Praise of Old Books
I write today in praise of old books. There is a unique pleasure in holding a venerable old volume in your hand. I’m not talking about moldy and mildewed books, of course. A faint musty smell, however, yellowed pages, a well-worn binding, and the slight imperfections of old typeset pages speak a soothing language all their own.
A lot of used books come along in my line of work. Teachers amass a lot of books, and Latin teachers accumulate a lot of very old books. People will often give unwanted (by the giver) books to us. Sometimes they donate boxes of them to schools. These rarely find their way into classrooms and school libraries. More often they find themselves in faculty workrooms with a sign inviting all interested takers to help themselves.
Hidden Treasure
I’ve often found hidden treasure in these boxes. One of these gems is Poems Every Child Should Know, printed in 1904 and edited by one Mary Burt. You can read a digital version HERE on Project Gutenberg. Miss Burt had a good eye for poetry. She included classics by Shelley and Keats, Longfellow and Lear, and many other eminent poets.
Not all the names were familiar to me. I found a poem called “Barnacles” by Sidney Lanier. I had never heard of the poet, although it seems he’s well known in his native state of Georgia. In any case, I used the poem in a 9th grade English class. The students liked the poem, both the form and the content. In fact, they liked it better than the more current selections in their anthology. My wife also used the book extensively in teaching poetry to our own children.
Glimpses Into the Past
Another treasure is a copy of Homer’s Odyssey, printed in 1889. In this case we can even catch a glimpse of the book’s journey over the past century-plus. There are the handwritten names of several different owners in the front. One of them seems to have had the book in the 1930’s while studying at the same college I attended fifty years later. The pocket containing an old checkout card reveals that this is one donation that did make its way into the library stacks. The last borrower on the card took out the book in 1983.
My oldest book, however, is also the one that gives the most fascinating glimpse into its past. I found this one in a closet full of abandoned books under a staircase in the school in which I was working in Portland, Maine. It’s a volume from 1882 containing selections from Caesar, Sallust, and Cicero. Its first owner was a young woman named Hannah Loring who attended Greeley Institute (now Greeley High School) in Yarmouth, Maine.
The Prize Exhibition
She wrote more than her name in the book, however. There are quite a few notes, some academic, others more personal, throughout the book. The most intriguing is an entire page filled with the program of the “Prize Exhibition of 1882 at Greeley Institute.” The young folks put on quite a show. There were various solos and duets. Musical selections included something called “The Jolly Brothers Galop” [sic], as well as “Song of the Alps,” a solo effort of Miss Loring herself.
“. . . the young folks put on quite a show . . .“
In fact, Hannah appears in several of the numbers in the Prize Exhibition. You can easily understand why she lovingly wrote out the whole program in her Latin book. We can almost picture her excitement. I contacted the Yarmouth, Maine, Historical Society at the time I came across the book (c. 20-25 years ago). I was hoping to find descendants of Miss Loring who could appreciate this intimate look into the life of their teen-aged great-great-grandmother.
Old and Very Old
Sadly, the historical society was not able to connect the original owner of the book with anyone still living in the area. They were able to trace Hannah Loring’s family back in time, however. It seems that they had come to Yarmouth in the previous century from Hingham, Massachusetts. As it happens, I was teaching in Hingham when I came into possession of Poems Every Child Should Know. Like my antique copy of the Odyssey, Hannah’s text of Caesar, Sallust, and Cicero brought with it a direct (if coincidental) connection to my own life.
Now, you might want to point out that in my praise of old books, I’ve been discussing these books more as objects than as repositories of the literary efforts of their authors. Well, I like physical books. But of course these aren’t just old books but old books, some very old. I was showing the 1889 Odyssey to one of my sons recently, and he pointed out that the book itself isn’t old at all compared to the story told in its pages. A story in fact in the same language and words in which it first found written expression almost 3,000 years ago.
Time Travel
It’s a good point. And if holding a century-old book in your hand can give a sense of a tangible connection to its readers over the past hundred years, what about reading the same words that have fired the imaginations of countless readers over the past hundred generations? And in fact that’s what the classics can do for us. As I put it in my first post here, Time Travel is Real.
It is indeed. As I explain in that earlier post:
You can go back in time and hear Julius Caesar speak in his own voice. With the great poet Vergil you can recite the very words that cause Octavia, the sister of the Emperor Augustus, to faint. Cicero can share with you all the back channel gossip about the illustrious figures of the Golden Age of Rome. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas can explain God and the World to you directly, without the filter of a translator’s interpretation. All you need to do is learn Latin.
And Greek, I might have added. Even if you don’t know Latin and Greek (yet – it’s never too late to start), there are translations and more than enough good old things in your native language. Just pick up an old book, and start travelling. . .
