Diderot's Dangerous Idea

In the late 1740s, bookseller and printer, Andre Le Breton, approached Denis Diderot to undertake a French translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.

Instead, Diderot decided to produce an original work that would encompass all branches of knowledge and challenge conventional ways of thinking. From the outset, the project was viewed as a threat to ecclesiastical and aristocratic power, in that it advocated religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and industry. The first volume appeared in 1751, but in 1752 a court order was issued to cease the project. With the help of sympathetic supporters, Diderot was able to continue work in secret, and a second decree was issued in 1759 in an effort to suppress the work. Despite continual harassment and loss of friends and associates, Diderot carried on, with the final volumes of the 28 volume set finally being distributed to subscribers in 1772.
The photograph inserted above shows the title page of the first volume. This volume is part of a complete first edition set from the collection of about 400 rare books, that until recently were held at the Fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The collection has been moved to the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University, where it will be maintained in the archive and be made available to researchers.

Organ of Love

The Valentine's postcard pictured below dates from 1908. It comes from a collection of personal papers held in the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University, the official repository of historically significant records pertaining to life and times in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Its seemingly unromantic caption reads: "Take back your heart. I ordered liver." Whatever personal message the sender was trying to get across to the recipient may be gleaned to some extent by the handwritten line on the card's front border and from the text on the back of the card. However, what caught my attention was the curious wordplay on internal organs, that was obviously penned by a commercial copywriter and considered worthy of mass production as a greeting card.

St. Valentine's Day was instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, on February 14th, 496, in commemoration of a priest martyred in Rome. Perhaps due to its pagan association with Cupid, or possibly because it had become such a secular and commercial phenomenon, the official observance of this day was removed from the religious calendar in 1969. The first association of St. Valentine with romantic love can be traced to Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fools, written in 1382 in celebration of the first anniversary of the engagement of Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. However, given the date of the engagement, Chaucer's reference to St. Valentine appears to be linked to the observance of the feast day of Valentine of Genoa on May 2nd. How the linkage between romance and the feast day of Valentine of Rome on February 14th was established is not known, but it is often spuriously linked to Lupercalia, a Roman fertility festival, that was celebrated in the middle of February.
Personalized Valentine's greetings date back at least until the middle of the 18th century, with commercial card production starting in England in the early 1800s. The mass production of Valentine's cards was started around 1850 in the United States, thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of Esther Howland, the daughter of a stationer in Worcester, Massachusetts. The addition of candy and flowers appears to have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, as other sectors capitalized on the marketing opportunity established through the greeting cards.
What exactly is the message of this card?
In ancient Greek philosophical writings, as well as in early physiological works, the liver is associated with the dark emotions (wrath, jealousy, and greed). Dating back to ancient Egypt, the heart is seen as the seat of truth and the soul. So, is our seated diner rejecting love and asking for anger? Is this some curious variation on the old chestnut that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach? Is this a card that a man would give to a woman, or a woman to a man? Given the time period, is it logical to assume that this is the man's wife? Otherwise, what is she doing feeding him? Whatever the intended meaning might have been, in today's world, a card like this would be more likely to conjure up images of Hannibal Lecter, than it would to evoke some expression of love.

One of a Kind

To my knowledge, this is the only photograph of my paternal grandmother Mary Jane Baillie/Campbell/Cannon, with her four children, their respective spouses, and her two grandchildren (one of whom is me).

I have no idea what the occasion was, but this photograph was taken some time in 1957, in the living room of my uncle Jack Cannon, my father's half-brother, who is seated at the far left of the picture. To his right is his sister, my father's half-sister, Mary Cannon, who never married. Third from the left is Doug Liddle, who was married to my father's sister Jess Campbell, and next to him is his son Doug, my only cousin on my father's side.
In the middle is my grandmother, who by this time was a widow twice over. To her right is my father's sister Jess, and to her right is Jack's wife Alberta. At the far right is my father William Campbell, and to his left is my mother Claire Elizabeth McLeod. As you might have guessed, I am seated in front of my parents, looking rather bemused by the proceedings.
I have had no contact with my cousin Doug in over forty years, and as far as I know, with the exception of my mother and he and I, all the others pictured here have passed away.

End of Year, New Beginning

As 2011 draws to a close, I am getting rid of stuff and packing in preparation for moving to a smaller house with more land, in a more rural area. The move will only add about five minutes to my drive to work, and it will be nice to be surrounded by more trees.

Of course, apart from the turmoil of the physical move, changing houses brings with it thoughts of changing other things. I have not been as successful with this blog as I had hoped. So, my pledge to myself is that I will post to this blog at least once every month, even if the posting is only a status update.

