Last Leverett Book

It’s been a quiet month here at the Bookcase, but that’s because it’s been quite a hectic one in real life. The planning for our wedding is in full gear, we’ve been traveling to visit family and get some vacation in, and we’ve moved out of our small apartment and into a large house!

Our move has taken us out of the tiny town of Leverett and into the neighboring small town of Montague. This week, therefore, a brief post on a book that is not particularly rare or valuable, but that nonetheless has special sentimental value: the last book I rescued from the Leverett Book Shed before we left town.

The book is a well-kept copy of Polly Oliver’s Problem: A Story for Girls, written by Kate Douglas Wiggin and published by Houghton, Mifflin, and Company of Boston. The book was printed in electrotype by The Riverside Press of Cambridge. The first edition appeared in 1893, but my copy is dated 1895; I can find no comparable listings for a 1895 edition on dealers’ websites or in the usual online catalogues. The book itself was not tremendously rare (it went through further U.S. editions in 1894 and 1896, as well as a U.K. edition in 1896), though my copy is prominently numbered as the “twenty-fourth thousand” printed.

Wiggin (1856-1932; right) was a noted American children’s author and educator, famed as one of the pioneers in the kindergarten movement. In 1878 she became the first public kindergarten teacher in the state of California and in 1880 she founded San Francisco’s Silver Street training school for teachers. In order to raise more funding for her school, she began writing children’s stories, a practice that she continued after the death of her first husband and her subsequent move to Maine in 1889. In Maine she re-married and continued writing stories, novels, music and songs, books on early childhood education theory and method (including the ground-breaking Children’s Rights [1892]), and plays, sometimes with the collaboration of her sister, Nora Archibald Smith, and sometimes with illustrations by noted American artist N. C. Wyeth.

Her most famous book was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) which was made into a popular film in 1917 and adapted into a miniseries for U.K. television in 1978. After her death, her ashes were scattered on the Saco River and her house (below) became the Hollis Public Library. Many of her papers are kept in the Kate Douglass [sic] Wiggin Collection at Bowdoin College -- the institution that granted her an honorary degree (its second to a woman) in 1904 and that she continued to support throughout her life. A rival collection of her papers exists at the San Jose State University Library Special Collections & Archives. A bibliography of her works is available at the Fantastic Fiction website and Project Gutenberg.

The book was machine printed in sixteenmo. The pages are 12cm x 17.5cm and are made of a firm but unremarkable stock typical of the turn of the century. It is bound in light gray buckram cloth, with blue border decorations and titling on the cover, spine, and back. Eight illustrative plates on a sturdy glossy stock appear throughout, depicting black-and-white line-drawings of scenes from the chapter in which they occur; these are not integral to the gatherings in which they appear. The frontispiece of Polly is guarded by a tissue sheet that is -- remarkably for a circulating juvenile library book -- fully intact. The contents consist of 212 pages of text in 18 chapters, plus 7 leaves of preliminaries and 2 blanks at the back.

Polly Oliver’s Problem was a sequel to Wiggin’s enormously popular young adult’s novel The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1887). The tale follows the adventures of the eponymous hero, whose endeavors to find employment brings her (like Wiggin herself) to California, where she ultimately finds rewarding employment reading to young children (again, like Wiggin). Though largely conventional in its form, Wiggin's book does make some interesting use of letters and other texts within the story. The book was somewhat successful, going through several editions (and still available in print today), but it was not a tremendous critical success. The review November 26, 1893 review in The New York Times was unimpressed by the narrative and writing style:

This little story by Mrs. Wiggin, while it possesses much of the characteristic charm of the graceful writer whose “Cathedral Courtship” and other delicately-humorous sketches have been so greatly admired, is rather strained and fine-spun and a little too artificial and pedantic to be a very popular tale with growing girls. We are afraid it will never be classes with the writings of Miss Alcott and Mrs. Whitney and the other mistresses of art of entertaining very young women. It is to be commended for its purity of tone and lack of cant. Polly is frequently a vivacious and entertaining heroine, but her nerves are a trifle overstrung, and something of the enervating influence of Southern California atmosphere, which a few of the many folks who go to the Pacific coast from the East complain of, permeates the story.

