any information on Kenneth Joyner or Mrs. Daw yet, but I'd like very much to do so and to give the book to someone for whom it might have sentimental or family history value.

The Case for Trump as a Libertarian Hero

I think there is one, and I think it's to be found by reading between the lines of this piece by Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag.

Most of the piece is nonsense on stilts, of course, but its central point -- that Donald Trump's candidacy has put paid to any libertarian influence in the Republican Party -- is, if true, worthy of celebration.

Greenfield's position, in a nutshell (paraphrased to accentuate the truthiness lamp he hides under a bushel when using his own words):

"Those mean old libertarians were more trouble than they were worth. Sure, they made for a good fig leaf to hide the Republican Party's authoritarian big-government essence, but dammit, they kept trying to make the GOP actually be libertarian. Good riddance to them, thanks to Trump. Now we can stop pretending to favor smaller government, more freedom, less regulation, etc., and just be our big, bad, ugly, fascist selves. 'MURKA!"

If he's right, I think that's a good thing. And if Trump is responsible, libertarians owe him our thanks.

There have always been libertarians who fall for the "libertarian Republican" guff, but the last two presidential cycles really drained lots of libertarian energy into that cesspool thanks to lots of activists falling for Ron Paul's doomed and pointless candidacies.

Coming into 2016 it looked like Rand Paul might have the same effect. Fortunately, he went out of his way to shed any libertarian cachet he might have been counting on before the cycle really got going. Libertarians were abandoning the Party of Big Government (R-Label Edition) even before Trump announced.

But I can buy the notion that Trump really sealed the deal. Thanks to Trump, we are virtually guaranteed that in next year's presidential election, neither major party will put up a candidate who even bothers to pretend he or she doesn't hate our freedoms.

Whether or not the Libertarian Party can bring itself to exploit that gift by offering a real alternative is another question entirely. But hey, we can always hope, right?

Thanks For Asking! -- 09/02/15

This week's AMA thread (and the podcast to follow) are brought to you by Darryl W. Perry:



How it works:

• Ask me anything (yes, anything) in the comment thread below this post.
• I'll answer in the comment thread, on this weekend's podcast, or both.