Here is part of a little social media project I started many months ago but lost interest in—mainly because no one else seemed interested—but remembered this morning after reading Bob Keyes’s entrancing article in the Maine Sunday Telegram. It’s half homage to the old days in West Point Village and half a business piece looking at the local oyster trade in the midst of oceanside gentrification and the Covid Pandemic. Give it a read.
In any event thinking about it reminded me of Ernest Haskell, his house on the West Point Road, his introduction of John Marin to Maine, and that iconic view of the Phippsburg Congregational Church you see across Center Pond when headed north on Route 209. The title of Haskell’s 1924 etching is Crystal Morning which really brings to mind that sparking view you get under blue skies with Center Pond twinkling, but this broad view is a lot quieter. With the bluff on the left and the high trees it recalls the aspect of the pond you would see before the DOT undertook a big project on Route 209 in the early 1980s when the “cliff” on the west side of the road just on the Bath side of the Basin Road was blasted and moved back from the pond fifteen meters or so—that stretch of road got straightened a bit, and widened a good deal, allowing for faster travel and the consequent loss the leisurely pace to really take the view in.
One of the things that intrigued me most about Haskell ’s story was his connection to John Marin and introduction of Marin, much better known as a “Maine” artist than Haskell, to Maine through West Point. Haskell had met Marin in Paris a few years earlier. Marin was a bit of an itinerant wandering up the coast and stopping here and there and is better known for his connections further downeast. Haskell, in spite of putting roots down in one place, is sort of lost to time. A second thing that intrigued is Haskell’s death in a Bath hospital as the result on a car wreck on those beautiful winding roads of Phippsburg just about a mile from his on the West Point Road. Third, and something that really resonated with me at the time I “found” Haskell in the Sumer of 2020, was death of his first wife, Elizabeth Louise Foley, in 1918 as a result of last great American pandemic, the Spanish Flu.
On Its Way Home, Samuel Parker's Exploring Tour Beyond the Rockies.
“If I can get them into the hands of someone who values them I will be doing us both a favor.”
Old books with maps and charts are interesting. One on hand they send you further down the rabbit hole looking for meaning, history, accuracy, and context. On the other hand the they add another layer to the question of the book’s value; their folds, creases, different methods of insertion and placements almost always lead to questions about the book’s condition. They are often missing altogether.
So I found Samuel Parker’s 1838 Exploring Tour Beyond the Rockies, recounting his travels to the Oregon Territory, a particularly interesting find in my inventory of several thousand old and rare books. I am happy to report it will find a home with a collections registrar, regional landmarks commissioner, and historical archeologist with deep experience in regional museums and historical preservation organizations in the Northwest. The book is on the road home.
The map accompanying Parker’s work is reputed to be the first reliable map of the interior of Oregon territory. Parker was on a religious mission pursuing locations, and presumably people, to bring into his particular fold. According to the Washington State University digital library site which contains an online version of the map, “In 1834, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed Rev. Samuel Parker to go to the Oregon Territory and scout locations for missions there. Parker traveled overland to Oregon in 1835, and traveled as far north as Colville while locating sites for missions near Spokane, Lewiston, and Walla Walla. Eventually, he traveled to Fort Vancouver, and from their obtained free passage by ship to Hawaii, and after some delay there he returned to Boston via Cape Horn. In 1838, he published this map, and the book from which it was taken, as an aid and inducement to future settlers.” The Wikipedia entry on the ABCFM is fascinating.
The description of this map as the “earliest reliable source, made from personal observation” is attributed to The Plains and the Rockies: A Critical Bibliography of Exploration, Adventure and Travel in the American West, 1800-1865, begun by Henry R. Wagner and continued by Charles L. Camp and Robert H. Becker. Book and map sellers most often refer to this source as “Wagner-Camp.”
In addition to its map the book contains a glossary of native terminology with English equivalents, and various climatological data.
We Walked Because We Had To
Ireland. In the 1970s. Unaccountably that is where these photos took me.
Perplexing because the barn, seen by me a thousand times, and the tree photographed dozens of times, could not be less like the Ireland that it took me too. The rock strewn hills of the Partry Mountains, treeless but for some wind-stunted abstractions, its deep green grass perpetually shorn by flocks of sheep wandering in a steady drizzle or maybe a fog lifted from the grim glacial lake nearby waiting for some quirk of the atmosphere to lift it just high enough up the steep sided valley to condense and drizzle its way back to the boulder strewn earth. The sheep, fractiously companionable, wandered freely. The only sign of humans a spray painted marking in red or blue on their soggy mud-bedraggled fleeces.
How did I get here?
Not the tree. It is a grand thing standing there proudly for all to see. Not the barn. Little thatched whitewashed stone things were dropped here and there around the Irish hills, nothing so imposing as this. Not the nearly cloudless sky.
The shadows then.
But once a day the sun showed itself slanting away from the west called up at the same time every day by some trick of Atlantic gusts pushed through a not too distant fjord, sometimes making a prism of a still lingering rain shower. Forty-five minutes or maybe an hour before the ski darkened and then rain, steady again, resumed its grey work.
Forty-five minutes to bounce a ball in the road—old macadam with its varied pebbles still visible like a crowd of periwinkles following one another over the mild hills and curves down the two mile shoreline of the lake. For forty-five minutes the pumice like surface of the water grew brighter green and even dared to hint at reflecting the odd blue smudges between the clouds. Forty-five minutes to watch the long shadows of the neighbor men stretching out over the road, chasing and catching their makers for just a moment at the crest in the road just to stretch out again behind them as they headed down the hill toward The Larches, the local pub.
The walking then.
Ours is a time of walking.
Theirs was a country of walking.
Cars were few, roads were narrow. Work seemed to be mainly with the sheep or in peat bog. Peat needed a cart but, like the pace of peat burning, the cart seemed fine with a donkey or an old horse to pull it. The neighborhood walked, or biked, to and fro, if it felt the need to move at all. And in the evening when the sun made its brief appearance to call them out, they strolled.
The same man would saunter by our little house every evening. His shadow stretching out behind him down the slope just to rush up and catch him briefly at the crest of the next hill. Our place stood at the crest of a hill so he would arrive alone to greet us and be joined by his shadow. We weren't to do more than acknowledge the greeting. There was no clear reason for it, just some tacit understanding that he was not approved of. Perhaps our dour and distant landlady had passed some wordless clues to our parents. So we’d move to the side of the road and stop bouncing the ball back and forth. He’d pass by, smile. I see him in a cap, his hands in his pockets and a jacket hanging in the loop of his arm. Shortly, just after dark we would hear the singing wending its way back along that two-mile shoreline.
But for now we would step back into the road and resume bouncing the ball.
And now in 2020 we walk too.
Relentlessly, sometimes with a grim resignation, we walked. The need to do anything but stay inside overcame inertia, indifferent weather, and habits generations in the making. At the same time came a sense of discovery, joy in simple things, the early greening of moss, the trickle of melt water in an otherwise quiet wood, paths through woods that we had not traveled since childhood, stumbling upon artworks placed in the woods to astound the infrequent passersby. It was spring after-all, or what counts for spring in Maine, so the signs of renewal were there. And we were forced outside to greet them.
The photo of the tree and the barn with its long twilight shadows was taken just two or three weeks into the 2020 lockdown. Our local schools had last welcomed students in person March 12th, my wife was working from home, my oldest had been sent home from college. Only I left the house on a regular basis to a work place radically changed where a mood of, at times, grim, dutiful, determination drove us to normalize the abnormal. On the way home I would stop at, a local market with a keen sense of its responsibilities and purpose in this new and peculiar time. I would scout for an available pound of butter, bag of sugar, or perhaps a treat.
And then we would walk.
Sometimes together, sometimes separately. It was not long before we and others stumbled to the fact that the neighborhood streets no longer met the need. The awkward glances exchanged during the pas de deux of greeting an oncoming walker called for new territory. Hesitant parallel steps from the curb to cross the street lest we cross wakes of exhaled breath not yet cleansed by the daylight and breeze, followed by both resuming the curb before some gesture or nod cemented who would cross and who would stay drove us to more far-flung spaces. A short drive and leaving the car by the side of some rural road opened new territory; even there there were others.
An old navy base in my town has a stretch of disused road and paths on the near side of the runways. I would bike out there in the evening. For six weeks I never went on the property without running into a man I know and his wife; sometimes their grown children were along. I have known this man casually since childhood; he’d been an intimidating kid, a little older, quick to take on the smoking habits of his tribe, a disruptive presence in school. Not a walker by nature, he speaks with the rasp of a man who is never far from a smoke. Bundled against the March wind cutting across the airfield his garment was a vintage snowmobile jacket emblazoned with a sled makers’ logos. No hi-tech fibers of the outsider. Nonetheless they too were driven out for ninety minutes in the weak sunlight. We greeted with a nod and a wistful smile, acknowledging another day’s meeting on the little patch of earth that we do share.
I met a neighbor maybe three miles from our block. I asked him if he was going any place special. “No. Just going.”
Coming home from work on a backroad at a crossroad nearly two miles from town I was slowed by traffic yielding for pedestrians. Usually empty, this intersection had seven pairs of walkers making their ways.
After traversing two land trust properties and a friendly farm my wife and I headed to a town owned patch of woods that leads down to the bay. We had gone too far from home to get back in time to make supper so we called our daughter for a ride. Another time bushwhacking through the woods near the shoreline on that same old navy base we got turned around and had to use location services on the iPhone to show us where on God’s Green earth we were.
A muddy afternoon on one of the more obscure trails of neighboring Freeport’s land trust left us starring in disbelief at a mail box with a name, street number and adjacent newspaper receptacle deep I the woods on rutted, rocky, root filled track wide enough to maybe accommodate a 1979 VW Rabbit. It was wet, there was still plenty of snow deep in the woods, the paths were a quagmire, so we improvised wandering through the woods just off the trail.
Yet on each of these walks we met people. There were the hardcores and wannabes, crisp synthetic fibers, hydration systems, and hiking poles to aid the conquest of a meandering path through a copse, but there were also tank tops, faux-camo, and Mountain Dew.
There is an expectation about conserved public land. We are owed some kind of pay-off. But so many of these walks were just quiet, subtle meanderings that I question that perception of accessible public lands.
All the websites, Facebook pages, and campaign materials feature the big pay day: cliffs, waves, mountain tops with water views, kayak camping on remote islands. Make no mistake, a walk that culminates in a crescendo is a fine thing. But if that is all you want you will miss the fine details, the chance “to see the world in a grain of sand.”
And we were working, some tethered at home to the internet, some more thankful than ever just to have a place to go outside the home. A place to give some little normal structure to the grim reiteration of marking time with the statistical recitation of deaths, infections, hospitalizations, and bombastic fabrications.
