Drowned in Snow

Look at Norway
Ed: Yngve Woxholth
Norsk Kustforlag
Oslo, Norway circa. 1960

Caption: Girl playing with a bear near Nystuen


Caption: Corn with spikes stiffend by radioactive rays


Caption: The radioactivity being measured


Caption: Skiing to school in darkness


Caption: Defence problem: Communication, the railway to Bergen drowned in snow

A Green Yule

A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch
Charles Mackay, LL.D,
Whittaker and Co
London 1888


This title was spotted by a friend in a charity shop on Clapham High Street. A wonderful find! Includes handwritten notations by a previous owner, a resident of Edinburgh in 1890, who has added definitions of Scotch words Mackay seems to have left out. High percentage of words are linked to drinking, several terms for favourite cows but I found a few relating to my theme for the month - the weather.

Ourie or oorie, cold, shivering.
This word, peculiar to Scotland, is derived from the Gaelic fuar, cold, which, with the aspirate, becomes fhuar, and is pronounced uar.

I thought me on the ourie cattle.
-Burns: A Winter Night.

The English, hoar-frost, and hoary (white, showy) hair of old age, are traceable to teh same etymological root. Jamieson, however, derives oorie from the Icelandic ur, rain, and the Swedish ur, stormy weather, through the origin of both is to be found in the Gaelic uaire, bad weather or storm.

Uppil, to clear up; applied to the weather.

When the weather at any time has been wet, and ceases to be so , we say it is uppled.
-Jamieson.

From the Teutonic aufhellen - auf, up; hellen, to become clear, to clear up.

'A green yule makes a fat kirk-yard' - one of the many Scottish proverbs at the back of the book.

And my favourite drinking term:
Ultimus eekibus, the very last glass of whisky toddy, or eke, one drop more at a convivial gathering before parting for the night: the last of the ekes.

Snow White's Coffin

Feeling a bit guilty today because I missed The Big Wave, climate crisis demo. Instead I went to the Fashion and Textile Museum to see Czech designer Jacqueline Croag who was a huge influence on Festival of Britain designs. Particularly like the book print textile. Even had vintage fashion books in the shop but a bit pricey.
Then on to the Design Museum to see Dieter Rams - Less is Better - great exhibition of his work with Braun including a few cool OOP manuals and brochures. Liked the video interview where he talks about how his competitors labelled his revolutionary stereo with a glass lid - 'Snow White's Coffin.'

The Long Rain

The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
Rupert Hart-Davis
London 1962

'The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunnelled the soil and moulted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.'

Excerpt from The Long Rain

Not strictly an OOP book but I particularly liked this collection of short stories found in a fourth edition The Illustrated Man from Lewisham Libraries stack.

A Ton of Mud for Every Inhabitant

The recent floods in Cumbria reminded me of this OOP title:

Florence: The Days of the Flood
Franco Nincini
Allen & Unwin Ltd
1967



A shocking photographic document of when the river Arno burst its banks in 1966. Much of Florence was flooded under several metres of river water with many lives lost. The aftermath left the city covered in tons of mud, oil and debris - a ton of mud for every inhabitant. 5,000 were homeless with food shortages, 6,000 shops out of business and 1,300,000 rare books and manuscripts in the Bibliteca Nazionale and 1,400 works of art were damaged.

There are moving accounts - citizens giving shelter to prisoners who had had to escape the flood over the rooftops, of a curator who risked her life to save Galileo's telescope, of monks who spent days going through the mud to recover minute fragments of colour washed from a Cimabue crucifixion and of tragic attempts to survive on upturned tabletop rafts.

At the back of the book are similar accounts - taken from extracts of OOP chronicles of previous historic floods from 1269 to 1844.










With one eye on the Copenhagen Climate Summit, OoPPs blog will dwell on all things climatic in December.