Four-thousand new old books: Tales from the flea market, Part I

Benet Pols March 9, 2024

Stephen Spender.

I had never heard of him. He was, I learned, a poet. English. Very active from the 1920s through the 1950s and somewhat active beyond that. Knew Auden, Hemingway, T.S.Eliot and all sorts of others.

Among my four thousand or so recently acquired new old books are a lot of poetry books. This is regrettable in many ways, not the least of which is, for the most part, they are not worth much.

There are a few things that dictate an old book’s value: one of them is its condition. This Stephen Spender book was “near fine,” in spite of its sixty-nine years on shelves. Not so old to be “rare,” or antiquarian, but “vintage” is fair. Because it is in great shape, I wanted it to be uncommon, if it could not be rare.

Nope. Half a dozen or so listed in single digits on AbeBooks, my primary selling platform.

In any event, I had never heard of the guy. Even so, I listed it at $10.

Two days later I read this:

”About twice a week I would venture to London, usually to the Churchill Club, where a very good dinner was furnished for half a crown. I mean a really good dinner, not a canteen or Red Cross Club dinner. It was at the Churchill Club that I encountered T.S.Eliot, heard Myra Hess, heard that fine Octet and other things—Peggy Ashcroft and Stephen Spender reading poetry, a talk by the recently retired Archbishop of Canterbury etc. etc.”

There he was. Stephen Spender, in the same paragraph with Peggy Ashcroft and T.S. Eliot, in a letter from my father to my mother written in 1944 or 1945 describing his wartime experiences in England (Not to worry, my father also described Buzz-bombs, V-2 rockets, and plenty of death and destruction).

Not coincidentally, I stumbled on Spender while reorganizing some papers to make a more efficient workspace for my four thousand new old books .Perhaps I should bump that price to $11.

We Belong to the Rock.

Benet Pols December 1, 2023

My thoughts flittering between The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge and the photos I was trying to make, I rapped on the door on Summer Street.

The copy I had owned had been deposited at the post office on my way down to the river. Rated by me as in “poor” condition, I was happy to send it on its way back to England even if I was only to gain $44. Originally printed in 1548 “in prose and ryme doggerel,” my copy had been reprinted in 1814 from an original in a printing of 120 copies.

Bedecked with a pair of imposing Nikons I stood on the porch hoping my knock would be answered. I had no back up plan. Behind me in the driveway was a middle-aged, lightly blistered, Subaru Forester bearing a “Save the FJWB” bumper sticker. The Frank J.Wood Bridge, a 1932 WPA project linking Brunswick and Topsham and bookended by Brunswick’s Cabot Mill on the South and The Great Bowdoin Mill of the Pejepscot Paper Company on the North dominated the view shed from this Summer Street home. The bridge has also been the source of long ranging community conversation as its inexorable end appraoches.

**Looking down river toward the Frank J Wood Bridge, and its replacement, now under construction, from a residence in Topsham.**

As it turns out The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, despite its majestic title, is fairly prosaic: it ranks as the earliest known continental guidebook in English, but I didn’t know that at the moment. I had not considered it in any way since researching and adding it to my inventory back in October 2019. Patience is a big component of the used book business. When I awoke Tuesday morning to find the order, I completed the customs forms and packaged the book up and posted it. It may have been wanted for Christmas.

I started pondering its high-minded title during the mile and a half walk to the Topsham side of the river. I had stopped several times along the way to get photos from beneath the Frank J. Wood Bridge at Brunswick’s 250th Anniversary Park and from various other spots that might show the crews at work, their implements, and their progress.. A lot of clambering around on the river bank and various rock piles to get the best views gave me time for idle thoughts between exposure changes, consideration of the sun, and waiting for bridge builders, traffic, and pedestrians to do something more interesting.

There’s nothing like transparency. I rated it “poor” and am pleased someone will get some pleasure from it at $44. An 1814 reprint of a book initially published in 1548. The 1814 edition was in 120 copies and bears this notation, “This volume was faithfully reprinted from an almost unique copy of my own (illegible) and is presented to by friend Mr. David Showell, of Park Lodge, Kent Road. London Institution” It also bears inscriptions showing subsequent ownerships up through the middle of the 19th century. Its author, Andrew Borde, was an erstwhile monk, an occasional Suffragan Bishop, a writer of early fad diet books, a physician, a traveler, and an acolyte of Cromwell who wrote about all these topics. He died in prison after being convicted of keeping house with three loose women.