We needed outdoors time that didn’t require travel. We needed an afternoon walk.
Maine By Foot, a comprehensive town-by-town list of Maine’s many publicly accessible trails provided an excellent source of new, nearby walks. Some stunning and surprising, some subtle and comfortable like that grain of sand. Land trust websites are also a great source.
Rambling through these properties on a nearly daily basis brought forth the true purpose of the land conservation.
So much if what is preserved is not accessible to the public, but that is okay. The land is there for the grain of sand, for the wildlife, for oxygen, and for carbon sequestration. And it provides a generous buffer to sustain what is accessible.
So much of what is preserved is undistinguished: no grand vistas, no water features, no adrenaline rush from the big climb. But there are the shadows, the horizontal light of afternoon.
So much of what is accessible and beautiful isn’t preserved at all, at least not formally. It exists in the view-sheds on the rural roads that are seen more fully at a walking pace that at 45 miles an hour.
Go for a walk. Find the greenest green of the moss, marvel at the bluff that hosted a ski area in your childhood, listen to the throbbing of peepers deep in woods of an old navy base, wonder at the light and shadows. Someone made the effort years ago—centuries even as is the case with the Brunswick Town Commons—to leave it alone just for this moment. Take the moment and you may find yourself carried over the ocean and the years to a roadside in Ireland forty-five years ago.
I take my camera with me on a lot of walks but I don’t always use it. Sometimes I go out for a walk with the express purpose of making some pictures.. Other times I just go without it. In this gallery are photos from the Chase Preserve and Freeport Woods, near Maquoit Bay, the Pennelville neighborhood in Brunswick, Bradley Pond in Topsham, Sewall Beach in Phippsburg, The Commons in Brunswick, Bunganuc, Wildes Road in Bowdoinham and Merrymeeting Bay, Crystal Spring Farm, Merriconeag Farm and Skolfield Preserve in Harpswell, Tumbledown Mountain in Weld, and assorted other places around the area.
Enter Gallery
Old Books With Maps, Always a Welcome Trip Down the Rabbit Hole.
1812. A War.
For an American anyway, I may know a lot about the War of 1812. As a Mainer, I have seen the masts of Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, flickering in my periphery between the trusses of the Mystic River Bridge and the rooftops of Charlestown while headed to Boston. There she sits, everything there is to know about the War of 1812. I may even have visited her as a child on a school trip. After some thought, I can also tell you James Madison was president during this war; this, I know, because his wife Dolley, of snack cake fame, is reported to have rescued a painting of George Washington from the White House before the British arrived to burn it.
I do remain a little unclear on how the United States ended up “winning” a war in which the opposing side first managed to invade the capital, drive out the President, and burn down his house. It may have been connected to the fact that the British were also busy fighting the French and Napoleon in a separate war back on their side of the ocean. That’s a war I know less about.
But while assessing some books for listing I ran into several with large fold out maps. Among them Relation Circonstanciée de la Campagne de Russie 1812, a French history of Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 invasion of Russia, Edward Falkener’s 1862 work on the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, and Samuel Parker’s 1838 Exploring Tour Beyond the Rockies, recounting his travels to the Oregon Territory.
Old books with maps and charts are interesting. One on hand they send you further down the rabbit hole looking for meaning, history, accuracy, and context. On the other hand the they add another layer to the question of the book’s value; their folds, creases, different methods of insertion and placements almost always lead to questions about the book’s condition. They are often missing altogether.
The map accompanying the last is reputed to be the first reliable map of the interior of Oregon territory. Parker was on a religious mission pursuing locations, and presumably people to bring into his particular fold. According to the Washington State University digital library site which contains an online version of the map, “In 1834, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed Rev. Samuel Parker to go to the Oregon Territory and scout locations for missions there. Parker traveled overland to Oregon in 1835, and traveled as far north as Colville while locating sites for missions near Spokane, Lewiston, and Walla Walla. Eventually, he traveled to Fort Vancouver, and from their obtained free passage by ship to Hawaii, and after some delay there he returned to Boston via Cape Horn. In 1838, he published this map, and the book from which it was taken, as an aid and inducement to future settlers.” The Wikipedia entry on the ABCFM is fascinating.
The description of this map as the “earliest reliable source, made from personal observation” is attributed to The Plains and the Rockies: A Critical Bibliography of Exploration, Adventure and Travel in the American West, 1800-1865, begun by Henry R. Wagner and continued by Charles L. Camp and Robert H. Becker. Book and map sellers most often refer to this source as “Wagner-Camp.”
In addition to its map the book contains a glossary of native terminology with English equivalents, and various climatological data.
Click images for a Slideshow
Falkener, was a drawer, artist, and draftsman so his work, The Temple of Diana at Ephesus, is notable not just for its large fold-out map, and many smaller interior maps, but for its colored plates. They are the equivalent of a current architect’s renderings with scenes of the archeological sites as imagined in their day, beautiful and detailed.
The Temple of Diana as a name for the structure itself is no longer in favor. Wikipedia’s page on the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, notes that it is less precisely known as the Temple of Diana; Diana was the Roman equivalent of the name Artemis
Both the colored plates and the maps and other schematics from Falkener’s work are frequently reproduced and available for sale through various reprint services. At least one of the plates even shows up on a tee-shirt. All of this makes my efforts at photographing the plates carefully—I didn’t want to use the scanner for fear of further damaging the brittle binding—seem vaguely pointless.
Slideshow
Campagne de Russie 1812, in addition to its maps, is filled with data. The work was obviously popular in its time as even my rudimentary French told me this February 1815 edition was the fourth edition of the work. It also suggested further research in english. As I plowed through the Wikipedia entries on Napoleon’s reckless caper to Moscow, I was first astonished by the apparent irrationality of the campaign: Wikipedia suggests the reason for the campaign against Russia was to stop the Russians from trading with the English which in turn would make his simultaneous war with England a little easier.
My second realization was that most of what I know of the Napoleonic Wars, and the American War of 1812, I learned from historical fiction, notably the sea-faring novels of Patrick O”Brian. As a result, with the exception of the Battle of Waterloo, burned forever into my nine year old consciousness by the brutal battle scenes depicted in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo during an ill-advised childhood trip to Portland Maine’s State Theatre, I know mainly about the naval engagements of the wars rather than the political intrigues and land based battles.
Slideshow
I know about Nelson and the Nile. I know about blockades at Toulon and Brest. I know about Gibraltar, still shimmering in my mind from the one time I actually laid eyes upon it—late at night in 1960s while passing it in the Italian liner Raffaello. And I know about the USS Constitution and its taking of the British frigate Java. In The Fortunes of War O’Brian’s primary character, Capatin Jack Aubrey, was conveniently placed as a guest onboard Java at the time of the battle. And of course I catch a quick view of it off my left shoulder when headed to Boston.
And now, thanks to my travels down the rare book rabbit hole, I know that Wellington’s English and Bluecher’ s Prussians were not the only ones to defeat Napoleon.
Relation Circonstanciée de la Campagne de Russie 1812, a French history of Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 invasion of Russia. $88 AbeBooks.
Edward Falkener’s 1862 work on the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. $88 Abebooks.
Samuel Parker’s 1838 Exploring Tour Beyond the Rockies, recounting his travels to the Oregon Territory. $88 Abebooks. (SOLD)
You Want to be Where Everybody Knows Your Name (Or Do You?)
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.
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.
This Year, Go Ahead And Buy That Teacher Gift
This year go ahead and get your kid’s teacher an end of year gift. In fact, if you’re still working, make it a good one. They really deserve it.
Distance learning is difficult emotionally and physically. Your teachers all had to turn on a dime to get this thing running for the kids. As an observer, I see the mental fatigue as so much different from the typical teacher’s work day. It is a peculiar blend of being continuously connected but still disconnected. The school day has a way of creeping into the whole day. There is eye strain, back strain, an inability to move much during the work sessions, hurried meals between student meetings without the usual social benefits of the school house or the teacher’s room. The quick transition from one one-on-one session to the next is more like a call center than a classroom.
Beyond that the teachers miss your kids, they miss seeing the games, recess, plays, choir, music, and art. I think they even miss the bickering, the drama, and the social intrigues.
And we are all waiting to see what the fall will hold.
Ordinarily at this time of year I write to suggest that if you have difficulty hitting the sweet spot with the teacher gift that a gift in their name to the Brunswick Community Education Foundation (BCEF) might be a good solution.
The original post—updated a bit—is down below.
No doubt about it, the BCEF is still a great cause; if you can afford it please make them a gift too. After all, just a couple of months ago when distance learning went from being a concept to a fact of daily life in the blink of an eye, BCEF jumped right in to fill a funding gap. BCEF purchased 50 new chrome books to help the Brunswick Schools assure access to the new online teaching norm.
And BCEF is missing you too. Spark, its annual shindig, celebration and fundraiser was cancelled like so many other things.
The post below originally appeared in May 2015 in a separate blog focusing on Brunswick
At this time of year we get asked a lot what makes a good teacher gift. We are sort of experts. My wife Beth is a third generation public school teacher in her district. She has more than twenty years experience on the receiving end of year-end gifts that run the gamut from truly touching, to truly comical, to truly insane, to truly practical.
To get the right teacher gift you have to know the person, or at least know something about them. And they’re just like us, they’re all different.
Except in one important respect: they all want to help our children learn and grow.
Even with our family’s vast experience we too have been stymied in our efforts to appropriately acknowledge the work and personal commitment each teacher makes to our children. There are plenty of road blocks. As your kids get older the personal connection you have with each teacher diminishes somewhat; let’s face it, a teacher in grades K-2 can serve as a surrogate family member. But your 9th grader’s Math teacher? Not so much. You may not even recognize your kids’ high school teachers.
How can we thank them all? One thing they all have in common: they all want to help our children learn and grow.
And then there’s the expense. When your first kid hits the junior high teacher gifts take on a whole new meaning. You’ve got L/A, social studies, math, science, languages, art, band, chorus, PE. And maybe there’s someone else over there your child has formed a special bond with: nurse, coach, librarian, crossing guard, bus-driver, the extraordinary volunteer. They’re all deserving.
How can we thank them all? One thing they all have in common: they all want to help our children learn and grow.
It’s a busy time of year. Shopping for everyone, if you’re trying to be thoughtful at all, will burn out the best if us. It’s like Christmas but we don’t even get to see them open their presents (they do it late at night at the kitchen table while they’re thinking about whether they should go in the next day to finish year-end paperwork). So if you can’t really shop, a gift certificate works well.
