The Private Library

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• Why a private library?
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• How to Build a Private Library for Less Than $1 a Day
• How to Furnish Your Private Library

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Christmas and The Private Library (Part III)

Because Christmas celebrations in most parts of the Western world are a mix of often competing strands of paganism, folklore, mythology and religion, the holiday has been both heavily promoted and heavily criticized over the centuries.

During the English Interregnum, for example, the English Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas altogether.  From 1644-1660, [a]ll shops and markets were to stay open throughout the 25th December and anyone caught holding or attending a special Christmas church service would suffer a penalty.  In the city of London things were even stricter as soldiers were ordered to patrol the streets, seizing any food they discovered was being prepared for a Christmas celebration.

This ban was effected in part because the Puritans felt that Christmas celebrations were an unwanted remnant of the Roman Catholic Church and, therefore, a tool of encouragement for the diss[ident] community that remained in both England and Wales. They argued that nowhere in the Bible had God called upon his people to celebrate the nativity in this manner.  (Several other holidays also were banned for containing Popish elements, including Easter.)

The Puritans also were unhappy with the fact that celebrations of Christmas often led to drunkenness, promiscuity, gambling and other forms of excess.  So the celebration of Christmas in England went underground for a while, even as those Puritans who set sail for the Americas took the urge to ban Christmas with them (a ban that would be effected in Boston from 1659-1681).

In some parts of the world the war over Christmas continues to this day, as several recent books make clear:

  

In any event, Christmas remained for most people largely a community and/or church celebration.  Due to repeated and prolonged sectarian tensions, celebration of the holiday had, over the centuries, been seriously diminished in many locales, and might well have died out altogether had it not been for the publication of several works of fiction in the early decades of the 19th century.  These titles not only revived the holiday itself, but also, for many celebrants, shifted the focus of the celebration away from church and community to family.

Perhaps most significant among such works of fiction were Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820), which supposedly drew upon the tract Vindication of Christmas (1652) for many elements of its stories about Christmas; Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas (first published anonymously in New York's Troy Sentinel newspaper on 23 December 1823); and, most influential of all, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843).

Initially published in seven serial installments from June 1819-September 1820, Irving's Sketch Book probably is better known today for Rip Van Winkle (published in the first installment) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (published in the sixth installment) than for the other twenty-seven stories and essays that comprised its first American publication.  It was, however, the five stories published in the fifth installment of January 1820--which revolved around an idealized Christmas celebration at an English country manor--that contributed to a revitalization of Christmas celebrations in the New World, and that had a self-professed influence on Dickens' own contribution to that revival:

 

Moore, whose authorship of A Visit from St. Nicholas has been debated for decades (usually resolving in Moore's favor), is responsible for, among other things, giving each of Santa's eight reindeer individual names:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Dunder and Blixem!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

(The names of the last two reindeer would be changed in later printings to Donder and Blitzen.)

The illustrations that accompanied the many re-printings of this poem also would significantly impact the public's perception of the mythical figure of Santa Claus (although it would be caricaturist Thomas Nast's illustrations of Saint Nick, depicted below, that would have the greatest and most long-lasting impact):

In the current (December 2009) issue of Fine Books & Collections, author Jonathan Shipley argues that one reason Dicken's A Christmas Carol has had such an oversized influence on modern Christmas celebrations is that the author himself frequently read from this work, to great effect, during several public lecture tours in Great Britain and America.

Penned during a feverish six weeks in the fall of 1843, all 6000 copies of the initial press run of A Christmas Carol sold out on its first day of publication, 19 December 1843.  Because the great expense of its hand-colored plates cut considerably into Dickens' profits (financial pressures had been the reason Dickens had written it in the first place), this was Dickens' first and only book to be published with such plates:

Dicken's "little carol" has never been out-of-print, and it has inspired some of the world's best illustrators, printers and binders during the course of its many reprints:

The British poet and editor Thomas Hood had declared shortly after publication of A Christmas Carol that [i]f Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were ever in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease. 

How right he was.  The book remains the essential title for any private library focused on Christmas.

In the 166 years since A Christmas Carol's original publication, thousands of Christmas-themed works of fiction have been published worldwide in a huge variety of languages.  Such books are readily found, and eagerly sought, at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales, publishers' clearance sales, and in all manner of bookshops around the world:

  

The publication of so many Christmas-themed titles often makes it difficult to critically assess the influence of such literature, although a few attempts have nonetheless been made:

 

Tomorrow, we will examine some of the books reflective of the increasing industrialization of Christmas since the mid 19th century....

Christmas and The Private Library (Part II)

Whether one is collecting everything one can about Christmas, or only focusing on a particular aspect of the holiday, most folks building a private library around this theme generally include on their shelves one or two books about the origins and evolution of the holiday...

  

...including its associated religious and/or secular traditions...

   

...and perhaps also the evolution of the holiday in various locales:

 

For most folks, this is about as far as they delve into the origins and evolution of the holiday, preferring instead to focus their time and money on those one or two aspects of Christmas in which they are most interested (collectibles, cookbooks, etc.). 

Others will delve deeper, adding to their shelves books that deconstruct the holiday bit by bit....

