The Great Book-Cataloging Expedition

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Hi, I'm interested to know if you work as a cataloguer? I hope you have a nice day.

Ha! Nope, my job is completely unrelated to my love of books.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: World List of Abbreviations of Scientific, Technological, and Commercial Organizations

Author: F.A. Buttress

ISBN: none given

Year: 1960

Quite the gem, here. While Russian abbreviations are not included due to the possibility of confusion with the Cyrillic alphabet, otherwise this is truly an impressive list of not only the abbreviations themselves, but what they stand for and each organization's street address (my favorite part, just in case you need to contact the Quebec Society for the Protection of Plants).

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction

Author: ed. by Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken, and Norval Smith

ISBN: 90-272-5236X

Year: 1995

This book was compiled to bring together some of the large amount of new research on pidgins and creoles that was being published in the early 90s. Interestingly, pidgins are treated as linguistic entities in their own right rather than intermediate steps towards a creole. To add to the fun, the editors went out of their way to find diverse examples of everything.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: The Languages of Britain

Author: Glanville Price

ISBN: 0-7131-6396-8

Year: 1984

Divided up by the various language families, it's a pleasant surprise to see that languages are given roughly equal amounts of coverage. A great deal of the information is historical in nature, though this is a decent amount of space devoted to talking about these languages in modern Britain.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Interlingua: A Grammar of the International Language

Author: Alexander Gode and Hugh E. Blair

ISBN: 0-8044-0186-1

Year: 1975 (2nd printing of 2nd edition, original 1951)

Designed to be used in conjunction with the Interlingua Dictionary, between the time of the first edition and this one, Interlingua had gone from a project to a real conlang. Thorough, set up in a logical, clear way, and just as useful today for a learner of the language as it was nearly 40 years ago.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Ourika

Author: Claire de Durfort Duras

ISBN: none given

Year: org. 1823

First, a note about this style of publication: there are a couple of companies out there (this one is from BiblioBazaar) who like to take public domains, scan them in, and print/bind them. This results in a printing that is extremely difficult to read, with lots of smudging and hacked-off sentences. The novel itself, however, is quite interesting--it features an educated, black, female protagonist (who ends up in a nunnery because the world is too much, since this was still the 19th century and things couldn't go too far) living in France and telling her life story.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Author: Francoise de Graffigny

ISBN: 0-87352-777-1

Year: 1993 (org. 1747)

As the title implies, this is an epistolary novel, told from the perspective of a young Incan princess in France. She spends the majority of the book being stunned by the bizarre French customs, and pining for the love of her life, Aza, to whom she had been promised (there's a twist to that later, but I won't spoil it). Less about moralizing than social commentary, and actually a quite enjoyable read.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: La France Contemporaine

Author: William F. Edmiston and Annie Duménil

ISBN: 978-1-4282-3123-8

Year: 2010

Now, if ever I've posted a textbook, this is one (I also happen to have taken classes from both of the authors, to give some context here)--in a nutshell, France for American college students. This is the cultural stuff you don't see a lot--discussions of religion which include Islam, for instance. It's intended to be a crash course to push someone through before sending them off to France to allow them to function as an actual adult. Obviously at the moment no longer the most up-to-date version, but still interesting.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Manon Lescaut

Author: Abbé Prévost

ISBN: 1-58977-029-3

Year: 2006 (org. 1731)

Oh, Manon Lescaut. As a courtesy to all, this is the worst of my lot of foreign-language books (it only gets better from here!). The Sorrows of Young Werther have nothing on the shear unadulterated teen drama of Manon Lescaut, which is a mess of hormones, ruined lives, death, and general poor choices. There's also a healthy dose of moralizing thrown in to add to the reader's suffering.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Mankind, Nation and Individual: From a Linguistic Point of View

Author: Otto Jespersen

ISBN: none given

Year: 1964 (reprint of 1946 edition)

I have a special place in my heart for Otto (von) Jespersen and his unique take on languages and linguistics. An enjoyable read, even though a great many of his theories have been proven incorrect with the passing of decades. Read it as the piece out of time that it is, and you won't be disappointed. Note that I say nothing about the content--see the first line, I'm being diplomatic.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Sign, Symbol, and Script: An Account of Man's Efforts to Write

Author: Hans Jensen

ISBN: 69-13545 (Library of Congress Catalog Number)

Year: 1969 (3rd edition, originally published in 1935 in German)

While the book was very definitely updated between the original publication date and the 3rd edition, 1969 is still fairly early in the modern study of linguistics. Where the book shines, though, is in its original intent. It's a massive collection of the histories of various scripts, organized partially by language family, partially by geographical region.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Language, Society, and Education: A Profile of Black English

Author: Johanna S. DeStefano

ISBN: 0-8396-0020-8

Year: 1973

An utterly fascinating look into the beginnings of the modern study of AAE. Given the time in which it was written, it's shockingly in favor of dialects of English being recognized and supported. It also provides an interesting look at the debate that continues today on how to treat AAE in a classroom setting (by way of interviewing four different teachers and getting their takes on how best to handle the situation of having students who speak different dialects of English all trying to learn and use a standard dialect).

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: "Symbology" The Use of Symbols in Visual Communications

Author: Elwood Whitney

ISBN: 59-13554 (Library of Congress Catalog Number)

Year: 1960

Published as the report on the fourth annual visual communications conference, this book covers a striking array of symbols in various contexts, from religion to highways, to discussing symbology in regards to illiteracy, to advertising and medicine. The conference itself sounds like it was truly fascinating (and with some unexpected religious undertones, which are prominent throughout the book).

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Studies in French Language, Literature, & History

Author: ed. by Fraser Mackenzie, R.C. Knight, J.M. Milner

ISBN: 8369-1067-2

Year: 1969 (reprinted from 1949)

Published by the same group who put together the Todd Memorial Volumes, this book focuses predominantly on the French language and literature (particularly on historical linguistics), with a bit at the end of history.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Todd Memorial Volumes Philological Studies (I and II)

Author: ed. by John D. Fitz-Gerald and Pauline Taylor

ISBN: 68-22950 (Library of Congress Catalog Number, same for both volumes)

Year: 1968 (reprinted from 1930 original)

An utterly fascinating look into the history of linguistics. Since Henry A. Todd was a scholar of Romance philology, the volumes (which are a massive collection of essays by various scholars) predominantly focus on Romance languages.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Plants for Profit: A Complete Guide to Growing and Selling Greenhouse Crops

Author: Francis X. Jozwik

ISBN: 0-916781-00-3

Year: 1984

This book focuses primarily on growing and selling ornamental plants--so flowering, bedding, and foliage plants. It's designed to be a step-by-step guide, rather than a theoretical work. And, admittedly, I was rather taken with the photo of "the author and a few close friends" wherein the author is depicted holding two poinsettias and surrounded by several dozen more.

[thegreatbookcatalog]

Title: Plants-a-Plenty

Author: Catharine Osgood Foster

ISBN: 0-87857-156-6

Year: 1977

Less theoretical than the last text on plant propagation, this is a guide for the more average reader wanting to propagate their own outdoor or indoor plants. It is quite thorough, and focuses on the practical rather than theoretical aspects of vegetative and seed propagation in a standard home garden.