Ricky Lee Grove

  April 2026 Reading Challenge: Haiku-like story of a Geisha love story set in the snow country of northern Japan Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata was first published by Iwanami Shoten Publishing in 1948 and in substantially revised form in 1948. The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1956 and translated by Edward Seidensticker. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of wasted love and the transient nature of beauty. The novel follows Shimamura, a wealthy, detached dilettante from Tokyo who specializes in the study of Western ballet (which he has never actually seen). He travels to a remote hot-spring town in the mountains of Niigata to visit Komako, a rural geisha. Over the course of three visits spanning several years, their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of heavy snow and isolation. While Komako falls deeply and desperately in love with him, Shimamura is emotionally “numb,” viewing her passion with the same detached aestheticism he applies to art. The n...

 I love watching old cartoons. There's just such a sense of fun in them. They are all forgotten now, except for those studying animation. It's a shame, because these short cartoons were well-crafted, funny, and very creative. So when I came across a collection of cartoons from 1929 at archive.org, I was so delighted. My favorite cartoon of the 16 featured in the archive is "When the Cats Away".  When the Cat’s Away is a 1929 Walt Disney Mickey Mouse short that stands out because Mickey and Minnie are shown as actual mice rather than the familiar cartoon-sized characters. It was released on May 3, 1929, and is generally treated as the sixth Mickey Mouse cartoon. The film was directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks and Ben Sharpsteen. It was a loose remake of Disney’s earlier 1925 silent short Alice Rattled by Rats, which helps explain why its character setup feels a little unusual compared with later Mickey cartoons

  The cover art for the iconic Dover Publications editions of  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu  often utilizes 19th-century archival illustrations rather than contemporary commissions. The covers were designed by the company’s legendary editor and scholar,  E.F. Bleiler . He often selected the specific archival woodcuts and period artwork used for these covers to ensure they captured the "shudder-filled" atmosphere of Le Fanu’s prose. The specific illustration on the cover of Guy Deverell is a wood engraving, but there is no credit for the artist (often the case with many publishers printing public domain novels). It is appropriately creepy because of the objects (old church, dead tree, crow), but the colorization is excellent. I’m sure the original image was black and white. If Bleiler designed the cover, he chose swaths of blue, great and amber which come together to suggest the “sensational” quality of the story. Another excellent cover in the Dover Sheridan Le Fanu repri...

Archive.org has a great library of LP/vinyl recordings. While browsing through the library, I came across the personal collection of Donald R. Snow , which was donated to the archive by his family. There are 182 vinyl records in the collection, primarily jazz and pop. One of my favorites is George Cates's Polynesian Percussion It was released in 1961 and has 12 great tracks of what I call Tiki music. Here is the album cover and  an embedded audio player for the whole album T  

  Early in the paperback revolution (started in 1939), Pocket Books decided to try a paperback book vending machine. 50 paperback books for a quarter each. It was an interesting idea, but it failed in the end because readers wanted to actually handle and look at the books they were buying. Unlike candy or coffee, which is uniform in content, books vary by plot, genre and cover art.  According to this article , two years after the first Book-O-Mat was released, an updated version was created by Rock Ola, a company that specialized in slot machines and juke boxes. Apparently, it failed as well. However, it looked like a much better design than the original, since you could actually see the covers of the paperbacks

More info on this remarkable duo here