a life told

What can you tell about a person by looking at a random shelf of books, or in this case a part shelf? I have many books, many of which I have not read. I used to buy books, usually used, that caught my eye. The purchases very quickly got ahead of my time to read. I’ve read six of those showing here. They are: Tudor & Stuart Britain, 1471-1714 (from a university course); The Streets of London (well, it is the sort of book you dip into here and there or use to look up a street you came across reading something else); Concession Street in Context (a local history of businesses on this neighbourhood street – I am so grateful I can walk to shop, rather than drive); Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (from a very interesting history of Russia course I took one summer. This was my first inkling that there were very few jobs for historians. The fellow who taught us in Hamilton, had just taught the same course the term before at the U of Toronto, and was rushing off to Edmonton a week after finishing with us, to teach it again, there); A Tour through the whole island of Great Britain (an 18th century tour); The Diary of Thomas Turner (another 18th century study).

Some of these as noted, were books I read while doing my undergraduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I had an excellent prof for 18th century English history – though he was required to stray into the 19th century in teaching also. Dr. Paul Fritz loved 18th century England. He had been a PhD student of Sir John Plumb at Cambridge. I recall a fascinating class where he talked about architecture in the 18th century – both great houses and landscape architecture. Since then, I have always included architecture in my history of religion courses. As an M.A. student at McMaster, he had us come to his apartment in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, for a relaxed seminar one week. The building was a fairly typical 1960s/70s apartment tower on the edge of an older, but still genteel part of town on the southern fringes of downtown. A typically ugly bare elevator car and a typical hallway leading to his apartment door. Oh, but when we stepped through that doorway inside! It was an experience very much like one of those mystical stories where you step through a portal into an alternate universe.

We found ourselves in an 18th century gentleman’s sitting room by the simple act of crossing a threshold. Dr. Fritz had collected heavy, oaken furniture, the walls had oil paintings – in particular one of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of… well of anywhere, but England in particular. He had a top of the line TV, but it was hidden inside an old looking wooden cabinet – a computer sat on an enormous oaken desk – the only openly modern device visible. I am afraid I was more interested in the decor and design and the artifacts than the subject of the seminar. Perhaps that is why most of the books on this shelf date from the two undergraduate courses and one graduate level seminar I took from this interesting man and superb teacher.

Did any of this say anything about me, I wonder?

2020

For this year, Anno Domini 2020 I chose a screenshot of the way the Bible appears in this cyber era. This is an evangelical Protestant site where one can find many Bible translations and also a search box. I noticed that the default translation is the King James version. In the post on the 60s I noted that this translation was the translation for the English-speaking world, even to influencing Catholic Bibles from the 18th century into the present day.

If you click on the translation tab you will find 219 translations. The greatest number are in English, some 60 versions,  but Chinese translations are very common too. These perhaps reflect the long history of missionary work in China.  I don’t know how these statistics compare to other religions, but the numbers printed, distributed and translated into many languages and often several translations into one language is surely remarkable.

I think the early division of Christianity into east and west and also into fragments especially in the east in early days and later the fissiparous Protestant churches has meant there has never been a single official Bible from which all translations flow.  The Bible is actually a compilation of books written at different times and places and wedded together into one volume. I suppose one could see Christianity as a living coloured mosaic that has been added to and altered at different times. Or as something like white light which is in actuality all the colours of the visible spectrum merged. It may look like one but is many, joined.

Post Scriptum:  I was determined to work the word fissiparous into one of these blog posts!

And I made it before midnight eastern time and thus before the end of the 12th day of Christmas.

the 60s

In this blog post I decided to combine two 1960s style Bibles here:  one is a peculiar sort of Bible and very Protestant; the other is a standard text Bible, but deliberately Catholic.

First the 1960 Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs. The Gideons are a group I did not know much about until I began this blog post. The Bible shown above was given to me in Grade 5 in 1960. As I recall (dimly), two men wearing brown suits came into the class, were welcomed by our teacher and spent a few minutes preaching casually, then handed out free copies as above. The Gideons (taking their name from an Old Testament figure) were formed in 1899 by two travelling salesmen in Wisconsin. According to that reliable source, Wikipedia, this group today gives away on average two Bibles per second and has distributed roughly 2 billion since they began this practice in 1908. To be a Gideon you must be male, over 21 and in a sales or professional occupation – and, most importantly a member in good standing of an evangelical Protestant church.