But even a gift certificate has its drawbacks—still, how well do we know these people? Is Ms. Smith an Applebee’s person, or more like Wild Oats Bakery? Mr. Jones looks like he could use some exercise but will the Cross-fit certificate be an insult? To be sure you probably won’t go wrong with LLBean or Gelato Fiasco but $5 or $10 doesn’t buy much gelato. We’ve got a 9th grader, 6th grader and a 4th grader. Just the 9th grader has eight content teachers and six coaches. They’re all deserving.
One thing they all have in common: they all want to help our children learn and grow.
The first time we faced this dilemma was back when our 9th grader was in 6th grade. We asked a friend who happened to teach at BJHS. She said, “just a card with a note that really expresses how you feel about them will go so much further than a gift certificate or a scented candle. But if you really know them, or your child has a unique idea, then maybe a token that complements the note is OK too.”
If you really know them you know that they all want to help our children learn and grow.
The Brunswick Community Education Foundation has a great way for you to thank your teacher this spring. BCEF provided more than $35,000 in grants to the teachers of the Brunswick School Department this spring. They did it by collecting contributions from parents, community members, and businesses around town. The grants serve to supplement our children’s learning experiences and increase the ability of our teachers to do their jobs (without having to spend their own hard-earned pay to fill in gaps).
The grants run the spectrum from musical instruments and books, to classroom visits from birds. The grants covered all ages, and covered the full range of learning styles in the student population—all students will benefit. A list of the 2015 grant recipients is here. It’s a great way to thank your teacher and make their job just a little bit easier next year.
Learning To Judge A Book By Its Cover
A Tree.
A fixation for humankind since the beginning. It stands to reason. According to the story, the tree made its debut on the third day, three long days before man made his appearance. And trees are the most ecumenical of symbols; we have the Bodhi, Banyan, and scores of trees sacred to other beliefs.
A single tree always captures the human imagination. Consider this snippet from Edna St. Vincent Millay spotted recently in the Instagram feed of the Millaysociety:
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Not knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Against a backdrop that pre-exists humanity it is hard not to get drawn in by the cover of The Hermit, published in 1906 when dust jackets were still a relatively new phenomenon that had yet to suck all the decorative skill and craftsmanship off of the “boards” and onto the disposable and more fragile dust jacket.
The cover is both bold and simple. The title is well preserved bold gilt lettering in a woodsy font like hand-hewn lodge poles. The author’s name, also in gilt, is in type reminiscent of modern life in 1906. It could have appeared on the letterhead of the book’s protagonist, Martin, a man who had left small town North America to win fortune in the city in some vague but remunerative profession.
But the main decoration is a simple, detailed rendering of the bough of a tree, heavy with cones. It is dark, but rich, mainly green with some reddish brown peaking through on the cones. The blocking and embossing have texture and invite a touch. It very nearly smells of spruce.
But that is the best thing about the book
Munn’s descriptions of nature and topography are good, the relationships between the guides and the “sports” realistically, if awkwardly, describe the dymanic. And the relationships between men of equal status is plausible. Martin seems on a near par with Dr. Sol, his old school mate who remained in town, but a patronizing condescension pervades every other relationship. Editing and continuity are poor too. One thread that involved two lengthy trips into the woods, a gunfire riddled entanglement between a supposed murderer holed up in a booby-trapped cabin and two untrustworthy game wardens consumed a pair of chapters but ended abruptly with “it must be recorded that not until years later did Martin find out who really occupied this inhospitable cabin on the Moosehorn, or what the ultimate fate of McGuire was.” The bigger mystery is why it tied up fifty pages of text without having the slightest relationship to the remainder of the plot.
I read this book, cover to cover, because the cover art lured me in and because the book itself was in really good condition given its 114 years on shelves. It could be read without diminishing its market price (maybe ten dollars).
And that, according to rarebookschool.org, is the point: “Dust jackets were introduced near the end of the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s the jackets were decorated far more heavily than boards. But between 1830 and 1910, cloth covers were the first thing a customer saw, and bookbinders worked to make the covers attractive. The nineteenth century saw a wide range of decorative designs, fueled by the evolution of technology and taste. Each decade developed a recognizable style, which means that the date and often the intended use of a nineteenth century cloth-bound book can easily be judged by its cover.”
Another excellent example is photographer Herbert Gleason’s early twentieth century homage to Thoreau. Gleason followed several of Thoreaus perambulations and produced what we now call coffee table books. They tip the cap to literature and to Thoreau while providing a vehicle to showcase Gleason’s own photographic career. Through the Year With Thoreau is a loose month by month collection of Thoreau’s observations, coupled in each case with a matching photograph. For instance in early.April, Gleason matches Thoreaus paean to the skunk cabbage with some nice photos of—skunk cabbage.
(Gallery, nine images, click through)
A current online seller of the 1917 Houghton Mifflin edition focuses on the cover art. “Lovely pictorial decorated binding. Center of the front cover shows a woodland scene with lake with the title gold-stamped. This central tableau is surrounded by pine leaves and acorns in silhouette.”
Another seller notes its copy has the rare dust jacket illustrated with the same illustration as is shown on the boards. Given the print date of 1917 it appears that cover illustration had reached its peak and was near its replacement by dust jackets alone. Every square inch of the front board on Through the Year With Thoreau is used. This contrasts with the relative spareness of the design on The Hermit and with much of some best known work of the previous two decades.
Sparseness, or subtlety, characterized the work of Sarah Wyman Whitman, a prolific cover designer bridging the nineteenth and early twentieth. Trees, or more generally, vegetation feature prominently in her work and she appears to have been among the first to be credited for her work, working the subtle monograph “SW” into her design. Whitman also received credit directly from one of the authors with whom she frequently collaborated, Sarah Orne Jewett. ‘In fact, Jewett, who only dedicated ten of her twenty books to her colleagues and friends, took great pleasure in inscribing her collection Strangers and Wayfarers to, “S.W: Painter of New England Men and Women/ New England Fields and Shores.”’ (see Publishers’s Online Covers linked below). By contrast in The Hermit and Gleason’s Thoreau tribute, as in most other illustrated books of the time, the illustrator is credited but the cover designer is anonymous.
Whitman’s work is so central to the books she designed that the covers, in some cases, may be more important than the contents or authorship of the books themselves. A near complete collection of Whitman’s covers are in the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collection & Archives at Bowdoin College. Its collection of 328 covers is said to contain about 85% of Whitman’s complete works.
Completing this collection would make a compelling argument that—in some cases at least—a book should be judged by its cover.
—Benet Pols
(Gallery slideshow, click through)
Sources and other additional information:
Publishers’ Bindings Online details the collaboration between Sarah Whitman and Sarah Orne Jewett
The rarebookschool.org on judging 19th century book covers
Bowdoin notes its acquisition of a collection of Sarah Whitman’s covers
Nicole Morris details the realationship between Whitman’s book cover art and her stain glass work at the Worcester Central Congregational Church
A link to the Boston Public Library’s Flickr gallery of its Whitman covers.
Kate Douglas Wiggin. A Face of Brunswick in 1904 and the first President of the Bowdoin Society of Women
The Presidents of the Society of Bowdoin Women are all listed on the back of the 1968 pamphlet. Each one of them, save the very first President, is identified by her husband’s given name and surname: Mrs. George W. Burpee, Mrs. Chester B. Abbott and so on. Even the first—whose very name the pamphlet memorialized—included the patrilineal married name as a parenthetical (Mrs George Riggs).
It was a long time ago, but the summer of love was just a year away, the term bra-burning would enter standard usage after the 1968 Miss America Pageant, and in three short years the college would admit women giving a whole new meaning to the Society of Bowdoin Women. A decade later to the applause of local teenagers, a woman would appear bare chested in her senior photo in the college yearbook.
So who was Mrs. George Riggs and why did she warrant her own name at the top of the list while all the other presidents were named as derivatives of their husbands?
She was Kate Douglas Wiggin, a celebrated author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whose many books include Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. A Mainer, of sorts, she was the first president of the Bowdoin Society of Women.
“The choice was a happy one. Mrs. Wiggin shared with her friend and fellow Maine author, Sarah Orne Jewett, the distinction of being the first women to have received the Bowdoin degree of Doctor of Literature. President William DeWitt Hyde described them in 1904 as ‘The only daughters of Bowdoin.’ ”
So by virtue of her honorary degree from Bowdoin, and the imposing figure she casts in the photo that memorialized the event, Kate Douglas Wiggin qualifies for Faces of Brunswick, Maine.
Wiggin was not born in Maine, but moved here as a young person after the death of her father, and lived in Portland for a spell. The family relocated to Hollis and a boarding house after Wiggin’s mother remarried. For a time she attended the Gorham Female Seminary, a predecessor to the Gorham Normal School and what is now known as the University of Southern Maine,
A family illness triggered a move to California and led eventually to teaching positions and a position training teachers for kindergartens. Wiggin was not her birth name but the surname of her first husband, a San Francisco lawyer she married in 1881. But Wiggin was her name during the beginning of her literary career in the 1880s. She relocated to New York during the end of the decade and back to Maine after Mr. Wiggin’s 1889 death.
From this time forward she spent substantial time in Hollis. Some of her earlier works which had been self-published had been reissued in 1889 by Houghton Mifflin. Timothy’s Quest, published in 1890 confirmed her literary career and the remainder of her life was devoted to writing and travel to support a schedule of lectures and readings. On one of these trips abroad she met and married George C. Riggs, of New York. On-line sources suggest Mr. Riggs was an advocate for Wiggin’s literary career and that her out-put increased during their marriage. To be sure her most famous work, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was published during this period in 1903.
In 1905 she purchased a home in Hollis and renamed it Quillcote, or House of the Pen. Some sources suggest it was a farm she had admired as a child in the area, others suggest it was the very boarding house she had occupied as a child upon her move from Portland.
Where did these books come from?
The Rabbit Hole has many chambers.
These books come from the collection of Bessie Singer, herself a graduate of the Gorham Normal School and my wife’s grandmother. She and her husband were avid book-collectors. Their home in Bath, when acquired by us, was lined with built-in bookshelves on a common wall in the living room adjoining the neighboring property. In addition rough-hewn make-shift shelves lined the hallways, spare rooms, and many of the interior walls of the house. Regrettably many of these books were damaged beyond preservation or use as the result of a plumbing failure before we acquired the house. Only those books on the built-in shelves against the common wall were salvageable. Dominating this collection was a substantial store of local interest, often by Maine authors, or about Maine, together with a collection of various American works from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth.
Distractions in Inventory Control: What was Polly Oliver’s Problem?
After posting some of these photos on Instagram I got an inquiry, what was Polly Oliver’s Problem?
