[HN Gopher] Poe's best-selling book during his lifetime was a gu...
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Poe's best-selling book during his lifetime was a guide to
seashells
Author : pseudolus
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-05-29 11:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| lmilcin wrote:
| I use 6.5 digit calibrated multimeter, precision programmable
| power supply and programmable load (all from Keysight) to
| discharge/charge my car's battery:) In total the equipment to do
| this is almost the cost of the car.
|
| As a bonus I get nice chart and precise measurement of battery
| capacity:)
|
| Likewise I have precision data logging laboratory thermometer,
| with current calibration (to 0.01C) to measure temperature of
| bread dough. Not strictly in category of overkill -- I am running
| experiments to come up with formula to calculate exact perfect
| bread dough recipes, taking temperature into account.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Wrong article?
| whiddershins wrote:
| I saw a pretty cool Twitter thread pointing out how many people
| made most of their money from something distinct from what they
| are known for.
|
| Kanye: clothes
|
| Foreman: grill
|
| Jobs: Pixar?
|
| Not sure about the specifics but it's definitely a common enough
| phenomenon to be worth noticing.
| nubb wrote:
| 50 cent, I think, made the most of his money on purple Vitamin
| Water.
| jandrese wrote:
| George Foreman is probably better known for the grills now than
| the boxing career.
| kazinator wrote:
| Once, upon a midnight dreary,
|
| While I pondered, weak and weary,
|
| Over many a quaint and curious seashell,
|
| Gathered from some forgotten shore ...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Lenore sells seas shells by a sea shore
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| And the seagulls uttered 'nevermore'
| kazinator wrote:
| Sea-shell-strewn, she sleeps in her sounding-sea-shore
| sepulchre.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The Masque of the Red Mollusk
| legerdemain wrote:
| I don't know what this is supposed to prove. Poe was a failure
| whose writing was never popular during his lifetime. The fact
| that he is better known since his death is entirely due to the
| activist efforts by Ivory Tower academics and English teachers to
| make the rambling writings of an ancient hack into mandatory
| reading for students.
| [deleted]
| luckycharms9000 wrote:
| Is being a 'failure' entirely dependent on whether or not
| someone was successful in accomplishing some sort of goal?
| There are plenty of people that might be considered non-
| failures that successfully engaged in behavior that was/is
| abhorrent and detrimental to society. Wealthy slave plantation
| owners wouldn't be considered 'failures' in that sense of the
| word. To me, it doesn't seem like failure is a useful binary
| metric in determining the worth of a person.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Too many 80s and 90s kids into goth when they went to college
| but came out as English majors. I think for the most part
| however instructors just follow a template teaching method and
| don't change it. I mean, why the hell else do we still make
| kids read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn? They are some of the most
| boring pieces of American literature to date, not even good
| historical novels. To Kill A Mockingbird does a better job and
| even that goes way over kids heads.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| As a Russian, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were an important part
| of my childhood, just as "To kill a mockingbird".
| stephenhuey wrote:
| Thank you. The 2 parent comments seem to misunderstand a
| couple things. Just because something is popular doesn't
| mean it's profound, and vice versa. Also, just because
| something goes over many students' heads doesn't mean it
| wasn't worth trying.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd go farther--probably too mean for HN, but this kind
| of attitude gets a pass on here in part because people
| are too restrained in slapping down painfully-bad
| opinions that aren't about technology--and point to the
| above two comments as illustrating the difference between
| "literate" as in "can read words" and "literate" as in
| "at least knows what actually _reading_ looks like, even
| if not fully capable of it oneself ".
|
| It's the equivalent of "classical music sucks, it all all
| sounds the same to me and is really boring" or "jazz
| sucks, it's all just random noise" or "hip-hop sucks,
| it's all just angry yelling". No, you're bad at listening
| to music, broadly, and are so bad that you don't even
| realize how bad you are. This is different from just
| happening not to care for a given piece or artist, but
| understanding why the work may be considered good, or at
| least important.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Is art important because someone tells us it's important,
| did something different, or is it up to the beholder?
|
| I'd wager the average american if asked throughout there
| life would reconcile the fact that EAP was not worth
| learning about.
| tmp65535 wrote:
| Similarly, I've been writing respectable, sophisticated software
| for decades but I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece
| of software, by a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app
| (http://driftwheeler.com)
|
| Other projects I've published have a trickle of users. But this
| app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing population of
| users from all over the world. I get email every day asking
| whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me, suggesting
| improvements, etc.
|
| It's ironic, and there is a difficult lesson to be learned from
| this reality.
| andi999 wrote:
| Probably the lesson is most stuff boils down to product market
| fit. Speaking of product: the app is not available through play
| store, isn't it?
| tmp65535 wrote:
| All the major app stores restrict pornographic or sexually
| explicit content.
|
| But if you Google "porn app", the 4th or 5th search result
| (SexTechGuide) is a page that features the app, with a
| review, pros/cons, and the funny icon.
| robin_reala wrote:
| If you're interested in reading Poe's non-poetry fiction, I put
| together all of his short stories and novellas into a free/libre
| compilation for Standard Ebooks:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
|
| Having said that, I personally prefer the writing of Leonid
| Andreyev (described as Russia's answer to Poe). Coincidentally,
| I've put together a short fiction compilation for him too:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict...
| WilTimSon wrote:
| Thank you for the links. So I take it Andreyev is also gothic
| fiction or do his similarities to Poe lie in some other
| aspects?
| gojofika wrote:
| You might check the link to get unlimited https://bit.ly/34tc4BI
| (100% trusted & quality service guaranteed)
| billfruit wrote:
| I am guessing that Melville's most selling book in his own
| lifetime was 'Typee'.
| throwaway45209 wrote:
| Really like his 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'
| wxnx wrote:
| Interestingly, Poe is not alone as a famous writer of fiction who
| became fascinated by a particular branch of zoology. About a
| century later, Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed with butterflies,
| with one of his hypotheses (then thought of as largely
| insignificant and incorrect) later being borne out by genetic
| studies -- ironic, given the man's distaste for the idea of
| genetics.
|
| Nabokov himself even went so far as to say:
|
| > It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in
| Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology
| and never written any novels at all.
| artmeansart wrote:
| Reminded of Ovid.. we may know him now for 'Metamorphoses,' but
| during his lifetime, his most popular books concerned dating and
| relationship advice. Such excellent, timeless topics as where to
| look for love (go for walks around the Colosseum), how to speak
| at dinner parties, the importance of bathing, give compliments,
| less is more with regard to cosmetics, etc.
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(page generated 2021-05-30 23:00 UTC)