This idea of religion in a public school system comes up in my teaching when students here in Ontario, Canada begin to note that only Catholics have publicly funded religious schools. I can then tell them that the ‘public’ schools in Ontario were at one time ‘Protestant’  schools and publicly funded. I have personal memories of daily Bible readings, saying the Lord’s Prayer (the ‘Our Father’ to Catholics) as part of opening excercises, a general assent to Christianity from teachers, and occasional visits in class time from a local Protestant minister. And of course, the receipt of free Bibles from the Gideons.

George Grant has a good essay on the degree to which these public/Protestant schools actually assented to Christianity in the early 60s. The essay can be found in a collection of his essays, Technology and Empire (1969). The particular essay, Religion and the State, was first published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1963. The 1969 reprint has a new introduction by Grant where he critically analyzes his own earlier thinking. In general he states that the true religion of public schools was consumerism and that only lip service was paid to Protestant Christianity.  Judging by my own 1960 experience, I am not sure his assessment was entirely accurate, unless of course I was personally more attuned to faith and the message received from curriculum and teachers and Gideons than most. This inclusion of a basic, Protestant Christianity in schools was a product of the attitudes and mind of Egerton Ryerson in the 19th century. Ryerson, like Sir John A. MacDonald, has been cast from the firmament of national worship because of their ideas on indigenous education, as has the place of religion in these formerly Protestant schools.

I have also alway been curious why these gift Bibles only include the Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament. I have no answer, just the question.

The second Bible pictured above was published in 1966 using a 1946 updated translation originally from 1611. This is a Catholic Bible and the interesting point here is that it is not based on the first Catholic Bible English translation, but the King James Anglican version that became ‘the’ Bible for English-speaking Protestants and is still so for many today. The original Douay-Rheims Bible has a complex publication history which I won’t go into here as that would require a long article on its own. But, in the 18th century another entirely different Catholic English translation was produced in England that was based on the King James Anglican translation. It was translated so as to ensure it matched the last Latin Bible and did not conflict with Catholic theology. This 1966 Bible is in that tradition which also has a complex publication history. Like the family Bibles I described earlier in this series of blog posts, it contains explanatory notes, especially for the Old Testament indicating it is meant to be used as a study Bible. This too is new for Catholicism. The existence of English translations was part of the Catholic Reformation that followed the Protestant – sometimes called the Counter Reformation as it was seen at one time as a reaction to the Protestant reform. To some degree it was, but reform had been bubbling under the surface before Martin Luther. But what is new here for Catholics is Bible study and a Study Bible.

Both these Bibles show a Christian world in the 1960s that saw Bibles as sources of intellectual study – a type of science of the Bible, or Godly science. Given the state of Christianity in the contemporary world I think it obvious that this attempt to study the Bible as one would study Biology or Physics did not achieve positive results. I am currently struggling with Charles Taylor’s philosophical works on ‘secularism’ and his ideas such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘individuation’ as factors in the change if not the decline in Christian belief in the western world. More on this in the final installment of this series.

1954

At this point, I leap into the mid 20th century. This Bible is the same size as the 1899 Bible and the original owner, my elder brother the same age, nine, as my grandfather when he received his Bible in 1899. There are differences, however. This Bible, as was common in the United Church of Canada, was given to students free at a certain age in Sunday School. It is cloth bound, not leather and has no special identifier on the cover. It has maps at the back, but in black and white and only three: ‘The Ancient World’ (actually the eastern Mediterranean sometime prior to the arrival of the Roman Empire in the east); ‘Palestine’, with three inset maps of Palestine at the time of the Tribes of Israel; at the time of the Kingdoms of Judah & Israel and ancient Jerusalem; thirdly, ‘The Mediterranean World in the First Century’ – listing some of the Roman provinces and showing as far west as Italy. The book is published by the American Bible Society and is less obviously directed towards historical study than the 1899 Bible.

Sunday School classes in the United Church of Canada were heavily weighted towards teaching basic Christianity utilizing the Bible, reinforced by hymns for children such as Jesus Bids Us Shine.

