Grave Literature

My fiancée and I have recently started attending local estate auctions in order to get some nice furniture for our new home. At our first estate auction, I successfully bid on two boxes of antiquarian books (yeah, I know: not furniture...). The experience was quite different from what I’ve written on previously in regards to attending a book auction. At the estate auction, the choices in terms of books were far more limited; however, because fewer people there were interested in books at all (they were mostly bidding on the furniture, art, furnishings, and jewelry) the price was ridiculously reasonable. This week’s book is one of the items acquired for Tarquin Tar's Bookcase from my prevailing bid.

The book is a first edition of Churchyard Literature: A Choice Collections of American Epitaphs, with Remarks on Monumental Inscriptions and the Obsequies of Various Nations, written by John R. Kippax and published by the eminent firm S. C. Griggs and Company of Chicago in 1877. The book was printed by the Chicago firm of Blakely & Brown (founded in 1871 by Connecticut native Charles Franklin Blakely). A second edition was published by Singing Tree Press of Detroit in 1969, a third by Corner House of Williamstown, MA in 1978, and a fourth by Heritage Books of Bowie, MD in 1994.

Dealers online list the first edition as “collectible” and price it from between $18 and $63 (an association copy signed by the author is being sold for $125). In other words, even at its cheapest valuation, this one book (out of two boxes of approximately 40 books) is worth (at retail) about one-third of what I got the lot for at auction. At its highest valuation (sans autograph) it’s worth more than what I paid for the entire lot.

Kippax (1849-1922) was a member of a nineteenth-century archaeological society, which was his justification for authoring the book -- his first publication; he is perhaps better known, however, for his later interest in various fields of science.

The record of his publications suggests an eclectic range of interests over his lifetime. In 1880 Duncan Brothers of Chicago published Kippax’s A Hand-book of Diseases of the Skin and their Homeopathic Treatment (further editions from other publishers followed in 1884 and 1890) and in 1884 Gross & Delbridge of Chicago published his Lectures on Fevers: Delivered at the Chicago Homeopathic Medical College.

Homeopathy remained Kippax’s interest throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1910, however, he released a book titled Comets and meteors, and in 1914 G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York published his richly illustrated book on astronomy, The Call of the Stars: A Popular Introduction to a Knowledge of the Starry Skies. I’ve had difficulty finding good biographical information about John Kippax, but it seems from the history of his publications that he was a man of many different studies.

The book is bound in red cloth with some ornate black decorations on the cover and gilded decoration (now faded) on the spine. The pages measure 12.5cm x 18cm and are of a slightly heavy stock that has faded a bit with age. Preliminaries include four blank flyleaves (the first conjugate with the front pastedown), a frontispiece (graveyard scene before a church and the last three lines from Longfellow’s 1842 poem “The Goblet of Life”), the title page with copyright on the verso, the dedication (incorporating a quote from Robert Blair’s 1743 poem “The Grave”), the table of contents, and a two-page preface signed “J. R. K.” and dated “Oak Park, Nov. 5, 1876.” The pagination of the book silently incorporates everything from the title page onward, running [1]-[10].

The contents of the book include an Introduction on the history and aesthetics of graveyard epitaphs and obsequies (pp. 11-35); epitaphs on eminent personages (pp. 37-63); admonitory epitaphs (pp. 65-86); devotional epitaphs (pp. 87-102); adulatory, laudatory, and bombastic epitaphs (pp. 105-128); professional epitaphs (pp. 129-145); ludicrous, eccentric, and ridiculous epitaphs (pp. 147-165); punning and satirical epitaphs (pp. 167-176); miscellaneous epitaphs (pp. 177-198); and an index to names, places, and subjects in the book (pp. 199-213). Four blanks end the book.

The unusually large number of blanks at the start and finish of the book -- seemingly such a waste of paper -- perhaps were to encourage readers to jot down their own discoveries of interesting or moving graveyard literature. Having grown up in Salem, MA and wandered many an old and peculiar cemetery, I can recall coming across a number of haunting (and some humorous) inscriptions dating back to the 1600s. The examples that Kippax provides of what he terms “grave literature” are quite diverse, but the reader (well, at least, this reader) is drawn especially to the numerous examples of witty and humorous epitaphs (see the images throughout this post). The form of the genre -- pithy couplets that often have to stretch to rhyme with an odd last name -- makes it ripe for the set-up and delivery of punchlines, one-liners, and word-play. I suspect there’s also a certain element of catharsis in laughing in the presence of death; to mitigate, or at least manage, the haunting mystery of the inevitable demise that awaits us all, we take comfort in the macabre juxtaposition of the grave and the jest.

