For two years now, I have been a member of LibraryThing.com, a website where you can catalogue your whole library: what joy! As of today, in the wake of some unexpected book-buying, I have catalogued 713 volumes. That doesn’t include dictionaries, cookbooks, Calvin & Hobbes, and the like, but it does include most of my library. The serious books--the history, theology, fiction, poetry, essays, and especially the books on books--are all in there. One of the nice things about LibraryThing is that you know you are in the presence (virtual anyway) of people who understand your weakness. Among the hundreds of online groups you can join is one named Bookshelves: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill.
Oh my, yes. Fill they will.
I live in a small apartment, so probably buying five books today wasn’t my most prudent idea. But prudence is not necessarily a key aspect of a bibliophile’s character. As the minister Henry Ward Beecher writes, “Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant’s relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearnings of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?” (250).
Amen. Preach it, brother!
I already have stacks of books crowding in front of the books that are standing neatly together on the shelves. As Adrian Joline says, dear old friends of books “sometimes [lament] because the shelves are not exactly adapted to the association of fellow-books so that we fear that they will not be as friendly one to another as would like to have them…. what more agreeable work may he find than that of assorting the books, so that… their skyline be less jagged than that of lower New York…” (43). Unfortunately, my shelves resemble New York less than they do, say, New Delhi.
Sigh. More later.
Beecher, Henry Ward. “Bookstores, Books.” Star Papers. New York: J. C. Derby, 1855.
Joline, Adrian H. At the Library Table. Boston: Gorham Press, 1910.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Gentleman Scholar, Part 2
I recently bought a copy of Carl Spizweg’s 1850 painting “The Book-Worm” for my apartment. The more I look at the oblivious old man standing on the ladder with books under his arms and between his knees, fondly reading yet another text in his hands, the more I recognize that my Inner Child and my Inner Warrior Princess have some company deep in the archetypal cavernous library of my mind. Still, I’d like to find a good archetype for a female scholar and/or bibliophile that might more accurately portray what I and so many of my friends recognize about ourselves.
One problem typical in women’s history is that the reality of women’s lives often far outpaces the (usually) male portrayal of them, particularly in books. Not quite two centuries ago, Jane Austen brought attention to this problem in her novel, Persuasion. The protagonist, Anne Elliot is having a heated discussion with her friend Captain Harville, about love and the comparative constancy of men and women. Harville says:
[W]e shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse…. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men. (Austen 220)
And Anne replies: “Perhaps I shall.—Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands” (221). Education and literacy must perforce precede bibliophilia; a book can only serve as a conversation partner if a person can understand the language it speaks. And for centuries education was limited. During the middle ages, only the clergy were literate. When all texts were copied out by hand, the ability to read was far from a necessity, even for lords: that’s why they had clerks and scribes, who were usually priests. However, literacy could come in handy in other ways. “Benefit of clergy” meant that anyone arrested for a crime, who could prove he could read (and it was usually a man), could be tried by an ecclesiastical court rather than a civil court. When the difference in punishment for a serious crime could be, say, a pilgrimage rather than hanging, the benefit is obvious. (After all, pilgrims might actually return home alive.) This morsel of history helps explain both the connection of maleness with scholarship and, less directly, the deeply embedded misogyny of bibliophiles up until our own century.
The source of that less direct reason is Richard de Bury’s book Philobiblon. Richard, served as Cofferer to the King, Treasurer of the Wardrobe, and Clerk of the Privy Seal for King Edward III of England in the fourteenth century, and became Bishop of Durham in 1334. He traveled often on political business for the king and used his exhausting journeys in Europe as opportunities to collect books. But of course, he had been trained as a priest in a time when people were still busy blaming Eve for the sin of Adam and everybody else. So it’s no surprise to see, in Chapter IV, when he describes, “woman, to wit, whose cohabitation was formerly shunned by the clergy, from whom we have ever taught our pupils to fly, more than from the asp and the basilisk;...this beast, ever jealous of our studies, and at all times implacable” (34).
