Death of Ponitawski, detail.Only one copy has come to auction in thirty-five years. There is only one copy in institutional holdings worldwide. So few were issued, in fact, that the publisher didn’t bother having a title page printed. Only four copies are known to exist. This is one of them.Manuscript title inlaid to window-panel with engraved border.The book is Military Duties, Occurrences &c. &c., a color-plate book of the utmost rarity by Henry Alken, one of England’s great artist-designer-engravers of the nineteenth century. The book is at my side as I write; it’s another great day in Rarebookadoon, the enchanted...
Gen. McChrystal’s "Bad Habit": He Loves Old Book Shops
(I wish I was home, relaxing in my library, reading a good book)During the 1960s, the phrase “military intelligence” was considered an oxymoron. In the midst of the Vietnam war it was a darkly glib joke, defensible only because of the series of strategic blunders that were made; it certainly seemed to be true that military officers were not the brightest candles in the chandelier and disdained expressions of intellect.It wasn’t true then, it isn’t true now. Buried within Dexter Filken’s New York Times magazine feature last Sunday profiling Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of allied military operations in Afghanistan, is...