Oddity of the Week: The Scanning Finger
Created | Updated Jul 13, 2014
An odd Oddity.
Scanning the Page
The moving finger…er, scans, and having scanned…er, gets uploaded on the internet…
Some helpful person scanned this copy of Ben Hur into the archive. Unfortunately, they forgot to let go. Result: an edifying image of some fingers. Hands-on library work, you might say.
We found this interesting. After all, staring at well-manicured fingers is actually preferable to reading General Wallace's prose. Don't believe us? Dig this excerpt from the book. Then tell us why it was the best-selling novel in the U.S. for about sixty years.
It may be doubted if the people of the West ever overcome the impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries; in such manner, too, that while we are looking at him we are thinking of them: therein is the wonder. The animal which now came out of the wady might well have claimed the customary homage. Its color and height; its breadth of foot; its bulk of body, not fat, but overlaid with muscle; its long, slender neck, of swanlike curvature; the head, wide between the eyes, and tapering to a muzzle which a lady's bracelet might have almost clasped; its motion, step long and elastic, tread sure and soundless-all certified its Syrian blood, old as the days of Cyrus, and absolutely priceless. There was the usual bridle, covering the forehead with scarlet fringe, and garnishing the throat with pendent brazen chains, each ending with a tinkling silver bell; but to the bridle there was neither rein for the rider nor strap for a driver. The furniture perched on the back was an invention which with any other people than of the East would have made the inventor renowned. It consisted of two wooden boxes, scarce four feet in length, balanced so that one hung at each side; the inner space, softly lined and carpeted, was arranged to allow the master to sit or lie half reclined; over it all was stretched a green awning. Broad back and breast straps, and girths, secured with countless knots and ties, held the device in place. In such manner the ingenious sons of Cush had contrived to make comfortable the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, along which lay their duty as often as their pleasure.
Now, aren't you glad you read that? No? There's no accounting for taste, then. As we said, Ben Hur was the US's best-selling novel from its publication in 1880 until 1936, when it was supplanted by the next number-one best-seller.
Which was what, you say? Oh, Gone With the Wind, of course. US readers have such good taste in books, don't they?
