Do You Need to Phone Home First?

Apparently no one gave the staff a heads-up about his return. See video of the President trying to get into the Oval Office at the White House unsuccessfully.

Participation in a Challenge Again? Maybe

As it happens, Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings is once again hosting his delightful springtime tradition, the Once Upon A Time reading challenge. I think I participated in either the first or the second of these, or maybe I simply entertained the possibility of it. (I know I did complete one of his Readers in Peril (RIP) challenge.) At any rate, I am feeling nostalgic about fantasy at the moment and I have a number of titles available that qualify.
(1) Tales from 1,001 Arabian Nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba and Other Favorites (Penguin Hardcover Classic)
(2) Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
(3) The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones
(4) The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty)
(5) The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) by Michael Patrick Hearn
At the same time, there's a nuance that Carl has added this year that I like - the option of reading two non-fiction titles about the four genres on which this challenge focuses -- mythology, fairy tales, folklore and fantasy. Of course, that one would require selecting which collection of expert essays I would want to read. I have ordered a new (to me) fairy tale book edited by Jack Zipes (actually published in 2000) and I never did finish Maria Tatar's Enchanted Hunters. So should I do this? Perhaps. Anyone know of a good retelling of Puss in Boots?

Are Fine Editions The Same as Fine Apps?

I have before me two beautiful editions of Jane Eyre - one is the New York Public Library edition published in 1997 in conjunction with Doubleday's centennial  and the 150th anniversary of the text’s initial publication. The other edition is more recent, published in 2010 by White's Books a publisher specializing in artistic book cover design -- in this instance one designed by Petra Borner (http://www.borner.se/)  

Both editions have high-quality production values associated with them. Acid-free paper, good solid bindings,  The New York Public Library (NYPL) Edition is clearly a labor of both scholarship and pride. It features a brief biography of Charlotte Bronte with images not just of her but of manuscripts by and about the author of Jane Eyre, many of which are held in the NYPL collection. You see her written correspondence to a publisher signed as "Currer Bell", the pseudonym she used. There is a photo of her writing desk. These are not half-tones dropped in as an insert on photographic glossy stock but are instead are placed so expertly in the introduction that they do not intrude on the reader's experience of the primary text. Instead the supporting materials within this book’s binding are arranged to satisfy any curiosity on the part of that reader to know more of the text's background and context. 

The NYPL edition’s cover is less striking than the White’s edition, which according to the paper wrapped around the back cover at purchase reflects the artist's inspiration found in the natural symbolism of Jane Eyre with the intent of conveying “the brooding romanticism of the story”. The intent behind White's edition is to feature the cover art of the designer. The production values are perhaps even higher than those used for the NYPL edition; the quality of paper is superior as is the legibility delivered via combined font and leading on the page.

For real bibliophiles, these are important criteria. There is appreciation of the external packaging of the internal text.

What strikes me is that today (even as I type this) there is a panel at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX on the discussion of print as it impacts on the design of apps and other digital reading environments. From the panel’s descriptive abstract: ...Print Design is becoming an important influence in the evolution of Interaction Design. As a craft, design for printed media has a rich history. Several generations of designers have pushed its boundaries in countless directions. It has been shaped over several hundred years as both a functional and aesthetic discipline, with a deep foundation of principles, practices, theories, and professional dialogue. In comparison, Interaction and UI Design is still a relatively young field. Its history has largely been driven by technology and functional goals. The dialogue around it has been centered on usability, which has been its purpose in the context of technological advancement. The visual language of UI has evolved from that standpoint: that it should evoke the familiar, analog experience of tools, buttons, knobs, and dials. That foundation has led to a very specific visual language in interactive experiences. In the past ten years however, the relevant technologies that support the design of Interfaces - displays, processing speeds, and rendering engines - have matured to a point that they provide a more capable canvas for design. Meanwhile, our culture has become visibly more comfortable with the technologies that surround it. These combination of trends are creating an important inflection point for designers. The aesthetic experience of the digital surface can now be considered and explored in a more sophisticated manner.

Production values in a physical book matter. It is a visible demonstration as to whether this is a publication that someone deemed to be of such value as to deserve the best of treatment in production in order to attract the highest number of buyers at a sufficiently profitable price.