What sort of knowledge were we talking about? Spiritual, astronomical, philosophical, or scientific? How had in been introduced? Empirical, methodical study, force, or was it revealed?

I was about to back off the porch when the owner of the Subaru opened the door. I asked her permission to walk through her back yard to make some photos of the work underway over by the bridge. Work which will decidedly not be saving the FJWB.

I had been on the property before because in the side yard, hard on Summer Street, is a gravel labyrinth with an old millstone at its center. Assorted other relicts of ancient millworks and a flutter of Buddhist prayer flags welcome passersby from the street for a moment of reflection. But I didn’t think I should go around the back side the house armed like Ron Galella without asking permission.

The homeowner asked where the photos would find a home and I pointed across toward Fort Andross, as if to explain it all. I told her some will end up on the radio station’s website and a larger number would end up on my own website. The radios station’s listeners and followers seemed to enjoy seeing the bridge work the last time I had shared them through WCME. It gives people a chance to inspect what they might only catch a glimpse of while crossing the bridge.

“Of course,” she said and thanked me for asking, “not many do” she added. “Do you know what I’d suggest? go through the labyrinth and across the back where you’ll see a big rock.”

I had seen the rock. Standing on the FJWB looking upstream toward the falls a high granite promontory protrudes into the river side. All rock save a lone rugged evergreen doing its best to slowly cleave the rock. The rock was the reason I was at her door. I wanted to be on it with my cameras.

“Of course, we don’t own the rock,” my host added, “We belong to the Rock.”

And there was my introduction to knowledge.

Photos of construction of the new bridge to replace the Frank J. Wood Bridge, also known as the Green Bridge, between Brunswick and Topsham, Maine. These photos were made November 28, 2023. The replacement bridge and all related construction will be completed in 2026.

Photos of The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, by Andrew Borde 1548, reprinted here in 1814. Photos made in October 2019.

Grant Wood Was a Drone Pilot

Benet Pols April 2, 2023

At work with ninety seconds to kill as the microwave atomizes day old haddock and rice for the benefit of the entire lunchroom you could do a lot worse than scroll the twitter feed of @culturaltutor

The Tutor’s bite sized pieces and visuals have few rivals in the twittosphere for a person looking for a brief break from the monochrome of sports-twitter pontification. Where else could someone learn that Grant Wood was a drone pilot, and a half-dozen other factoids about the man who did this, but is so well known for American Gothic?

Along with a quick tour of perspective, lighting, the non-existence of electric lighting in 18th century New England, how horses run, and some quick side-tours into Copyright, public domain, and the life of Longfellow, the reader might stop to wonder whether Grant Wood had ever flown or otherwise spent time aloft. Wood died in 1942 so it is not a given.

Wood was, in 1931, memorializing Longfellow’s work first seen in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1861, which in turn memorialized Revere’s ride of nearly a century earlier. So all of it is mythologized, or imaginary, or fanciful even. But here is a real version of the Longfellow original.

If you can’t find the cultural tutor on twitter, or your abhorrence for it outweighs your curiosity you can find the Tutor here. The Tutor also produces a nice weekly news letter that more or less collects the twitter bits in prose. I get it, but generally only sample bits as it doesn't fill the interstitial space quite like the Tutor’s twitter.

If you do still tolerate twitter, and like this sort of thing, another great feed for a little on the go thoughtful cultural eduction is @Victoria_s_reed Senior Curator for Provenance at @mfaboston. “Mainer. Art, due diligence, restitution, provenance, museums, and ladies with severed heads,”as her bio reads.

This link takes you to a listing for The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere in the Atlantic Monthly from January 1861.

Laura E. Richards's House, Lost to a Christmas Fire

Benet Pols December 26, 2022

Laura E. Richards’s house in Gardiner Maine burned down this Christmas. Known as the Yellow House, it was a causality of the winter storm just before Christmas that dumped vast rains accompanied by hurricane winds across much of Maine and left other cataclysmic weather damage across the country. The storm itself didn’t cause the fire; a generator used during the resulting long power outage ignited the blaze. One more bit of historical architecture, an artifact of the past, a building with a story to tell, is now gone.