What Makes a Book Valuable?

I was also asked recently about the most valuable book in our library. Unlike the question about the oldest book, the answer to this question is far more complicated to determine.

 
Among the seemingly most valuable books in the library is a complete run of the Gentleman's Magazine (pictured above), from 1731 to 1868. The age, condition, completeness, and relative availability (or lack thereof) of this set all contribute to its value. In more blatant financial terms, in some cases, individual articles sell for thousands of dollars, while individual issues or volumes can sell for a few hundred dollars each.

With respect to individual works, our library also possesses a copy of Robert Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra, published in London in 1753, a copy of which recently sold in New York for $7500. As is obvious from the picture below, this volume is a precursor of what we would now call a coffee table book, with this one actually being big enough and heavy enough to serve as a coffee table.

Not only is this a big book, but it also contains some big surprises, like the engraving illustrated below. Much of the value of this work is associated with its existence as an expression of material culture.

With both of these examples, an insurance adjuster will want to know the replacement cost, and a rare book dealer will want to know how much a collector is willing to pay for such a work. What does a librarian want to know?

For that answer, we turn to the writings of Indian mathematician and librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (d. 1972), recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern library science. Among his five laws of library science, the first three are: books are for use, every reader, his or her book, and every book its reader. If our copies of the Gentleman's Magazine and The Ruins of Palmyra sit on the shelf and are never used by anyone, are they of any value at all?

Old Books, New World

Recently I was asked what the oldest book in our library was. I didn't have an immediate answer, nor was I sure how to go about finding out. I employed a variety of search techniques, including browsing through the rare book stacks, all the while focusing on religious books, which I figured would be the most likely candidates. Finally I came across a small book printed in 1641. I can't say for certain that this is the oldest book in the collection, but it is definitely one of the oldest.
While we might refer to it as the "Passionate Remonstrance" for short, its extended title is, with some liberties in spelling and capitalization, "The passionate remonstrance made by his holiness in the conclave at Rome: Upon the late proceedings, and great covenant of Scotland, etc., with a reply of cardinal De Barbarini in the name of the Roman clergy." The work is bound, as indicated on the title page, "together with a letter of intelligence from the apostolic nuncio (now residing in London) to Pope Urban VIII."

This 80-page satire, which vilifies the Scots for turning away from the Church of Rome, is usually attributed to the English pamphleteer Richard Overton (d. 1664). I had never heard of the book or the author before, but then I do not study the 17th-century Scottish Church. In my efforts to discover something more about the book, I found that a print-on-demand version, based on a digitization of a 1646 printing, was available from Lightning Source through Amazon for under fifteen dollars. In this brave new world of universal access, knowing what I know now, can I really justify keeping my copy on the shelf?

Libraries, Donations, and Collectors

I was recently flipping through the final volume of the New Colophon (1950), a sadly short-lived quarterly for book collectors, when I came across this image of a label in one of the articles.

The label had been designed by Elmer Adler, a Pynson Printer and the originator of the quarterly in 1930, for insertion into books donated to the libraries at the University of Michigan. The article by Randolph G. Adams, who, at the time, was the Director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, was entitled: "How Shall I Leave My Books to a Library?"
Like the majority of articles in the quarterly, this one is full of historical and literary tidbits, anecdotes, and asides, of great interest and amusement to bibliophiles and, of course, of no small interest to many librarians. One particularly entertaining quip that caught my attention, as we are in the midst of a major renovation at my library, states: "Librarians are, after all, people, and in recent years even the architects who design libraries have taken to consulting them."
The bulk of the article is devoted to an explication of six rules for potential book donors, the first of which is to select the proper library, whether public, private, academic, or what have you. Next is to select the appropriate librarian, here tellingly referred to as the curator - the one who will cherish and protect your books. Third is to consult a lawyer and "get your wishes translated into the cold language of the law."
The fourth rule, and the one that provides the context for the label pictured above, concerns the proper use and exploitation of donated works, with an emphasis on two points - adding new works, and eliminating duplicate holdings. Regarding the latter, Adams suggests that any potential curator must possess adequate "knowledge of provenance, binding, and association." However, the cautionary label suggests that this is not always the case, and the label was deliberately inserted in books not only to give librarians pause but to give potential donors a sense of comfort. Risk always abounds and as Adams observes: "There is no protection in a rare book library against disloyalty or stupidity on the part of the staff."
Coverage of the final two rules is woven into the discussion of the other four, emphasizing the timeliness of donating (don't leave the handling of such a delicate and weighty matter to the executors of your estate), and the importance of providing an adequate monetary gift to facilitate "the intelligent arrangement, handling and administration of your collection," even to the extent of "endowing your curator."