The Enemies of Books

William Blades - The Enemies of Books (1880)

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In contrast to yesterday's post celebrating bibliophilia here's one that's a collection of horror stories for us.  William Blades (a London printer and biographer of Caxton) compiles all the various ways books and even entire libraries can be destroyed.  Chapters cover fire, water, dust, gas, ignorance, bookworms (the actual insect), bookbinders, collectors and "Servants and Children".  Many accounts are drawn from his own experiences such as finding pages from a Caxton volume being torn out to stuff a hole in the wall.  But there are others from historical and journalist sources, librarians and collectors.  Perhaps read along with Reynolds & Wilson's Scribes and Scholars and wonder that we have anything left that's over a few centuries old.

The Book-lover's Enchiridion

Alexander Ireland - The Book-lover's Enchiridion (1882)

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There's an entire sub-genre, though a small one, of anthologies praising books and the love of books.  Alexander Ireland was a Scottish journalist who wrote an early biography of Emerson and was an avid collector himself (including multiple editions of Anatomy of Melancholy).  This Enchiridion (a small handbook) was his most popular work (first issued under the pseudonym Philobiblos) and went through several editions in just a few years.  These older collections are always interesting for the half or completely forgotten writers included as well as unexpected excerpts from more familiar ones.

Lyric Forms from France

Helen Louise Cohen - Lyric Forms from France: Their History and Their Use (1922)

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I have a weakness for these types of anthologies - blatantly "educational" but still standing as a readable collection and with background material of some substance.  At least two of these forms (sestina and villanelle) still have currency though none have completely died - the result I suspect of poets moving to free verse but still wanting some type of structure.  Cohen was a high school teacher best remembered for dramatic anthologies (such as One-Act Plays by Modern Authors) and who did her doctoral dissertation on the ballade.

Americanisms, Old & New

John Stephen Farmer - Americanisms, Old & New (1889)

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Apparently the former colonies didn't speak quite right so this dictionary appeared to help confused Britons.  "America" in this case includes the U.S., Canada, West Indies and other near-by English speaking areas.  This copy is a tad dark but well worth browsing.  Check out the detailed explanation of a storm for the term "barber" (Canadian backwoods we're told) or next page find out how to "bark a squirrel".  The still very much alive "ouch" is "a Southern exclamation of pain. It appears to be a survival for it is quoted in ancient glossaries."  "Gnarler" is the "generic name among burglars for a watch-dog".  "Pork and beans" is "the American national dish".  One that's changed a bit is "ding-bat" described as "applied to anything that can be thrown with force or dashed violently at another object, from a cannon-ball to the rough's traditional 'arf brick, and from a piece of money to a log of wood".  And I'm recommending to comics writers "cosouse" which is an "onomatopoetic word representing the fall of a heavy body into water".  As you expect from such a book from this period nearly everything sexual is carefully avoided while some today offensive material appears (though I can't help but mention "wife" as a "fetter fixed on one leg only").

Jean-Henri Fabre

Jean-Henri Fabre - Insect Life: Souvenirs of a Naturalist (1891, English 1901)

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Years ago I heard that the naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was a favorite of the surrealists though after tracking down some of his writings (this was before the internet) I was a bit confused.  What I read was fine, with the kind of personable approach I associate with that era and that too often seems to have either vanished into the "rigor" of academia or the wayward enthusiasm of environmental writers.  But it wasn't obviously proto-surrealist and I wondered if maybe I mis-read and the surrealists hadn't cared.  Which didn't much matter since Fabre seemed like a natural fit for this blog.  Then I found a piece by Donna Roberts that confirms the link and gives more detail than I had before.

Despite any of that Fabre is interesting because of how he might fit into any literary canon.  Literature is typically approached and taught, as others have pointed out, as basically novels, short stories, lyric poetry, a few plays and some odds and ends.  Memoirs and autobiographic writings have edged in recently but still the emphasis is on what's easily teachable and the results of a certain type of creative process.  Naturalists and science writers don't fit here, usually sent over to history of science.  Of course this is all recent - a century ago "literature" would have included Fabre and all sorts of letter writers, travel accounts, religious texts and so on that rarely fit literature classes.

The other aspect of Fabre's place is that he's mostly unknown in the Anglo-American world.  There are a few stray reprints (currently Dover and Beacon have a volume each) but he's not somebody I would expect even a well-read person to know.  But I gather that in France he's more a standard, if second-tier, author (though my sense of this is quite likely off considering that it comes from stray second-hand reports over the years).

Many of Fabre's books are available from Open Library and other sources and from skimming they seem to be very similar.  I chose Insect Life because this is a translation of the first volume of Souvenirs entomologiques though I don't know whether it's complete or not.

The Authoress of the Odyssey

Samuel Butler - The authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands (1897)

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Late in the 19th century novelist Samuel Butler (Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh) promoted the idea that whoever wrote The Odyssey (and not as often reported about his claim Homer in full) had actually been a woman.  In 1897 he released this book to sway the unbelievers, most of whom declined to sway.  Mary Beard calls it a "zany argument" and since I haven't yet read it that's probably the best place to leave this.  Beard wrote a full essay on the book in the collection Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview that's likely more interesting than the actual book. In his notebooks Butler claimed of The Odyssey "If the poem is to ever be well translated, it must be by some high-spirited English girl who has been brought up at Athens and who, therefore, has not been jaded by academic study of the language." By those standards we'll have to make do with un-well-translated poems though Butler himself gave a stab at it.  (There's a Delphi Classics ebook that includes his and several other translations in full along with numerous Homerian oddities.)

The Shakespeare Apocrypha

C.F. Tucker Brooke - The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908)

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There have always been a few plays that floated in and out of the Shakespeare canon such as The Two Noble Kinsmen which can be found in some current "complete" editions.  But there have also been plays attributed to Shakespeare for various reasons - to capitalize on his fame or because it seemed like his work.  In 1908 C.F. Tucker Brooke (who would start teaching at Yale the following year) edited a collection of fourteen such plays.  It's fascinating reading for Shakespeare buffs.  In 2013 Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen released William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays which has some overlap but as with many recent Shakespeare editions seems to be driven a tad eccentric by the needs of distinguishing itself commercially.