JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The cover art of this semi-pacifist pamphlet may well be the most interesting part of the work, so far as I can tell. Mr. Brown didn’t so much write a manifesto about arms merchants and war as collect some bits of news on index cards and then type them up (in no particular order) and publish them, adding bold to more than a third of the text and CAPS for the important stuff. It seems as though this 8th (actually, “Eight Edition” as it says on the cover in a variety of naming editions that I have never seen before) edition was published during the war (a 10th coming in 1946), and I’d say a small fraction of the writing centers on WWII. In any event a lot of it reads like Outsider History, and I can’t spend much time on it–particularly when he drives a stake into Brits for praying for Spitfires, which would not have been a terribly popular insight in 1944.

So, I’m posting this as an example of striking and effective cover art, and that’s it.  

Other works by Brown have the same flavor–they also indicate a very busy writer, perhaps, except that these are all short pamphlets of a few dozen pages. Of course decades of work could go into them, but I think not. In any event, here is a sample; Hitlerism in the Highlands, 1948; Stepmother Britain, 1948; Scotland-Nation Or Desert? Second Edition 1948; War for Freedom Or Finance? 1941; Scotland, this Wealthy-and Poor-Country , 1948. Many went into numerous editions with about the same pagination–my guess is that there were small press runs, with bits and pieces added every now and then.  

Oliver Brown shares the same name as the Brown v Board of Education Oliver Brown, but they are not the same person.