Books I'm reading: History of the Violin

I recently read this 2006 Dover reprint of a book by William Sandys and Simon Andrew Forster originally published in 1864 about the history of the violin and other stringed instruments. It was not exactly what I was expecting. While it covers early precursors of the violin, it does so in a rather haphazard way and there are so many overlapping terms for the earliest instruments that I was not left knowing a great deal more than I already knew. In addition, the book frequently gets bogged down in lists of instruments made by individual luthiers or genealogies of families of luthiers, some of which I skipped through. No attempt is made to define technical terms used and the text is liberally seasoned with Latin and French quotes with no translations.

While the book discusses the famous Amati, Stradivarius, Guarneri, and Stainer families, it also devotes a great deal of time to recent (at the time of writing – that is, 150 years ago) families of violin makers with a special emphasis on English violin makers. These last are hard to keep straight because of the English habit of naming everyone James, Thomas, John, or Charles, sometimes for multiple generations. I came out of my reading more confused than anything. That said, there was enough of interest between the covers that I DID actually finish the book, my skipping of lists here and there not withstanding. Interesting, but I think most modern readers would expect a more organized and objective treatment of the subject than the title suggests.

Books I'm Reading: The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters

A Dover publication of a text originally published in 1957, I picked this up somewhere long ago and finally read it over a recent weekend. John Toland's The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters is not very well titled. It would be better called The Great Dirigibles: One Disaster after Another, as the author spends little time talking about the successful flights of these once-great airships. The book is mostly a telling of how some of the most famous of them met their ends—in great detail, based on eyewitness accounts. If nothing else, this book makes it clear just how fragile and dangerous dirigibles (especially hydrogen-filled dirigibles) were.