To find women role models for scholarship and bibliophilia then, it would seem that we are going to have to look closer in time to the (enlightened?) present.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
de Bury, Richard. Philobiblon. Trans. John Bellingham Inglis. New York: Meyers, 1899.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Gentleman Scholar and Other Archetypes, Part 1
I’ve been looking around my apartment lately, at the furniture, at the books, and at my as-yet unrealized internal vision of the book furniture (oh, come on, tell me that you don’t envision bookcases all along your longest wall!). And I’ve come to the strange realization that I apparently have an internal self-image mirroring the British Gentleman Scholar. Now, this would be okay, I suppose, if, in fact, I were British and/or belonging to the upper class and/or male.
I’m not.
I realize that this is, potentially, a problem. Here I am: an American (liberal), middle class (and more bourgeois than I like to admit), female (feminist), well-traveled-antiquarian-English-professor-type. My deepest instinct tells me that the breadth of my experience, the width of my mind, the rigor of my training and the shear pain of my having spent the last fifteen (15) years trying to teach college students (who are, every year, worse at basic spelling) how to write, argue, and think critically—surely all this is much more important than extraneous identifiers such as nationality, class, or sex. Surely.
I guess it would depend on whom you ask and when you asked them. Andrew Lang, in his otherwise lovely little book The Library, says,
Naturally, Lang does not spend any time considering that the very education that men got in his time (and women didn’t) might offer the key to the differing views of the value the two sexes placed upon money and its use, or books and their use or lack of use. We all can only speak from our worldviews. Lang (1844-1912) could not help being a man of his time. A Victorian like Lang naturally could not imagine that, within less than a century of his book’s publication in 1881, an entire rethinking of the relations between the sexes might occur.
Sometimes, when I am feeling optimistic in the extreme, I wonder what utopian wonders the next fifty or hundred years might bring. Might women start earning 90 cents to a man’s dollar, as opposed to the 76 cents we earn now? Might more marriages turn out like my brother’s? I was practically in the ether back in late June when I watched him starting to cook dinner while his wife sat tensely watching the opening of a Red Sox game. Dinner was quite good. The ballgame, while not great per se, taught me a lot about baseball and marriage in the 21st century: my brother tried (manfully?) to explain the offside rule (or something like that) while his wife kindly corrected his minor errors. I wanted to dance. The ballgame was—well, it was 21st century Red Sox, which is to say they actually had a chance of winning; whether they did or not I don’t recall. Eighty-six years of not winning the World Series has become trivial since they finally won again. Now that they have won twice, the whole thing is, as they say, “academic,” which tends to mean unimportant except in terms of statistical analysis.
And this brings me back to the idea of the scholar. When people talk about scholars, the topic of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” frequently comes up. Now this topic could go two ways, although it rarely does. Usually, what people mean when they use this phrase is that somebody (probably a white male of the upper classes) is getting paid good money to think about thinking about thinking, which seems to the speakers like a waste of good money on someone who probably already has good money and can’t be bothered to do a real job. (Whereas I myself would only use this definition for “philosopher,” these speakers also include historians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics. I might have to reconsider about literary critics.) What is interesting here is that the phrase “art for art’s sake” gets a little more sympathy from such speakers. At first glance that seems odd, because presumably the same elite who decide what constitutes Knowledge are also the elite who decide what constitutes Art. Still, within a given society, pretty much everybody agrees on what constitutes Money, and artists are assumed not to come from money, have money, earn money, or know what to do with money, unless buying more Burnt Sienna counts. So there’s less resentment involved.
But there is another sort of idea that comes along with “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Not too surprisingly, I have mostly heard this idea expounded by individuals who have doctoral degrees in the humanities and jobs in apparently unrelated fields, and from those who were in doctoral programs in humanities until they realized that jobs would not be forthcoming if they actually finished the program and thus sidled out with a Masters degree and a really good sense of how to do research. Both groups say the same thing, and what they say reminds me of what I was told in high school about the Necessity to Learn Algebra: “It Will Teach You How to Think.”
Now as a general rule, I would rather be taught how to think than what to think, and I have experienced both states of learning in different ways, having spent eleven years in Catholic school (where my siblings and I stood a much smaller chance of getting beat up than we did in the public schools of our town in that time). Since I began teaching college freshman composition in 1993, I have seen an astronomical need for the teaching of critical thinking; what I learned in junior high and high school, students might learn in college if they are lucky and/or possessed of enough curiosity; for many, these things are never taught or learned. Where socio-economic class fits into this equation, I’m not quite sure, since I’ve seen kids from struggling families excel out of shear cussedness (and I mean that in a good way). I came from a family that was, in terms of education, upper middle class, and in terms of economics, ranging from lower to upper middle class (and back again) back and forth over the years, as the national economy carved switchbacks in the national experience.
