The Day New York Went Dry

Bridgman - Ducasse, C.J. (Curt John). Collection of five (5) offprints by C.J.Ducasse: 1.C.J.Ducasse - The Non-Existence of Time - 1925 / 2. Truth, Verifiability and Propositions about the Future - 1941 / 3. C.J.Ducasse - Some Observations concerning the Nature of Probability - 1941 - Inscribed by the author / 4. C.J.Ducasse - Some Questions concerning Psychical Phenomena - 1954 / 5. C.J.Ducasse The Guide of Life - 1958 / /
Curt John Ducasse (7 July 1881, Angouleme, France - 3 September 1969) was a philosopher who taught at the University of Washington and Brown University. He is most notable for his work in philosophy of mind and aesthetics, and his influence can be seen in the work of Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars. Ducasse served as the president of the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in 1939-40. (Wikipedia) Curt John Ducasse (1881-1969), was born in Angouleme, France, on July 7, 1881. His father was a sea captain and his mother the daughter of a German painter. He went to school at the Lycee of Bordeaux and the Abbotsholme School in Staffordshire, England. In 1900 he left his first position in a Paris business house to work for a dry goods firm in Mexico City. His job was an "elevator," carrying bolts of cloth up and down stairs all day, while he slept on the store's counters at night to save money. His next job of measuring window panes did not last long. Next he took a stock of Mexican lace to New York and opened a shop. When the lace business did not prosper, he got a job handling Spanish correspondence for a music firm and went back to Mexico as a music salesman. In 1906 in Seattle, while he was secretary to an engineer involved in railroad construction, he decided to study philosophy. He received his bachelor and master of arts degrees from the University of Washington in 1908 and 1909, taught there for one year, then went to Harvard as a University Scholar in 1910 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1912. He returned to teach at the University of Washington, and while there published his first book, Causation and the Types of Necessity. After returning from a long train trip to read an article at a meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago in April 1924, he decided to organize the Pacific Division of the Association. In 1926 he came to Brown as associate professor of philosophy. He was made full professor in 1929 and was head of the Philosophy Department from 1930 to 1951. He was acting dean of the Graduate School from 1947 to 1949. He retired in 1951, having reached the compulsory retirement age, but was asked to teach part-time. He retired from part-time teaching at Brown in 1958, after which he accepted a part-time teaching position at New York University, He was the author of The Philosophy of Art in 1930, Nature, Mind and Death in 1951, and A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death in 1961, and numerous articles and other books. He was fond of cats. The last one he and Mrs. Ducasse owned was a Siamese named Chichibu after the brother of Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Chichibu died in 1954 at the age of 22, and was buried in the back yard of the Ducasse home with a marker of blue (the color of Chichibu's eyes) on the gravesite. Ducasse was interested in and wrote about all sorts of paranormal phenomena. He thought that the idea of reincarnation made sense, stating that, given the genius and the boob, the beautiful and the ugly, it would be a manifestation of justice in the universe. He said that the study of the paranormal "broadened my horizon of the potentialities of human nature and of the universe. So many people are hemmed in by tacit beliefs and disbeliefs, by conformities and the things they take for granted, that they shut their eyes to the fact that the material world is not the whole of this world and that there are apparently dimensions of nature as yet unknown and unexplored. ... I face the prospect of dying as an interesting adventure, as a sort of laboratory experiment." Ducasse died on September 3, 1969 at the age of 88. His ashes were buried in the yard next to Chichibu. (Encyclopedia Brunonia)

8°. From the offprint-collection of Percy Williams Bridgman.

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literature england literatur Hope, Anthony: The Intrusions of Peggy aus dem Nachlaß Gerhard Löwenthal, Nelson ca. 1905, London 1905

