Finding a Good Book

        

              My blog essays vary considerably in their lack of ambition, but mainly readers get a snapshot of my Tuesday mind around lunchtime when I realize with a start that it is Tuesday around lunchtime.  This week was an exception.  I had a really serious topic—what I’ll call in short hand the Stanford rape case—and I was mulling over some issues in my head for a couple of days.  Then the Orlando massacre occurred, an event so horrible as to silence more modest revulsions, yet one concerning which I have nothing conceivably useful to say. 

Furthermore there came into my mind from the ether the advice of the Apostle: “whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report… think on these things.”  A scholar’s life is like all others in most respects.  Its girders are family and friends, its secondary framing the other human relationships connected to them and to one’s professional duties and habits.  How lucky I have been in all these regards.  One particularly marvelous aspect of the scholarly life is that you actually get paid for reading books.  It occurs to me that at least a few readers who read just for the love of truth, beauty, enlightenment or amusement might be interested in some professional advice.

“Of making many books there is no end,” wrote the biblical sage at a time when there were many millions fewer of them than there are today—before adding sagely “and much study wearies the body.”  A time will arrive in your life, if it has not already arrived, when you will realize with a pang that there is no possible way that you will be able to read all the books you will want to read, need to read, would be better for reading.  So many books, so little time.

One classic mistake sometimes made by even sophisticated readers is an overemphasis on the contemporary.  You probably ought to do no more than a tenth of your reading from among titles taken from the current book reviews.  You would never limit your appreciation of music to works composed in the last twelve months or your enjoyment of painting to canvases finished in the last two weeks.  There is nothing wrong with reading to “keep up”—that is, from a desire to be able to participate intelligently in a larger cultural conversation—but the conversation you really want to be interested in covers centuries and continents.  It is a conversation—like all the best aspects of culture—that brings the living into colloquy with the dead.  Remember Milton’s wonderful observation in Areopagitica: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

You can find your quarry by trial and error in a leisurely walk through the stacks of any reasonably well stocked public library, but I have found it helpful to call upon the aid of others who have thought longer and more systematically than I.  Among my books there are three to which I make recourse on a pretty regular basis.

The first of these is now called An English Library: a Bookman’s Guide, by F. Seymour Smith.  The first edition, dated 1943, which I picked up back in the Fifties, was one of those funny old wartime British books that seemed to be printed on crumbling toilet paper.  The edition I now use—there may well be a more recent one—dates from 1963.  Its new introduction begins: “An English Library, like wartime willow-herb, grew on a bomb site.”  It is double the size of the original effort, but still true to the old subtitle: “An Annotated List of Classics and Standard Books”.  If you were to read half of them, you’d be reading at a very high standard indeed.

The second reference work is a much more recent addition.  I became addicted to it only during my fairly recent residence in Paris.  The second-hand book trade in France is miserable.  The old joke about boarding house fare—“the food is absolute poison, and such small quantities”—seems vaguely relevant.  There is not really a lot on offer, and the prices will strike an American as shockingly high.  But at the Saturday market in Georges Brassens Park in the Fifteenth I was willing to pay 10€ for La Bibliothèque idéale, which is one of the “Encyclopédies d’aujourd’hui” of the Livres de poche series.  Its subject matter, cunningly distributed over a thousand pages, is French-language books (including many translations) that a couple of Parisian intellectuals consider your best intellectual diet.  They have forty-nine categories, and in each of them they list and characterize what they take to be the ten most important, the twenty-five most important, and the forty-nine most important titles.  Notice that they leave you a whole category to make up for yourself, and within each category you get to choose one additional title.  Robbespierrean democracy.

Finally, I use an American book—Steven Gilbar’s Good Books: A Book Lover’s Companion (Ticknor and Fields, 1982).  This is another huge and promiscuous catalogue, organized by interesting and often enough eccentric category, that eschews the obviously highbrow.  A nice feature of this book from my point of view is that it has a foreword by Clifton Fadiman—a name that will be familiar to you only if you are getting on in years.  He was one of the great public literary intellectuals of the Fifties, and the host of a popular quiz program.  He features tangentially in my Anti-Communist Manifestos.  We also just happen to have two elegant modernist Danish wood and leather beds that once belonged to him in our crawlspace, though I shudder to imagine their current condition.  I’ll reserve the account of how Clifton Fadiman’s beds got into my crawlspace for the next time I am desperate for a blog topic.  The next time you are desperate for some good bibliographical advice you can turn to any of the three books mentioned.