I wondered if it might be of the medical variety based on the title of chapter 3: “The Doctor Gives Polly A Prescription.” But exploring the first few pages a little more carefully it seems apparent that her problem was either “the boarders,” or the “Chinese.” As she plots to rid her house of boarders, Polly contemplates a banner, “‘The Boarders Must Go!’ to hasten their departure and then considers “To a California girl it is every bit as inspiring as ‘The Chinese Must Go!’” This slogan was common in cartooning and anti-chinese propaganda of Wiggin’s nineteenth century west coast experience. Wiggin makes a play on it as she remonstrates with her mother about the burden of keeping a boarding house.
“The Chinese never did go,” her mother informs her.
“Oh, that’s a trifle; they had a treaty or something, and besides, there are so many of them, and they have such an object in staying.”
Well. Whatever Polly’s problem was it certainly was not political correctness. I have yet to fully explore her problem. In any event, I expect everything will turn out well enough.
As it happens I am deep in another nineteenth century work connected to Maine invited by its woodsy cover art, The Hermit, a 1903 work by Charles Clark Munn. Its binding is in fine shape and the pages of this Grosset and Dunlap edition flow just as smoothly as something printed in the last couple of years. I have little fear of diminishing its value as I read it.
The Yearbook.
Sometime in the fall or winter of 1979-80 I went to the Bowdoin admissions department for an interview. Admissions was then housed in the two story building across the plaza from Coles Tower, which was then known as “the senior center.” The decor was vaguely Danish modern and the low slung table in the waiting room held a collection of yearbooks and other college paraphernalia spanning the years. As a faculty brat I’d seen a lot of it before, we had a decent collection of yearbooks in the house by which we marked the passage of the years by my father’s progression from young turk to distinguished lion of faculty.
I knew which one I needed to see. 1979. I even knew about where in the book to find her. I didn’t have the page number memorized, but I knew she was toward the front of the seniors section in the upper left-hand corner of a page on the left.
She was gone. Scissored out. A perfect 4” by 6” gap where she belonged. I lifted my eyes and was met with the tight lipped smile of the admissions department secretary. Yes, she admitted. She had cut a photo out. “Not everybody needs to see everything.”
Was this some sort of test? Part of the admissions gambit, root the perverts out early? Or was it just to put the pressure on immediately to raise the anxiety level for the meeting with the admissions officer. Calm down. Not everyone coming through these doors knew what was on page 102 of the 1979 Bowdoin Bugle. In fact, maybe only I did.
How did this woman in the admissions department, unknown to me to that point, know I would look right there?
I sat there bereft and gradually grew indignant at this act of vandalism? What about the kid on the other side of the page? Not right. You’ve denied some student their chance at immortality here in the admissions department. What about that person, having their senior picture cut out because the secretary found the flip-side a little racy? The injustice. I was enraged on behalf of the missing student from the class of 1979.
I do not recall any of the other details of my interview, but I was admitted. I still have that 1979 yearbook. Intact. On the back side of page 102, at the top of page 101 is an uncaptioned candid of three girls laughing, standing by a car, its doors flung open, on the road side. It is terribly over-exposed; the detail in the girls’ faces is completely lost. Probably only they will even recognize themselves in the photo.
A Chop Shop For Old Art Books?
What is the highest use of a nineteenth century coffee table book filled with steel plate engravings, woodcuts and other illustrations of famed art works?
The books themselves are nice objects in decent shape given their one hundred and fifty years on shelves, in living rooms, attics, or at flea markets, and book barns. Neither has the inherent value of a rare book. Neither is a first edition, and each was produced in several editions during a few year period. Their popularity at the time of their printing limits their present day rarity.
One, The Art Journal for 1875, is a collection of articles, briefs and notices and shows on its pages the spotting and foxing consistent with its age. But it’s binding is solid, the page’s gilt edges brilliant, and the tooled Moroccan leather worthy of shelf space in a Merchant and Ivory period piece.
The second, the Goethe Gallery, features female characters taken from the works of Goethe as depicted by the German muralist Wilhelm Von Kaulbach. By the time of the book’s production the reader was several degrees removed from Goethe himself. Popular and productive in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Goethe’s characters were illustrated by Kaulbach a generation later. Kaulbach’s works were collected, reproduced as engravings by the photographer Josef Albert and published Friedrich Bruckmann whose Bruckmann Verlag produced the work.
According to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography, Bruckmann’s “first success as a publisher came in the first half of the 1860s with a photographic portfolio of Goethe’s Frauengestalten, the photographs reproducing drawings by the director of the Munich Academy of Arts, Wilhelm Kaulbach. Kaulbach’s so called Goethe-Galerie, drawings of female characters found in Goethe’s fiction was reproduced in large-size photographs by Josef Albert. Bruckmann also issued this work in different techniques, formats and prices (a sales strategy that would become typical for him) and tried to launch a Schiller- and Shakespeare-Galerie as well.”
So the books are available in fair numbers from on-line booksellers. In spite of their age and beauty as art objects themselves they are not terribly expensive.
But in both cases interest has been shown. The prospective purchasers of each were in China. The first purchase of Appleton’s Art Journal was stymied by the disproportionate costs of shipping these heavy large books through international channels (my shipping matrix for international orders has since been adjusted) But the offer on the second-the Goethe Gallery-is still alive pending provision to the prospective buyer of more photos of plates and a count of the plates (there are twenty-one).
So what is the interest?
With my own home decorated—for generations—with framed prints of classical scenes once extracted from much older coffee table books I think I know. Over my shoulder is a Gezigt op de nieuwe brug en tooren der oude kerke, a favorite scene of old Amsterdam still readily found on the internet for one-hundred dollars or so. It’s occupied the same wall space in this room for fifty years or more.
The highest present value of my books is not as a books but as a source of frame-able nineteenth century steel plate engravings of important art work.
The knee jerk reaction is opposition. Something says that the book itself was—is—a complete work, a piece of art, a representation of the skills of the book-binders, the engravers, the designers, the leather toolers of the time. The gilt, the marbled paste downs, the fore-edge tapered in a sleek curve to better reflect the gilt, and the Moroccan leather spine demand to remain intact.
Blogs, commentary, and threads on the question suggest that a lot of people feel this way. “Looting” is a term that gets thrown around.
They also suggest a pair of threshold questions, one about degree and one about the remaining essence of the object itself.
The first is an exercise in relativism. After all these are not the Elgin Marbles, or the Benin Bronzes.
But consider other, milder nineteenth century British archeological plunder? For decades the Bowdoin College Museum of Art has displayed its Assyrian reliefs reportedly salvaged from the abandoned ruins of the City of Nimrud in present day Iraq. They’d been obtained by a generous alumnus in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent research and new technology have allowed the museum to project the colors scholars speculate the reliefs might have worn in their original state. A similar relief adorned an open hallway of one of the Middlebury College’s academic buildings back in the day. Considering the upgraded display of the Bowdoin relief I wondered about Middlebury’s. Unsurprisingly its provenance and path to Middlebury was nearly identical to Bowdoin’s relief. It even came from the same merchant, or archeologist, as the case may be. Are there similar works at Amherst, or WIlliams? Yes, indeed. I imagine further research would turn up other examples scattered across the older American college campuses.
Perhaps there was not the will, the capital, or audience to preserve and appreciate the Nimrod reliefs at home in the nineteenth century deserts of the Middle East. Possibly selling and shipping them half a world aways was the only way to preserve them. And of course they were sold—not spirited away like the Elgin Marbles, not straight up theft like the Benin Bronzes.
Which leads to the second more objective question
Does the book—or palace—still function as a book, or a palace, or has time and the elements rendered it mere salvage job. In human terms is it time to check its drivers license to see if it checked “yes” under the organ donor box.
In the case Art Journal and Goethe Gallery, the answer is plainly yes. These are still intact, functioning, readable books. The spots on their pages no more an impediment than the spots on the backs of my hands.
But consider my own walls: a colored engraving “French Troops Retreating Through and Plundering a Village” has fascinated me since childhood, a dead dog lying in a rubbish strewn foreground as soldiers emerge from a basement displaying wine to the horse mounted officers. Scenes of ancient Roman ruins are stacked loosely around the house, still waiting to be framed after years, and years.
Perhaps the frontispiece of Art Journal 1875, “Tintern Abbey — Moonlight on the Wye” an engraving of Benjamin Williams Leader’s work should grace someone else’s walls instead of remaining shelved and gradually adding even more spotting to its margins. Consider also that these books are serving no real purpose now. As I excavate them mining for value and trying to move them to some place where they will serve someone else’s interest should I really be questioning that interest. When a buyer has purchased a slim volume of poetry do I analyze the buyer’s intellectual bonafides or do I package the book and ship it? IThey are for sale after all.
So I am making the photographs and trying to do a careful job. After glancing through the accompanying text by George Henry Lewes, a literary critic of the era, I learn that Lewes was perhaps better known as George Eliot’s life partner.
If the sale goes through—good enough. If not—good enough. Another thing I have learned—the books are both worth more to me now than before.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Face of Brunswick since 1850. First editions, her imitators, detractors, and their work.
In the shadow of Bowdoin College where Harriet Beecher Stowe is reputed to have written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the accepted canon of civil war literature has a distinctive abolitionist tinge. A first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin evokes powerful images.
Consider whose hands this first edition may have passed through, one of the first 5000 copies printed. 295,000 more would follow that first year of 1852. By then Stowe had moved to Andover Massachusetts ending her two year sojourn beneath the pines of Brunswick. That is correct; she lived here just two years.
What did this copy mean to those who held it? How did they acquire it? Was there an equivalent of pre-ordering on Amazon in 1852? Who was it shared with? Did the book pass from hand-to-hand among a circle of important, influential people? Imagine this very copy on the night stand of a person whose mind it would change. In 1852, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin new to print, Louisa May Alcott and her family moved from their Concord, Massachusetts home, Hillside, selling it to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perhaps a copy was left behind in the shuffle.
The same first edition also provoked a broad but shallow counter reaction in the literary world. Instead of landing in the household of some abolitionist, it may have belonged William L.G. Smith and inspired his effort to refute Stowe’s work with his own Life at the South; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, As It Is. Sometimes known as plantation literature, or Anti-Tom novels, a collection of twenty-seven known novels tried to tell the “real” story of slavery.
Louis Masur, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, observed: “A literary countermovement emerged: anti-Tom novels that sought to offset the claims of Stowe's fiction by showing slaves as content, denouncing the treatment of free blacks in the North, and portraying slaveholders as good Christians. The best-known of those included W.L.G. Smith's Life of the South; or, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" As It Is…” Masur noted that these novels did not sell particularly well. In part because Stowe had anticipated the retorts and possible pro-slavery responses by publishing, nearly simultaneously, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin; it focuses on the characters in the novel and provides testimony from newspapers, slave narratives, letters, and other sources to support in its portrayal of slavery. Stowe argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin, "more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result. ... This is a mosaic of facts.”
