January 2011

A The browser who leafs through The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia , by Barry Moreno (Simon & Schuster, $30.00), will find entries not only on the statue’s nose (three feet eight inches long) and replications (a 44-foot polyester model made for a 1968 film can be found today in Barentin, France), but also on Benjamin Jaurès (“a delegate representing the French Senate at the inauguration of the Statue”), Simon Cameron (author of the 1877 congressional resolution accepting the statue), and France’s Third Republic.

A few weeks ago I found myself balanced atop a ladder at die Strand, a vast used-book store in Manhattan, hanging onto a shelf with one hand and reaching greedily for John Lukacs’s The Last European War with the other. I stretched out as far as I could; just a few inches more and it was mine. Then, horror, the ladder began to tilt. So this is how it ends, I thought—with a great, sprawling crash into nineteenth-century Prussia. Perfect. I managed to regain my balance; no swan dive, but definitely a bad bibliographic moment.

The University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection has a surprising star attraction, the Directorio Telefonico de La Habana , Havana’s last published telephone directory before Fidel Castro’s takeover. Out of the collection’s 500,000 documents and artifacts, the 1958 phone book is one of the most frequently asked about. Half a million Cubans fled the country in the decade after Castro took power, but almost none took along a phone book—a key, it turns out, to reconstructing and imagining Havana life in those days. As a result, hundreds of people each year consult the university’s copy, which was long kept under lock and key. Esperanza de Varona, coordinator of the Cuban Heritage Collection, says it lets exiles “remember the feeling of the time that they left, and pass those memories on to their children.”

Books Telephones Antique to Modem by Kate E. Dooner (1992).

Web site www.cavejunction.com/phones .

Organization Antique Telephone Collectors Association, P.O. Box 94, Abilene, KS 67410 (785-263-1757).

Museum Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) exhibit “Information Age.”

Internet-auction search terms With the word telephone , try antique, candlestick , or Bakelite .

In one strike, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone made communication the most modern of technologies, wherein electricity chased the speed of sound right up to the speed of light. The phone has remained modern ever since, yet the blindingly fast systems of today can still accommodate the old phones. A cradle phone from the 1930s can connect today to a cell phone on a ship out at sea—via satellite and without a hitch. Most telephones made after 1925 can be used today with their original workings intact. There is a peculiar satisfaction about a technology that moves forward and yet leaves nothing behind.

FOR SERIOUS COLLECTORS:

ANTIQUE TELEPHONE SETS—C. 1877-95. Early phone boxes ($500-$!,000) and threepiece wall models sometimes called “coffin” phones ($2,000-$9,000) attract the most attention, and money, because of their rarity.

The highly skilled miniaturist Sarah Goodridge painted Daniel Webster a dozen times during his 40-year political career; that he was considerably more to her than an illustrious subject is suggested by the astonishing little talisman she executed in watercolor on ivory and gave the senator in 1828, a self-portrait whose subject would be manifest only to one who knew that telltale mole. The painting—no bigger than a playing card—descended in Webster’s family and is currently perhaps the most arresting picture in an exhibition of miniatures, “Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures,” that has been organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition stays there until December 30 before going on to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. The show is accompanied by a handsome book of the same title by Robin Jaffee Frank, published by Yale University Press.

Japanese tourists heading to the Grand Canyon often pass through the Navajo Reservation town of Kayenta, Arizona, but when they stop at the local Burger King, it’s not just for food. A 75-foot message sign advertises the real attraction: NAVAJO CODE TALKER EXHIBIT (alternating with 99-CENT WHOPPER!).

Japanese tourists heading to the Grand Canyon often pass through the Navajo Reservation town of Kayenta, Arizona, but when they stop at the local Burger King, it’s not just for food. A 75-foot message sign advertises the real attraction: NAVAJO CODE TALKER EXHIBIT (alternating with 99-CENT WHOPPER!).