On the Virtues of…

In Praise of Used Books

/ L. R. Smith / 2 Comments

When I was in graduate school at University of Toronto, Trinity College’s annual Friends of the Library book sale was an event well worth the price of admission, and by admission I mean the nominal fee one had to pay to get in early on the first day. Some years were better than others depending on what one was hunting for. If the right person was downsizing their library, it was pure gold. One year, I nabbed both a volume I of the English Historical Documents (Whitelock) and the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the Shorter Cambridge Medieval Histories and and early edition of Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England. No matter what the year, the EETS (Early English Text Society) volumes on offer never seemed to be what I needed, and I was not in a position to say, “Good Lord, a mere $30 for Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love? But of course!” It’s hard to justify building up one’s library of Middle English devotional literature if that is not one’s focus.

Much as I love used books, it is not unheard of for them to make my thoughts drift to hellfire and damnation. I once loaned a copy I had of a textbook to a student whom I knew to be in a tough financial spot. “Return it to me at the end of the semester,” I said, never imagining that I needed to include some gentle admonition that the use of vivid pink highlighter in someone else’s books was not the done thing. Who uses highlighter on someone else’s book, let alone their professor’s?!  When the book was returned ruined and without apology, I consigned the textbook to the dumpster and the student to Terrace 2 of Purgatory with the indolent and unshriven. Then, there was the student to whom I loaned Frank Barlow’s wonderful book on the Godwins and that little wretch never returned it! I love Barlow. I love the Godwins. I loved that damn book. It’s a very, very, very good thing I could not remember to which student I loaned it because s/he would have been consigned (vengefully and immoderately) to the seventh ring of nether hell with the thieves. Admittedly those were my books, but the latter was “used” when the student decided to keep it and the former was most definitely used (and abused) when I got it back.

I am not a fan of errant ink in books neither my own nor other people’s. That is not to say that I am adverse to writing in books. The margins of my books are littered (a word that probably captures the true value of my comments and observations) with comments in pencil—fine, tiny pencil—that can be erased should I regret, or think better of a comment. The one exception to my “no ink” rule is in inscriptions. I love finding a used book with an interesting name and place and, if I’m lucky, date. Something about that little trio turns the proverbial tables. It is no longer the book coming into my possession, but rather that I am entering into the book’s history much as when one meets a new friend who naturally has a life that preexists your acquaintance. Something about that attendant past stays with me as I read, and I sometimes feel I enter a sort of conversation with a book’s past owners.

So, on the odd occasions when I pick up the ancient volume of Longfellow I inherited from my parents, I read with one “Mr. H. H. Kennedy” who clearly wrote with a dip pen and whose rather 19th-century style of handwriting suggests that he may have purchased the book for the $1.00 it cost when it was printed in 1882. Longfellow, I must admit, it not generally my tipple. I’m much more likely to spend an hour imbibing from one of the two volumes I have of Michael Drayton’s poetry, in which pursuit, “ROGERS” keeps me company. While there is no “Mr.” on the page to certify this assumption, there is something indefinably masculine about the confident surname smack dab in the center of the front page. Towards the bottom, city and date place the self-possessed Rogers in New York, February 1, 1954. I like to think of him sitting in Bryant Part to read Drayton after he’s spent a lovely morning in the Morgan Library & Museum studying Assyrian seals.

It is perhaps only right that a trilogy of saga-esque novels would have a more complicated history than volumes of poetry. My three volumes of Sigrid Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter (Knopf 1946) each have two facing book plates from each of their previous owners. “EACH BOOK IS A NEW ADVENTURE” proclaims one bookplate which bears a picture of a knight charging out from the covers of a book. The bottom of the bookplate reads, “Ex Libris Marion G. Burns”. If the style of this first bookplate suggests a young reader, the handwriting does not. Marion wrote her name in clean, simply written large and small capitals. (I like the way she does her ‘A’.) It has style without being self-conscious. I think I would have liked Marion. The bookplate on the facing front page contains a picture of a ruinous Greek temple on a seaside cliff. “Mildred Knowles” in a handwriting with rather swooping (but not round) capitals. Under her name, Mildred conscientiously wrote “from Kathy – Christmas 1986”. Something about the second bookplate that makes me think that it is only Marion who reads with me; only Marion who thought deeply about Kristin’s life and experiences, and whose heart was wrung as mine is by these tales. I do not feel the same about Mildred. There’s just something about the self-consciousness of the bookplate of hers that niggles at me. Indeed, I wonder (without any justification whatsoever) if she even read the books. I likely do her a great injustice and have probably earned myself time in…. Oh, what ring do slanderers go to? Is it Purgatory or the Inferno? Bother.

More recently, I plunged over the metaphysical cliff in the wake of John Donne. My purchase of Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford, 1952) came with a inscription in silvery blue ink: “R. M. Heckstall-Smith Sidney Sussex College Cambridge”. It actually took me a little while to make sense of the signature, but when I finally did, I kept thinking, “That name looks really quite familiar.” And so, while I do not usually google the names of my books’ previous owners, I did on this occasion. Now, when I pick up this book, I cannot help but smile at the thought of a young, undergraduate version of Dick Heckstall-Smith reading metaphysical poetry with me. Perhaps the young jazz saxophonist only bought the book for a course, but I like to think it was more than that. I like to think that he picked up our book every now and then over the years of an innovative career. Perhaps some poem by Vaughn or Donne provided a spark that required some musical expression from him. There’s no way of knowing, of course, but it’s lovely to think of the book spinning out worlds beyond itself and the words on the page shedding denotation and slipping into unbounded music.