My memory of my elder brother (who died of cancer 16 years ago) was of a natural cynic about Christianity. He claimed to me when a teenager that he had read through the Bible and was unimpressed. When my family lived in Toronto and he was a teenager, my parents made him attend their United Church congregation there, rather than senior Sunday School. I recall one time when I attended too,  instead of going to Sunday School, he gave me lessons on how to avoid boredom. He brought along paper and a pencil and sat drawing pictures or doodling through the service. He told me I should do the same if I were ever required to undergo this experience in the future.

In later life he became an aficionado of various exotic spiritualities. After his death, when my sister and I travelled to the family home where his life ended, I found a book shelf filled with volumes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto and New Age material, but no Bibles. I think he was a bit ahead of his time in terms of the decline of active (or even passive) Christian belief in Canada. A harbinger, if you will.

It is interesting though, that he kept this Bible, even if not on his main bookshelf.

Insurance?

1899

This is the first of this series that is not a ‘family Bible’, but a 6 X 4 inch personal Bible. As such it has no section between the Old and New Testaments for family rites of passage. As you can see it has an inscription:  a gift from my mother’s grandparents to her father when he was a boy at Christmas in 1899. His grandfather came initially from Liverpool, first to Jamaica, then to Canada. His father moved from Kingston, Ontario to Oswego NY, then to Rochester NY.

The Bible bears the imprint of Oxford University Press, American branch and was printed in the U.S. His parents had his name printed in gold lettering on the front cover. Considering it is roughly 121 years old, the book is in remarkably good condition. The cover is leather with some fraying as can be seen above, but the pages are pristine as are the colour maps at the back. Maps are important in these 19th century Bibles as they were used for study: of scripture and its meaning and with maps to place the events mentioned in the text. The first map shows Egypt and the Sinai tracing the journeys of the Israelites on their way to ‘the promised land’. Next is a map of ‘Canaan’ with tribal names added. Then comes a map of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Following are maps of Palestine in the Roman era and time of Jesus; Jerusalem and environs; and the eastern Mediterranean showing the travels of St. Paul.  History figured large in the thought world of the 19th century. This centrality of history, based to a degree on Christianity, lasted into the 1960s at least, in schools. At some point after that History, except national history, was no longer a required subject. This makes one wonder if we, in the West, are now a people without history, without a foundation, drifting about  where the winds of social change and fad drive us. I wonder too if the decline in Christianity in the West is one cause of the removal of required History courses from High School curricula. If the goal of worship is the nation state and not the divine, then History declines in importance.

I found most interesting the fact that a Bible was considered to be a good Christmas gift in 1899 for a nine year old boy (my grandfather was born in 1890). This was not a notably religious family. They were members of the Church of England in England and Canada and the American equivalent, the Episcopal church in Rochester, NY.  Apparently later in life my grandfather became a Baptist, which according to the research of the sociologist Reginald Bibby is unuusal. For Canada anyway, he tracked denominational change and found concentric circles: Anglicans might become Catholic; Catholics Anglican; Methodists might become Anglican or Baptist; Anglicans might become Methodists, but almost never go as far afield as the Baptist church.  People, when they changed denomination stayed within the loosely familiar, that is – unless this occurred through marriage. Even here though, as religion is intrinsic to culture (anthropologically defined), marriage was within degrees of cultural familiarity.

I don’t know enough about my grandfather to know how deeply he felt his faith, except that he did begin attending a Baptist church as an adult. But I do know he liked his booze – usually cheap rotgut – and this is not an aspect of Baptist behaviour, though it is acceptable for Episcopalians. Again, religion is more than about theology; it is a way of life.

1864

This Bible has its covers – detached but still in existence. The interior of the front matter gives a date of 1864, but for some reason, the title page for the New Testament says 1865. I wanted to put the cover front and centre to give an idea of the intricacy and heft of book covers for family Bibles in the mid 19th century. I have added other images: the title page showing this, the Bates family Bible, was published and printed in Glasgow Scotland. An interior note says the company had permission from the Crown to produce 3,000 copies of this edition. William Collins & Co. is an interesting example of publishing. The firm began as a publisher of Bibles and religious books in 1819, indicating that this was a profitable niche. A hundred years later it began to publish fiction, murder mysteries in particular. Now it is part of the conglomerate HarperCollins as publishing companies attempt to deal with the rise of eBooks and the online world in general by uniting into larger firms.