Consider whose hands these Anti-Tom novels passed through. What did it mean to them? How did they acquire it? Who did they share it with? Did it pass from hand-to-hand among a circle of important, influential people? The question is just as interesting, but from a diametrically opposite perspective.
Also hitting the shelves in 1852 this fake Uncle Tom could easily have been confused with Stowe’s original. Its publisher chose not to print the first clause of the title, Life at the South, on the book’s spine, instead going with just Uncle Tom’s Cabin and dropping in the subscript, “As It Is,” almost as an after thought. A coincidence, who knows?
Either way this particular piece of the Anti-Tom canon is worth a lot less today than the real Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As of this writing AbeBooks shows six copies running from between $88 to $366 depending on condition(my fair copy entered the fray at 88 and at some point I re-listed it at 66, it was listed online for 19 months before selling) . Meanwhile first editions of Stowe’s book run from $400 to $15,000.
An excellent source of material concerning Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. This web based archive curated by University of Virginia Professor Emeritus Stephen Railton contains the original texts of UTC, along with contemporary news accounts, reviews, press notices, and editorials. It also includes the full texts of eighteen of the Anti-Tom novels as well as an exploration of Uncle Tom’s influence in children's literature, music, the theatre, and film.
Stowe was in Brunswick for just two years, deployed here as a faculty wife at Bowdoin. Her brief time as a Face of Brunswick has been recounted in one way or another for generations. During the latter half of the twentieth century most in Brunswick remember the Stowe House as a restaurant and inn that eventually added a motor court style addition. Now a National Historic Landmark, the house was purchased by Bowdoin College in 2001; the house itself serves as offices together with a historic site, “Harriett’s Writing Room,” which is open to the public. The local Congregational church has long marked a pew where Stowe was reported to have occupied for her two years in Brunswick.
More recently, Brunswick’s a new elementary school, opened in 2011, was named for Stowe. Even as Stowe’s work influenced generations, and world events, her legacy in town can still stir powerful emotions. A public dispute over just where she sat while she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin erupted in court battle between neighbors and the college. The neighbor claimed that Stowe had rented a room in their house to write in as her own rented home at 63. Federal Street was too chaotic; the college has long maintained that she likely wrote at home or in her husband’s office in Appleton Hall.
Other Related Books from the Rabbit Hole listed on AbeBooks.com
A first edition, first printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, Harriett Beecher Stowe (sold).
A first edition of Life at the South: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, As It Is, 1852, William L.G. Smith, $88 (Sold for$66)
A first edition of Two Little Confederates, 1888, a children’s story loosely based on the life of its author, Thomas Nelson Page, who grew up—white—on a plantation in Virginia. A reviewer on Goodreads tells us, ”This look at the Civil War through the eyes of two young Southern brothers exposes the many evils done to the South by the North.” Flipping through it and looking at the nicely done illustrations, you sense a strong tang of Gone With The Wind . $27 (Sold)
A first edition of Dred: Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856, Stowe’s second novel concerning slavery in two volumes, $88 (Sold)
Not What I Wanted: My Diane Arbus Phase
This is my Diane Arbus phase. Thankfully it only lasted the one frame.
I never cared for her work. I looked it over from time to time as expected of a student of photography. It is a part of the canon. I understand Arbus’s view that her time with “freaks” elicited, as she said, feelings of both shame and awe. And I appreciate the concept when manifested in street photography, but with her work, nearly portraits, it felt staged. Like voyeurism, a schtick rather than a decisive moment.
It was definitely not what I wanted when I made this photograph: two of my favorite people, my mother, and my first born daughter. I did not want to make a spectacle of either one. I was looking for something quite different. So this photo has been consigned to a folder with contact sheets and negatives these last eighteen years.
They were in different phases of life: one just entering and only recently able to stand on two feet, one leaving, now unable to stand on two feet. One adding new words every day, one barely speaking.
But in this photo neither one looks the way they typically did.
To be sure, my mother’s age and failed memory generally left her looking vague. Her internment was recent, her accommodations unfamiliar, and she was cared for by people who, no matter how kind they were, were undeniably strangers. Even so my mother was ordinarily cheered by the presence of her grandchildren. Her engagement, however fleeting, rose noticeably. She would reach for them, extending a quaking hand gnarled by arthritis, while at the same time reaching for some forgotten word, murmuring quietly, emitting gasps that neared recognizable syllables . Her eyes would quicken and dart from the child to the parent fastening to some connection. For a moment knowing that she too was connected. It pleased her to hold them in her lap. My daughters were young enough not to be intimidated, or alarmed by the old lady in the wheel chair—not yet resistant to the common room filled with the aged, tanged with senescence, where every eye but her own was rheumy.
Likewise the hooded eyed, barrel chested “you talkin’ to me?” kid grasping the chair and defying the lens is unfamiliar. Ordinarily I saw whimsy, curiosity, a twinkling eye, and above all, a smile.
In many ways what makes this photo unusual among my collection, what gives it its peculiar aura, is just a series of rookie errors. It is too contrasty. If I’d been more interested in a grey card, I might have rescued some definition around Isabella’s eyes-maybe the twinkle would have been visible-or maybe even the detail on her animal slippers. If I had understood the zone system with its pushes and pulls maybe the sharp contrast between lower left and upper right would not be so stark.
But the starkness may be what makes this interesting. The contrast is bad but the highlights are not completely blown out, nor is the shadow black. My mother’s hair is still defined even in its straw-like whiteness against the sky, its wispiness foretelling something.
I took the kids all those times to cheer my mother, I told myself. More likely I could not go alone.
In her Aperture Monograph Diane Arbus speaks about photographing the unusual: “When it comes time to go, if I have to take a bus somewhere or if I have to take a cab uptown, it’s like I’ve got a blind date. . . .And sometimes I have a sinking feeling of, Oh God it’s time to go and I really don’t want to go. And then once I’m on my way, something terrific takes over about the sort of queasiness of it…”
Oh God it’s time to go and I really don’t want to go. How that captures my feelings during the interminable three years of my mother’s wane. Nothing terrific ever took over, but a comprehension of my particular covenant settled the queasiness so I could do it one more time.
In October's endless brightness
In October’s endless brightness I took a walk in the woods with my oldest child.
The trip to Acadia was happenstance. Her college has an odd early fall break, an early long weekend with a Monday and Tuesday off. The rest of the family is just back to school or working.
My daughter loves Acadia and Mount Desert Island. Every summer she goes to a running camp on the island. With a professional staff and college aged counselors, the camp trains some of Maine’s most promising cross country runners. Campers spend the better part of a week sleeping in tents, running the carriage trails of Acadia National Park, swimming its beaches, and staging skits in the campground’s vintage community hall. The most recent summer, after a move from camper to counselor, she embraced the place even more.
Our house has a lot of old nautical charts and survey maps kicking around. Older damaged ones get used as makeshift wrapping paper; the featured locale may match the gift or the recipient. In September she asked me if we had an intact map of MDI for her dorm room wall.
As we pondered what to do with this weird fall break, I won a national parks pass in a drawing at work. Entry required a one sentence essay on what I’d do with the pass if my entry was drawn—I used a semi-colon, some dashes, and more than a handful of commas. For good measure I smuggled in another thought in a parenthetical. I work for a large well-known outdoor products manufacturer that for more than 100 years has made the same iconic piece of footwear; for many people the boot and the company symbolize Maine: flannel, fresh air, pine, the crunch of fallen leaves, or crust on snow.
One of the central ironies of my job is that I spend my working days far from the out-of-doors. The stark realities of an efficient modern facility that saves Christmas for millions year after year is that many of us spend our working days indoors with the hum and buzz of machinery in place of the snap of twigs and birdsong. But with liberal access to its outdoor programs, bucolic camps owned and maintained just for employees, and programs like the park pass giveaway, time off is focused on the outdoors. And time outdoors is celebrated.
It’s not as though we needed the pass to get into Acadia. Admission is inexpensive; once you’ve been to a national park you realize what a deal it is.
But I do love a bargain. And in this case, the bargain was an inspiration. It got us to Acadia and a few other spots along the road.
My daughter and I had been to Acadia together before. Another odd holiday in the fall of 2001, the season of empty skies: a fall when people gave up planned travel time, skipped weddings they had booked, and went to weddings nearby home to fill in for guests from away who could not fly. A friend was running an Inn on Deer Isle. The guest list dried up, but we were an easy drive away. So with her cousin, born a few months before her, and two sets of parents she spent a few days on Deer Isle exploring quarries, paying homage to Burt Dow, eating in nearly empty but welcoming restaurants, and making a day trip to stroll the nearly empty trails of Acadia strapped to one of her parents’ backs. Hiking with a Kelty pack slows you down. The pace is more a stroll than the forced march of some hikes. It is a lot more about being there than getting there.
Her cousin was walking but my daughter had yet to walk. In fact she didn’t crawl; she was a scooter. But she didn't drag one leg behind and hitch. With her legs nearly perfectly symmetrical and the soles of her feet meeting like hands in prayer, she threw her arms forward and lifted her body, full speed ahead. When moving at full clip she sounded like a dufflepud. The know-it-alls were generous with their gloomy opinions about the repercussions her motility would have for her: reading, writing, speech, gross motor skills, fine motor skills they preached gloom. They were wrong of course.
She rode the Kelty pack like an elephant master steering her beast of burden one way and another—reaching this way and that, thrashing when necessary, chattering to her cousin with all the words she had. Late that night as a lightning storm lit the walls of the old Inn to keep her awake, she tottered from the edge of her portable crib to her mother, just four, maybe five full steps but beaming as if she had just won a race.
This October the walk was just as unhurried. We started around Jordan Pond in tandem with a young couple clad in matching yoga pants who hustled to the shallow end of the pond where its outlet is strewn with large rocks. The rocks make a path into the water for the money shot. In the background are the photogenic Bubbles—north and south—a pair of perfectly matched rounded mountains that rise abruptly from the far shore of the long and narrow pond, apparently sculpted by the receding glaciers just for the ardent instagrammer. The Bubbles can frame you, you can pose is if holding one in each palm, or suspend them one from each set of forefingers and thumbs.
The pair bustled ahead and immediately assumed their positions, he with the camera, she with her head coquettishly cocked to one side, and a hand rested just-so beneath her chin. The bickering started on cue. The cocked-head pose alternated with a scowl as the muse waited impatiently for the camera man to get the Bubbles in the right place.
The unexpected morning cold sent us back to the car. With long pants and another layer, the extra time gave the couple a few hundred meters head start and we learned again that, “life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Don’t get me wrong. I took a lot of pictures myself—maybe 45 that were keepers, the stunning landscapes, sunsets, funny shots, the money shots from the peaks, but my favorite is just the girl strolling along stopping to consider things and chat a bit. The park is there in the background, but the main thing is the walk.