Knowing that bottom-of-the-line apps can cost in the range of $26,000, one wonders how we’re going to recognize quality in the digital reading environment. Will it just be determined through a slick interface (and I’m not intending to denigrate the difficulty of that achievement) but rather I’m wondering how long it will take for the navigational conventions as well as the packaging to be set for trade books in a digital environment.

Odd and the Frost Giants [Review]

Title: Odd and the Frost Giants
Author: Neil Gaiman (his site: http://www.neilgaiman.com)
Illustrator: Brian Helquist  (his blog: http://bretthelquist.blogspot.com/)
Copyright: 2009, Harper, ISBN 978-006-167173-9
Genre: Literary fairy tale
Length: 117 pages

Summary: Odd is a 12-year old boy very much at odds with the rest of his Viking environment. He’s lame in one leg and even he admits it was due to his own failure to think through his actions. His father is dead and his mother has remarried a man who has no particular interest in Odd. Winter has dragged on for far too long, affecting overall spirits in the village. Can anything be done to improve his lot in life?

This literary fairy tale satisfies our appetite for stories about coming of age and quests. Odd encounters members of the Norse pantheon in animal form (with one of the priceless scenes being one with Odd awakened by those animals indulging in human speech when they think he’s still asleep.)  Ultimately, Odd thinks his way through the resolution of the conflict that has kept Spring from arriving when it ought. If there is a take-away from this reassuring fairy tale. He returns to his home and to his mother having grown in a variety of ways.

Excerpt: “Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day, the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold.
In the village, people began to get on one anothers’ nerves. They’d been staring at each other across the Great Hall for four months now. It was time for the men to make the longship seaworthy, time for the women to start clearing the ground for planting. The games became nasty. The jokes became mean. Fights were to hurt.”

Spring is of course the antidote to this type of illness as is beauty.

Also relevant: I liked this story just as I liked the companion illustrations by Brett Helquist. (For a taste of those illustrations, make a point of viewing the book trailer found here: http://www.mousecircus.com/extras.aspx)  That said, I doubt that Odd and the Frost Giants is the most timeless of Gaiman’s works, but, on the whole, it is a satisfying story -- satisfying rather than being charming or adorable or enchanting. This short (14,000 words) tale is explanatory in many ways, helping younger readers better understand what is required in life. Odd is called upon to be smart; he must think  things out. He must be resourceful in meeting the challenge of putting things back on track. Far from being able to turn to his creature companions for assistance, he has to figure out the answers. The Norse Gods while helpful at times in Odd’s quest just as readily demonstrate their well-known character flaws. (Odin is overly taciturn while Loki tends to boast of his cleverness).

The length is right for the tale; it spins out over the course of six chapters, suitable for reading out loud over the course of an evening or two. Sentence structure is simple but appropriate. Nothing has been dumbed down.

One tidbit, this story has aleady been tranmuted into another medium; this link takes you to a puppeteer’s blog where she discusses her challenges in delivering Gaiman’s tale to an audience.

Perhaps I’m wrong and this work will live longer than I anticipate.  If it’s any indication, I don’t think I will be passing my own copy on to the local library friends book sale.  I too need to be reminded of Spring and the importance of Beauty.

My 2007 review of Gaiman's Stardust.

A Time to Keep Silence [Review]

Title: A Time to Keep Silence 

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Karen Armstrong

Copyright: New York Review of Books, 2007, New York, ISBN: 978-1-59017-244-5

Length: 96 pages

Genre: Essays

Summary: On the surface this tale is about visits to several religious houses, taken not on the basis of any religious fervor but in the hope of finding a quiet place to work. Back in the '50's, Patrick Leigh Fermor visited St. Wandrille des Fontanes, La Grande Trappe,  and Solesmes, and an even more ancient form of monastic shelter found in the Turkish rock monasteries of Cappadocia with the purpose of writing a book. The three essays in this book were drawn from letters written by Fermor during the course of those visits to the woman who would later become his wife.

