Friday, May 13, 2011

Unabomber auction

The Wall Street Journal reports that Theodore Kaczynski’s personal effects will be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to Kaczynski’s victims. A Flickr set of fifty-one photographs shows letters and manuscripts, shoes, sunglasses, tools, and a L.C. Smith & Corona manual typewriter.

No photographs of books, of which there are several hundred. The Smoking Gun has the list. Did you know that Kaczynski owned a copy of The Elements of Style? At least one reader has made much of that fact, characterizing Kaczynski and E.B. White as reactionary makers of primitivist manifestos.

comments: 2

normann said...

TK was such a pedant that he would correct cast-iron idioms to their more logical counterparts, insisting for example on "eating one's cake and having it too", whereas the great unwashed say it the opposite way. Tics like this actually helped the FBI track him down, because TK's brother recognized his brother's pedantries in the published manifesto, and alerted the authorities.

I was never that bad.

Michael Leddy said...

Here’s a post from Language Log on Kaczynski and that phrase, which he seems to have picked up from his mother.