Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Thoreau in the Bookstore, Again

Posted on January 14, 2016 | 1 comment

By Corinne H. Smith

Here’s another Thoreau-related story from my day job at the bookstore. This time I got my hands dirty.

The boss gave me a stack of boxes to go through. My job was to figure out what was in them and to catalogue the volumes into our database. “There might even be some Thoreau in there,” he said. He knew what to say to get my attention.

I lifted the lids and saw that each box contained bound volumes of old magazines. VERY old magazines. Most were from the 1800s, and I had never heard of them. He was right. There could be some Thoreau in here. We were certainly dealing with the right time period.

What fun it was, to handle and read some of these 19th-century issues! They were intended to bring enlightenment and entertainment to people living away from the east coast cities. Here was “The Cultivator: A Monthly Publication to improve the soil and the mind,” with its great mission and tagline. Next was “The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry, Legends, Wit, Romance & Art.” I guess it wanted to cover every base. “The Rural Repository” had an even higher goal. It was “Devoted to Polite Literature, such as moral and sentimental tales, biography, traveling sketches, notices of new publications, poetry, amusing miscellany, humorous and historical anecdotes, &c. &c.” Some of these periodicals included engravings of real or fictional scenes. I love this stuff.

I was especially eager to pick up and look through the three volumes of “The Daguerreotype.” Henry Thoreau famously sat for a daguerreotype session with Benjamin Maxham in Worcester in June 1856. I knew it had been merely a short-term career for Maxham, and that he left Worcester a few years later. Maybe I could learn more about him here. But no. The magazine only spanned the years 1847-1849, and it only copied articles from France, England, and Germany. And it had no illustrations at all. None! What a letdown.

I put aside the heaviest and the messiest but matching books for last. Almost all of these volumes had crumbling outer spines. A reddish-brown dust poofed away from the books and onto my hands. In many instances, both the front and back covers had separated from the spines. Some were tied with a black ribbon to stay together. Each book was about two inches thick. They were old, they were in bad shape, and they were substantial. But amazingly enough, the bindings were the only awful part. The pages they were protecting were quite clean and readable. They were almost as pristine as the days they were printed.

This set turned out to be the first 23 volumes of a periodical called “Southern Literary Messenger.” It was published in Richmond, Virginia, from August 1834 until June 1864, when the war intruded enough to stop it. Our run went from 1834-1856. This was a major publication, and it contained literature and reviews of work from both Northern and Southern authors.

Edgar Allan Poe contributed a number of essays, poems, and reviews to the “Messenger” in its opening years, and he even served as editor for a bit. I found “The Raven” in volume eleven, 1845. It wasn’t the poem’s first publication, but it was still an early one. I also read his review of James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics.” Poe didn’t mention how Lowell chastised Thoreau for resembling Emerson; but he did manage to diss both Lowell and Margaret Fuller simultaneously. (You can read a transcription of his critique at http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/slm49l01.htm.)

What could I find related to Thoreau here? Well, “Walden” came out in August 1854. Maybe there was a review …. And yes, wouldn’t you know it? In the September 1854 issue, I found a combination announcement and review of Thoreau’s second book.

I wonder how many Richmond residents ran down to the store of bookseller and publisher Adolphus Morris after reading this paragraph? How well did Henry’s words sell in the South, back then?

Alas, while this was a new-to-me find, it was not a new one to the realm of Thoreauviana. The text of this review appeared in The Thoreau Society Bulletin in 1954. And yet, it’s still fun to launch such treasure hunts when wading through drifts of 19th-century pages.

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, News and Events, The Roost

Second Snow

Posted on January 10, 2016 | Comments Off

Of Fire, Water, Air, Earth in the Winter Mountains

For, as after a rain there is a second rain in the woods, so after a light snow there is a second snow in the woods, as the wind rises. Thoreau, Journal, 12/17/51

So too in the mountains…when the wind rises.

It is almost as if some fire were burning north of Franconia Notch. The north wind into which I point smokes over the ridges and courses down like its cousin water; it is a Niagara of variable white pouring toward me, flying by above. I edge into a pullout, grab my camera, step out and climb some feet up the bank; now I can feel the snow’s tiny grains ticking on my face, hear them on my quickly-inadequate nylon shell. I click off a few hurried shots and retreat to the car, where soon the fire of the engine is shunted back to me by the heater. Too elemental out there to tarry, I think.

Still, I look up into the coursing air, and in the thicknesses and thinnesses of the snows, in their flap and veer, I see the turbulent, liquid quality of air.

The snowfall now on the move again was, like all thus far this winter, a minor one, an inch or two overnight, and I brushed it easily from surfaces; the early morning world was a still-life. This second snow, however, this reshuffling, has a cold edge to it.