This is one-third travel, one-third history, one-third Fermor's meditation on a life that he finds as much disconcerting as it is engaging. He is respectful of the monastic life, but clearly has no idea why it would be pursued. What he finds most striking is the monastic pursuit of devotional silence in contrast to the rest of modern life. He writes with erudition, assuming that his reader will be comfortable with historical details as well as with untranslated phrases in French or Latin throughout A Time to Keep Silence. A 2005 newspaper profile of the author characterizes this work as “exquisite” and the lyricism of Fermor's descriptions are indeed beautiful.

Excerpt: The faces of the seated monks are hidden in their hoods; their heads are bowed; and they themselves are only just discernible under the accumulation of shadows. The solitary voice reading aloud seems to issue from an inner silence even greater than the silence that surrounds them. The reading comes to an end; the single light is extinguished; and the chanted psalms follow one another in total darkness. The whole service is a kind of precautionary exorcism of the terrors of the night; a warding off of the powers of darkness, each word throwing up a barrier or shooting home a bolt against the prowling regions of the Evil One. “Scapulus suis obumbrabit tibi”, the voices sing; “et sub pennis ejus sperabis”. The New York Review of Books site links to a Googl Books preview; visit http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/a-time-to-keep-silence/

Also Relevant: This book reminded me however fleetingly of James Hilton's Lost Horizon. The desire to escape a society constantly moving in haste to the next Big Thing discounts the value of older approaches to solitude and sustaining inner quiet. Hilton's novel is, of course, more frivolous than this short series of essays but the mindset of Conway, the novel's protagonist, reflects the feelings of the author Fermor.

For this New York Review of Books edition, Karen Armstrong's introduction picks up on the similar attraction of Fermor's work for a distracted audience in the 21^st century, “As time advances, the stress of work and the threat of outside distractions make the need for silence and privacy more urgent than ever...” We all benefit from pursuing some form of sabbatical from our pell-mell daily race towards – what? Seeking the silence of another form of life is sometimes the right answer.

NKJV Greatest Stories of the Bible

I had enrolled in the Thomas Nelson Book Review Blogger program and received a free review copy of the book discussed in this blog entry back in 2010. The original draft of this review is quite literally a year old.  .

Title: NKJV Greatest Stories of the Bible

Author: Thomas Nelson Publishing

Copyright:  2009, Thomas Nelson, Nashville (ISBN: 978-1418541668)

Length: 624 pages (including index)

Summary: Those who publish Bibles are frequently challenged in finding new ways to present the content in ways that are both practically useful and attractive to the market.. For some publishers, the easy approach is to slap a new cover on the Biblical canon with some few study aids such as maps and glossary and ship the product.

Other publishers spend time and resources on considering the various purposes that readers have for selecting a Bible. The volume may be used for purposes of devotion, for purposes of education, for purposes of cultural reference. This particular volume, The Greatest Stories of the Bible, is not in fact a Bible in the traditional sense, as the front matter makes clear. While the actual text is taken literally from the New King James translation of material, the volume is made up of editorially-selected extracts from the Biblical canon with an eye to building a narrative thread through both the Old and New Testament. Rather than presenting a more fluid storyline, Nelson's Greatest Stories of the Bible has focused on ordering a string of  various stories and plot lines  (each not more than three or four pages in length). [For why this is currently considered to be a good approach, read this article, Why Johnny Can't Read the Bible http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/may/25.38.html]

This treatment works for some Books of the Bible (such as the Book of Jonah, a minor prophet) but not for others (such as the Book of Job).  The Book of Jonah is broken into four relatively equal segments (Rebellious Prophet, Repentant Prophet, Successful Prophet and Pouting Prophet). Given the length of the original and its flow of its storyline, this makes sense. Contrast that with the treatment given to Job, a fairly lengthy poetic treatment of Everyman's reaction to the decisions made by a seemingly capricious Deity. In this volume, Job has been reduced to three chapters (specifically 1,2, and 42) which reduces the message of Job down to the overly simplistic message (and this is my statement of the takeaway from those segments) of “God is God, so mind your manners and don't whine”. Hardly inspiring. Some of the more awkward incidents in the lives of patriarch Jacob as well as King David have been eliminated entirely.

