I am currently reading a biography of Unitarian bigwig William Ellery Channing. Several years ago, I purchased in Concord, Massachusetts (the used bookstore is gone--a sign of the times) a different biography of William Ellery Channing only to discover while reading it that the subject was a different William Ellery Channing--the poet rather than the parson. This also happened to me when I picked up a biography of John Winthrop in Northampton, Massachusetts. Fortunately, I recognized my error before reading a book about John Winthrop the Younger, governor of Connecticut and founder of New London, rather than a book about that man's father, Boston Puritan and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The most amazing thing about the book on my nightstand is that, though its publication date was March of 1903, the required reading accoutrements include not only a trusty highlighter, but a pair of scissors, too. That's right, in its 106-plus years of existence, my copy of "William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion" has never been read! For over a century, this book never realized the ambition of every book: to be read. Its fortunes changed dramatically when I rescued it from the shelves of The Book Bear in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Sometime later this week, it will have accomplished what its author intended of it when he wrote it in the first years of the 20th century.
According a sticker affixed to the inside of the cover, the book once belonged to the "Crosby Emery" library. From what I can gather, that library, like my own, is a private collection. A quick Google search reveals two academics from my area with that peculiar double surname. The sister, Anne Crosby Emery, served as the dean of the women's college at Brown; her brother, Henry Crosby Emery served as a professor of economics at Bowdoin and then Yale. Strangely, the brother married his sister's step daughter, making his sister his mother-in-law. I am less interested in their peculiar family arrangement than I am in why "William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion" went unread in the Crosby Emery library.
It evokes the story, certainly belivable even if its tellers aren't very credible, of how the radicals who conducted the Columbia University takeover of 1968 discovered that so many of the books in school president Grayson Kirk's office remained uncut. In other words, the books served as decorative pieces, props, showy furniture dishonestly attesting to their owner's reputation as a man of learning. Am I to make the same deductions about the Crosby Emery library? Based on one uncut book, that would be unfair. As the beneficiary of many well-wishing writers, I ocassionally get a book in the mail that I don't get to read. Perhaps these academics benefitted from the same phenomenon. One hundred years from now, the people reading the books that once lived in my library will be less able to detect unread books. Uncut books are anachronisms. Publishers have been cutting the pages for their readers for at least as long as this brother-sister pair have been dead. So, although my highlights suggest read books, my lack of highlights don't scream "unread book" the way an uncut page does. The history of my unread books will be more obscure to their owners in 2109 than the Crosby Emery library is to me today. The history of a book gets more mysterious as history marches along.
I had this "unkindest cut" experience a few years back reading William James's "Pragmatism." Checking out a copy from Georgetown University's library, I was surprised, toward the end of the read, that turning the page didn't bring me to the next page but rather two pages later. The copy of Pragmatism that I read, as I recounted in a 2006 post, was "a beat-up, 1925 edition that belonged to a Mr. Weeks of Alexandria, Virginia as of December 1, 1943. It seems to have come into Georgetown's possession in 1984. In the book's 81 years of existence, I don't think it has ever been read.... My evidence for writing this is that several of the pages haven't been cut. In the home-stretch of the book, I had to cut, sloppily so, pages 285-288, and then, 297-300. Pragmatism is one of the most talked about philosophy books of the last hundred years. But books talked about are not always books read."
At least people still talk about "Pragmatism." Apart from being unread (until I got my hands on it!), the Channing biography has yet to prompt a review on Amazon. But the fact that I am reading it right now proves that someone (that would be me) is reading it. A book allows readers to converse with writers who lived centuries ago. You are seldom without intelligent company if you make a book your constant companion. The book on my nightstand allows me to glean insight and information from a man who died 105 years ago. He is, chronologically speaking, closer to his subject. That makes me closer to his subject, too.
Broadening one's perspective to include perspectives from beyond the land of the living is a good reason to read books. Broadening one's audience to beyond the realm of those yet born is a good reason to write books. H.G. Wells' time machine, Doctor Who's TARDIS, and Emmitt Brown's DeLorean are the stuff of fiction. The genuine article is the primitive device of bound papyrus that takes readers to days long past and writers to days still far off.
very nice post flynn
That is brother William James, isn't it?
Good catch, Webster. Corrected in original.