Coming to the pond we had two choices: go left and work our way around to the sunny-side of the pond or go right and head directly toward the Bubbles. My daughter chose left, and the far side, based on the need for the sun’s warmth. But the walk down the west side turned out to be the better path. It meanders a bit and gives you changing views of the scenery. Because of wet ground and some habitat conservation efforts, significant portions of the path feature narrow elevated board walks. There is a detour into the woods around some trail reconstruction that pushes walkers away from the pond and into the woods for a brief time through a little mushroom forest. Near Tumbledown Cove the path features some uneven walking over and around granite boulders that provide more opportunities for the Instagram shot—we briefly crossed paths with the young couple here too.
The pace was the thing though. Interesting little spots to stop and inspect, in and out of the shade. We had had plans to do Jordan Pond in the morning, get lunch and find another vigorous hike for the afternoon, but the pleasant pace and an unspoken Mac Davis mentality kept us, consumed with delight gazing through October’s endless brightness at the brilliance of Jordan Pond.
(With phrases borrowed from two great writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and my father)
Where is Elm Island, Mr. Kellogg?
“Where is Elm Island, Mr. Kellogg?”
“Oh, I made that Island out of my imagination for the story. You know it’s pretty hard finding an island on the Maine coast bearing northwest from the mainland. Still, notwithstanding that fact, I know at least half a dozen islands are pointed out as the suppositious place where Lion Ben and the boys lived and labored.”
For most people around these parts the name Elijah Kellogg evokes the memory of a family wedding, drives down to the Dolphin Marina, or the funeral of a friend. It’s that quaint church in Harpswell, on the neck, just opposite an older meeting house with the ancient burial ground. On the left not long after the Lookout Point Road.
That wasn’t always the case however, Kellogg was a celebrity of sorts in the 19th century. Not long before Kellogg passed on in 1901 he was visited by another then renowned Mainer, Holman Day. Day was putting together a retrospective on Kellogg’s career. His piece, which includes the quoted exchange about Elm Island, would wend its way around for a couple of decades before landing in Maine, My State, a 1919 publication intended as a reader for Maine’s primary schools. Consider how more recent figures of Maine children’s literature—Robert McCloskey, E.B.White, or Barbara Cooney—are lauded now.
The Church’s website itself tells us the, “Reverend Elijah Kellogg was called as Pastor on April 25,1844 and installed on June 18, 1844. So began an affiliation that lasted, though not without interruptions, until Reverend Kellogg's death on March 17, 1901. The Harpswell Centre Congregational Church was renamed in his honor and is now known as The Elijah Kellogg Church, Congregational.” A substantial monument to the man dominates the church yard; its inscription includes, “A lover of the Sea and the sailor and a sympathetic friend of boys, for whom he wrote many stories which have made his name and memory dear to them everywhere.”
But for the most part “who was Elijah Kellogg?” Is a question that doesn’t get asked much outside of his old stomping grounds.
Kellogg wrote five different series of stories. The Elm Island series is what captured Holman Day’s attention, and Elm Island was the first of Kellogg’s five series, published by Lee & Shepard of Boston between 1869 and 1871, It’s also what first caught my attention as I have three first editions: The Ark, Hardscrabble, and Lion Ben, the first of the series of six different books.
The engravings throughout the text and including the frontispieces are by John Andrew & Son of Boston, which, among other great works it produced, was responsible for the engraving of the first eleven volumes of Edward Sheriff Curtis’s monumental work, The North American Indian. According to one source, John Andrew & Son opened in 1869, the year Lion Ben, Kellogg’s first in the Elm Island series was published. According to another source the firm opened for business in 1852. Both sources make it clear that the book publishing business of the time involved a significant number of reconfigurations of business models and relationships among the shops responsible for different parts of book publishing. Within one building might be several business each devoted to one of the constituent parts of getting a book to market, typesetting and printing in one shop, engraving in another, and binding handled by yet a third.
Elm Island as Kellogg imagined it might not have been a real place when Holman interviewed Kellogg, but the Maine Island Registry does list Elms Islands as among Maine’s 4600 or so islands. The pair of little islands are even in Harpswell, just a shade west of Orr’s Island but a good distance by water from Kellogg’s neighborhood on the neck. Wheeler’s History of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell first published in 1878 also notes an Elm Island consistent in location with the Elm Island of the Maine Island Registry: “east of the lower part of Orr’s Island.” But these little Islands are much smaller than the three mile by two mile dimensions of Kellogg’s imagined Elm Island. Six square miles would comprise an island of some 3840 acres, half the size of Isle au Haut. The Elms are listed at just half an acre a piece, and are much as Kellogg described countless little islands throughout the bay in the opening pages of Lion Ben, “a mere patch of rock and turf, fringed with the white foam of the breakers.”
A travelogue of the era, Scenic Gems of Maine, published in 1898 by Geo W. Morris of Portland, stated with authority, but no attribution, that “Ragged Island, midway between Bailey’s and Small Point Harbor, is pointed out as the Elm Island where “Lion Ben,” and other homely heroes portrayed by Elijah Kellogg had their imaginary being.” Ragged is a good sized island of about 75 acres, and has had its share of literary glory as the seasonal home of Edna St. Vincent Millay from the 1930s until her death in 1950, but it is still far smaller than Kellogg’s Elm Island.
But this, as Kellogg reported to Holman Day with his quizzical smile is just suppositious.
(See Abebooks.com for listing of these three titles along with many others)
A Rabbit Hole Filled With Books
“There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’. . . .but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”
My rabbit hole is packed with old books. There is no first edition of Alice in Wonderland in this hole. There will be no $40,000 eureka moment.
It fact, there is more head-scratching over why a first edition of Kipling, 120 years old, is listed by on-line booksellers—over and over again—at just three or four dollars? Puzzling or not, it explains why my fine old shelves—themselves acquired by my father in furtherance of what we now call a side hustle—are laden with 2000 or more “rare” books. These same books have filled the shelves for thirty years or more and barely moved that whole time.
And my Rabbit himself is an eight volume, boxed, Folio Society edition of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In two boxes of four volumes each, it must be worth something to someone.
Forty dollars, it turns out. Scores of this set are listed on eBay, ABEBooks.com, and biblio.com. Not only will there be no eureka moment, but lunch money will be hard to find in this lot.
My father, who once owned these 2000 volumes, knew this. He’d wound down his book business as best he could during the last fifteen years of his life. He had not acquired any new titles since the early 1990s. Of course there were books given to him, gifts, and things thrust on him in his professional capacity as a writer and professor of philosophy. And of course he read, so many of those books linger too (a nearly complete collection of the works of Patrick O’Brian, some soft-covered, some hardbacks). And he did get fooled into the Gibbon, but that is another story.
His wartime correspondence with my mother, and his good friend Dick Tansey (Gardner’s Art Through the Ages) always contained tidbits about what book one of them had seen recently, and much perseveration over prices. So book collecting and book hunting were hobbies from his earliest days and loosely connected to his career as an academic. Eventually it blossomed into a business of sorts, Editio Princeps. By the 1960s and through the 1970s he spent good chunks of his spare time wandering the winding and rolling backroads of Northern New England looking for that dusty old jewel.
Every family trip “up the coast” was just an excuse to poke around some nearby “Antiques & Books” place just for “five minutes or so.” These rambles were not completely without interest for my younger sister and me. Captives of our age and lack of independence we, unlike our older siblings, were lured, or dragged along under some pretense.
The book barns might be in interesting ocean-side communities or the less traveled parts of Maine. The dank out-buildings held curiosities: ship-models, old fire-arms, uniforms, the colored blown glass balls, riddled with imperfections that once floated fishing gear, or ancient doll houses. Even books—the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift—boxes of them, National Geographics so old they had no cover photos. Flea markets had tables lined with old coins, baseball cards, vintage toys, or records. The carnival like atmosphere didn’t suit serious book hunting however. Walden wasn’t going to be found next to an early Elvis statue. The stops in flea markets were likely a sop to my mother who might briefly eye some lamps, old linens, or a decent old soup tureen.
But as it became clear that none of these things were coming back out to Sylvia, the Mercury that my oldest sister hand repainted with a brush in a vain effort to conceal some malfeasance, or the Fiat, itself a mobile curio, we lost interest and drifted back out to fidget under a tree or sit in the back seat disturbing our mother’s reading . My father’s “just five more minutes” grew to consume entire afternoons. Mother had already satisfied herself that the single odd piece of decent silver was owned by a dealer too vulgar to converse with, and that the textiles smelled too moldy to be rescued.
As we traipsed from crossroad to village a couple things always seemed true: the buildings smelled the same, and we were never going to get anything good to eat. Why stop at Round Top Ice Cream when there’s half a package of Stoned Wheat Thins and some ham right in the car?
The dealers were always stashed in an oddly placed barn, or an outbuilding leaning against the side of a declining old New England house. They seemed to coalesce in the smaller towns, bunched near one another like a gasoline alley for old things. The whiff—mouse, foxed papers, the dry sills and space between windows, punky floorboards—was always more or less the same.
The estate sales—auctions generally—might have been in a stately old shingle cottage on a bluff near the water or in a decrepit Italianate place in one of Maine’s smaller mill towns. Sixty years would have passed since the man that built the mill shuffled off leaving his name on the lintel of a nearby school and the once grand family home in the hands of his last matron sister. In turn the old pile ended up owned by a collection of scattered grandnieces and nephews left to claim a few baubles and turn the remnant over to an auctioneer.. With luck this auction would have evaded the attention of the Portland or Massachusetts set—too far inland, no big lake or old summer colony nearby, or maybe it was just November.
Eventually the pretense of a trip up the coast had lost its allure for even my mother. We were left behind and my father was free to adopt a more strategic and business-like approach to his collecting in the 1970s. And Editio Princeps hummed along for fifteen years or so.
By the 1990s the value of continuing to shop individual titles to buyers and institutions had diminished. My father’s desire to look for new material had pretty much petered out in the 1980s, and shelf space became rare—sure he would still poke into a junk store if he found himself in a new town for a speaking engagement or a college visit, but the days of actively looking for books were over. His “hot” titles had been sold and he was left with a collection of mid-level interest. The effort of marketing far outweighed the payback. In an effort to shed clutter he had begun shipping large lots—“children’s books 1880s”—to auction houses like Swann Galleries (thirty years later, I still get mail from Swann). A periodic check for a few hundred dollars would appear with the mail—his cut, less commissions, fees, and the costs of packing and returning the relict back to Maine.
Which relict, always of diminishing interest and value, was returned to the shelves without any effort to re-index or organize, and generally a little worse for its travels. As the millennium ground to a close so too did even these efforts.
