Books from University Presses and a Butterfly Surprise
By Stuart Mitchner
Ever since binge-reading “Risk,” the 93-page-long first part of Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays on Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press $34.95), I’ve been planning a Book Scene featuring Edward Tenner’s magnificent new collection. According to APS Press, the book is named “for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing.” The author, a Plainsboro resident, puts it more succinctly: “The very idea of a smoking lounge immediately under 7 million cubic feet of flammable gas, advanced precautions or no, seems ludicrous to generations familiar with the horrifying imagery of the airship’s end.”
Reviewing Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology (2003), one of my first pieces for Town Topics, I used the term “Balzacian” to suggest the obsessive intensity with which Tenner explores every aspect of every subject he pursues. That same command of informative narrative explains how he’s managed to construct a page-turner from four decades of pieces for journals unlikely to make an everyday reader’s heart beat faster, such as The Miliken Institute Review, the Wilson Quarterly, and Technology Review.
Looking for Consequences
My “unintended consequence” has much in common with the old boyhood alibi “accidentally on purpose,” which is why I’m writing about Butterfly Moments in an issue of Princeton Magazine containing an article on butterflies in decline. Another article in the Summer issue, on New Jersey walking trails, gave me the cue for The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images (Yale University Press 2023). Call it coincidence or consequence, after beginning with Tenner’s book, published by APS, which joined forces with University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023, I’m adding new work by two local university presses, Looking for a Story: A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee (Princeton University Press 2025) and Raritan On War: An Anthology (Rutgers University Press paperback 2025).
Butterflies in Prague
A beautiful little volume published in Prague in 1954, Max Svabinsky’s Butterfly Moments is one of the most unlikely guests ever invited to a Book Scene. What attracted me when I first found it was the pen and ink sketch on the cover showing a pretty woman in an ankle-length dress with a butterfly net in her hand, her eyes fixed on the winged beauty she’s about to capture. That was even before I saw the 20 striking water colors by Svabinsky, who describes chasing “like a young savage” the Red Admiral, the Uuritcae, the Polychroros, the Atalanta, and the Antiope, and finally the “Parnassius Apollo, a butterfly of graphic beauty, white, the edges of its wings transparent as the thinnest of ricepaper,” its head “like that of a lamb with large black eyes.”
The woman on the cover reappears in the front and back endpapers like Svabinsky’s muse, his ideal, the love of his life. At first glance the front endpapers show nothing but the pond, dragonflies in flight, reeds bending, everything in a soft-lead-pencil haze. Then you see her, up to her knees in the water, still with the net in hand, but without the dress. On the rear endpapers she’s back in the dress, sprawled barefoot on the bank of the pond, dozing, hugging the grass, breathing it all in, the net flung to one side, the air alive with butterflies.
Walking the Walk
According to the publisher’s commentary, Barnard professor William Chapman Sharpe’s The Art of Walking is “the first book to trace the history of walking images from cave art to contemporary performance …. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions. From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy tightly intertwined with the path of Western art. The path includes Romantic nature-walkers and urban flâneurs, as well as protest marchers and cell-phone zombies. It features works by artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Agnès Varda, and Maya Lin.”
The New Criterion says Sharpe’s book has something for every rambler,” as it ranges from “early Egyptian wall paintings to Turner’s depiction of rubble tourists visiting Tintern Abbey to Christo & Jean Claude’s Floating Piers in Italy’s Lago d’Iseo.”
McPhee As a Consequence
Call it coincidence or consequence, at this moment I’m reading the fifth and latest of John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa, a “project meant not to end,” which appeared in the January 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker. As Noel Rubinton points out in Looking for a Story, McPhee also calls it his “old man’s project.” So far, the highlight of the 2025 piece has been the section titled “The Pitted Outwash Plain.” After describing “countless themes” that the title covers, from “the ride home in the school bus” to “the creation of the Great Lakes,” McPhee returns to his home on the Princeton Ridge: “I not only live on the pitted outwash plain, I am one.” His account of what that entails is a hoary AARP delight, ending thus: “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”
Looking for a Story is, in the publisher’s words, “a complete reader’s guide to McPhee’s vast published work … including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name.” Beyond detailing more than 70 years of McPhee’s writing, Rubinton recounts his half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little-known part of his legacy. He “inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here.” As New Yorker editor and McPhee’s former student David Remnick comments, “With his exacting bibliography,” Rubinton “draws the map with the care and precision of his subject,” leading you “again and again, to where the gold is.”
Raritan Lives On
Among Tenner’s strongest pieces in Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge are the ones that first appeared in the quarterly review Raritan: “Confessions of a Technophile,” “Adam Smith and the Roomba®,” “Constructing the German Shepherd Dog,” and the volume’s concluding essay, “The Shadow: Pathfinder of Human Understanding.”
Although Jackson Lears has said that Raritan’s last issue under his editorship is Late Spring 2025, he and Karen Parker Lears have selected work that “typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility” for Raritan on War, which Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, calls “a compelling and relevant collection of writings revealing the human, geopolitical, and moral costs of America’s long engagement with perpetual global war. Raritan on War is a profoundly important intervention in its revelations of the human consequences — at home and abroad — of the bipartisan commitment to war making.”
From the editors’ July 2024 introduction: “We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places—Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war, such as the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.”
The Butterfly Surprise
Community book sales are festivals of happy coincidences and unintended consequences. On my way out of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley’s March sale, I noticed a 1920s guidebook to Prague with a wonderful, wholly intact fold-out map of the city. As soon as I got home, I remembered an unexpected treasure from Prague that had turned up decades ago at another book sale. But where was it? I was afraid I’d lost it. After weeks of searching, I finally found it behind a row of books in the no-man’s-land of my closet.
Butterfly Moments ends with an epilogue about the artist, “his vision of happy human life, his sensibilities overwhelmed by the beauty of the human body and of nature,” his drawings “perhaps best compared to the songs in the work of some of the great masters of symphonic music.” In fact, one of 21-year-old Robert Schumann’s first works was a suite called Papillons, which has been recorded by German pianist Kristin Merscher, who is smiling on the Eurodisc cover, surrounded by butterflies.
