This book was published in 2006. I am reading it for the second time. The subtitle is The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World.
I am happy to see that the author is still alive at age 79.
Chapter 1 The Magic Door
In the early years of the twentieth century a woman named May Lamberton Becker enjoyed enormous popularity for the "Reader's Guide" columns she wrote for the New York Evening Post and later the Saturday Review of Literature. She highlighted the best books in every field of knowledge. She dedicated her work to librarians.
A. David Schwartz owned a famous independent bookstore in Milwaukee. As he was dying, he spent his last days rereading War and Peace. What better way to go out.
Terry Waite, the Anglican churchman, spent 1,763 days in captivity in Beirut, speneding his time reading Including Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Anne Frank found her readership when her diary was accidentally discovered when her Nazi arrestors failed to notice the scattered papers on the floor in her hideaway. She called her diary Kitty. While working on her diary she was reading every book available to her.
Azar Nafisi wrote about an Iranian bookclub in Reading Lolita in Tehran released in 2003. The ladies in the reading faced reprisals and jail time for what they were doing.
Langston Hughes was the Poet Laurette of the Harlem Renaissance and discovered books as a lonely second-grader in Lawrence, Kansas, living with his grandmother. Books were his world as he read about people who did not always talk in monosyllables..
Literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage. The Greeks have their Iliad and Odyssey. The Chinese have their Tao de Ching, the Italians their Divine Comedy, and the Spanish their Don Quixote.
Chapter 2 One Out of Many
This chapter talks about books, rare books, books that made a difference, and bibliophiles
Ian Fleming had an awesome personal library.
Book exhibitions like London in 1963
Emerson was our first public intellectual.
Lists of the best English and American novels change and fluctuate over time.
"The soul selects her own society---Then---shuts the door."
Sooner or later the life of our times is summarized in its books. Malcolm Cowly, 1939. Still true?
Henry Addams never intended Education for public consumption.
Henry with a pedigree like no other was an intellectual's intellectual.
His book changed people's minds for sure but how I do not know.
Charles Beard was more talked about than popular and read.
By 1967 some 720 million copies of the quotations of Chairman Mao were in print.
The book will last forever. The book is such a wonderful thing, and it has so much to it beyond the text itself, the physical artifact, the book will absolutely last for hundreds of years.
Chapter 4 Silent Witnesses
To help my treacherous and defective memory a little--and it is so extremely bad thatI have more than once happened
Henry James's library was eventually broken up and dispersed.
His library seemed to have no discernible plan or order the way the books we're mixed.
James's biographer Leon Edel calls the notes that James scribbled in his books "silent witnesses."
Literature not only comes from life but from other literature as Henry James would attest. So would Bob Dylan.
Chapter 5 IN THE MARGINS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a voracious reader, kept notes on everything he read. You tend to think in reading about these great 16th, 17th, and 18th century geniuses that reading was all they ever did.
Denis Diderot had a personal librarian.
Hitler's favorite book was Thomas Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great. Dr. Goebbels wass reading it to him in the bunker with Hitler tearing up because he identified with Frederick who had many enemies
The history of reading is a fairly recent endeavor. The basic premise is that readers give meaning to texts so histories of reading interpretations are scholarly.
Darwin would have his wife Emma read fiction and light history to him out loud but he would read scientific content himself.
Of the books written in the Romantic Era Mary Shelley's Frankenstein commands the greatest attention. The first printing of 500 copies was ignored and indeed the book was ignored for the next 40 years. The first 500 were to pricey for most people. Only when inexpensive copies started being produced in 1880 start surge in popularity. Thomas Carlyle initially called the book "foul.
Was the French Revolution in the late 18th Century a product of the printing press? Apparently a historical case can be made.
Chapter 6 PAVING THE WAY
The David McCullough chapter.
The author greatly admires David McCullough.
McCullough speaks of the enormous influence of Common Sense. The revolution still would have happened but probably starting sometime after 1776. Paine was an uneducated corset maker. McCullough says that Paine's influence simply cannot be overstated.
McCullough tells the author that in the 18th Century the world of the mind was to be found in books and ideas were to be found in books and there was nothing a person could not learn from them.
In 2022 I cannot imagine a book having the popular influence of a Common Sense.
In the DOI Jefferson admitted that he was not expressing anything that had not bee said before.
We are what we read to a great degree says David McCullough particularly the founding generation. Adams was a deeper and more passionate reader than Jefferson.
Adams was the most assiduous reader of his generation, and his reading was deeper and broader than Jefferson's.
There is a letter from Abigail Adams to her son, John Quincy Adams, written in 1816, in which the following observation is made: "Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires that will quit him"
At about age 75 Adams undertook reading a 16-volume French history---in French.
Would John Adams be tweeting today? I would hope not. Would he be on Facebook? The internet? I would think so. TikTok? I think not.
Adams never stopped reading, never stopped growing intellectually. In his 80's he could work in his fields during and read Thucydides at lunch.
"Let us dare to read, think, speak, write. Let every sluice of knowledge be open and set flowing." John Adams at age 29
"You may not be able to insure success, but you can deserve it." John Adams
People who are fluent in multiple languages like Elizabeth I (fluent in six) utterly amaze me.
Chapter 7 A TERRIBLE TRUTH
John Keats "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816)
Chapter 8 GOSPEL TRUTH
I am reminded that in Beyond Belief Elaine Pagels believes that the Gospel of John was written to counter the Gospel of Thomas. P. 176
Chapter 9 HARVEST OF RICHES
The Broccoli Chapter
"I am a bookman," Matthew Broccoli says simply. "Everything I do, everything I write, everything I collect, has to do with the book in American culture and the profession of authorship." P. 194
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