It is indeed, deluxe. Not only does it have the usual black & white artwork illustrating scenes from the Bible, this edition contains coloured maps and has, running in a column down the centre of each page, explanatory notes and references to the text on either side.

Family Bibles were not some dusty book on a shelf sitting ignored, but were used for study by the family. In the 1860 post I focussed on the integration of religion with business. Here you see the integration of faith with daily, family life.  The entries in the same handwriting and pen were probably done in the 1880s by my grandmother’s mother (a Wright from the 1860 Wright family Bible). I don’t mean to get into genealogy here, but am thinking through the time period that family Bibles were used, at least in my mother’s family. The last entries in this Bates family Bible were made by my mother between the 1940s and the early 1970s. This is important also to note something useful to the historian:  handwriting. Handwriting (now called cursive for some cursed reason) is highly individualistic. Thus you can get a sense of who wrote what, when. An historian will not necessarily or even usually know the individual doing the writing (I recognize my mother’s handwriting as she used to send me letters), but can discern different personal styles and assign rough dates to them. Future historians who are taught only printing and not handwriting will have to take special classes in reading handwriting in the future or lose a large swathe of historical information.

1860

The first thing I did when looking at this page was do a quick google search of William W. Harding. I found that he was the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper from 1859 to 1889.  The paper was founded in 1829 and purchased soon after by Harding’s father Jasper. It was then called the Pennsylvania Inquirer. Like a good capitalist, Jasper expanded the business by purchasing newspapers in the region – all printed on flat-bed presses, the direct descendant of Gutenberg’s press. His son William White Harding took over in 1859 and changed the name to the Philadelphia Inquirer and upgraded the press to a Bullock steam press. This was a rotating press developed by William Bullock, also of Philadelphia. The rotating press allowed continuous printing onto rolls of paper. This type of printing press was invented in 1814 by a German living in England and was taken up by the Times of London which ensured its adoption widely. The steam driven rotating press was developed in the U.S. in 1843. Bullock further improved the technology in such a way that allowed printing on both sides of the paper at the same time and also automatically folded and cut it into sheets.  Thus the wonder of capitalism and technology so opposed by the Left today.  When the Times changed over, their printers threatened violence, but the company promised them other jobs, ending the threat. Thus the wonder of organized Labour softening capitalism and technology. The Bullock press could print 12,000 sheets an hour and with later improvements that increased to 30,000 sheets. Today newspapers are shedding their printing operations to go online, or consolidating them into central locations for a number of publications owned by large corporations. Of course, this is what the Hardings did in the 19th century too. The difference is that the employees losing their jobs are not being moved elsewhere in their respective  companies. A change in how information is disseminated is underway and has been underway for a number of years now. But, in the 19th century, printing presses were the technology of the day and still had a century and more to dominate how information was spread.

The Bible above is dated to 1860, the second year that William W. Harding ran the company. I wonder were Bibles a money maker? Business men were Christians then and combined their Christianity with their business world. I saw this while working on my PhD dissertation and while writing entries for a local historical project, The Dictionary of Hamilton Biography. Business men (and they were all men) belonged to several clubs, including their church. Working class men might or might not belong to one of the early union organizations such as the Knights of Labour, but did have their own churches as well. English-speaking Canada and most of the Anglosphere was dominated by Protestant Christianity, for which the Bible was central. Political speeches, newspaper articles and reports, novels, poetry, were all peppered with Biblical references that were commonly understood. All of this, of course, began to fall apart in the 1960s, but that is a subject for the last two entries of this series of blog posts. In 1860, the Bible was the book both in terms of religion and in terms of cultural  norms. If a person had read no other book, that person had read at least parts of the Bible and understood Biblical references.

This volume lacks a cover or back, but still has the spine holding it all together, which brings to mind the old metaphor about needing a backbone to withstand the vicissitudes of life. Harding was a good example of what used to be called ‘Yankee ingenuity’, combined with family inheritance.  He changed the name of his inherited newspaper to the Philadelphia Inquirer, perhaps a reflection of the growth of urbanism and its concomitant pride in one’s city. He updated the technology at the same time and began to print Bibles in 1860. He sold the business in 1889 just prior to his death, but the new owners continued in the same vein.