Essential Bookness

There is in our town a fine institution of continuing education or “senior academy” called the Evergreen Forum.  Each year it offers in conjunction with the Senior Center a large number of courses impressive in their range and scope.  I have  taught a few courses in this program in the past, and in the spring I am scheduled to teach another—this one on eighteenth-century occultism and other matters raised in The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  I have met many engaging people among the Evergreen seminarians, including Harry Pinch, whose wife has been over the years one of the Forum’s principal movers and shakers.

            Harry asked me a couple of weeks ago whether I was receptive to suggestions for weekly blog topics. I’ll take the opportunity to announce publicly that the answer to that question is affirmative.  My aim is “general interest”—a category perhaps not always or entirely coincident with my default religious and political opinions.  Harry had been struck by an essay by David Streitfeld entitled “Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind,” published in the New York Times “Technology” section in early December.  Harry wondered whether this stimulating piece might offer some grist for the bloguiste’s mill.  And of course it does.  Its subject very generally is the fascinating commerce between the printed book and the e-book.  Yes, I know--but this really is an excellent essay, and you should read it in its entirety, as I am engaging with only a few of its implications.

            Everybody knows that electronic technology can revolutionize the reading experience.  What Streitfeld is struck by is the reluctance of the book industry to let it do so.  You don’t need to turn pages in an electronic book.  However, makers of reading machines are going to extraordinary lengths to try to recreate the “feel” of turning a page.  Although the idea of an autographed or inscribed copy of an e-book ought to seem absurd on the face of it, canny Amazonians are inventing one.  I guess that if you can make an electronic cigarette, you can make an electronic anything.

But why?

            Although literacy commands a legitimate private sphere (personal letters, diaries, etc.) the great historical impulse in graphic communication is directed toward the public sphere.  I have lots of reasons to be interested in “publication”, broadly understood.  I am a reader and a writer, the owner of a library, an expert on medieval manuscripts, an amateur historian of printing, and an actual letterpress printer.  I conclude that all major developments in the history of publication have been driven by one or more of four considerations: the authoritative accuracy of the published text; the durability of the publishing medium; the number of copies that can be produced; and the cost of the publishing process.  The first consideration—accuracy of text—may take you by surprise; but many early printers considered the new option of authorial correction of proof sheets quite as important as the capacity for the multiplication of copies.  From the analytical point of view an electronic text satisfies all four desiderata as well or better than all previous modes of publication.  Yet many of us resist.  But why?

            Part of the answer—an important part—lies in universal habits of cultural conservatism.  “Most things that exist in the world,” said the great cultural anthropologist E. B. Tylor, “exist for the reason that they once existed.”  Contrary to popular academic belief the argument that “we have always done things that way” is among the most powerful one can muster.  We have always made books by the mechanical application of ink to paper—so long as “always” means perhaps a tenth part of the long history of publication and so long as we restrict ourselves to our own neck of the cultural woods.

            It is no easy thing, however, cleanly to separate the essential from the decorative.  That is a major point of Streitfeld’s essay.  The particular thought that captured Harry Pinch’s attention was this: “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.” My late colleague and friend, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, became famous for his concept of the “paradigm shift,” a rearrangement of the mental furniture so thorough-going as in effect to supplant an old “reality” and establish a new one.  Such, for instance, was the triumph of the Copernican astronomy over the Ptolemaic.

            But few shifts were so dramatic or so complete.  The perfection of durable writing surely qualifies, and perhaps, but only perhaps, so does the invention of movable types.  But Gutenberg’s technology, however incrementally improved, remained essentially the same for half a millennium.  Now letterpress has been trumped by offset lithography, the process used to produce every book that most people alive today have ever read.

            The matter is perhaps semantic, but I cannot consider the advent of lithography as a paradigm shift, any more than I can so regard the shift from scroll (words laid out in a single long roll) to codex (words laid out in sequentially bound discrete sheets).  That shift, incidentally, has been reversed on your computer screen.  There is very little theological difference between a Torah procession in a Jewish liturgy and the gospel procession in a Christian liturgy; but you will see fossilized in the contrast two historical moments in the history of writing and reading.

            So what is “the future of the book”?  There will not be a single future, but many.  It is possible to read writing produced in a myriad of forms: spray-painted on the sides of subway cars, traced by a finger on a steamed-up mirror, puffed into the cold air by a sky-writing airplane.  Some poor souls will doubtless come to think of a “book” as a fugitive sequence of pixels on a hand-held screen.  But how can there be a real book without the tactile ghosts of the type on the backside of a sheet of laid paper, or the smooth feel and smell of old calf?  And how can you really read it except with the aid of green-shaded glass lamps on a polished old library table?

Great Men, Great Books

Dante begins one of the cantos of the Inferno by congratulating the Florentines for achievements so remarkable as to gain for their city a great reputation through all of Hell. “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” apparently approaches such celebrity. I have just had my second electronic proposition to “monetize” it. Is monetize a word?