It was heartening to see that certain stories of women were still deemed important to the overall message of the Bible.. We see somewhat less familiar figures such as the Judge Deborah, Jael, and Abigail.as well as the better-known Ruth, Sarah, Esther and Mary Magdalene.

Overall, however, this treatment is largely respectful of both the content and the reader's intelligence. Each of the 250 “stories” is manageable in length for purposes of reading aloud or instruction. For example, in introducing great works of classical art, a book such as this would be quite useful in presenting the literary reference for a painting of Jacob meeting Rachel at her father's well for the first time. Production values are pleasing (cream pages with a light brown type, good quality paper and deckle-edged, a ribbon bookmark sewn into the binding); the cover design uses the conceit of a tattered old volume and debossing of the trim at the edges adds a pleasing tactile touch.

Ventus [Review]

Title: Ventus

Author: Karl Schroeder (official web site). Schroeder is a physicist by training, an author of more than half a dozen science fiction titles and a professional futurist/consultant.

ISBN: 0-312-87197-X (note that the full text of Ventus may be downloaded from the author's site in formats compatible with a number of e-reader devices; see this page for more information)

Genre: Science Fiction (Hard SF)

Copyright: 2000, Tor, New York

Length: 477 pages

Summary:  In exploring his theme of man's intelligence versus machine intelligence, Schroeder provides us with a set of characters who before the ending of the novel will reveal themselves to actually be a range of beings some of whom are fully human, others part-human-part-machine and finally others who are fully machine. We first meet Jordan, a youth who is ripped away from his home and family when he goes in pursuit of a runaway sister. Calandria May is a woman who has a mission to complete on Ventus, a planet she doesn't find to be particularly congenial or welcoming., and it is she who spirits Jordan away to join her in an assassination plot impacting on a war that threatens to engulf this planet. One meets the character Armiger when he is lying dead in his tomb with a grave robber about to sack the place for whatever may be of value. Later the reader encounters Queen Galas, both goddess and monarch to her people. These inhabitants of Ventus live uneasily between the tyranny of the Winds who maintain control over Ventus and the social constructs that humans have created in order to survive on this planet. Before Jordan, Armiger and Galas and the other significant players (Axel, Megan, General Lavin, Marya, Enneas, Ka) have assembled for the last battle, each will have traveled across the planet and into space in the interests of protecting and sustaining civilization as they understand it.

The story is told in tensions between male and female, human initiative and programmed hardware, agrarian world and technological environment. This is a science-fiction reworking of the Frankenstein tale -- what happens when man creates a machine that is smarter and stronger than humankind? What can be done when that machine must be turned off but there is no record of how that might be accomplished, when there is no clear understanding of the nature of the original programming that drives the machine? There are hints of the fantastical technologies found in Isaac Asimov's and Ray Bradbury's short stories of the 1950's, but Schroeder examines our interactions with tools and technologies in the harsh light of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology as we understood them in the year 2000.

Extract: One image that I tapped seemed to stagger as it stopped. I tapped it again and it jittered in place. I touched my finger to the wall and slowly drew it along. To my amazement, the pictograph followed....Soon I had ten or so of the things lined up in front of me. The rest were were still whirling around, but they were less fearsome now that I knew I could control them....I immediately made another discovery. If two or more images overlapped, they would both flash for a few seconds, then disappear, replaced by new ones. These new images were the reply of the desal. (page 221)

Also Relevant: Vernor Vinge addressed an audience of information professionals at ALA Midwinter this month and suggested that this novel along with Canticle for Liebowitz were the science fiction they needed to read in order to prepare for the future. As per his notes found here, he sees the theme of Ventus as being a discussion on the nature of extreme distributed computing. His talk was entitled "Guardians of the Past, Enablers of the Future" and focused on how important the preservation of the human record is at both a local level (as represented by the way in which the inhabitants of Ventus have fallen back in their use of technology) and at a far higher level (grasping Ventus' role in the wider space-traveling universe known as the Archipelago). The cover art shown above represents Queen Galas, but might just as easily have been a futuristic image of a librarian. Having learned through Twitter of Vinge's recommendation, I went out and found this book in both print and ebook forms and tried to race through it as quickly as I could.