I have come north for contact with what Henry Thoreau called the “unhandselled globe,” (Ktaadn, The Maine Woods) and, in a minor way, I get it more than once while watching the wind stir this “second snow” and fling it like veils of dust across the mountains that rise above. Especially when I step out into it.

Within this snow and behind it the mountains are both substantial and in motion, and I am little, but in no little awe.

Much of the cloudcap blowing from the summits is “second snow.”

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Meeting Thoreau at the Bookstore

Posted on January 5, 2016 | Comments Off

By Corinne H. Smith

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me.” ~ Thoreau, “Life Without Principle.”

In my work at a used bookstore, I happen upon references to Henry Thoreau on a semi-regular basis, often without warning. Last week he showed up three times. And in each instance, someone offered a unique interpretation of his words.

Thoreau emerges 3 times

The first came in a 1927 book called “Handmade Rugs” by Ella Shannon Bowles (1886-1975). Bowles was the author of a number of craft-related books in the early 20th century, including “Practical Parties,” “About Antiques,” and “Homespun Handicrafts.” Later she wrote several books based on geography and New Hampshire. How did she somehow bring Thoreau into her narrative about home-made rugs? Amazingly enough, in the final and concluding paragraph, where she wanted to emphasize how much of themselves the rug-makers put into their work:

Thoreau says the value of a thing is determined by the amount of life that goes into it. So home rug-making will live on, as far as the craftswoman expresses herself in the products of the rug hook, the needle, and the loom.

While this is a nice sentiment, I don’t believe it’s quite what Thoreau had in mind. The sentence Bowles was referring to was from the “Economy” chapter of Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Bowles had remembered the idea from the point of view of the creator, and not of the purchaser, as Thoreau had. These are slightly different takes, and both equally valid. But hardly the same. We also have to wonder how Bowles knew of and read Thoreau, since his circle of fame was still rather small in the 1920s. Perhaps being based in New England helped her.

The second time Thoreau came to me was in the fifth edition of “Much Loved Books: Best Sellers of the Ages,” by journalist and literary critic James O’Donnell Bennett (1870-1940). It too originated in 1927, with a 1932 library edition. It was a collection of 60 lengthy columns that Bennett wrote for The Chicago Daily Tribune. Here he extolled the virtues of select classics, including Walden. He practically tripped over his enthusiasm for Thoreau and his work:

Of Thoreau’s masterpiece two wonderful things are true –
No man having attentively read it is ever the same man again,
Second – Nobody ever wrote a book in our tongue like it.

And this was just the beginning. Bennett gushed over Thoreau and Walden for nine pages. He mentioned that he had visited the Concord Antiquarian Society, the predecessor to the Concord Museum. And he was quite familiar with the 20-volume set of Thoreau’s works that was published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1906, as well as Ellery Channing’s biography, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. I don’t believe I’ve read a more devoted tribute from someone from this time period. His concluding paragraph read:

He is the bonniest, gravest, honestest spirit in our literature, and his great book has the sunshine, the crisp snow, the bird notes, the morning light and the morning fragrance of Walden pond bound in with every one of its nearly 400 steadying, exhilarating, comforting pages. It lives and sings.

Wow! When Bennett died, he left his library of 7,000 volumes to The Tribune for use by the journalists. His funeral announcement in the paper said: “He liked to read random bits from such writers as Thoreau, Hazlitt, Tolstoy, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare, his personal literary gods.” Bennett sure had a good core group at his fingertips.

The final time Thoreau showed up at the bookstore last week, it was in conversation with a regular customer, whom I’ll call Earl. Earl is in his late 70s, and he likes to talk. When he brought three big, colorful books on European castles to the checkout desk, he told me he was saving up his money to make the trip across the ocean to see some of these castles. We chatted about travel and books and other random subjects. Earl is the kind of person who has been places and has read widely, and this was not the first time he and I had talked.

Somehow my interest in Henry Thoreau came out. Earl seemed pleasantly surprised at this news, probably because it turned the conversation in a different direction. He admitted to me that he had once read the book that he mistakenly called “On Walden Pond.” (See my earlier post about this phenomenon at https://thoreaufarm.org/2013/10/two-ponds-or-two-henrys-one-work/.) I chose not to correct him.

“Do you know what my favorite part was?” he asked.

I shook my head. With Earl, it could have been anything.

“My favorite part was when he said that you should dig deep. I liked that. I think this is what I’m doing with my castle research and with the other historical subjects I’m interested in. I’m really digging into them, and I’m enjoying it very much.”

I commended him on his research and his choices. At the same time, I marveled at the fact that out of the entire text of Walden, the one sentence that resounded most with Earl was: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Yet I had no doubt that this was exactly what Earl was doing.

Here were three different voices from three different sources and with three different interpretations. You never know what piece of Thoreau’s work people will take and what perspective they will have on it. I continue to be amazed at how far he continues to reach.

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Historic Preservation, Literature, Living Deliberately, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote, Walden