This particular copy belonged to my maternal grandmother’s mother. My maternal grandmother had the maiden name Bates and her mother’s maiden name was Wright. Thus, this is the Wright family Bible. In the section dividing the Old and New Testaments of these very large, family Bibles, there are pages  for writing in marriages, births and deaths. Family and Christianity were in the same fashion as business and Christianity, an integral whole. These Bibles usually included plates of  images of Biblical scenes – I wonder if research has been done on the artists who drew the pictures?  I would guess a book could be written about these large Bibles. These books must have had pride of place in a house as they are large – the three copies I have are roughly 11 x 9 inches and about 3 – 4 inches thick – let me translate that to metric:  28 cm x 23 cm and 10 cm thick. They have heavy bound covers and spines and often a metal clasp to hold the book shut. This 1860 copy is missing both the front and back covers, but still has the heavy back attached. They are sewn, not glued as well. They scream permanence and solidity.

Our civilization’s artifacts say much in a language that few speak today in a conscious fashion, saying different things at different points in history. 1860 was a time where solidity, permanence, and confidence nestled within technological change, or rather technological change did not challenge faith. Technological change served the Biblical foundation.  Bibles were designed to last and to represent the foundation of social relations – reminding all of the teachings about building on a rock, not shifting sand.  If you click on this link, you will see I used the King James translation as would be proper for 1860.

This was a society linked corporately by an inchoate and at the same time, learned knowledge of the Bible in its King James version in the English-speaking world. This Bible represents a world now lost where faith was integrated into all aspects of life, whether you actually believed the doctrines or not. There were Catholics who shared in this but who were on the outside to a degree, though the translation used in 1860, the Douay/Rheims had much the same form of English. This was a Protestant world where Catholics were on the outside, and non-Christians barely acknowledged, though in the 19th century the only non-Christians the majority had any awareness of were Jews.

Bibles as artifacts represented a world where language, architecture, education, science, technology, social relations, entertainment aspired to a formality (not always achieved – there is a good literature on drinking culture in this period) as an ideal. A sense of permanence permeated life, which I suppose made the frantic and seemingly sudden changes of the second haf of the 20th century all the more startling when they came.

where shall we go?

This is an interesting little book. I picked it up used somewhere, sometime, some place. This morning I had a minute to spare and sat in my easy chair and opened it. I found a curiously abbreviated account of world history from a European perspective, translated from the 1966 German original. It is a kind of map dictionary, with text in tiny print using many abbreviations – world history for those in a hurry. Here is an example from the first page of text:  “During the 19th cent. – the transitional and final period of Eur. or Occidental dominance – . . . The tech. cent. fostered a materialistic viewpoint . . . Polit. revolutions . . . The Indust. Revolution . . .”

Maps, charts, graphs, arrows aplenty on maps illustrate the abbreviated yet pointedly correct analyses of its historical narrative. When I first became interested in history, my mother gave me her first year (Freshman) history text:  A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe by Carlton J.H. Hayes (Macmillan, 1938). Carlton Hayes wrote in a clear and unpretentious style that ever after I took as the best form for academic writing. This atlas further compresses this clear and focussed style. When I encountered post-modernist writing in my M.A. year at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, I was intrigued by the complexity, but not seduced. I think, perhaps, the complexity hid a hollow centre.

[Kinder, Hermann and Werner Hilgemann. The Anchor Atlas of World History: Volume II From the French Revolution to the American Bicentennial. trans. Ernest A. Menze with maps designed by Harald and Ruth Bukor. New York:  Anchor Books, Doubleday. 1966, 1978]

The bibliographic information here reminds me that the first properly conducted History course I took in Grade 12 in an Ontario High School covered the period from the French revolution to the post World War II system of international relations. This was where I learned to write a full history essay with Humanities style footnotes and bibliography. The course was repeated as History 10 at the University of Windsor, Ontario, where I had no need of being taught how to write an essay, nor did anyone else in our class of about two dozen students.  I am constantly surprised at the poor education students who study undergraduate history have received in High School these days. (I was too lazy to google where to put translator and other persons names involved – I used to know by heart all the forms of Humanities Style referencing – now called Chicago style… but I am old and lazy.. or lazy and old?)

