The Future of Boryanabooks
With the death of Lionel Rolfe, the founder of Boryanabooks, on November 6, both the book publishing section and the monthly blog posting are currently on hold. The posts today, January 1, 2019, are the last. The website will stay up at least through early August 2020, so the years of existing posts will stay accessible. Boryanabooks, both the book publishing and website, are now the property of Lionel’s daughter, Hyla Douglas. She has not solidified any plans at this time for the future of the project.
Boryanabooks was created in 2009. Over those nine years it produced 14 books, all of them in ebook Kindle format, and most of them also in paper, through Amazon’s CreateSpace publishing service.
For this month for our last set of posts we are offering four chapters from Lionel Rolfe’s books. Novelist Umberto Tosi writes about his decades long friendship with Lionel. There are tributes by Linda Laroche from the Pasadena Weekly and from Mike Sonksen from the Cultural Weekly. There is also a last Honey column in our Notes from Above Ground section, this time on the road to San Francisco traced by early Spanish explorers. Honey van Blossom is the pen name of California Bay Area attorney Phyl van Ammers. And we have one more short piece by the late Katherine Hisako Glascock.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