That was a mistake. Ventus is a novel best read slowly, taking in every paragraph, as there is significance in every scene in the early chapters describing each individual character and their interactions. The pacing is slow in the beginning but in the middle third of the text, the action speeds up dramatically. You need to understand Armiger's rising from his tomb just as you need to absorb the nature of Calandria May's space ship and the uninhabited mansions of Ventus. This is not science fiction to be read through lightly, but rather to be ingested and considered. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recognize its creative fuel for re-thinking the role of libraries and archives in the future.

Bonus Link: Science fiction author Cory Doctorow blogs about Karl Schroeder's work (Feb 2006 -- note link to podcast interview there)

It's Those Rampaging *Anarchists* Again

It's not that I'm not sympathetic to any lingering trauma for the Duchess, but the coverage in the UK-based London Daily Mail tabloid does take the cake:


On a day of bitter recriminations after the tuition fees protest:
■ It was revealed that the Duchess of Cornwall was prodded in the ribs through an open window by an anarchist as she and Prince Charles were surrounded by a mob;


Come now. I know it's traditional with the Brits, but must we resort to characterizing them as anarchists? It makes the student protestors sound like something out of a 1920s' thriller.

The Father Brown Stories (G.K. Chesterton)

This entry was originally composed back in May of 2009, but inexplicably never posted.

I have spent the past few weeks re-discovering the Father Brown mysteries by G.K. Chesterton. I am quite sure that I was in 8th grade the first time I read a collection of these and I'm fairly sure that I wasn't able to appreciate them at that age. This time it was a combination of some old British television episodes on sale and a paperback Modern Library edition that intrigued me. Borders had a sale on boxed DVD sets and I picked up two seasons of the Father Brown series, starring Kenneth More, circa 1972, for half off. As it happened, the following weekend at Borders, there was a copy of Father Brown: The Essential Tales on the shelf. Between that and the full text of all of the stories available here, I read some dozen stories or more over the course of the last month. Chesterton's stories run approximately 9,000 words (or 15 pages printed out on normal 8-1/2 x 11 paper) so they are just the right length for a thoughtful read on a 20-25 minute commute. Specifically, I printed out:

• The Man With Two Beards
• The Mirror of the Magistrate
• The Dagger with Wings
• The Oracle of the Dog (*)
• The Curse of the Golden Cross(*)

and one still to be read is “The Vampire of the Village”.

In The Essential Father Brown, I read:

• The Blue Cross (the very first Fr. Brown story)
• The Queer Feet
• The Hammer of God
• The Eye of Apollo

Two of the stories particularly caught me in watching them on DVD (see asterisked items above). Neither was adapted slavishly but both captured the essential drama of the individual tales. In Curse of the Golden Cross, the linear narrative on the DVD picks up with a guide explaining the significance of the Byzantine gold cross and then jumps to the archaeologist in Crete who forms the focus of the story, a Professor Smaill who receives anonymous threats because someone resents his discovery of the cross. . The narrative then shifts to shipboard where we see the doctor in conversation with Father Brown. The story as written flips that order, opening on shipboard and the story of the cross emerging in the first few pages as Father Brown and Professor Smaill form an alliance to uncover the threat to his life. Written in the mid-nineteen-twenties, the story plays on the public interest in archaeological excavations at that time, excited by the discovery in 1921 of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Father Brown is entirely pragmatic in the stories, not particularly impressed or taken in by superstition or folklore. He solves problems, based on his keen professional grasp of human frailty and behavior.

In Curse, the party visits an old church, (having a catacomb relating to Smaill's discoveries) to dine with the old vicar and view his excavation. The small set of suspects (met on shipboard and gathered again on shore at the church) and the limited set of locales in the tale make the attempt on Smaill's life an ideal candidate for a television episode.

The Oracle of the Dog was similar in approach (small set of suspects, limited setting), featuring someone who attributes a pre-turnatural awareness to the howling of a dog, included with Cross in the collection, The Incredulity of Father Brown.

The Wind in The Willows: Annotated Editions [Review]

I'm looking at two distinct publications in this review, interestingly both annotated editions of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

Title: The Annotated Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame, edited with a preface and notes by Annie Gauger
Introduction by Brian Jacques
Copyright: 2009, W.W. Norton, New York City (ISBN: 978-0-393-05774-4)
Length: 384 pp.