But here’s the thing: I lived on the corner of a block that, if we labeled the corners A, B, C, and D as they do in geometry classes, meant our house was at point A and the local library was at point B. From second grade on, I could borrow books about anything without ever having to even cross a street. And that’s power, regardless of social class or economics.
Lang, Andrew. The Library. The Art at Home Series. London: MacMillan, 1881.
I’m not.
I realize that this is, potentially, a problem. Here I am: an American (liberal), middle class (and more bourgeois than I like to admit), female (feminist), well-traveled-antiquarian-English-professor-type. My deepest instinct tells me that the breadth of my experience, the width of my mind, the rigor of my training and the shear pain of my having spent the last fifteen (15) years trying to teach college students (who are, every year, worse at basic spelling) how to write, argue, and think critically—surely all this is much more important than extraneous identifiers such as nationality, class, or sex. Surely.
I guess it would depend on whom you ask and when you asked them. Andrew Lang, in his otherwise lovely little book The Library, says,
Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. …[B]roadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don’t understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. (61)
Naturally, Lang does not spend any time considering that the very education that men got in his time (and women didn’t) might offer the key to the differing views of the value the two sexes placed upon money and its use, or books and their use or lack of use. We all can only speak from our worldviews. Lang (1844-1912) could not help being a man of his time. A Victorian like Lang naturally could not imagine that, within less than a century of his book’s publication in 1881, an entire rethinking of the relations between the sexes might occur.
Sometimes, when I am feeling optimistic in the extreme, I wonder what utopian wonders the next fifty or hundred years might bring. Might women start earning 90 cents to a man’s dollar, as opposed to the 76 cents we earn now? Might more marriages turn out like my brother’s? I was practically in the ether back in late June when I watched him starting to cook dinner while his wife sat tensely watching the opening of a Red Sox game. Dinner was quite good. The ballgame, while not great per se, taught me a lot about baseball and marriage in the 21st century: my brother tried (manfully?) to explain the offside rule (or something like that) while his wife kindly corrected his minor errors. I wanted to dance. The ballgame was—well, it was 21st century Red Sox, which is to say they actually had a chance of winning; whether they did or not I don’t recall. Eighty-six years of not winning the World Series has become trivial since they finally won again. Now that they have won twice, the whole thing is, as they say, “academic,” which tends to mean unimportant except in terms of statistical analysis.
And this brings me back to the idea of the scholar. When people talk about scholars, the topic of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” frequently comes up. Now this topic could go two ways, although it rarely does. Usually, what people mean when they use this phrase is that somebody (probably a white male of the upper classes) is getting paid good money to think about thinking about thinking, which seems to the speakers like a waste of good money on someone who probably already has good money and can’t be bothered to do a real job. (Whereas I myself would only use this definition for “philosopher,” these speakers also include historians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics. I might have to reconsider about literary critics.) What is interesting here is that the phrase “art for art’s sake” gets a little more sympathy from such speakers. At first glance that seems odd, because presumably the same elite who decide what constitutes Knowledge are also the elite who decide what constitutes Art. Still, within a given society, pretty much everybody agrees on what constitutes Money, and artists are assumed not to come from money, have money, earn money, or know what to do with money, unless buying more Burnt Sienna counts. So there’s less resentment involved.
But there is another sort of idea that comes along with “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Not too surprisingly, I have mostly heard this idea expounded by individuals who have doctoral degrees in the humanities and jobs in apparently unrelated fields, and from those who were in doctoral programs in humanities until they realized that jobs would not be forthcoming if they actually finished the program and thus sidled out with a Masters degree and a really good sense of how to do research. Both groups say the same thing, and what they say reminds me of what I was told in high school about the Necessity to Learn Algebra: “It Will Teach You How to Think.”