Editio Princeps had run its course. The post-office box in the neighboring town was given up, tax write-offs for the Barn Chamber where the books were stored ceased. All that remains is half a box of nicely printed business sized envelopes.
And the books. The Relict.
It’s an apt term. The book business has more than a whiff of the church-yard to it: reticence, bordering on secretiveness, ritual, and arcane terminology.
For my father monetizing, as we say now, what started as a hobby borne of his intellectual pursuits was crass at some level. His reluctance to publicly embrace the pursuit verged on embarrassment. Did he feel his friends and colleagues would be on-guard as he eyed their book shelves during faculty get togethers? Was it curiosity or avarice?
On another level he needed to keep his identity as a connoisseur shrouded to succeed. So long as the dealers, flea marketeers, and estate auctioneers took him for a rube he might score. Just as a restaurant critic needs anonymity , my father often bought whole crates of books labelled “lot $10” rather than arouse suspicion by asking for just that one slim Henry James and leaving the rest behind. It made him uneasy: the mild omissions were diminishing. And so the post office box was rented in Topsham away from the curious throng of Brunswick, and a pseudonym underscored all the correspondence.
And what correspondence. Catching a fish is one thing, finding a buyer is another. Finding collections on particular topics at colleges, universities, historical societies, trade associations, and fraternal organizations took leg work.
There was no internet. The internet for book dealers and collectors was a newsletter that appeared on a weekly basis in the old bike basket that served as a mail box on our front porch. The AB Bookman’s Weekly, AB for Antiquarian Bookseller. With a cover page of newsy briefs, it was mainly a source to place and read classified advertisements. I’d eyeball it the same way I might read a cereal box or the “Talk of the Town” in the New Yorker: just idly. I might offer helpful advice, “If you ever found a copy of Alice in Wonderland you’d be rich.”
The remoteness and the unfamiliarity of the correspondents led to some stilted language in the offer letters. “Gentleman, we are in possession of, and offer for your consideration, a near fine copy of The Atlantic Monthly, February 1862, Vol IX containing some important work, not frequently found.” As if the offices of Editio Princeps were staffed by a coterie of diligent scholars with an entire department devoted just to civil war literature. As if to name the Battle Hymm of the Republic would curse the deal. As if “we” are not selling something, merely offering it.
The return correspondence was just as strained.
To be sure, Editio Princeps had its victories. A slim volume picked up at a junk store in Livermore, or Jay, for maybe thirty-five cents, sold to a collector far, far away for $715, plenty of other wins in the several hundred dollar range. But plenty of duds too. The unabridged Century dictionary in 14 volumes with companion volumes on proper names and geographic names graces a full shelf and half in my home. It’s old and looks impressive. You can find it listed for two-hundred dollars or so. One-fifty seems like the low end of what current owners hope for so I might aim even lower. But at three feet of shelving and weighing in at eighty-four pounds it is difficult to see the margin. After shipping and the hassle of packaging are considered, the effort and cost of getting it to a buyer make the curb seem like a likely option. But I suppose it can sit there for another three years while I grind through the rest looking for the odd single volumes I can list for forty dollars.
On my half birthday, looking once again at this relict, as I have nearly every day for the past fifteen years, it dawned on me that if I did not do something about it soon it will become my children’s problem. Like the grand nieces and nephews of that mill owner in Norridgewock or Canton, my kids may sell the whole lot, grand shelves included, to a junk dealer.
So down the rabbit hole I have gone. I am giving myself eighteen months to make a credible dent.
Among the duds, I have found a few nice things. Not diamonds in the rough—more like shiny objects. These shiny objects have value to someone out there—and if I can get them into the hands of someone who values them I will be doing us both a favor.
The difficulty is the contours of the Rabbit Hole itself. I have heard of Rudyard Kipling, he was a very popular writer, there have been entire courses based on this work, therefore first editions of his work must be rare and worth a lot.
Not really. He was so popular everyone had his work; a ton of it, in good shape, fills the internet.
A second facet of the rabbit hole is the desire for something to be valuable just because you like it, or find its mere existence fascinating.
Bob, Son of Battle by Alfred Ollivant caught my attention. Wikipedia summarizes the plot like this:
The story emphasizes the rivalry between two sheepdogs and their masters, and chronicles the maturing of a boy, David, who is caught between them. His mother dies, and he is left to the care of his father, Adam M'Adam, a sarcastic, angry alcoholic with few redeeming qualities. M'Adam is the owner of Red Wull, a huge, violent dog who herds his sheep by brute force. The other dog is Bob, son of Battle. He herds sheep by finesse and persuasion. His master is James Moore, Master of Kenmuir, who acts as surrogate father to David. David and Moore's daughter Maggie become romantically intrigued by each other.
What more could you ask for? Sheepdogs, just like Babe, and romantic intrigue in Scotland, just like Outlander.
It’s an old book, 1901, and in good shape, but it’s just a later printing of the first edition—it can be had for twelve dollars.
Does the photography make it more valuable? This later edition was illustrated by a photographer, Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore (yes!), who went on to become important through his own work. Dugmore was praised by Steiglitz and wrote technical articles for the earliest editions of Steiglitz’ Camera Work. Dugmore’s book When the Somme Ran Red was a seminal work of war photography. Chasing these details is a fascinating turn through another annex of the rabbit hole.
But the answer is still twelve dollars. I have listed it for forty assuring that I remain in the rabbit hole for some months more.
Growing up in the shadow of Bowdoin College where Harriet Beecher Stowe is reputed to have written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the locally accepted canon of civil war literature has a distinctive abolitionist tinge. Imagine my surprise at pulling from the remant of one of the auction lots, Two Little Confederates?
Published in 1888, Two Little Confederates is a children’s story loosely based on the life of its author, Thomas Nelson Page, who grew up—white—on a plantation in Virginia. A reviewer on Goodreads tells us, ”This look at the Civil War through the eyes of two young Southern brothers exposes the many evils done to the South by the North.”
Flipping through it and looking at the nicely done illustrations, you sense a strong tang of Gone With The Wind . In this post civil rights era there ought to be a good market for post-reconstruction era white-washes of the civil war. But in its condition, I may get thirty dollars for it. Some day.
The Rabbit Hole is deep. It is wide, and it is many chambered.
A post script on the Folio Society.
Later in his life, my father, a cultured and educated man, who had spent his professional life trying to instill culture in others, fell prey on occasion to cultural marketers. He was generally suspicious of come-ons of one sort or another. As a result, even though our family travelled widely to the iconic sites of Europe, there is nary a single statuette of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in our house. Books we’ve got—tee-shirts and knick-knacks not so much.
But my father was on book mailing lists. AB Bookman’s Weekly folded in the 90’s and their assets were purchased, and he was on dozens of auctioneers mailing lists.
So in his eighties I and all my mystified siblings began to receive identical gifts of the current hot series on PBS on VHS. Likewise the boxed Folio Society book sets were a late in life anomoly. One Christmas my father spent an inordinate amount of time quizzing me about which of the girls I thought should receive a complete boxed set of Jane Austen. Never mind that fact that Jane Austen had been enjoying a huge renaissance, paperbacks were everywhere—Emma Thompson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Allen Rickman & Colin Firth were making fortunes off her—we’d all read them all and the house already had (and still has) a lovely and still readable set printed in 1893.
He eventually settled on my wife who was new to the family and therefore desrving this special gift. Neither set will be for sale, the Folio Society edition was a gift to my my wife, and the original is decorative and owns shelf space in our living room that gives credence to the notion that we, too, are cultured.
But my father never found his mark for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. One of the boxes is still in its shrink wrap, twenty two years later.
Nor, I gather, judging by the numbers of copies available on eBay, did scores, if not hundreds, of other well intentioned gift-givers back in 1997 when the Folio Sociiety issued this iteration of Gibbon.
We had, and I still have, a perfectly serviceable version of D.M. Low’s abridgment from 1960. At 903 pages it is much more likely to be read and has the added feature of listing the dates of the era under discussion at the top of each page. The Low I may keep, the Folio Society will go when I find a buyer.
After all, it sent me down this hole. It should be the first to go.
It's No Drive-In Movie, But The Price is Right
With the Red Sox in an early August tailspin, Jerry Remy and Dave O’Brien needed something to fill the grim innings. Something to divert them from the diversion they’re paid to talk about. They settled on the drive-in movie theaters of their youth. Even the youngish Guerin Austin chimed in.
Here in Maine where trends are slow to arrive and even slower to depart, drive-ins had mainly faded away by the early 1980s though a few stubborn hold-outs still plug away here and there. Remdawg’s reminiscences about the big boxy speaker hanging off the car window, parking on a hill, “Let’s all go to the lobby,” playing between features, and the thrill of riding into the drive-in hidden in the trunk of a Plymouth Valiant ring true in Brunswick, Maine as much as in Somerville Mass.
The Bowdoin Drive-In, located about where the Walmart is now, faded away first, leaving no trace at all. “Cinema Treasures” suggests the Brunswick Drive-In on the Portland Road closed around 1984. Just a whisper of its grandeur persists.
But the silver screen still lights up the summer skies of Brunswick. Since 2012 the NorthWest Brunswick Neighborhood Association and the Town of Brunswick have put on monthly summer movie nights in Davis Park. No cars, and the neighbors get to hear the movies, but there is plenty of food even without a lobby. Tess’s Market is right there, and Taco the Town, or some other local vendor will be on hand.
The next movie, “The Lego Movie 2,” will play Thursday, August 15 at dusk. Bolos will be there with chips and salsa, there will be a field hockey clinic and camp games to warm up the crowd and pass the time waiting for the sky to darken.
1344 Pounds of Granite
Bill Patterson tested the limits of a borrowed pick-up truck by loading it with thirty-two curling stones and driving them from Sudbury, Massachusetts to The Rink at Brunswick Landing for a series of curling demonstrations. The stones, each weighing about forty-two pounds, belong to a curling club in Massachusetts. The club loans the set, and associated gear, to groups looking to start local curling facilities.
More photos
Located just behind Flight Deck Brewing off of Admiral Fitch Avenue on Brunswick Landing, the rink hosted its first curling demonstrations on pair of beautiful February weekends. Sometimes compared to shuffleboard on ice, curling is extremely popular in Canada, and in colder European countries, but is familiar to most Americans only as a curiosity during the winter Olympics. The antic sweeping, the audible strategic discussions and interplay between the players, and the fact that the stones actually slow down as they move into scoring position gives the sport a kind of conversational sociability that is drawing people in.