Title: The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition
by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer
Copyright: 2009, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (ISBN: 978-0-674-03447-1 -- linked page includes interview with Lerer in mp3 format, as well as a 14-page excerpt in PDF)
Length: 273 pp.

The 100th anniversary of the initial publication of The Wind in The Willows (WitW) was actually in 2008, but these two editions celebrating that anniversary appeared in 2009. I can't recall how the two came to my attention, but I purchased both of them in August of this year in order to see how they compared. One of the most memorable fictional events from my childhood was the Dulce Domum chapter of WitW. Mole, walking along in mid-December, suddenly catches a whiff of his old home and runs urgently back to it with Ratty in close pursuit. Mole is in bad shape, but his supportive friend helps him back to some semblance of himself, with a reassuring preparation of a meal and the arrival of a holiday chorus of field mice singing in the snow outside the door of Mole End. It's one of the most emotionally reassuring renderings of home that I have ever found in literature. Looking at the way in which these two editors handled the annotation of this particular chapter is indicative of the differences between the two editions.

The Norton edition, primarily intended for the trade marketplace, opens with an extended explanation of the chapter's title in latin (essentially, home sweet home), including other uses of the phrase in art and poetry. She makes an attempt at identifiying the geographical location for the fictional Wild Wood. Perhaps most controversially, she notes unspoken themes of homosexuality based on Mole's and Ratty's friendship as evidenced by the 1937 illustrations by Payne. In particular, this chapter contains a dozen illustrations from the various editions of WitW. Because it is so closely aligned with Christmas, despite never being called that in the text, the illustrators could draw from the emotional symbols of that holiday in their contributions. Given that Mole is supposedly a middle class, low-church Victorian sort, Dulce Domum functions as a landmark for showing how far Mole has come in his own journey from an unseen creature laboring in a burrow to being up above ground and out of his natural element on the River. Gauger points this up with an annotation regarding potential allusions to The Odyssey. Gauger has 52 notes to this chapter, some of which are (in my opinion) irrelevant. While it might be valid to tie Mole's unconscious awareness of proximity to his home to a telegraphic signal, it doesn't seem worthwhile to take up space by noting Nelson's use of flags to send the message at Waterloo (England expects every man will do his duty).

By contrast, the more scholarly Belknap Press version, edited by children's literature scholar Seth Lerer (University of California-San Diego), offers no explanation of the chapter title. Where the Gauger edition has 12 illustrations included with this chapter, eight of which are in color, the Lerer edition has only 3 black and white Shephard illustrations. (Note: The single inset of color illustrations in the Belknap edition has 8 glossy pages of illustrations from a variety of editions, not all of which refer to this particular chapter. However, the inset is placed squarely in the middle of this chapter, most likely for production/binding reasons.) Lerer includes 47 notes to Gauger's 52, but his are brief and predominantly tied to his stated scholarly themes. Those include a belief that Grahame was deeply influenced by John Ruskin's thinking on the value of domesticity and a human need for caring shelter. A second theme in Lerer's interpretation of WitW is Grahame's language and the frequent inclusion of examples from the text in the Oxford English Dictionary to illustrate contemporaneous usage. Another contrast between the two interpretations of these editions is that Lerer sees the function of this chapter as differentiating Mole's emotionally valid affinity for his old burrow with Toad's artificial ties to his estate, Toad Hall. The former is naturally appropriate whereas the latter shows Toad in a stone and wood construct, not the natural dwelling place of an amphibious creature. Toad has never found his natural place in the world and Mole still retains that awareness.

I don't think I would be satisfied with owning just one or the other of these annotated editions. Each is a perfect complement to the other. Gauger's edition focuses less on the total body of Grahame's life and work and more on the various editions and body of illustrations associated with The Wind in the Willows. Lerer's effort is at positioning The Wind in The Willows in the larger context of the author's life and historical context. If Grahame's work has any emotional significance in your life, you may also wish to have both on your shelf.

Other useful links:
Interview with Charles van Sandwyck, illustrator of the most recent Folio Society edition of The Wind in the Willows
Web Resources Compiled by Kenneth Grahame Society