Setting the Stage

 Each of these books has a story other than the one printed on its pages.  If it weren't for those stories, I might discard the oldest ones with tattered covers and slightly yellowing pages and buy newer reprints, or maybe, in an extremely weak moment, subscribe to an electronic book source and buy one of those stupid e-readers.  I would be just a capable of rationalizing my decision as the next person, but why do I resist? I can only explain by first telling some of these stories.  First, the 7 books pictured above were given to me by a grandmother with foresight when I was six or seven years old.  At that age, having been taught via phonetics, I could read them aloud, but certainly could not fully understand them.  Somehow I absorbed from my grandmother that with repeated readings over time I would eventually understand them and it would be worth the wait and the effort.

 My boxed set of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll had reprints of the original illustrations which I loved.  I spent hours as a child trying to duplicate them.

 From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I learned about dust jackets, inside cover illustrations, and bookplates.  I also began my admiration of elegant penmanship and longed for the day I would be entitled to try to write with an ink pen.  That day finally came in second grade.  Why was the pen called a crow quill?  Did my introduction to Lewis Carroll foreshadow my eventually becoming a math teacher  or an English teacher?  I've been both and am currently teaching English at college.  Did the graphics in these books and my grandmother's elegant penmanship foreshadow my brief forays into graphic design and my current interest in nature journaling?  My love of elegant book plates?  My having a daughter who became a graphic design professor and bought me some elegant book plates in Italy that honored Pythagoras.  Did grandma's vision extend that far?  Could this experience be replicated with an e-reader?  Will we have a future in which batteries are required for reading?  Yuck!

 I can write like this, once or twice a day, for maybe a couple dozen words, but it takes extreme concentration and putting my brain in graphic design mode.  Grandma could write like this all day.  It was built in.  I have always envied that, but have been too lazy to develop elegant penmanship.  Who knows, I may yet do it.

 The big fat one on the left, The Science of Life, might seem like an arrogant title, but that's what "biology" actually means.  It has always frustrated me to see most high school biology classes focused mostly on dead stuff and not being able to go outside.  This particular volume is by H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley.  Literary giants, polymaths - I love this book. I missed my chance to meet Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry, "Darwin's "bulldog."  An eye-opening book by him is Religion without Revelation. Next, an 1899 printing of Charles Darwin's magnum opus was a gift from a parent in a town where I was teaching high school.  The town was more anti-Darwin than most, and this parent knew I'd be honored by the gesture.

The light green one in the middle was published in 1886. The binding shows the title to be Wood's Natural History.  The title page calls it Illustrated Natural History by Rev. J. G. Wood, M. A., author of many "natural history" books in that era.  This copy, according to a stamp inside the front cover, was once the property of the Downieville School and the Alleghany Schools in Sierra County. I assume it was discarded at some point since I found it all moldy in the attic of the former Feather River Inn when it was the site of the Feather River Preparatory School.  I'd love to know if the book was discarded because it was old or because there was an enlightened science teach on the staff.
I keep this book as evidence of the backwards, racist "science" that was common in the late 1800's.  Perhaps under the influence of Herbert Spencer's "social Darwinism."  In the descriptions of the races of humans we find such classics as "...in this membrane (in the skin) is the seat of color; it is found in all men, but the cells are variously developed.  In the skin are also found the glands for the secretion of the odors so well known from the Negroes, for instance" and "our ideas areas yet confused as to the moral and spiritual life of the Negro, but it may fairly be asserted that consciousness has not yet attained to any realization of spiritual existence.  Such words as God, law, etc., if they have any meaning at all to a native of Africa, it will be that of a fetish.  Again, he has no morality, and he thus seems connected to mankind by rather slender ties" and, finally, in describing the Caucasian race, "No other race has the stamp of spirit so prominently in its features or so noble a bearing, nor is the human ideal of beauty approached so near in any other race.  This race is foremost among man on this earth in all mental and moral attainments."  Interestingly, each description of a race is accompanied by a detailed line drawing.  I might post photos of some of them later.  The drawing of a man accompanying that last description bears an uncanny resemblance to the illustrations of Jesus that are in the Bible I was given for perfect attendance at Sunday School during 5th grade (pictured above).
I'll save my stories about the three remaining books in the above photo for my next post.

