I‘ve never stuffed a note in a bottle, and tossed it into the ocean. But I seem to have done the bibliographical equivalent, and the evidence has washed up on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
On Thursday morning, the Facebook site of the National Library of Israel posted an intriguing item about a volume someone had uncovered in its stacks. It was, in fact, a mildly soporific volume—Uganda and Human Rights: Reports of the International Commission of Jurists to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (1977)—but with a tantalizing mystery attached. The book was an enumeration of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s long history of human rights abuses in his country, but it was inexplicably inscribed to an acquaintance—”Phil Torzian, whoever he is,” as the Library describes him—and the inscription was
All good questions, and all unanswered—until now.
The key to the mystery lies in the text of the book’s inscription:
“To Phil Terzian with Best Good Wishes from Field Marshall President Idi Amin, D.S.O., V.C., C.H., O.M., D. Litt (hon.), Chancellor of Makerere University, Kampala, 28th May, 1977.”
The handwriting is printed, not cursive, and decidedly tentative, even childish, in style. There is a revealing misspelling—”marshall” for “marshal”—and some of the letters are reversed. (The “e” in Terzian is rendered backwards, hence the Library’s misreading of the name as “Torzion.”)
(facebook.com/NationalLibraryofIsrael/photos/)
Of course, to the naked eye, or the eye of a curator at Israel’s National Library, this is evidently an inscription from the semiliterate Amin, who cherished his self-appointed British honors (civil and military) and was, indeed, chancellor of Makerere University in Kampala. But to the skeptical eye it is clearly a joke: Even Amin, who revelled to some degree in his notorious barbarity, would not have sent a copy of such an indictment to a friend—indeed, was probably not aware of its existence.
I say this with confidence because the “Phil Terzian” to whom the volume is inscribed is me.
Admittedly, I have no recollection of ever possessing this particular book; but I’ve been collecting and (occasionally) discarding books for over a half-century, and not all of the thousands are indelible in my memory. Yet I know it is mine for a couple of reasons. First, I have a lifelong habit of writing fictitious inscriptions in books—picked up, perhaps, from Max Beerbohm’s comparable practice—mostly intended for people in on the joke. I also concede that it is possible I inscribed Uganda and Human Rights to myself, and have occasionally, and all too knowingly, included such artifacts among books I’ve sold or donated.
But the other reason points to another culprit. My late cousin, A. Stephan Terzian Jr., M.D. (1949-1982), and I shared an idiosyncratic sense of humor and mordant interest in Idi Amin. In the mid-1970s, I was working at the New Republic when a glossy photograph of Amin—dressed in his robes as chancellor of Makerere University—arrived at the offices. Almost immediately I seized this treasure, inscribed the portrait to my cousin, deposited it in a frame, and presented it to Steve the next time I saw him. Human Rights and Uganda, I suspect, was a reciprocal gift.
Of course, this leaves one final mystery: How on earth did the volume find its way from my library to Jerusalem? In a long career as a journalist I have lived as far west as Los Angeles, as far south as Alabama, and as far north as Providence: I could have sold/donated the book practically anywhere over the past half-century, and the new owner of Human Rights and Uganda might have migrated to Israel, or presented his/her collection to the National Library—or the Library might have acquired it on its own. In the homeland of the Entebbe raid (1976) an interest in Idi Amin is not implausible.
At any rate, I hope this information is of some help to the National Library of Israel. As for myself, I’m delighted by this evidence that my juvenile humor may be causing consternation all over the planet, in bookshops and libraries and on the Internet, unto posterity.
Philip Terzian is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