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On the Virtues of: Dictionaries

/ L. R. Smith / 3 Comments

My introduction to dictionaries was early and paradoxical. They were simultaneously sources of frustration and illumination, roadblock and delight in one.

“Mommy! How do you spell [ɪntræktəbəl]?”

“Look it up in the dictionary, dear.”

This was the inevitable (and to my mind idiotic) answer to my frequent badgering about how to spell things I’d overheard.

“Mommy! How do you spell [prɛkoʊʃʌs]?You did not just say that. St. Denis

“Look it up in the dictionary, dear.”

“Mommy! How do you spell [ɪnkorɪd͡ʒɪbəl]?

“Look it up in the dictionary, dear.”

“Mom! Why is the vowel in /bɝp/ different from the one in /wɝm/ when they sound the same?”

[Readers are encouraged to insert their own heartfelt sigh of despair, for my mother, alas, did not share my delight in words like ‘burp’ and ‘worm’. Her sigh of despair was the soundtrack of my young life.]

I was equally despairing. After all, How the dickens was a gal supposed to look up a word she couldn’t spell? Grumbling, I’d start thumbing through our massive Webster’s. I would inevitably get distracted from the original word by something that seemed even better. I made the acquaintance of ‘inexorable’ that way and took great satisfaction in that discovery. Few things are as gratifying as finding just the right word, and ‘inexorable’ was the perfect word to describe my mother’s standards for her daughters (not that I said so out loud).

In the years since, I’ve collected and been given various dictionaries. In graduate school, my friend Charlotte blessed me with the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and it remains an enduring delight. The definitions are as trenchant as the words are diverting. Take, for example. buss beggar which means a superannuated fumbler, whom none but beggars will suffer to kiss them. Frankly, I’m more likely to use “superannuated fumbler,” but that’s just me.  

Some years after those early perambulations through Webster, I made the acquaintance of a dictionary that would change everything for me. Clark Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary seemed like a humble enough book when I purchased it for an introductory course in Old English Language and Literature. I had no idea. I’d gone into grad school with the intention of doing Middle English literature, but that class in Old English changed everything. Here was English without any of that silly French influence! Here was English unadulterated by that ridiculous phenomenon called the Great Vowel Shift! Here was the perfect language for blissful maceration. [Read that sentence carefully, please, and then think Latin to macerate.]

Clark Hall in hand, I’d sit down to translate a passage of poetry and get lost jotting comments in the marginalia. Some words just tickled my fancy. What is there not to love about a word like offrungspic or “sacrificial bacon”? It makes you hungry and makes you laugh at one and the same time. Huzzah. Who among us hasn’t needed a word for “decoy reindeer” (staelhran)? And now, you have it. Then, there’s feaxfang, I believe it says a lot about a culture if it needs a noun for “seizing or dragging by the hair.”

The inside back cover of my Clark Hall soon became a mass of scribbles as I made notes of the words that were especially evocative. [It may help to know for what follows that: æ is the letter ‘ash’ and, conveniently, the vowel sound is that of ‘ash’ or /æʃ/; þ and ð are respectively the letters ‘thorn’ and ‘eth,’ and represent the ‘th’ sound both unvoiced /θ/ as in ‘smooth’ or voiced /ð/ as in ‘this’.] Here’s a sampling from the inside of that original cover:

gnyrnwracu – revenge, enmity

searocræft – treachery, art, engine, instrument of torture

wiþersaca – adversary, enemy

dierne – hidden, secret, remote (but also deceitful)

wyrmsele – hall of serpents (hell)

scinna – spectre, illusion, evil spirit,

hræwic – place of corpses

snædingsceap – sheep for slaughter

beorcholt– birch wood

twigærede  – cloven

ongalend – enchanter

Some words were discovered in getting lost in Clark Hall, others in context. Either way the words themselves began to weave bits of a history about me. The final consonantal slap of hræwic following that initial breathy expiration spread a battle-field before my eyes. Gnyrnwracu and twigærede became the warp and woof of a story of patient duplicity and vengeance.  Since, I’d never thought of writing novels (poetry was more my thing), the scribbling continued, and the images roiled, but I had not thought of going anywhere with it.

Then, one night after too many pots of Earl Grey and far, far too much Latin (probably papal bulls – I remember those being particularly excruciating), I lay sprawled upon the aforementioned Charlotte’s bed (beneficent giver of the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue). When her fiancé came in to say good night, Charlotte (who has a rather imperial bearing) said, “Tell Liesl a bedtime story.”  Now, good friends are a blessing, but good friends who can tell whopping good stories are a treasure. That night Richard made up a fantastic story about a “dragon whose tongue was so wide that trucks could drive both ways on it.”

While the dragon of my histories is a smaller dragon than the one of Richard’s tale, the beast was inspired by his creation, and terribly inconvenient it has been! I’ve never been interested in writing fantastical stories. My stories were to be alternate history, not fantasy. So, it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to my characters when a dragon began to wrap its claws around their fortunes. Well, I blame Richard. He opened that can of wyrms although I suppose, if I’m to be honest, I’m the one who made the creature a wyrmsele.