There are no reader’s marks in the copy, but it was evidently well-read: the outside of the spine has split toward the bottom, revealing the discarded paper used in the binding of the book (not enough text is visible to make out what precisely was used). There are a couple of penciled dealers’ marks on the recto and verso of the front flyleaf and in the lower inside corner of the penultimate flyleaf. The recto of the front fly also bears two stickers that offer a clue as to the book’s past. In the middle of the page is a simple bookplate bearing the name “H. H. Player”. I’ve found a gentleman named Henry H. Player who lived on Queen Street in Middlesex in England around 1847, but that may be too early a date for this book. Besides, I suspect this copy hasn’t left the United States.

In the lower inside corner of the same page there’s a store sticker for W. A. Butterfield of 59 Bromfield Street in Boston, MA. In addition to retailing books, Butterfield was a publisher from 1904 until at least 1919, specializing in literature (particularly Shakespeare and works related to the Bacon-Shakespeare lunacy) and the arts, nature, and local history. As a large majority of the epitaphs recorded in Kippax’s book are from the northeastern United States -- and New England in particular -- it would presumably have fit rather well into the store’s stock in the early years of the twentieth century.

"And now I sit and muse on what may be...": A First Illustrated Edition Longfellow Poem

This time of year sees high school and college graduations all around the country, and it was no different in our neck of the woods. Since so much attention is given to the graduates going through their rite of passage, I decided that with this week’s book I’d turn the attention back to the other players in this annual drama: the parents. The book is, once again, not technically part of my collection, though it does currently reside in Tarquin Tar’s Bookcase.

The book itself is actually a single poem, accompanied by 42 illustrations, and typographically stretched out to fill a whole volume. The poem is The Hanging of the Crane by the American literary icon Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and this was its first appearance in book format, published by the noted Boston firm of James Osgood in 1875 and printed by the Welch, Bigelow & Co. University Press. It had first been published in the March 28, 1874 issue of the New York Ledger, though Longfellow had probably written it for private circulation amongst his acquaintances before that date because it was only through the intervention of his friend Samuel Ward that Robert Bonner, proprietor of the Ledger, bought the manuscript from the poet for the staggering sum of three thousand dollars (nearly $57,000 in modern currency). Today the Osgood edition is not extremely rare, though it is quite collectible; most dealers value it at approximately $40 to $90 (or $200-$400 if signed by the poet). 

The poem appeared in many later editions and anthologies, perhaps the most significant reprinting being the 1907 Houghton Mifflin edition to celebrate the centennial of Longfellow’s birth (Houghton Mifflin was the firm that Osgood’s company eventually became; Osgood itself had previously been the legendary Ticknor and Fields, publishers of nearly every nineteenth century American author of note, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau). The 1907 edition included illustrations by Florence Swan that were based on the Longfellow’s house on Craigie Street in Cambridge, where Longfellow himself hung his own fireplace crane in 1843.

This copy was rebound after the turn of the century for an early owner, and while some collectors would consider it therefore less valuable I find the binding -- green cloth boards with green leather corners and spine, with gilded edges and elaborate tooling and marbled paper on the inside -- both tasteful and elegant. The rebinding was done by J. W. Meyer & Company, a New York bindery located at 147 West 24th Street in the first decades of the twentieth century and that had gone into business in 1905. Knowing the importance of original bindings, Meyer’s craftsman preserved the original leather exterior of the first binding -- rich green all over with sumptuous illustrations and gilded decoration -- and pasted the cover, spine, and back onto extra leaves at the back of the book. Overall, the book is in excellent condition.

The pages measure 15cm x 21.5cm and, with the exception of the leaves inserted by the second binder (two at the front and five at the back), are of a heavy, almost card-like, stock with brightly gilded edges. Providing a collation of the book is made more complicated than normal for several reasons: it looks as if the sheets were not printed in the customary fashion but were printed with two conjugate leaves (that is, one oblong sheet) impressed at a time and then quired together into two large gatherings; this, however, does not account for the rebinding, which could have resulted in a reconfiguration to the original gatherings (and may explain the apparent loss of a leaf at the start of the book).

Many dealers online describe the book’s construction as octavo, but this seems merely conjectural to me. The pagination of the book reveals that an initial leaf was apparently lost in the rebinding: after the two leaves inserted by the binder, the preliminaries run [iii]-x, with [i-ii] as the missing initial leaf. After the preliminaries there are two unnumbered leaves and then the start of the poem proper, which runs [15]-64. The inserted leaves at the end are also unpaginated. This is the first time I’ve seen a book in which the miniscule Roman numerals used to paginate the preliminaries are continued numerically with the Arabic numerals used to paginate the book’s contents; I don’t know if this was part of this book’s unique design or a regular trait of the printer or publisher’s.

There are no marginalia in the contents of the book, though there is one instance of an owner’s annotation on the recto of the second inserted leaf at the front. A neat italic hand, using dark brown ink, has gifted the book with an amusing little inscription:

November 5th, [19]58

To Finn & Esther and their brood!