Polly is a poor, well-bred girl with ambitions for a “career”. She finds this career as a professional story teller for children. She begins in the hospitals, and there is perhaps a trifle too much of sickness and misery in the little volume to make it entirely agreeable reading, yet it is certainly not an unwholesome book, though it lacks the fresh charm and buoyancy of much of Mrs. Wiggin’s other work. The heroine’s mother dies after a spell of nervous prostration, and the symptoms in her case are set forth with admirable clearness.

This reviewer clearly suffers under delusions of his own cultural importance. First -- setting aside the condescending quotations marks around the word “career” in the first sentence of the second paragraph and the description of Wiggin's book as a "little story" -- there is an implied message that it is Polly’s “ambitions” that mark the book as too “pedantic to be a very popular tale with growing girls”. Books lauding “ambition” in young men at this time are rarely dismissed for being too “pedantic”. Second, there seems a distinct, almost willfulness ignorance about the value of realism in literature in this reviewer’s sniping suggestion that “there is perhaps a trifle too much of sickness and misery in the little volume to make it entirely agreeable reading”; one might point out that there is also a trifle too much of sickness and misery in life as well. The praise of Wiggin for “set[ting] forth with admirable clearness” the symptoms of nervous prostration is completely useless and marks the reviewer as utterly unclear on the concept of priorities in literary priorities. It’s a little like praising the chef at a restaurant for the way in which the napkins are folded.

My copy of this book is remarkably tight and clean for having once been part of the circulating collection in the juvenile section of a public library. Only one page bears a reader’s mark (a dog-eared corner to hold a place) and occasionally scattered throughout there are some stains and grubby finger marks. There is some discoloration on the spine and some pink stains on the cover. Otherwise, it is in very good condition. A letter “J” (for Juvenile) is penned on the spine and the recto of the front flyleaf bears the bookplate of the Egremont Free Library (Volume number 616, no shelf number) and a “Discarded” stamp. The stamp is repeated on the inside of the back cover, along with the remains of a removed card sleeve (too bad the card is missing -- it’s always interesting to see to whom and how often an old library book is checked out. With the exception of some penciled dealer’s marks, these are the only evidence that the volume has been used.

Sleuthing Out a Notable Early Owner for a Wordsworth Limited Edition

A weekend trip back home to Salem regularly includes a visit to the Antiques Gallery at Pickering Wharf. One of the dealers there has a large selection of collectible and antiquarian books, most are decently priced and occasionally there’s some interesting turn-over in the stock as well. This week’s book was a bargain find from this store.

The book is a craft-printed, limited edition publication of seventy-five Sonnets by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was published in 1910 by Houghton Mifflin and printed by its Riverside Press division in Cambridge, MA in a limited run of 440 copies (Houghton Mifflin came into being in 1880 when the famed publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields merged with The Riverside Press). My copy is number 269. According to the Library of Congress, it was designed by artisan Bruce Rogers (the LC holds copy number 428, which had once belonged to Rogers). It was originally published in a protective slipcase but my copy no longer has the box. The Publisher’s Weekly Vol. 78 (Dec. 10, 1910; p. 2335) indicates that the book originally retailed for $5, or about $120 in modern USD -- quite a hefty sum for one book (PW also, however, erroneously lists the print-run as only 400 copies). Its value today is between $50 and $100, depending on condition.

It is bound in boards covered over with a thin vellum. The spine is a dark striped cloth with a decorative paper label for the title pasted on. The pages are very roughly cut (it was sold with the pages uncut), measuring approximately 16cm x 21cm, and are made of a rich, heavy woven stock bearing the watermark: PM / FABRIANO / ITALY. (Fabriano is a town in Ancona province in central Italy, on the eastern slope of the Apennine ridge; since the 1200s it has thrived as the pioneering paper-making center of Europe and was actually, in 1276, the birthplace of paper watermarking.) I haven’t been able to identify “PM”, but I’ve found descriptions of the mark in a book from 1930 and a print from 1932.

