Darwin

Following the mention at reference 1, reference 2 has now turned up, complete with customs declaration, as befits a package arriving from outside the European Union, that is to say the US. All mine for £7.62, including postage and packing.

We were struck by the red stamp 'DISCARDED' which looked and sounded rather harsh compared with the black stamp 'WITHDRAWN' used by libraries in this country.

With El Camino College being something called a public community college in Torrance, California, a place I had never before heard of, but which turns out to be a suburb of Los Angeles. A college which floats between high school and university, perhaps equivalent to NESCOT here at Epsom. A large place with around 20,000 students, more than half of them Hispanics. They welcome LGBTQIA+ students, but I have not yet worked out what the right hand portion of this acronym is about.

With a library large enough to have stoutly rebound this book; at least the name of the college is embossed in small gold letters at the bottom of the spine.

Illustrations mostly woodcuts of drawings, probably more or less originals from the 19th century, but with some old photographs in the body of the book and some more tacked in at the back, some of them of senior people from the Louisville University Institute for Culture and Communication, an establishment which appears to be located on the Ohio River, nowhere near Los Angeles, so I don't know what they are doing there (yet).

The contents of the book have yet to be looked at properly, and so far all I have found out is that there are a lot of references to one Sir Charles Bell, KGH, FRS etc, whose handsome treatise on the hand I already own (bought for £10, I think in Topsham) and who wrote another on the anatomy of expression, predating the present work.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-monkey-life.html.

Reference 2: The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals - Charles Darwin – 1872.

Reference 3: http://www.elcamino.edu/.