Wisdom

I was searching through this biography of J.R.R. Tolkien today, looking for a particular reference. I didn’t find the reference, but perhaps it was not in the biography but somewhere else. The picture of Prof. Tolkien puffing thoughtfully on his pipe is a good depiction of why I wanted to find this reference, which is an anecdote about an academic battle fought by Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis. They did not want Oxford to introduce what they called ‘the research degree’ (the doctorate) into the faculty of English. They felt it had no place in the study of English, whether language or literature. Research, they thought, was not what scholars in the Humanities, or at least in the English faculty, did. Scholars had mastered their discipline, that is, they had read and meditated on, discussed with others, all that had been written in their field and this was evidenced by the M.A. degree.  They then wrote the results of their meditations and discussions.

I am reading the biography of the Canadian intellectual George Grant. He had the same concerns, only expanded  to the Humanities as a whole. He too thought ‘research’ belonged with the sciences. Scholars in the Humanities should be reading widely and deeply and thinking and then writing the results of this process. Grant fought this in the department he established at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario Canada and lost this battle to the proponents of research. Lewis and Tolkien also lost their battle to keep the ‘research degree’ out of the Oxford English faculty.

Well, at least that’s how I remember this!  But I cannot find the reference. I’ve posted the question on an old email discussion group over all things Tolkien. It is a  high powered group made up of highly educated members and has been in existence on different platforms since the late 1980s. I have been a member since 1997, but rarely post anymore. So I hope to get an answer there, or I will have to re-read the Carpenter biography of Tolkien pictured above. And, of course, there he is doing what he preached, thinking and discussing, pursuing wisdom, not knowledge. (The difference between wisdom and knowledge is something I want to address).

in my poche

Inside is written in my scraggly handwriting (now inexplicably called cursive):  Ted Smith 12G.

12G was my class group in Grade 12 at Vincent Massey Secondary School in Windsor, Ontario, for the 1967-68 school year. In those days there were several streams in high school:  two year technical students who finished with Grade 10; four year commercial who finished after Grade 12; five year academic who finished with Grade 13. Grade 10 was meant to prepare you for factory work, or an apprenticeship such as auto mechanics (and parenthetically – both using actual parantheses and metaphorically) auto mechanics now earn roughly what a university or college prof does. The commercial program produced students with the skills to work in an office, where they might train in accounting or marketing or anything officy.  Most of the people I worked with later in my 20 year office career were graduates of the four year Commercial stream in Ontario high schools. The five year Academic stream was for those intending to go to university. Anyway, I studied French from grade 9 through 13 as well as one course at university. I bought this Larousse de poche in my Grade 12 year and used it extensively and still refer to it on rare occasions. I learned enough French to be able to read anything (with the aid of my Larousse) but I could never master the accent or cadence of French. German, I had no trouble with accent or cadence, but only studied that language for two years and could not function in it…. well, let me modify that statement slightly. Some years ago I was travelling the highway that runs around Lake Ontario between Toronto and Niagara Falls. I was heading towards the Falls when I came upon a car accident. There was a deer lying dead in the far right lane and two cars pulled off to the shoulder of the road. I got on my old flip phone (that’s how long ago this was!) and called 911. I got out of my car and walked towards the other cars. I saw then that the windshield of the leading car was smashed. Two people standing outside walked towards me and spoke to me in German (auf Deutsch). Into my head and out of my voice popped: Die polizei kommt. This bit of German caused the couple to start speaking to me in rapid fire German, of which I did not understand a word. I reached deeper into my memory banks:  Ich spreche nur eine kleine auf Deutsch. This stopped them, but apparently my German accent and cadence was enough to have fooled them into thinking I could speak the language. I had a similar experience in French even longer ago, when I was working at a corporation. Somehow or other a unilingual French speaker had got himself lost in the industrial north end of Hamilton, Ontario. I could not understand him and he could barely understand me as I stumbled through my High School French directing him to a bus that would take him back to downtown Hamilton. I needed my Larousse de poche, which despite its name would not fit into any of my poches.