There are no signatures and there is no pagination, though each sonnet appears on its own separately numbered leaf (recto). The collational formula may be expressed as 8^o: [A⁸]-[J⁸] [K⁴] [π]. The final blank flyleaf is a different paper, bearing 3.5cm chain-lines and part of a different watermark (not discernible); it is conjugate with the rear pastedown. The contents run as follows: two blanks; title page; two leaves (recto and verso) of “Table of First Lines”; inner title for section “Nature”; poems 1-24; inner title for section “Man”; poems 25-48; inner title for section “The Poet”; poems 49-75. Some of the poems within each section form short sequences of their own and these are often given a heading title on the first poem of the sequence along with Roman numerals for each poem in the sequence.

The copy is in average condition. As noted above, the slipcase is missing; the spine has suffered some chipping cracking. The initial flyleaf is discolored slightly from a reader’s insertion (more below). Whomever cut the pages did an odd job of it: at least one page has its upper outside corner clipped and three pages have been cropped quite severely (never resulting in the loss of text, though). I suspect that whomever it was that cut the pages open (probably the first owner) accidentally tore those pages when he or she was cutting them open and so, to clean up the tear, they trimmed the page off to the depth of the whole rip. A smudged (inky?) fingerprint appears on the title page.

Some early owner has written on the leaf bearing poem 51, using a watery brown ink (fountain pen, most likely) and very blocky handwriting. In the upper outside corner is written “Ref. / 812 / W92 / So.” and in the lower outside corner, “21101”. This seems like a library call number, but it does not belong to any catalog system I’m aware of (and why Wordsworth would be grouped with “Reference” rather than into poetry is unclear to me). There’s no other evidence of library provenance, but I suspect that my copy is indeed ex libris (which would explain the absence of the slipcase as well).

An early reader (or perhaps two) has also extended the collection of poetry to include five more verses. Inserted between the end of the Table of First Lines and the inner title “Nature” there is a leaf torn out of Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. The leaf (pages 599/600) is from the Wordsworth section and offers up four more poems by the writer: “Evening on Calais Beach”, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, 1802”, “England, 1802: i”, and “England, 1802: ii” (poems 521-524 in Quiller-Couch’s collection). This is printed on the usual cheap anthology paper and looks as if it has been folded in half at one point.

The fifth added poem is pasted inside the front cover of the book. It is the late nineteenth century poem “The Chambered Nautilus”, by famed Massachusetts jurist, poet, essayist, physician, and mustache Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. The poem meditates on the deeper meaning of a simple, everyday object, taking the nautilus as a symbol for the intellectual development of man and the fact that, as we mature, we outgrow our protective shells. The paper on which the poem is printed seems to be a cheap newsprint (a decorative border is just visible around the poem itself, but nothing seems to show through from the other side); the acid leeching from this to the recto of the facing flyleaf is the cause of the discoloration on that page.

Including Holmes’s poem in a collection of Wordsworth’s flights of fancy might seem odd. I can’t say for certain why an early reader would think to associate these two radically different poets, but I do have a (completely speculative) theory. Some of the books being sold by the dealer at the Antiques Gallery at Pickering Wharf bear a telling bookplate inside their front covers: the chambered nautilus icon used by Oliver Wendell Holmes to mark his own books (the Latin phrase, “per ampliora ad altiora” means “through breadth to depth”).

Perhaps this unique collection of Wordsworth’s poems came, also, from Holmes’s library (during his tenure, it should be noted, on the Supreme Court) -- perhaps the awkward cutting job of the pages was his, perhaps also his is the smudgy fingerprint on the title page. And perhaps the decision to paste his own “Nautilus” poem inside the cover, in the place customarily occupied by a bookplate, was his as well.