Two Home Towns

Once inside Booked Up (below) the browsing began. If you really want to get a feel for just how much is there you’ll have to go see it yourself. Still, I took a few notes that can give you a glimpse. One of the things that made the biggest impression on me as I scanned some of the more rare books was the incredible diversity of human experience, even just among westerners writing in English. Another was a humbling sense of the smallness of any one life on the tapestry of time.

Want to experience romance and adventure from the 19th century reader’s perspective? How would “A Slave of the Saracen” suit you? A fictional commentary on the family life of the day? How about giving “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” a read? Travel? Try “Seeing Europe by Automobile”, which was clearly written to differentiate the experience from rail or horse. Politics? Have the only copy of “Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th Century Pamphlets” I’ve ever seen. Science? “Soviet Genetics and World Science.” Philosophy? “The Life of Voltaire.” Nature? “The Life of the Salmon.” Weather? “The Climate of Indiana.” Religion and morality? Have a tiny little book admonishing against fornication written entirely in Latin but published some time in the 19th century?

Listing all that was no different than counting the stars in a tiny patch of sky and giving up. It was endless.

One of the books I finally decided that I would buy was “Nonsenseorship”, a 1922 commentary on American life in the era of prohibition and the moralism of that day. In the midst of today’s absurd rancor over politically correct speech and increasingly coercive regulations regarding whether we smoke, how we drink and now even what we’re eating, I was instantly taken by this passage from the foreword:

“From England, through the eyes of Frank Swinnerton, we glimpse ourselves as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by, lured by reports of America’s lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. “I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of ‘Don’t!’ and I want to know what it is like to have ‘Don’t!’ said to me by somebody who is not a woman.”

I think I’m really going to enjoy reading it.

On a more serious note, there was a book from 1908 that had an introduction so chilling that I could not help but write down an excerpt since I wasn’t going to pay the $200 to buy it. It was from “Kafir Socialism”, Kafir being the derogatory term for black Africans used by the Boers and others in the past. It was a political commentary on the direction of world politics in general and “solving the native question” in particular:

“In the case of races and classes, just as in the case of individuals, those that are the most efficient in their adaptation to environment, and not those that simply give expression to the loftiest sentiment, will survive and dominate all rivals; while the weak and inefficient will go to the wall.”

Mind you, this wasn’t some ratty, poorly written pamphlet run off the alleyway presses of the lunatic fringe. It was a nicely bound hard cover book with acclamations inside. In retrospect, how can you read that and be surprised that the horrors of the First World War were just around the corner, and those of the Russian revolution and the Holocaust not far behind?

But for every book on topics so grave there were at least as many others that were much less weighty. After a couple of hours of browsing Eric and Jill came back with quite a load. Eric got some things for his art studies and Jill found a reprint of what is purported to be the very first cook book ever published – from the 1400’s I think.

After paying up we were on our way back to the Metroplex, sure that we would return some time.