Now as a general rule, I would rather be taught how to think than what to think, and I have experienced both states of learning in different ways, having spent eleven years in Catholic school (where my siblings and I stood a much smaller chance of getting beat up than we did in the public schools of our town in that time). Since I began teaching college freshman composition in 1993, I have seen an astronomical need for the teaching of critical thinking; what I learned in junior high and high school, students might learn in college if they are lucky and/or possessed of enough curiosity; for many, these things are never taught or learned. Where socio-economic class fits into this equation, I’m not quite sure, since I’ve seen kids from struggling families excel out of shear cussedness (and I mean that in a good way). I came from a family that was, in terms of education, upper middle class, and in terms of economics, ranging from lower to upper middle class (and back again) back and forth over the years, as the national economy carved switchbacks in the national experience.
But here’s the thing: I lived on the corner of a block that, if we labeled the corners A, B, C, and D as they do in geometry classes, meant our house was at point A and the local library was at point B. From second grade on, I could borrow books about anything without ever having to even cross a street. And that’s power, regardless of social class or economics.
Lang, Andrew. The Library. The Art at Home Series. London: MacMillan, 1881.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Books Behind Bars
We interrupt these antiquarian reflections for a public service message.
This week, Northeastern University’s newspaper had a profile on Prison Book Program (PBP), a non-profit that sends books to prisoners. “The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match tem as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies” (Larocque 5). PBP has “served more than 100,000 prisoners in the last three years” (Capalbo 6), an impressive achievement for such a tiny organization relying solely on volunteers working out of the basement of a tiny bookstore in Quincy, MA.
But it also brings up some of the problems with our corrections system. As volunteer Pam Boiros points out, “Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prisons]…. It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated” (qtd. in Larocque 5). But the American prison system, the largest in the world, focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Prison libraries, whey they exist at all, are notoriously small, and most prisons have a rule that prisoners can’t receive books from individuals. Hence, the PBP.
The most commonly requested materials are dictionaries (PBP currently has none in stock), GED exam preparation books, books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Westerns, and business books. PBP also tries to keep books on LGBT issues, Buddhism, native American topics and legal self-help, as these topics are also frequently sought.
Since I was at a 50%-off sale at a local second-hand bookstore yesterday, I picked up a few such books along with the ones for my work, and I’ll be sending them along with a few new dictionaries in a few days. (See address below.) I encourage you to join me in making the world a safer place. Remember, books change minds; minds change lives.
Prison Book Program
c/o Lucy Parsons Bookstore
1306 Hancock St., Ste. 100
Quincy, MA 02169
Capalbo, Danielle. “Reading into the Facts on Prisoners, Literacy.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 6.
Larocque, Mark. “Local Non-profit Puts Books Behind Bars.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 5-6.
This week, Northeastern University’s newspaper had a profile on Prison Book Program (PBP), a non-profit that sends books to prisoners. “The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match tem as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies” (Larocque 5). PBP has “served more than 100,000 prisoners in the last three years” (Capalbo 6), an impressive achievement for such a tiny organization relying solely on volunteers working out of the basement of a tiny bookstore in Quincy, MA.
But it also brings up some of the problems with our corrections system. As volunteer Pam Boiros points out, “Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prisons]…. It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated” (qtd. in Larocque 5). But the American prison system, the largest in the world, focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Prison libraries, whey they exist at all, are notoriously small, and most prisons have a rule that prisoners can’t receive books from individuals. Hence, the PBP.
The most commonly requested materials are dictionaries (PBP currently has none in stock), GED exam preparation books, books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Westerns, and business books. PBP also tries to keep books on LGBT issues, Buddhism, native American topics and legal self-help, as these topics are also frequently sought.
Since I was at a 50%-off sale at a local second-hand bookstore yesterday, I picked up a few such books along with the ones for my work, and I’ll be sending them along with a few new dictionaries in a few days. (See address below.) I encourage you to join me in making the world a safer place. Remember, books change minds; minds change lives.
Prison Book Program
c/o Lucy Parsons Bookstore
1306 Hancock St., Ste. 100
Quincy, MA 02169
Capalbo, Danielle. “Reading into the Facts on Prisoners, Literacy.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 6.
Larocque, Mark. “Local Non-profit Puts Books Behind Bars.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 5-6.
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