Bet You Missed It

Carefully selected by Your Crack staff of News sleuths

Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Editor’s Note: Hey, are y’all reading this? If you know of an article that should be called to Against the Grain’s attention ... send an email to <kstrauch@comcast.net>. We’re listening! — KS

taboo Name of Pie

It’s Kentucky Derby time, and along with the mint julep is the chocolate walnut pie to honor the race. Louisville Bakery Kern’s Kitchen owns the trademark on the pie and is notorious for suing anyone who strings together the words “Derby” and, well, you know, “Pie.” He has sued Bon Appetit, Nestlé Foods and the restaurant owned by Colonel Sander’s wife.

Recently, the Sixth Circuit held a Louisville newspaper’s use of the forbidden phrase was not trademark infringement. It was “analogous to using ‘Derby’ to modify ‘horse,’ ‘hat,’ or ‘party.’”

See: Caroline Aiken Koster, “The Pie That Must Not Be Named,” The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021, p.A15.

Let’s read Our Violent 19th Century

Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood (2018) (70 violent incidents in US capitol between 1830 and 1860s); Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge (2020) (plots to kill Lincoln and disrupt electoral vote after election); (3) Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom (2010) (black voter murdered on way to Philadelphia polls in 1871); (4) T.J. Stiles, Jesse James (2002) (unreconstructed rebel and murderous outlaw); (5) William L. Riordan, Plunkett of Tammany Hall (1905) (making millions off “honest graft”).

See: Jon Grinspan, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8-9, 2021, p.C8. Grinspan is the author of “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.”

Book store Plug

Culinary historian Jessica Harris takes a tour of Mississippi barbecue and gets in a plug for Square Books in downtown Oxford on the Square, hence the name. She has a personal library of 6,000 volumes but is always on the hunt for more.

See: Jessica Harris, “Riding Shotgun,” Garden & Gun, June-July, 2021, p.108.

In May, Netflix will launch Jessica’s four-part documentary on African-American food, High on the Hog.

Message From the Land of Dinotopia

James Gurney wrote and illustrated the wildly successful Dinotopia series, a marvelously magical world where dinosaurs and humans coexist. Gurney’s weblog “Gurney Journey”(Dec. 14, 2011) acknowledges his encouragement and support by acrossthe-Hudson neighbors Ian and Betty Ballantine. You of course know them as the paperback pioneers and founders of Bantam Books 1945 and then Ballantine Books in 1952.

Ballantine had published Lord of the Rings and the beautifully illustrated Faeries. Ian once told James “There is no problem in the world that a book can’t solve.”

Ian posed as Nallab, the third assistant librarian of Waterfall City. The head librarian is Enit which with Nallab spells Ballantine backwards.

And in an ATG brush with the famous, a Strauch grandson George (age 6) is crazy about Dinotopia and wrote a fan letter to James Gurney. With incredible kindness, James sent George a postcard.

Dagny

Dagny Janss Corcoran is so known in the art world that she has become a single-name entity. Her father was a real estate developer by day — Thousand Oaks, Idaho’s Sun Valley — and entertainer of artists of L.A.’s Cool School by night.

Dagny founded the Culver City independent book store Art Catalogues. Her inventory has more than 10,000 titles of art catalogs — new, rare, and out-of-print. She calls herself an “art advisor for books” and builds bespoke libraries for an exclusive list of private collectors.

She has been painted by David Hockney and her legs sculpted by Edward and Nancy Kienholz and mounted on the front of a Playboy pinball machine in a “feminist assemblage sculpture” (The Bronze Pinball Machine With Woman Affixed Also).

Now, the Marian Goodman Gallery has posted her to Paris to their stand-alone bookstore Librairie Marian Goodman.

See: Michael Slenske, “Next Chapter,” WSJ Magazine, May, 2021, p.64.