A Map of Slavic Europe

This fold-out map (it's one of three in the book) is from Russian and the Slavonic Languages by W. J. Entwistle and W. A. Morison, a volume in Faber & Faber's Great Languages series. There's probably nothing here that would be news to a philologist or a Slavic historian, and I don't know to what degree the situation may have altered since the book was published in 1949, but it's interesting to have the extent and diversity of Slavic diffusion displayed in graphic form.

The big gap to the west of the Black Sea is the territory occupied by speakers of Romanian (a Romance language) and Hungarian (Finno-Ugric). Among other things, the map illustrates the little pockets stranded by the shifting of borders and the back and forth of migrations. Some of those pockets must now be extinct, like the "Wendish Slovenes of Lake Leba" (not to be confused with the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavian Slovenia, far to the south) who were said by the authors to have already dwindled to some 200-250 individuals.


Of the book's co-authors, William J. Entwistle was the general editor of the Great Languages series, succeeding L. R. Palmer. He was apparently not strictly speaking a Slavic specialist, as his title was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies in the University of Oxford, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Entwistle was also responsible for the volume in the series that was devoted to Spanish. Morison was a Slavicist at the University of London. Their work was performed under less than optimal conditions, but the combination of the recent devastation across Europe and the onset of the Cold War must have lent the book extra relevance, even urgency.

This book has been written under great stress, and cannot but show many faults. The war has absorbed the services of almost all the small band of competent students of Slavonic. One author has been wholly engulfed in public business, and the other partly, during the composition of the work, which has been elaborated too often in hotel bedrooms or railway carriages. Long neglect has left our libraries, despite the gallant efforts of the librarians, deficient in Slavonic works. Not infrequently we have been unable to consult essential works, and have had to rely on our own discretion.

Several of the projected volumes in the Great Languages series were never completed; the project seems to have petered out around 1960, though some of the individual books have since been reprinted by other publishers.

A Map of Bohemia

Luther Emanuel Widen alias Lew Ney likely rates barely a footnote in American literary history, but there was a time during the 1920s and '30s when he had a certain notoriety in Bohemian circles, and a New York Times article, back in the day, even referred to him, perhaps generously, as "the Mayor of Greenwich Village." His most durable contribution to letters was probably as a letterpress printer responsible for such curiosities as Christopher Morley's Rubaiyat of Account Overdue, which was dedicated to Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart, but he also garnered attention for such tepid publicity stunts as baptising a baby in the company of the entertainer Texas Guinan and paying for the marriage license for his wedding to Ruth Willis Thompson with 200 copper pennies donated by 100 friends. (Instead of receiving wedding gifts, Thompson, a poet, gave her guests copies of her latest book.) As a correspondent for Variety, Ney reportedly once concocted an item about an upcoming raid on an unnamed adulterous couple's Washington Square love nest, leading to widespread panic and hasty decamping on the part of any number of local philanderers who assumed that they were the parties in question.

I haven't been able to find a single online trace of the existence of this leaflet periodical, The Greenwich Village Saturday Night, which was written, illustrated, and distributed by Ney, and consequently I'm posting it in its entirety. It does say Volume II, No. 3, so presumably there were other issues, but on the other hand it also says "perhaps there will be a series of Saturday Nights similar to this issue in size and tone," so the numbering may have been a fiction.






For this issue, at least, Ney evidently had only one advertiser, the Smock Shop (smocks were big in Greenwich Village, apparently), but the effusiveness of his praise for the Little Quakeress restaurant suggests he might have been slipped a few coppers by that establishment as well. As a money-making scheme The Greenwich Village Saturday Night probably didn't go very far, but Ney's annotated map has a certain charm as a record of the Village's bygone amenities.

Update (2013): Julie Melby, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University's Firestone Library, has posted some examples of Wyden's printing work on the Graphic Arts Collection blog. The Princeton University Library holds one other number of The Greenwich Village Saturday Night in addition to the one shown here.