Sunday, January 18, 2009

Captain James Cook, Navigator, Explorer

Perhaps one of the greatest explorers of history was Captain James Cook, who sailed the world, discovering Tahiti, New Zealand, sailing south to Australia, making observations of the rare astronomical event, the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun from Tahiti. He captained his men with bold courage, going where no one from Europe had gone before. When his men anchored in Tahiti, they discovered the islanders knew the art of tatooing, and so a for the first time the long-established custom was begun with sailors getting tatoos. He was an accomplished captain, navigator and explorer.

He discovered the Hawaiian Islands, brought along scientists who explored and collected plants and animals and met with exotic peoples that were unknown to Europeans. This is a catalog, presumably for a show at the National Maritime Museum in London. It is illustrated with paintings, artifacts, telescope, barometer, chronometers and other tools of exploration used on the voyages. A fascinating and hard to find document of the life of a man whose adventures are the stuff of legend. Today is the Anniversary of Cook's discovery of Hawaii: January 18, 1778.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Our latest offerings as of January 12th

Another long list of items for sale at our online bookstore. They are alphabetized, with some reservations. That means that if the database has a quotation in the title it gets placed first in the list. And of course the grammar articles like the letter "a" and "the" all get sorted in together. So if you are an author, you might consider that when naming your book. But this list seems to be mostly OK. These are mostly books, with a growing number of CDs available.

The link below is the best place to find all these items in case you wandered in here from a handy search engine like Google or Yahoo. These are books that are for sale, not a personal collection, but available to people like you with credit cards or PayPal. We try to ship them from here in Texas within one business day, maybe two at the most. We are friendly folks and welcome your comments or insights about books.

Go here to find them: http://www.my-lynx-associates.com/

Just sign up for an account, name and address and so on, and you can own one of these marvelous selections. One proviso: they are subject to prior sale. So keep an eye on the one you want. It may not be here forever. Some of these items are one of a kind, meaning that they are not available elsewhere on the Internet. People are holding on to the other copies. We try and keep our prices close to the big bookselling websites, and we update prices frequently, so if you think it is too much, it is probably because that is what the big boys are charging. We attempt to keep our items a little lower than most for a majority of our items. Sometimes the book is signed or is fairly rare, or we are the only ones that have it, so we might charge proportionally more. But not always. We are still sorting through the category called "other" which has lots of items that were not pre-sorted when we set up the web site. So click on the "other" category to see the potpourri of items.

You might have come to this particular blog entry through a cached memory link in a search engine, or an enigmatic quotation in some other place, perhaps even some distant place in China or the Middle East that needed some English prose to make their website sparkle. We consider it a homage, but we don't know the specific reason that our prose is cut and pasted elsewhere. But as of December 2nd, 2009 this list (that was here of books and other items and is now removed), is somewhat outdated anyway. I have moved the lengthy list of available books to the following website / web blog as of December 2009: