Today I notice a second tribute, to a different jigsaw, in the form of a booklet about Kent lodged in a holiday house nowhere near Kent. A jigsaw (jigsaw 5, series 2) which was completed at the end of 2012 (see reference 1) and which resulted, shortly thereafter in visits to the place in question and to nearby Rochester. Memorable visits both, with our being impressed on the first visit by the size of the Medway and on the second by the size of Rochester castle.
We learn from today's booklet that England is considered to have been invented on the occasion of the battle of 455 mentioned in the earlier post, the first time at which the resident tribes of what is now England had banded together in a joint endeavour to repel the German invaders. Ultimately unsuccessful on this occasion.
I then started to doze a bit and got to wondering about the way that the thousands of books from a single printing might spread out over the world - the sort of thing that, back in the fifties of the last century, one might have been required to write essays about. I recall my older brother being tasked with an essay on the day in the life of a gate post. So let us suppose that 10,000 copies of this particular book were run off during the week commencing Monday 4th February 1952.
First thought is that I talk glibly of 10,000 copies as if they were all the same, when in reality they were not. The first 10 were especially bound in white calf skin and used for presentation purposes. The next 90 were especially bound in blue boards and wrapped with a tastefully designed dust cover. The remaining 9,900 were knocked out as booklets and intended for sale in souvenir shops in the ordinary way. But even they are not all the same. The first batch was done by Fred who was recovering from a binge at the time and slightly overdid the blue ink. The second batch was done by Alf who never got the hang of the stapler. And so on, with a serious collector being able to distinguish copies from the various hands involved.
We next suppose that all of them were equipped with a chip which could report its position to base, rather in the way of a mobile phone. We are then able to track the movement of every copy through its life, and perhaps a little beyond as the chip might not expire with its host book. We neglect, in what follows, this interesting complication.
So, for any point in time after said Monday 11th February 1952 we can say that so many books are still extant and this is their geographical disposition. We stick to a two dimensional disposition and neglect, in what follows, other possibilities. So on Tuesday 15th September 1953, 5,000 of the books might still be in store in Rochester. There might be clusters of them scattered around the souvenir shops of Kent and beyond. One of them might have made it to Valparaíso in Chile, carried there by an expatriate lecturer in the university there. Fifteen might have made it to Stratford, Ontario of all places, carried there by enthusiastic members of Stratford High School's famous girls' choir which had done a singing tour of Kent, England. One could make an entire television documentary about the disposition of the books on some particular day. One could make a series, taking a series of such days, a series which might include bearded pundits banging on in a learned way about the details of the mechanics of the dispersion of printed matter, rather as if they were talking of the migration of sardines around the Atlantic.
And the next thought is about the status in the scheme of things of something like 'the number of books from the February 1952 printing of this particular guide to Kent which were still extant and in the province (or duchy) of Aquitaine in France in the spring of 1961'. Can we assert that this number exists, even if no-one has bothered to articulate it in speech or words, let alone actually compute it? Is the failure of this number to exist anything to do with the fact that 'extant' is a rather woolly concept. Is the book still extant if it is being cannibalised to make wrappings for fish and chips?
I can see that such a number is different from the square root of 10, and certainly from the square root of minus 10. But it is perhaps in the same ball-park as 'the average age of the population of Cottenham'. And in the neighbouring ball-park as 'the length of the longest salmon in Loch Ness'. With due consideration being given to the angles that Cottenham might be empty of people or that Loch Ness might be empty of salmon. Or that length might not be a sensible attribute of a salmon.
At which point, my thoughts turn towards the breakfast baker.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jigsaw-5-series-2.html.
PS: I notice in passing the attempt of one Fiona Grant to sell me an advent calendar this morning. Google, quite properly, shoves her email in the promotions pot, but I am beguiled by Fiona being the sender and open the thing up, to find that she represents the Eden Bible Company. They are not the only energetic company to hide their marketing material of this sort - bulk emails - under such clothes, with the Tate Gallery being another such. Faintly dishonest to my mind, but which, oddly, irritates me less than those letters from utility companies addressed and signed as if I was a personal friend of the sales director. Is the essential difference here that the former are usually women (whom one assumes, possibly quite wrongly, to be young and pretty), while the latter are usually men?
Perhaps the EC should make a law that all such communications should include a fair & recent mugshot of the signatory in the top right hand corner.
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