What’s On Your Bookshelf?
My wife and I have begun the process of de-cluttering our home. Going through old clothes is one thing, old books another. I have decided to take an hour or so every now and then to look over our various bookshelves…including the ones buried in the basement. You know…the ones that contain old text books from university, the books your kids left behind, that Britannica of which you were once so proud but that has, with the passage of time and the reconfiguring of space, become an historical oddity.
My wife felt that I could not be trusted alone with the books, that I would almost certainly be distracted by their charms and sooner rather than later go derelict on her. She was, as always, correct.
I found dozens of treasures and more than a few oddities. Here are just two, from our literary collection, to start things off.
Restoration and Augustan Poets: From Milton to Goldsmith. I would normally have avoided any anthology that included Dryden, but this one did have Milton and, most importantly, Alexander Pope. Pope was then and remains today one of my favorite writers, less so for his mock-heroic classic, The Rape of the Lock, and more so for his philosophical musings. From his Essay on Man and his Essay on Criticism come countless aphorisms for which, Literarian readers know, I have a weakness. The essays are the sources for countless gems that have today become almost clichéd: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing”; “To err is human, to forgive, divine”; and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.
The Restoration and Augustan periods also encompass the Graveyard Poets, the gloomy folk whose meditations on mortality, epitaphs and worms are now considered precursors to the Gothic novel. Unexpectedly – how did I miss it then? – one of the editors of the collection was a certain W.H. Auden.
Tucked demurely into a corner of one bookshelf was a tiny leather-bound book entitled The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq – Revised and Corrected by the Author (Richard Steele). To enjoy this, a little background is necessary. Isaac Bickerstaff Esq was a pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift. His biting satire was at its best when he took aim at almanac publisher John Partridge. Angry at Partridge’s swipes at the Church, “Bickerstaff” first predicted his nemesis’ demise, announced it publicly and finally published an elegy to his memory, though, all the while a much-beleaguered Partridge was still very much alive. Steele boosted the launch of his newspaper, The Tatler, by putting Bickerstaff on the masthead as editor. Swift did, in fact, contribute to The Tatler, but it was Steele who did most of the writing. Lucubrations is a collection of excerpts from The Tatler.
The book’s dedication is to The Right Honourable William Lord Cowper, Baron of Wingham. If the name seems familiar, that’s because Cowper was an Augustan poet. It’s a wonder how things come together.
Cowper was hardly a great poet and would never, on his own, have made my collection. His hymnizing, however, did produce the invariably misquoted “God moves in a mysterious way” line (from the Olney Hymns, ‘Light Shining out of Darkness’). Actually, his best line was “God made the country, and man made the town”. Cowper’s religious leanings led him to associate with John Newton who is best remembered for his classic hymn, Amazing Grace. That is as close as the troubled poet ever came to amazing or to grace.
There were other neat discoveries which will feed into future posts. Right now, however, I have to get back to ‘work’.
De-cluttering? Hmm… You could say that moving is forcing me into the same process, to a different result. I realized, when I called the movers, that I have more books than furniture. That’s not depressing (quite the contrary!), but the fact that I haven’t read so many of them fills me with regret. Sigh.