A token of thanks for being a real live family for me -- 

An old book for your new home from the boy who wouldn’t stay for dinner, but did stay a month plus.

As Ever

Mike better known as “George”

In addition to the inscription, Mike apparently also removed a previous owner’s bookplate from inside the front cover, where the residue of the label’s glue is still faintly visible.

The book’s preliminaries include a plate showing a dinner party, facing (through an intervening tissue leaf) the title page (with the copyright notice on the verso), followed by four pages of a “List of Illustrations” giving the illustrations’ caption, artist, and page number; after this there is an illustrated half-title followed by the poem itself, divided into its customary 7 sections. All of the engravings were done by the English emigrant poet, political essayist, Chartist, and artist William James Linton and by artist, book designer, and newspaper man A. V. S. Anthony, who also designed the book and supervised its printing. I assume that Anthony was brought into the project by Portsmouth, NH native poet and novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who met Anthony when the two were working at the  New York Illustrated News (Aldrich as editor and Anthony as art manager), though Anthony had a closet relationship with Osgood’s firm in his own right, working as an editor on a youth newspaper the firm published and providing engravings for other books, including John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1870 Ballads of New England. Aldrich is significant because, according to an account given by Aldrich in the preface to the 1907 centennial edition, he was the cause of the poem’s composition:

One morning in the spring of 1874, Mr. Longfellow came to the little home in Pinckney Street [in Boston], where we had set up housekeeping in the light of our honeymoon. As we lingered a moment at the dining-room door, Mr. Longfellow turning to me said, “Ah, Mr. Aldrich, your small, round table will not always be closed. By and by you will find new young faces clustering about it; as years go on, leaf after leaf will be added, until the time comes when the young guests will take fight, one by one, to build nests of their own elsewhere. Gradually the long table will shrink to a circle again, leaving two old people sitting there alone together. This is the story of life, the sweet and pathetic story of the fireside. Make an idyl of it. I give the idea to you.” Several months afterward, I received a note from Mr. Longfellow in which he expressed a desire to use this motif in case I had done no thing in the matter. The theme was one peculiarly adapted to his sympathetic handling, and out of it grew “The Hanging of the Crane”. 

Anthony and Linton’s engravings are based on the work of two artists: painter and book illustrator (often used by Osgood’s firm, including for their 1875 edition of Whittier’s “Mabel Martin”) Mary A. Hallock, whose work supplied 28 of the plates, and the great American landscape painter Thomas Moran, whose work supplied 14. Not surprisingly, nearly all of the landscape and nature illustrations are by Moran; all of the interior and portrait illustrations are by Hallock. Besides that art, the book includes numerous emblematic and ornamental “vignettes” drawn by illustrator (and Civil War veteran, wounded June 14, 1863 during the 133rd Regiment of New York Volunteers attack on Port Hudson, LA) John J. Harley.

The “sweet and pathetic poem of the fireside” (to use the Riverside edition’s description), as suggested by Aldrich’s anecdote, centers around the plight of the empty-nester. It takes as its core motif the old house-warming custom of installing the “crane” (the hinged metal arm that held cooking pots over the fire) into the fireplace; the celebration of the hanging of the crane was symbolic, usually the last preparation before moving in and transforming the house (to use the cliché) into a home. For those of you interested in reading it, the full text is available online.

According to Alma Bount, in her Intensive Studies in American Literature, the structure and evocative mood of the poem is elegantly simple:

Part I is introductory, and represents the poet as remaining after the guests have spoken their good wishes and departed, and as sitting before the fire to dream about the coming life of the family just established. The other six parts contain the six pictures of home life that drift through the mind of the dreamer, and carry the founders of the family in his imagination from youth to old age. The table is represented as the gathering place, partly form the suggestion of Longfellow’s words to Aldrich, and partly because the entire family meets more often at the table than anywhere else. Each picture is preceded by a prelude of six lines. This breaking of the poem by preludes would not be good in a continuous narrative or description, but is an excellent device for keeping separate a series of six pictures scattered over a period of fifty years. (164) 

[The] closing part is remarkable for the way in which it gathers up the earlier parts, and rounds the poem into rhetorical completeness.... The figure in [the final] lines refers to the apparent endlessness of the home the parents have founded, one generation following another in their imagination, through ages to come. (167) The poem as a whole is quiet and meditative -- it is a series of six dream pictures. The poet writes tenderly, as one who has lived through these scenes and loves the memory of them. This poem would earn for Longfellow the title of “Poet of the Home and the Fireside,” if he had no other claim upon it. The poem is true to life, inspires the imagination, and pleases the artistic sense by its beauty of expression. (167-8)