Bibliophagist

No doubt a qualified alienist would comment on the fact that my bookselling operation is drawn in large part to obscure controversial pamphlets, religious tracts and amateur versifiers — and that I have chosen to set up shop in a space of similarly forbiddng opacity. Even with the nifty new shop sign mounted beside the door, I worry a bit that my store-front is the architectural equivalent of Historical Collections in Relation to the Church of Christ, and to the Rise and Progress of the Benevolent Institutions in the United States and Other Countries (Pittsburgh 1844).

What, we ask with a suitably stem-winding rhetorical flourish, is perhaps the lengthiest thread to run its crooked course through the rich tapestry that is our Grand Republic? One would do worse than to claim for this place in the national character the twinned pursuits of the production of ardent spirits (and kindred fermented beverages) and the consumption of same.

I am in mind of such spirits even at this early hour because I had been following with a certain professional interest yesterday the fate of a copy of Samuel M’Harry’s The Practical Distiller (Harrisburgh, Penna., 1809) at Pacific Book Auction Galleries (the acution house known to some in the trade as P-BAG, a perhaps affectionate echo of another San Francisco institution that itself boasts a certain association with pursuits Gambrinian, the Washbag). This copy of The Practical Distiller, cellophane tape repairs and all, was knocked down for $4600 — a practical measure of its scarcity in the trade and one which left my hopeful absentee bid panting in a ditch as the price raced ever upward, bearing its banner with strange device.

Much has been written about the use of distillation and fermentation as a means of preserving food on the frontier, viz. the itinerant Swedenborgian nurseryman John Chapman who sold his wares in order that the pioneers of the Old Northwest would have the means to produce hard cider. The farmers of Western Pennsylvania, of course, had also long converted their excess grain into more portable spirituous form — their unhappiness with the taxes upon such production leading to the first test of the strong federal government in the new republic.

Of course, the desire to bring beverages other than branch water to the frontier did not always meet with unalloyed success, as those involved in the Tombigbee Association would find. This project began with a Congressional land grant in 1817 and aimed to settle Bonapartist exiles in Alabama to produce wine and olive oil, though as as Thomas Pinney notes in his History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989),

the whole thing was grandiose, impetuous, and vague–grandiose because it was seriously maintained that the French would supply the nation’s wants in wine; impetuous because the would-be planters began settling even before they knew where they were to settle, with disastrous consequences, as will be seen; vague because no one knew anything about the actual work proposed or had any notion of ways and means. The idea that the veterans of the greatest army ever known, men who had been officers at Marengo, Austerlitz, Moscow, and Waterloo, would turn quietly to the American wilderness to cultivate the vine and the olive, emblems of peace, has a kind of Chateaubriandesque poetry about it, but little to recommend it to practice.

After these ersatz Cincinnatuses settled the village of Demopolis, they were forced to move over a land dispute and settle the town Aigleville. The French succumbed to fevers and the European vines succumbed to the Alabama weather; within ten years the project had washed up and any remaining settlers had turned to cotton.

M’Harry is admirably grounded in local conditions for his recipes, though, noting the suitability of corn, turnips and pumpkins in the distillation process. He includes some recipes for wine as well, though for much of the early history of America the common man would in general eschew the fruit of the vine for his more homely spirits. Indeed, Peter Buell Porter, the Secretary of War for John Quincy Adams, argued in 1829 in a letter to namby-pamby critics in the House of Representatives that, in effect, an army marches [or perhaps staggers along] on its ration of liquor:

The practice of indulging in the use of spirituous liquors is so general in this country, that there is not, it is believed, one man in four, among the laboring classes, who does not drink, daily, more than one gill; and it is from these classes that our Army is recruited. To subject, therefore, persons of such habits, at once, to a total deprivation of a beverage, to the free use of which they have long been habituated, would not only impair their health, but induce them to resort to means for gratifying their propensity which a moderate indulgence of it by the Government might prevent.

Such benevolent paternalism seems perhaps out of keeping with our image of the frontier as a place of rugged individualism, but I am here to provide the raw material of history and not to judge it.

An unnamed source in the rare book-industrial complex has brought three additional library blogs to my attention, each one worth adding to the blogroll. (I maintain my correspondent’s anonymity if only to assure my readers that The Bibliophagist shall guard the privacy of all who direct their correspondence, emails and billets doux to my care unless given explicit permission to blow your cover.)

The Beinecke Library maintains an on-line cabinet of curiosities, amply illustrated. Photographic collage from H.D., puzzle blocks, playing cards, and at least one reminder of the fitful diffusion of cultural capital across the porous borders of France and Belgium. (Georges Remi first launched the better-known boy journalist Tintin in a Belgian newspaper in 1929. Was this French counterpart intended to exploit contemporary popularity?)

Another literary figure who has elicited nearly as much respect as Tintin over the years is the illustrious Samuel Johnson. One cataloguer is going through the Hyde Collection of Johnson and Johnsoniana at the Houghton Library “one book at a time” and shares the results with the world.

(I note as an aside that Mary Hyde’s second husband, David, Viscount Eccles, was the source of the remark on the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco that has since served as something of a foundation document of this bookselling concern: “You see so many books here that everyone has forgotten.”)

Rounding out this trio is the Rare Book Blog at Princeton, a look at some fairly remarkable recent acquisitions and other library news. The blog includes a “vivid example of how the frugal decision of a bookbinder provides multiple evidence about the survival of texts” (with a fine image).

One great thing about the perhaps inherently easy-going rhetorical stance of online publications is that these blogs allow the less formal “cabinet of curiosity” format to return to the fore when writing about books and collections. It’s an old saw of collecting that the relationship between the reader (or collector) and the book as an object (rather than or perhaps in addition to the book as a text) is often what creates that gee-whiz frisson of possession or at least proximity. This is part of what creates value for books, value being a vexed question that unspools back at least as far as that noted darling of the bookseller set, Walter Benjamin.

(Bookseller and author Larry McMurtry in fact writes about book scouting in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen [1999], where he admits that the pursuit does not lend itself to compelling literary treatment. And while there is sometimes a correlation between my emotional response to finding a particularly interesting rare book and the financial advantages of selling same, the satisfactions of unearthing, say, a presentation copy of The Deserted Bride in a jumbled book shop in Cambridge, Mass., are not necessarily the stuff of paperback thrillers, pace Arturo Perez-Reverte.)

I am pleased to announce the availability of a new catalogue, “Sweet Singers (American Verse, 1806-1964),” a miscellany of 183 items available as a PDF via email. (I do not plan to offer a paper version of this catalogue.)

The authors included in this list range from Chauncey Lee, whose 1804 paraphase of the entire book of Job was intended to divert tender minds from the temptations of German Romanticism, to May Margaretta Duffee, whose 1945 epic Thou Shalt Not Covet treats of the triple murder of an Ohio family at the hands of a hog farmer down on his luck.

A number of the works issue from small presses around the Midwest, and while the aesthetic merits of many of these authors may be open to question, their zeal to follow the muse is not. As the bibliographer of fugitive verse Wynot R. Irish has noted, “the free spirit back of these queer poems is one that a nation will suffer to die at its peril.”

If you would like a copy sent along, please contact me directly via email — garrett [at] bibliophagist [dot] com [making the appropriate substitutions to the email address as necessary].