A nice old house in and of itself, it had stood in Gardiner since about 1810 so it represents another blow to the character of an old Maine village; it had many stories to tell. One story is its connection to literary and historical figures,

Laura E. Richards, was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe who wrote the lyrics for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Richards herself was a prolific writer; among ninety other works, she wrote one that took the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1917. Written with two of her sisters, it chronicled her mother’s life. Her father, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a well known abolitionist, founded the Perkins Institution, the Massachusetts School for the Blind. In 1876 Richards moved to this house in Gardiner, Maine, where her husband managed a paper mill. An elementary school in Gardiner still bears her name.

The story of the fire as reported in the Portland Press Herald, a local news paper.

SAMPLES OF THE WORKS OF LAURA RICHARDS AND JULIA WARD HOWE

While Richards’s biography of Julia Ward Howe sold, the following works are still available:

Toto’s Merry Winter, by Laura Richards, $57

The Battle Hymn of the Republic, as first printed in the Atlantic Monthy, $321

Who Owned This Book? And, Have You Seen "Topper" Lately?

Benet Pols February 27, 2022

Roland Keith Young, nominated for an Oscar for his 1937 performance as Topper, was, like his Topper co-star Cary Grant, an English born American actor with a lengthy film career. It stretched from a 1922 turn as Sherlock Holmes’s Watson until near his 1953 death.

Thomas Mann, renowned for Doctor Faustus and The Magic Mountain, one source of his recognition as the 1929 Nobel laureate for literature, also penned the novella Mario and the Magician, first published in Mann’s native German in 1930 and here translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter for a 1931 first American publication by Knopf.

Young’s bookplate, which can be found in the Cornelia Neltnor Anthony and Frank D. Anthony Book Plate Collection of the West Chicago Public library and seen on line in the Illinois Digitial Archives, is in this 1931 first edition.

This is a rare case when the answer to who owned this book? can be given with a high degree of confidence. Perhaps a case where prior ownership has a greater impact on its current value than its condition. After all, there are ten copies listed for sale on ViaLibri; they range from ten to eighty-eight USD. Only two include seller created images, in my opinion the best driver of price (a story for another day).

In addition to the story within its pages, this copy of Mario and the Magician has a story to tell: the story of who owned it. This makes it worth more than $88, but how much?

Having once owned a first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I can spend an inordinate amount of my time cataloguing books wondering whose hands the books have passed through. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first serialized in an anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era, before being published in two volumes by John P. Jewett in 1852. Jewett printed them in editions of 5000 until 295,000 had been sold that first year. My edition was a mixed state. That is Volume I came from the first run of 5000, while Volume II was a “Ten-thousandth,” or in the third printing of 5000.

Who would have been among the first five-thousand Americans to buy Uncle Tom’s Cabin? How would its ownership have influenced their conversation, thoughts, and social lives. But there were no indicia of ownership; the two volumes were just really old. Based on their condition they had been through many hands. Maybe important ones, but maybe just the hands of a guy like me, someone who reads. Their story—outside of their covers—was a general one, not a specific one tied to any particular person.

The Rabbit Hole is an interesting place, around every corner is a possible source of thought provoking information. Why else would I have spent a Saturday night watching Topper on YouTube, wondering about Billie Burke’s career and whatever became of Cary Grant’s wife Dyan Cannon?

One fruitless turn? My effort to learn whether the characters of Mr. Drysdale and Miss Jane from The Beverly Hillbillies were based on bank president Cosmo Topper and his dour secretary Miss Johnson as portrayed by Virginia Sale. Four peas in two pods they were, right down to the matching brush mustaches and forbidding hairstyles.

But the Rabbit Hole encourages procrastination. It’s a place where the perfect is often the enemy of the good. A first edition of Longfellow’s 1842 Ballads and Other Poems ought to sell itself. The Wreck of the Hesperus, and The Village Blacksmith appeared in book form first between these boards. It appears unique, none like it is available on-line.

And this one won’t be listed either. At least not until the mystery of Horatio Woodman, whose name appears in pencil on the first free leaf, takes better shape. A Horatio Woodman kick-started Boston’s Saturday Club which begat the Atlantic Monthly. Longfellow was a member too. Woodman and Longfellow were both Mainers. Me too, so I am in no rush.

