Poe’s best-selling book during his lifetime was a guide to seashells | Hacker News Reader

Poe’s best-selling book during his lifetime was a guide to seashells

atlasobscura.com

138 pointspseudolus38 comments

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...

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?

Andreyev was writing 75 years after Poe, so it’s not exactly the same genre (although remember that Poe, while most famous for gothic horror, also wrote in pretty much any genre, including basically inventing the fictional detective). What they do share though is a finely honed sense of the macabre, and the ineffable nature of reality. If we’re picking influential American authors, then it’s fair to place Andreyev mid-way between Poe and Lovecraft, especially with stories like The Wall[1] or The Red Laugh.[2]

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict...

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.

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?

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.

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.

Wrong article?

Haha:) Yes. Not sure how this happened. I inteded to respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334223

You clicked reply, then that post in another tab, then submit. Is this easy to engineer around? Yes, but they haven’t.

I keep reading comments that hint at the weird statefullness of hacker news

Well, it is possible that this exact scenario happened. I don't remember exactly what I did but it definitely wasn't the case of clicking reply, writing comment and submitting it. I also opened this comment section but I don't remember if it was before or while I was authoring the comment.

In any case this is the first time it happened for me and I comment regularly.

Hmm a possible variation on Muphry’s Law? What shall we call it?

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.

George Foreman is probably better known for the grills now than the boxing career.

50 cent, I think, made the most of his money on purple Vitamin Water.

US Presidents are the peak of this. Presidential salary is currently $400K, the real money is made as a former President. George W. Bush, Clinton, Obama have made incredibly amounts of money since being President.

Bill Clinton left office broke due to legal fees, and there are estimates of $100M net worth.

Well, they get paid ridiculous sums to speak at events, but really they're just being paid for an hour or two of their time. (And a favor of some sort). They're among the most well-connected and powerful people in their political parties even after leaving office, and paying them to do things after they leave office is perfectly legal.

This is a little different than Kanye or George Foreman, who are paid mainly based on their brand value. At this point, stamping a mediocre shoe with Kanye's name is the same as stamping a shoe with a Nike swoosh, except the multiplier is higher.

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.

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.

Poe's 1848 Prose Poem "Eureka" may have intuited the Big Bang and an expanding universe:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/edgar-allan-...

Really like his 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'

I am guessing that Melville's most selling book in his own lifetime was 'Typee'.

Once, upon a midnight dreary,

While I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious seashell,

Gathered from some forgotten shore ...

Lenore sells seas shells by a sea shore

And the seagulls uttered 'nevermore'

Sea-shell-strewn, she sleeps in her sounding-sea-shore sepulchre.

The Masque of the Red Mollusk

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.

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.

As a Russian, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were an important part of my childhood, just as "To kill a mockingbird".

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but you'd get the same distribution of answers for 90% of the mathematics anyone learns past about 7th grade. Or almost any other topic in school. The good things we use to introduce kids to good things get shit on a lot, but that's because most people go on not to ever engage with them or anything like them ever again, not because they're bad.

We do that so the kids who catch on and pay attention can understand what good things are, and maybe some of them go on to really dig deep on one or two fields so they can learn more about those good things, and hopefully they paid enough attention during their education that they at least don't think everything else is bad just because they never bothered to follow up on it or engage deeply or because they struggled with it (unlike [thing they think is good]) in school.

You can apply that same logic towards teaching kids trades or skills. Like forcibly telling kids to learn how to drive a semi because it's the backbone of our infrastructure. Doesn't mean they're gonna do it, but they should be exposed to it.

What I'm talking about is that our education system teaches kids a lot of pointless things, especially in the arts for the sake of thinking it is going to achieve some "third eye" opening greater good somehow. And people like me who decry it as some utter waste of time nonsense end up getting bashed because we should do it. It's just nonsense that does not need to be taught. If a shop-class kid is forced to read Poe, are we really helping him? Forcing him to stay back a semester to write a report on Poe when he is destined to be a welder, is that really necessary? Human civilization has done it for millennia, but now all of a sudden in this modern era students need a broad understanding of the world through the sub-par education system that is in the US?

I'm not buying it. If you can call the US education system "education." More like glorified taxpayer funded babysitting with some basic instructional stuff in between.

Your last line is a vast subject I'm not touching here. But as to whether a welder ought to learn certain things goes back to the priority that we teach all our students shared values along with the importance of critical thinking, and we prioritize this for students becoming welders or judges or programmers or anything else in our society. And one of my favorites for understanding history, societal values and reading between the lines is Huckleberry Finn, and I'm all for every student reading books like this and if many don't get it, that's unfortunate, but it's well worth trying. Art is often less boring than just telling someone an idea straight. I personally find good literature to be more likely to be remembered and truly internalized by the person. I'm a big believer in the lasting power of show, don't tell.

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.

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