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.

Thornton Wilder's "The Woman of Andros" and a Digression on the Social Utilitarian Perspective of Literature

In the small rural towns of New England, the social life of the community still often centers around those peculiar institutions that were the bedrock of village life two-hundred years ago: the town hall, the church, the post office, the village store, and, of course, the town dump.

Nowadays the town dump usually goes by a more attractive, cleanly moniker; in our town of Leverett, Massachusetts it’s called the Transfer Station. The euphemism is not misplaced: Leverett has the highest per capita recycling rate in the Commonwealth. Not only does our dump have an active recycling program, but it is against the law to throw out something that can be recycled instead. We also have a line-up of sheds dedicated to the second of the three R's: reuse. There is a “Take-It or Leave-It” shed for household items, a clothing shed, and--you guessed it--a book shed.

Most of the volumes in this shed are cheap paperbacks or outdated popular works of nonfiction (cookbooks, business manuals, self-help books, etc.). Many are damaged, if not by previous owners than by the admittedly dismal storage conditions of the shed. Every other week, after taking care of the household garbage and recycling, I take a moment or two to browse through the free books to see if there’s anything worth saving. This week’s featured item came from the Leverett Transfer Station Book Shed.

The book is American novelist and dramatist Thornton Wilder’s third novel, The Woman of Andros, published in 1930 by Albert & Charles Boni of New York and, for a time, a national bestseller. My copy is a first American edition; it was printed in small octavo format, with 82 leaves and bright orange flyleaves and pastedowns at front and back (the front flyleaf in my copy has been torn out). The binding is tan cloth with gilt lettering and an embossed red figure of a classically-dressed woman reclining in a chair (which occurs again on the title page, p. [3]); the paper is a hefty stock with deeply pressed vertical chain-lines with 2cm gaps, 5 to a leaf, with no discernible watermark. The pages measure 12.5cm x 20.5cm. There is some slight foxing and water-staining both within the book and on the front board and spine; the spine also has worn at the top from being pulled from the shelf. 

The only annotation or markings in the book that suggest provenance is the red-purple inscription of an owner’s name on the first leaf; the name is not terribly legible and might read “Dianne”, “Diarune”, or some other permutation of “Dia-” followed by several squiggled minim strokes and a terminal “e”. I do not know who this person is (or was), but the book has a local provenance since Janet Wilder Dakin, the youngest sister of Thornton Wilder, once lived in the neighboring town of Amherst, Massachusetts, in the building that is now the home of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. As far as I know, however, this particular copy is not linked to her or the estate. The first edition is not exceptionally rare and is usually valued between $15 and $55 depending on the condition and whether the original dust-jacket is extant (which is very rare); Wilder autographed a number of the copies during the book’s initial promotion and these copies are, of course, worth considerably more (between $180 and $280).

The core of the novel, the first part of which is based upon Terence’s comedy Andria (which was, itself, based upon two lost plays by Menander), is a classical narrative of the ancient Mediterranean world, written in a purposefully heavy-handed and ornate style and centering on the philosophy (yes, philosophy--the story is short on plot) of pain and suffering made meaningful through the prophesied coming of Jesus Christ, along with issues of generational conflict, a love triangle, and familial discord. The book appeared only a few months after the stock market crash of 1929 (which is perhaps why I subconsciously chose it for this week’s book) and its message of patient sufferance did not go over well with critics, particularly Marxist critics such as Michael Gold of The New Republic, who charged that Wilder was an elitist out of touch with the suffering of the average American. Gold wrote a withering critique in which he excoriated the philosophical novel for failing to come to grips with the economic disaster burdening the country (as if the crisis were somehow Wilder’s fault and not the fault of the brainless, short-sighted robber baron speculators). 

The review, and the heated exchange that followed, led to a nationwide debate about whether literature has an obligation to maintain relevance to contemporary social and economic conditions. Then, as now, when financial clouds lour upon our house, the communal knee-jerk response is to relegate the arts and literature to “luxury” status, arguing from the strictly utilitarian perspective that their duty is either to be “useful” or not “to be” at all. The argument--then as now--is both strained and ignorant, missing the point of why these fields are called humanities in the first place. Besides, one could also make the argument that we do not need the institution of insurance, we do not need banks, we do not need the stock market. At its heart, though, Gold’s argument hinges on the same myopia that causes economic ruin, it neglects the issue of temporality: we create art and literature to persist beyond the contemporary, beyond the moment, beyond the finite life of the creator. It is the embodiment of that part of our spirit that is meant precisely to rise above the peculiar, particular, and ephemeral needs, wants, and problems of today and, instead, to survive as our embassage to all those future generations yet unborn and unimagined.

But I digress...  

Following the 1930 edition of Albert & Charles Boni, the firm of Longmans, Green & Company released a U.K. edition the same year. Subsequent editions appeared in 1931 in Leipzig (E. P. Tal & Co.), 1932 (Boni), 1934 (Longmans), and 1954 (Longmans), as well as in various collections of Wilder’s works. It was never the most popular of his works and, despite the brief surge in its sales occasioned by the intense public debate following the Gold review, its lack of literary merits long ago relegated The Woman of Andros to the lower echelons of Wilder's otherwise legendary oeuvre. 

A more detailed description of the book, covering both its history and bibliography, can be found on the website of Professor John M. Unsworth at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.