In the general and ongoing nature of “The Way Things Work,” here is an interesting series of images from Macomb, a fairly large town in western Illinois — home of Western Illinois University, where a lot of my high school classmates went to university.

This building is the A. T. Ewing & Son Automobile Repository, which I take to have been a parking garage and auto mechanic for folks who didn’t have a garage at home; possibly an auto dealer as well. I would gladly appropriate this image for Agincourt (a town of similar size and vintage), though the asking price of $89 is way beyond my price range. Looking for other (cheaper) images, I accumulated the story of the Ewing garage in Macomb.

At some point the business closed and the building was adopted as the Lark Theatre for movies, the new out-of-the-house form of entertainment. That, in its turn, seems to have morphed to a legitimate stage theatre for dramatic production of the community theatre variety. And that in turn was demolished, replaced by a public park — onomatopoetically named Lark Park. Though I would gladly sacrifice the open space for the original building of about 1910.

And so it is with the fabric of our lives, civic and otherwise.

PS: Buildings of this general sort are quite common at the turn of the last century: (see below) clear-span and clerestory- or monitor-lit.

“I became a writer, a teller of tales,” he once said, “because otherwise I would have died, or worse.”  Carlos Ruiz Zafon [1964–2020]

My reading list lately has been crowded with books about bookstores. An old friend once joked (in all seriousness, I believe) that his notion of retirement was the management of a bar-bookstore-travel agency, because it combined his three favorite activities. I can applaud two of them.

There is always Fahrenheit 451, and 84, Charing Cross Road is in a class by itself. I didn’t get very far in A Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. But “The Library of Babel”, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, has been on my reading list for far too long. Then another Spanish-language writer stepped ahead of him: Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who created a quartet in the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books”. Last night (or early this morning) I finished Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and am about to begin The Midnight Library by Matt Haig:

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

Regrets I have aplenty. And I’d almost welcome an opportunity to reflect on what might have been. But only to confirm the choices made, no matter how ill-conceived.

There’s a blog entry here about Agincourt’s once-upon-a-time dealer in used and the occasional rare book which I probably need to expand. It’s already the end of October and I’ve not written very much.

Sarah Ruden’s introduction to her new translation of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass mentions the hapax legomenon, the thing said only once. Oh, would that I could claim as much for telling the Agincourt story, which, if anything can be said of it, is repetitive.

Translators of literature are the most admirable of writers: their indelible imprint is in the translated text, yet they themselves do not stand between author and audience. “Catalyst” is the wrong word, because the chemical reaction it sets in motion leaves the catalyst intact; it changes but is unchanged. Surely, for translators this can not be true — though as a monolinguist how would I know.

Ruden’s introduction reminds us that language has its quirks — idiom, figures of speech, dozens of them — and of the difficulty maintaining that quirkiness through translation. My first conscious encounter with the translator’s art was Andrew Bromfield’s masterful conversion of the novels of Georgian author Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili (a.k.a., Boris Akunin), where Bromfield somehow manages to retain the vernacular of a Japanese accent heard by a fictional Russian ear, then written by a Georgian author and rendered into English. Might I prefer a meeting with Bromfield over one with Akunin? Probably.

The hapax legomenon, the thing said only once, is infrequent in my experience. A case decades ago became the wound that never healed until, that is, words like acid reflux issued from my mouth — a thing said only once — that ended our “möbius friendship,” the kind that have just one side. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, for that was a moment of difference between theatre and drama; the act and the actual have rarely been more clear.

Teaching (that thing I do for money) is hardly hapax-atory. Each academic season for fifty years in the metaphoric saddle of acadême, however, I know that each class is unique; each class meeting will be like none other because both they and I are not who we were on Tuesday last. Did the Greeks have a phrase for the thing said often but never quite the same?

In the final tally, I will have said few things only once: “Will you marry me?” and “I do.” “You can put this job some place dark and moist!” or “I quit.”  And, of course, those few words that will be said as my eyes close for the last time. What do you suppose they’ll be?