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You Want to be Where Everybody Knows Your Name (Or Do You?)

Benet Pols July 11, 2020

One thing I have discovered about Catherine Maria Sedgwick is that she is perpetually being discovered.

A second thing I have discovered is that, in my circles anyway, this author now acknowledged to have portrayed women in a more sophisticated and nuanced way than was typical of her era, remains an unknown. I have asked people who I consider to be smart, literate, well read, and well educated if they can tell me anything about her (Hint: she’s not a Facebook friend of a friend). The results have been underwhelming.

A third thing I have discovered is that most people, including me, meet their discovery of Catherine Maria Sedgwick with a touch of self-rebuke. We certainly should have known.

A fourth thing I have discovered is the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society, a group of scholars and academics who get together annually to keep the fires burning, “promoting the study and awareness of Sedgwick’s life and works.”

But before I discovered any of these things I discovered that I own a first edition her first published novel, A New England Tale (1822). (link)

Most sources book-end her career and notoriety within the nineteenth century with a rise to prominence and a fade to near obscurity by the end of the century.

“Catharine Maria Sedgwick was one of the leading figures in early-nineteenth-century American literary culture. Although she is less well known today, she set a pattern for the development of both domestic novels and historical novels in this country. Male writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant respected Sedgwick as a peer, while female authors such as Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe regarded her as a literary role model.” (Annenberg) Other sources note Sedgwick’s primacy in establishing a distinctly American canon, “Sedgwick was immediately recognized as one of the writers creating an indigenous American literature.” (women history blog)

Indigenous American literature was an important concept for the young country , as was an indigenous arts industry. S.G. Goodrich, editor of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, an annual collection of literary works and “embellishments” noted in the preface to the 1836 edition that while for its nine years in existence, The Token had “been sustained by American writers” 1836 was the first year that the same could be said for its artworks. Owing to advances in the arts and production, the editors were proud to announce that the 1836 edition was the “first annual, and the only highly embellished book, issued from the American press, which could claim entire independence from foreign aid.”

A short story “New Year’s Day,” attributed to “Miss Sedgwick,” is the second piece in the 1836 Token.

But something else I have discovered about Sedgwick is that attribution of her authorship is often difficult to discern, and sometimes, apparently, willfully obscured. In fact, her second major novel, Redwood (1824), upon its translation for publication in France was attributed not to Sedgwick, but to James Fenimore Cooper. Why? Because of her known affinity with Cooper? Because, like Cooper’s work, Redwood featured sympathetic portrayals of Native American characters? Or perhaps because Cooper was an American author already well known to the French?

The photos of A New England Tale show Sedgwick’s name appeared nowhere in the title pages or elsewhere. Several sources suggest that her dedication of the work to Maria Edgeworth, the renowned Anglo-Irish writer, was a sly reference to the fact that this work too was written by a woman.

Just the pencil markings of a previous owner tell us the author’s name.

Anonymity, even for male authors, was common in the era—Cooper and Hawthorne—both published anonymously or pseudonymously. Recently Stephen King made use of the gambit with the Richard Bachmann series. Sedgwick, at certain times anyway, made it a bit of an obsession. So much so that she even wrote a short story on the dilemma, Cacoethes Scribendi, that appeared in Titles and Sketches. Iironically Titles and Sketches was the only one of Sedgwick’s books published in her lifetime that did carry her name on the title page. Sedgwick’s use of anonymity is nicely explored in Behind the Veil. Catherine Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication by Melissa J. Homestead. Homestead’s piece, though it focuses on Sedgwick, covers a lot of ground; it is sure to up a reader’s Jeopardy skills.

Whatever conclusion you draw, it may help explain why Sedgwick now requires “discovery.” As her Wikipedia entry sums up “By the end of the 19th century, she had been relegated to near obscurity. There was a rise of male critics who deprecated women's writing as they worked to create an American literature. Interest in Sedgwick's works and an appreciation of her contribution to American literature has been stimulated by the late 20th century's feminist movement. Beginning in the 1960s, feminist scholars began to re-evaluate women's contributions to literature and other arts and created new frames of reference for considering their work.”

It may also explain why all my smart friends know who Hawthorne and Cooper are, but not Sedgwick.