Now, another gift passed down from my Grandmother, to my father, then to me.  Family legend is that my grandmother knew Elbert Hubbard personally.  He went down with the Lusitania.
TO BE CONTINUED after my son and I fetch a Christmas tree.
Got busy in a hurry Saturday afternoon after fetching a Christmas tree.  It's now Sunday afternoon, and I have to chip away at this story a bit more. My special fondness for my various volumes of the work of Elbert Hubbard goes beyond the connection via my late Grandmother Willis.  That has to do with the Roycrofters, and writer's and craftperson's guild, founded by Hubbard in East Aurora, New York.  Hand-crafted books, letterpress, woodcuts, fancy title lettering, a reverence for literacy, and many other traditional values.  I have found that I don't agree with everything Hubbard said, but I greatly admire his dedication to his art and philosophy.  He seems like a combination of Ben Franklin, Will Rogers, and maybe some of the pragmatic European philosophers that influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson.  There was a bit too much of the Calvinist in him for my tastes.  Anyway, I find myself frequently going back to these books for inspiration.  Pictured above is the Note Book, a collection of Hubbard's own writing that is a bit reminiscent of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac.  I also have a copy of Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book, a collection of stories, lessons, pithy quotes, etc., from authors Hubbard admired.  I also have a few volumes of his Little Journeys to Homes of the Great.  Enough on Hubbard for now except to say that the experience I've had with him could not be duplicated by an electronic reader.

When confronted by on opening page like the one above (click on it), it's hard to turn it and begin to read. 

This net book is the grammar I used in high school.  Actually, it's the culminating work in a six-volume series which spanned 7th- through 12th-grade.  In those days teachers didn't worry about being boring and students didn't dare to be bored.  Those who couldn't avoid boredom usually quite school by age 16 and many got good jobs in factories.  The rest of us really mastered our language by the time we graduated.  I still borrow exercises from this book for my current course in Basic English Composition.  How does one master the distinctions among there, their and they're without lots of practice.  What was the incentive?  Prove your mastery and you were allowed to move onward.  The same was true with Algebra in those days - at least where I went to school.  I'm not sure what was going on in California at the time.  The Algebra textbook had a gazillion practice problems for every new skill.  What was the incentive?  Once you proved you had mastered a skill, you could not only move on, but you'd be complimented and you'd find it much easier to obtain hall passes and abuse the privilege by getting distracted accidentally on purpose. :) 

Consider the free use of words like "correct," "good," and " appropriate."  Who dares to use them these days?  Wouldn't want to damage that self-esteem.  As the document A Nation at Risk reported a few years ago when comparing USA's math skills and self-image regarding math skills with some 30 other developed nations (The American kids scored near the bottom in skills and at the very top in self-esteem.), the American kids "reeked of self-esteem."  When I am challenged to teach math or language skills to today's youth, I have to continually remind myself that they have inherited a cultural problem that was not their fault, and they need to be treated with patience and respect in order to be convinced that working on these skills matters. 

I arrived

Another oldie, my 1951 copy of The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  62 years is not that old when it comes to talking about truly old books.  This one has been reprinted many times, and I could get a fresh copy.  In fact, I have a fresh copy.  But, this one's a momento.  Back when New England high schools didn't recognize California writers, and we were not introduced to Steinbeck in junior high via The Pearl and The Red Pony in order to soften us up for The Grapes of Wrath in our junior year - we read Hamlet and A Tale of Two Cities instead - I arrived in graduate school without ever having read Steinbeck.  And I got into M. I. T. and Harvard!  Anyway, I was introduced to Steinbeck via this very book, purchased in Gainesville, Florida, by my college ecology teacher. Ironically, I had read some of the scientific work by and about Ed Rickets but didn't know of his association and deep friendship with Steinbeck.  This particular edition of the story of a fantastic field trip to the Gulf of Baja California, AKA The Sea of Cortez, includes an insightful and hilarious, 50+ page biographical sketch of Ed Rickets, the occasion being a memorial of Ed's death by a crash at a railroad crossing.
I learned that Steinbeck studied zoology at Stanford before I knew that he was a significant literary figure.  I love it when stuff like that happens.
So, a while later, I'll continue my story with the three books in the photo that I've skipped, and will get to the purpose of the thing which is to try to slow down the love affair with e-readers that will make certain companies very rich during the next month.