“It was a long time coming. But I’m glad that it’s finally here.” I’ll be beyond saying that again.

“Youth is wasted on the young”. — George Bernard Shaw

There’s a story behind this poster, advertising a band performing at the Yellow Brick Roadhouse — way back in 2010. Wish I’d been able to be there. The graphics, not incidentally, are by friend-of-the-project Jeremiah Johnson.

On the coast of Normandy, not far from Dieppe, is the Manor House of d’Ango, built circa 1530–1545 by Jehan Ango. Italian craftsmen built the house and outbuildings in a style of masonry similar to what I know as Plantagenet masonry from the vicinity of Angers. Apparently they are unrelated.

What interests me, of course, it the aggressive patterning of each style and how they might have been an influence on William Halsey Wood, designer in 1889 of the second Fennimore County courthouse.

And to think that just a few years ago I was within a mile or so of this amazing example of masonry construction. My friend Richard and I were at Varengeville-sur-Mer to see a country house by Sir Edwin Lutyens and literally had to drive by this on the way.

The round thingy, by the way, is a dovecote — filled with guano for fertilizer.

When the Northwest Iowa Traction Co. opened in the Fall of 1909, the line extended from Ft. Dodge (where it connected with the Ft. Dodge, Des Moines & Southern) to Storm Lake, with a projected westward extension that remained unsettled as they negotiated for right-of-way. Eventually they projected an arc southwest to Sioux City.

By late 1910 the company had leased a right-of-way (some an existing rail line and some parallel with a section-line highway) into Cherokee. The trick was avoiding bridge construction over the Little Sioux River. So by New Years Day 1911 the first run made its way from Cherokee to Ft. Dodge, a distance of about eighty-eight miles in slightly less than two hours. If negotiations had progressed, the line would have continued another fifty-one miles to Sioux City.

Barnum and Grou were flag stops; at Fahnstock there was a seasonal spur to “Resort”, the rural community on the east shore of Sturm und Drang. In Agincourt the interurban shared track with the city trolley system, a lopsided figure-eight with two short spurs, one to the cemeteries, the other to the Fennimore County Fairgrounds, where the interurban cars could run when required by charters and for special events.

Depots along the way would have varied — this is me writing in the “now” — with some stops utilizing the existing railway depots but some smaller stops (like the Grou flag stop) would have had custom designs, with luck providing a sort of corporate image. I’ve already designed the “headquarters” facility at Agincourt but the others have yet to come from someone else’s imagination.

Typical timetables could read both up and down, depending which way the car was moving. Both distance and time were noted, which means a lot of interpolation for me based on examples I can find on the web or, possibly, on eBay.

Fort Dodge — 0

Tara — 6.5

Barnum (f) — 3.0

Manson — 9.0

Pomeroy — 7.5

Grou (f) — 5.0

Agincourt — 9.0

Industry (f) — 1.0

Fahnstock — 8.0

<Resort> — 8.0

Newell — 7.5

Storm Lake — 12.0

Alta — 6.0

Aurelia — 6.5

Cherokee — 8.0

Marcus — this and the following stations were only projected

Remsen —

LeMars —

Merrill —

Hinton —

James —

Sioux City —

“Gaol” is an old British way of spelling jail, but you’re not likely to encounter it these days. One of the projects from mid-way in development of this process was a jail, connected with the second Fennimore County courthouse, as well as the Agincourt City Hall. At least that’s the way I remember if from circa 2008-2009.

Eric Hoffer (whose permission I haven’t asked) took this on as a “now” project, contemporary with his own effort — not necessarily an easier row to hoe.

I borrowed this image from a personal site he doesn’t seem to be using these days. But here’s the link to the page with other images of his jail. It doesn’t show much of the immediate context, though I can tell you it’s on the north side of the courthouse and (as I recollect) adjacent to the city hall. The would be about the northeast corner of Second Street N.W. and Agincourt Avenue.

If anyone knows Eric’s whereabouts, let me know.