leinen - OLn. 378 S. aus dem Nachlaß Gerhard Löwenthal Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (9 February 1863 - 8 July 1933),[1] was an English novelist and playwright. Although he was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels, he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898). These works, "minor classics" of English literature,[2] are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of the same name. Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister, being called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. He had time to write, as his working day was not overly full during these first years, and he lived with his widowed father, then vicar of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street. Anthony Hope Hawkins by Zaida Ben-Yusuf, 1897 Hope's short pieces appeared in periodicals, but for his first book he was forced to resort to a vanity press. A Man of Mark (1890) is notable primarily for its similarities to Zenda: it is set in an imaginary country, Aureataland, and features political upheaval and humour. More novels and short stories followed, including Father Stafford in 1891 and the mildly successful Mr Witt's Widow in 1892. He stood as a Liberal candidate for the Southern Division of South Bucks in the election of 1892 but was not elected. In 1893 he wrote three novels (Sport Royal, A Change of Air and Half-a-Hero)[3] and a series of sketches that first appeared in the Westminster Gazette and were collected in 1894 as The Dolly Dialogues, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Dolly was his first major literary success. A.E.W. Mason deemed these conversations "so truly set in the London of their day that the social historian would be unwise to neglect them" and said they were written with "delicate wit [and] a shade of sadness."[4] The idea for Hope's tale of political intrigue, The Prisoner of Zenda, being the history of three months in the life of an English gentleman, came to him at the close of 1893 as he was walking in London. Hope finished the first draft in a month, and the book was in print by April. The story is set in the fictional European kingdom of 'Ruritania', a term which has come to mean 'the novelist's and dramatist's locale for court romances in a modern setting.'[5] Zenda achieved instant success, and its witty protagonist, the debonair Rudolf Rassendyll, became a well-known literary creation. The novel was praised by Mason, the literary critic Andrew Lang, and Robert Louis Stevenson.[6] The popularity of Zenda convinced Hope to give up the "brilliant legal career [that] seemed to lie ahead of him"[7] to become a full-time writer, but he "never again achieved such complete artistic success as in this one book."[8] Also in 1894, Hope produced The God in the Car, a political story.[3] The sequel to Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, begun in 1895 and serialised in the Pall Mall Magazine, did not appear between hard covers until 1898. A prequel entitled The Heart of Princess Osra, a collection of short stories set about 150 years before Zenda, appeared in 1896. Hope also co-wrote, with Edward Rose, the first stage adaptation of Zenda, which appeared on the London stage that year. Hope alone wrote the dramatic adaptation of Rupert of Hentzau in 1899. [edit] Later years Hope wrote 32 volumes of fiction over the course of his lifetime, and he had a large popular following. In 1896 he published The Chronicles of Count Antonio, followed in 1897 by a tale of adventure set on a Greek island, entitled Phroso.[3] He went on a publicity tour of the United States in late 1897, during which he impressed a New York Times reporter as being somewhat like Rudolf Rassendyll: a well-dressed Englishman with a hearty laugh, a soldierly attitude, a dry sense of humour, "quiet, easy manners" and an air of shrewdness.[9] Blue plaque in Bedford Square, London In 1898, he wrote Simon Dale, an historical novel involving the actress and courtesan Nell Gwyn. Marie Tempest appeared in the dramatisation, called English Nell. One of Hope's plays, The Adventure of Lady Ursula, was produced in 1898. This was followed by his novel The King's Mirror (1899), which Hope considered one of his best works. In 1900, he published Quisante, and he was elected chairman of the committee of the Society of Authors. He wrote Tristram of Blent in 1901 and Double Harness in 1904, followed by A Servant of the Public in 1905, about the love of acting. In 1906, he produced Sophy of Kravonia, a novel in a similar vein to Zenda which was serialised in the Windsor Magazine; Roger Lancelyn Green is especially damning of this effort.[10] In 1907, a collection of his short stories and novelettes was published under the title Tales of Two People. In 1910, he wrote Second String, followed by Mrs Maxon Protests the next year. In addition, Hope wrote or co-wrote many plays and some political non-fiction during the First World War, some under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. Later publications included Beaumaroy Home from the Wars, in 1919, and Lucinda in 1920. Lancelyn Green asserts that Hope was "a first-class amateur but only a second-class professional writer.[2] Hope married Elizabeth Somerville (1885/6-1946) in 1903, and they had two sons and a daughter. He was knighted in 1918 for his contribution to propaganda efforts during World War I.[1][11] He published an autobiographical book, Memories and Notes, in 1927. Hope died of throat cancer at the age of 70 at his country home, Heath Farm at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey.[1] There is a blue plaque on his house in Bedford Square, London.(wikipedia)

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