Under crystal blue skies with temperatures in the upper 20s curling enthusiasts, novices, and passersby joined in for long afternoons of curling in the lengthening winter days. Patterson was gratified by the strong response, “There were many people, from retirees to recent college grads, that wanted to participate in this highly social winter sport. With youth hockey our focus has always been on the school age population, but this really opens things up. Plus the rink is highly visible and near to the amenities at Brunswick Landing. With Flight Deck Brewing, the Cooks Takes Flight food truck, and the fire pit nearby people were destined to have a good time. The consensus seemed to be that while curling is very tough to master it’s also a very friendly sport and easy for the beginner to pick-up and enjoy.”
Patterson spearheads Midcoast Youth Hockey’s effort to build an enclosed, refrigerated rink at Brunswick Landing to support local skating, youth hockey, and to provide practice space for the high school teams at Brunswick and Mt. Ararat high school. “Bowdoin has always been very good to us but local teams have to compete for ice at Bowdoin’s Watson Arena with the college’s own programming, which happens to include a curling club. I started to think about adding a curling venue to our project when I learned that the Bowdoin kids travel to Belfast at least once a week to use an enclosed dedicated curling facility.”
Curling requires a different ice surface than the smooth surface needed for hockey and figure skating. A pebbled ice surface created by specialized equipment is necessary. Belfast has the closest real curling facility. Under ideal travel conditions Belfast is still a ninety-minute drive from Brunswick. Patterson reached out to local curling enthusiasts through the Bowdoin club and built a network including the Bowdoin College Club, The Pine Tree Curling Club of Portland, and the Belfast Curling Club. This allowed Midcoast to track down the stones and equipment and to bring in some talent to guide the events. “We’d really like to build on the enthusiasm we saw these last weekends. We’ve been working on the idea of a rink for Brunswick for many years and it’s great to be able to expand what we can offer.”
Check the rink calendar for the Brunswick Landing Arena for future events, and the photo gallery to see all the fun.
Light the tree with Brunswick High's talented singers. How did they get so good?
Crotales.
They sound delicious don’t they? At this time of year they go nicely with a little cranberry sauce, or maybe some hot chocolate.
I’ve been thinking about crotales a lot this past week as the notices for the tree lighting on the mall float by me on social media. As always, when the Downtown Brunswick Association lights the tree on the mall the Brunswick High choir and assorted guests will be there to sing Christmas Carols and other seasonal songs. They’ll sing from 4:00 to 5:00 when the tree is lit.
Among the guests will be my daughter, now a college freshman. Brunswick High’s choir director, Ashley Albert, always reaches out to alumni to invite them back for these big events. It lends a sense of community and helps the kids reconnect.
My daughter is fortunate, she has been able to continue her musical pursuits in college as member of the college’s auditioned choir.
Thing is she feels that the auditioned choirs at Brunswick High are better than her college choir. More rigorous rehearsals, more demanding, better results. Her college is no slouch either. It is old, it is on a hill overlooking its New England town, with an ancient stone chapel that dominates the landscape. Its theatre, in the moderne style, and designed by the same architects that built the empire state building, opened in 1939.
So Brunswick High’s music program is just really, really good.
In part because they have talented and dedicated teachers and continuity of programming from elementary school right up through the high school, in part because the teachers get great support from the school administration, and in part because of the excellent work of the Brunswick Music Boosters.
But also because of the crotales.
Not really a tasty snack, but a percussion instrument, the high school’s crotales were purchased with a grant from the Brunswick Community Education Foundation back in BCEF’s inaugural grant year, 2015. Maybe you’ve seen something from BCEF in the mail. They’re getting geared up for their fifth season of reviewing grant requests from Brunswick Teachers. Give the BCEF website a read, come out to the tree-lighting Saturday, and keep the Brunswick music department and BCEF in your mind over the giving season.
The band will perform their winter concert on Thursday, December 6th at 7:00, the Choruses will sing Wednesday, December 19th at 7:00, both at Crooker Theater.
—Benet Pols
Welcome Home Lily
Note: Since this piece advocating for RunBrunswick’s effort to get a new track built was written a lot has changed. The community group raised awareness on the issue and $130,000.00. Because of these efforts in February 2019 the Brunswick Town Council adopted spending measures that moved the project forward. Construction began later in the spring of 2019 and a completed track was opened at Brunswick High School in the fall of 2019. But for the Global Covid-19 Pandemic, the new track would have hosted its first meet in the Spring of 2020. Here’s looking to 2021.
This is Lily.
She’s about 100 meters from the end of a grueling 2.6 mile run at the Quabacook Relays hosted each fall by Morse High School. The course features four hill climbs, two of which are among the most brutal hill climbs on any cross-country course in Maine. She didn’t win.
So why is she smiling?
She’s being welcomed home. It’s the final varsity heat of the day, the number one race, six varsity races are in the books. It is the pinnacle of the day’s competitive races. Several girls have already crossed the finish line in front of her.
So maybe she smiles because track and field is the most welcoming, and inclusive, of sports.
Track & field and cross-country are the most competitive high school sports in Maine. The programs produce far more college athletes than any other sport. At the same time the programs are also the most welcoming to athletes across all skills levels.
That may seem counterintuitive, for a sport to be simultaneously highly competitive and inclusive.
Unlike most team sports the slower runner or the novice high jumper does not impede the faster, stronger, or more accomplished athlete. No playing time has to be sacrificed to get the less competitive athletes in the game. The scoring system does not penalize a team for entering its least competitive, least experienced athletes. There are no cuts. To be sure there is some talent segregation: there are fast heats and slow heats, there are qualifying standards for conference championships, and even fewer make it to the state meet. But all the other meets, all season long, take all comers.
In many ways they compete against themselves, striving to get better. They’re on the same track, on the same day, in front of the same group of parents and fans as are the fastest and strongest athletes in town, or in the state.
That’s all well and good you say, but surely the best would get even better if they only competed against the best? For instance, look at ice hockey or soccer where club sports allow the most talented to develop without the drag of their less competitive school mates. Hockey has its “tiers.” There is club and “academy” soccer, AAU basketball and baseball, and scores of private clinics, and summer camps.
Surely these programs must do a better job developing young athletes and preparing them for the next level?
Ninety-nine Mainers from the class of 2017 were recruited and matriculated at scholarship offering Division I, or Division 2 colleges. One was a hockey player. Six were soccer players.
Twenty-six of the ninety-nine were track & field and cross-country athletes, far more than any other sport.
Most of the coaching for these athletes takes place at the local level, in municipal recreation programs, at middle schools, and then at high schools. In almost all cases the track these programs use is at the local high school. But not in Brunswick where the track at our high school is unusable.
The original track, installed when the high school opened in 1995, is compromised and unsafe for meets. Brunswick High has not been able to host a track meet since 2016. “Home” meets have been hosted at Lisbon High School, twelve miles distant, the last two seasons. The Town of Brunswick is not prepared to replace the track even though it is located at the high school. Replacement is a community effort led by RunBrunswick, a non-profit run by volunteers.
It makes sense that the track and field community will lead the drive to rebuild the track. This is about the most supportive athletic community you will find. It starts within the team and may come from the fact that it is open to all competitors. The support shown by the strongest most competitive athletes for the less talented—the inclusivity—is legendary. What they are supporting is improvement, or the next “personal best.”
But the sense of community extends beyond the team to a sense of a community among teams, and among the athletes and coaches of different teams. Morse High School trains with Brunswick during the indoor track season. Mt. Ararat and Brunswick, bitterest of rivals, support one another in the multi-team competitions. You often see coaches from one program with a particular specialty sharing pointers with athletes from other teams.
And the athletes. At the most competitive levels there is a brotherhood, or a sisterhood. You will rarely see more gracious behavior in young people than at the end of a race.
With more than a quarter of Maine’s college athletes coming from our track & field and cross-country programs, it is plain that this is an extracurricular activity that supports and enhances our student’s college applications. Brunswick should be supporting this program to the same extent it supports other extracurricular activities and athletic programs.
You can help. Support RunBrunswick. Many in the community have. Businesses big and small have donated, and many families are stepping up to help out too. As of this date RunBrunswick has raised $102,055 but the project will cost $900,000. Come to one of their fundraisers, spread the word. Let town leaders know you support the new track.
-Benet Pols
Maine's Most Complete Coverage of the State Cross-Country Championships .
See my latest on MaineMileSplit, the best source in Maine for news, data, interviews, and race videos. Here is 2018 Championship coverage for all six races, in all three classes.
Learning a New Sport, Part II: At least there is no offsides.
My most attentive readers will recall my view that the rules of field hockey can make following the flow of the game difficult for new fans, and present some challenges for the photographer. In the last three weeks, I have had plenty of opportunity to see a lot more field hockey, to ask some questions, and to do some reading. But the best thing I learned came in a flash, an epiphany.
There is no offside in field hockey.
Offsides seems simple enough, especially in ice hockey where a big, foot-wide, blue line painted on the white ice should help. But I know one hockey player who spent three years offsides, his inability to remember the blue line eclipsed only by his willingness to blame the kid carrying the puck for the whistle. I’ve heard soccer coaches—paid coaches on travel teams—berating sixteen year old linesmen because the coach plainly doesn’t understand when a player in a potential offside position should result in a whistle.
So kudos to field hockey: no offsides.
But it is still difficult to photograph. The length of the stick and the requirement that players only play the ball with the flat side (forehand) of the stick lead to some interesting contortions. And a lot of photos of back-sides.
And it never helps when you’re looking through the viewfinder and trying to cheer your team on at the same time. Shooting any sport is easier when the scoring, or who scores doesn’t matter. So this series from a game between Bowdoin College and USM last weekend allowed me to capture the full range of movement required for a player with the ball on her back-hand side to get a shot on goal without sacrificing the time to get in position for a forehand shot.
Time is important because the shot is coming off a penalty corner. You can tell by the crazy Hannibal Lecter mask the USM players are wearing, they only don these during penalty corners because of the heightened possibility of a ball or stick to the face. For a brief time USM will have just four defenders in the shooting area while Bowdoin may have as many as eight offensive players looking for a shot from a set play and as many rebounds as they can hammer on the net before the remaining six defensive players can run back into the action from midfield.
Trying to turn to her forehand will not only kill time, it will also allow the defender—shielded from the ball in the shot here—to take a better defensive position. The shooter is bent more than 90º at the waist with her stick parallel to the ground and almost level with the playing surface. While bending like this she has to retain her balance in order to apply some power to the shot.
And the shot. In the first photo the shooter’s wrists are crossed so that she can get the flat side of the stick to the ball, and take the only legal shot available. A disproportionate amount of the power of this shot will be generated by the shooters arms and wrists as she snaps the stick back into the forehand positions. She knows where the goal is— somewhere over her right shoould—but obviously couldn’t pick a corner.
And the third shot—it’s just a joyous the celebration.