Commercial shilling is beneath the dignity of this blog, but I do allow two easements. I continue to try to drum up business for the non-profit Library of America. They publish beautiful editions of the literary patrimony of our nation, and no literate citizen of the Republic should be without at least a few of their volumes. And if there is anyone in the world still unaware of the American Book Exchange, let me aid in stamping out that fragment of culpable ignorance. Abebooks combines the best of capitalist competition with the comprehensive capacities of the Internet in the service of great reading. It is as it were the biggest, and I do mean awesomely big, second-hand bookshop in the world, and I do mean world.

Despite draconian downsizing, I still have quite a few books and inadequate space to store them. One result of the situation is that I sometimes cannot lay my hands on a book I know I own but lack the leisure to search for. Under these circumstances I have been known on occasion simply to buy another copy from Abebooks. Sometimes two copies, in case the second one should get lost as the first one did. Such was the circumstance last week when I could not find a copy of Leonard Bacon’s wonderful translation of the Lusiads of Luís de Camões (Hispanic Society of America, 1950). I did not realize at the time that my dilemma would lead me to the perfect Christmas gift for my son Rich. The force of this remark will be clearer if I tell you that Rich is (a) a world-class birder, and (b) an enthusiast for Antarctica.

Avoiding the numerous copies priced at fifty or sixty dollars apiece, I was able to pick up two exemplars of the hardcover edition for a total cost of $18.95 including postage. (Did I mention the advantages of capitalist competition?). By the time they arrived, I had found my missing copy, plus another paperback version; but better safe than sorry is what I always say. And excess sometimes pays off; one of my “new” copies is a gem.

Bacon wrote a poem each year as his "Christmas card": Christmas Greetings, 1952

It is a presentation copy from the translator, Leonard Bacon, to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cushman Murphy. Bacon (1887-1954) was a “minor” American poet of the period between the Wars, a person in whom considerable literary talent joined with cosmopolitan cultivation. He traveled widely in Europe, and lived for several years in Florence. He published many books of original poetry, but this medievalist first “met” him through his erudition. His mastery of the Romance tongues is exhibited in his translations of the Chanson de Roland, the Cantar del mio Cid, and (his masterpiece as translator) the Lusiads of Camões.

Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973)

The recipient of the gift, Robert Murphy (1887-1973), was among the greatest ornithologists America has yet produced. He was also a prolific and elegant writer whose learned works make important contributions to ornithological study and whose popular journal articles did much to foster interest in bird-watching, natural history, and conservation generally. His most famous feat came early, in 1912. In that year he sailed on the New Bedford whaler “Daisy” to the subantarctic, where he spent several months studying the unique bird-life. This experience is the subject of an engaging recent book—Eleanor Mathews’ Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship. It is also memorialized, in cameo, in the sea lion on Murphy’s bookplate, executed in line etching by John W. Jameson (d. 1939). You can see why my son Rich must have this treasure.

The word that comes to my mind in thinking about the giver, the gift, and the recipient is gentleman—a lexical endangered species in a world becoming ever more coarse and cynical. These two guys were obviously gentlemen. The phrasing of the Christmas inscription—“the Robert Murphys from their Friends the Leonard Bacons”—compounds its fustiness with an offense against peecee. But it bespeaks a real friendship, and Murphy pasted it onto the book’s fly-leaf, just as he pasted onto the back fly-leaf the accompanying letter, written on elegant paper, embossed with a laureated “B” and an address: The Acorns, Peace Dale, R. I.

May 22^nd, 1953

Dear Bob,

Your letters always please. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your observations on “anting” and kind remarks on the verses. This is a rich year for birds. I have seen, apart from Persian Armies of Robins, the Baltimore oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, scarlet tanager (both sexes, the lady being the more aggressive) flickers, hairy woodpeckers, nuthatch, black and white warbler, chickadee wood thrush, hermit thrush, brown thrasher, goldfinches, and catbirds almost as numerous as the robins. Warblers and sparrows still remain too difficult for me to identify. But I notice that the English sparrow has become rarer than the chipping sparrow. The hordes of starlings have broken up for the mating season and they are only seen in two and threes. We have a grackle or two. All the birds listed were seen within fifty yards of the house. I wish I had your eyes, for I fancy I could then multiply my list by four or five. I don’t think many fly catchers have arrived.

I hope to be in N.Y. on the 27^th and 28^th. It would be fun to see you at the Club.

Meanwhile, our love as always to Grace and you.

Cordially yours,

Leonard Bacon

The final paragraph sent me to my current Century Club yearbook, where I was pretty sure what I would find. Leonard Bacon was a member from 1927 to 1954, Robert Cushman Murphy from 1923 until 1973.