 

...generally starting with ancient pagan antecedents, them moving forward to the various Christian accretions...

  

The deeper one digs, the more book shelves one needs.  Especially since certain works of fiction also have had a tremendous influence on how Christmas is celebrated....

Christmas and The Private Library (Part I)

There are a huge number of holidays that are celebrated around the world during December.  To cite but a few, there's Advent (the four weeks before Christmas); St. Nicholas Day (December 6); Chanuka (December 11-19 in 2009); Festival de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe (December 12); St. Lucia Day (December 13); Las Posadas (December 16-24); Yule (December 20-22); Winter Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere, December 21 or 22); Soyaluna (December 22); DongZhi (December 21, 22 or 23); Kwanzaa (December 26-January 1); Boxing Day (December 26); Ōmisoka (December 31).

Because many of the above holidays celebrate the triumph of "light" and warmth over "darkness" and cold, and are rooted in ancient pagan traditions that later were co-opted by proponents of Christianity, it is not surprising that quite a few of them are precursors to, or are associated with, what arguably is the most celebrated holiday in the Western World, Christmas:

The literature of Christmas is vast, and any book collector seeking to create a Christmas-themed private library quickly realizes that difficult choices have to be made. 

Does one collect everything written about or influenced by this holiday?  An impossible task--even if one has all the money in the world, some books simply are unavailable in the marketplace.

Does one focus only on nonfiction books (origins, evolution, secular or religious aspects), fiction (not all of which is cheery), or both?  Does one collect such books as a stand-alone theme, or as an adjunct to other collecting areas (folklore, religion, industrialization, childhood, illustration)?

Over the next several days, we will examine the literature of Christmas in more detail....

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. 

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies.... 

Gifts to Help You Build Your Private Library

If family and friends have thrown up their hands in exasperation at your request for yet another book (or gift card with which to buy more books), there are other gifts available during this holiday season which likely would go much further towards helping you develop the private library of your dreams.  At the top of this list are gifts you can give yourself. 

The most notable of these gifts is education.  No book collector, however advanced, can possibly know everything there is to know about book collecting.  That is why most advanced book collectors constantly seek out opportunities to advance their knowledge of books, book collecting, book history and related bookish concerns.

Organizations devoted to specific aspects of books, book history, book collecting and the like thus make an excellent gift at this time of year.  Many of these organizations publish journals on a fairly regular basis, and offer as well the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with like-minded book collectors several times a year.  The memberships for most of these organizations is quite inexpensive, and are a tremendous value.  We list 135 such organizations in the left-hand column of this blog under Bookish Organizations:

    
 
 

Another excellent gift would be a course or two at Rare Book School, California Rare Book School, London Rare Books School, or a one- or two-day workshop at any one of the venues listed here.  Among this year's offerings at Rare Book School, for example, are two new courses designed specifically for collectors, one on collecting law books, the other devoted to provenance research.

If you can't afford the expense (of both time and money) required to take advantage of the above courses, consider a subscription to one of the few remaining print periodicals devoted to book collecting, like The Book Collector or Firsts or Book & Magazine Collector:

   

If you need more shelf space and are considering doing a little weeding, why not consider donating some of your books to other readers via Book Crossing....

Place Names and The Private Library

In our several-decades-long love affair with books we have come across many interesting private libraries.  One of the most interesting that we've encountered, devoted to the literature of toponymy, lies at the intersection of two other well-regarded collecting themes, travel (see our posts of 18-22 July 2009) and local history (see our post of 27 October 2009).

Toponymy is the study of the origins, meanings, use and typology of place names--i.e., how did London come to be called London, or how did New York come to be called New York?  In some parts of the world (large parts of Africa and Asia and many of the oldest settled areas of Europe) the origins of many place names are lost in the mists of time.  In others, such as Great Britain and the Americas, place names often still can be traced, though not always without difficulty.

 

Toponymists have discovered that many of the earliest place names were given by "storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales."  Because place names are so important as geographical references, the assignment of such names in the modern world is much more scientific (usually utilizing principles and procedures established in consultation with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names), though such naming still relies heavily on local histories, name surveys, interviews with long-time residents and the like:

 

The literature of toponymy is not only about how El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles came to be shortened to LA, but also about how elements of place names result from etymological confusion, language evolution and/or replacement, and backformation:

  

Whether one collects toponymic literature as the sole focus of one's private library, or as adjunct to other collecting areas (local history, travel, etc.), pursuit of such literature is likely to prove both relatively inexpensive and altogether fascinating....

  

Stippling and The Private Library

One of the more interesting techniques of book illustration, stippling often is encountered in books of the 18th century (especially in books published in continental Europe). 

As noted in a recent National Gallery of Art exhibition, [s]tipple is a dotted tonal printmaking technique in which patterns of closely massed dots are made by repeatedly impressing pointed or pronged tools directly into the copperplate or through an etching ground.  This results in shading and patterning of the images so illustrated.  The most prominent modern artist employing this technique probably is Noli Novak, whose stipple portraits so often adorn the front page of the Wall Street Journal (and who recently was the subject of a National Public Radio podcast):

 

Stippling generally results in an illustration which is closer to that produced by pencil than any other intaglio engraving technique:

 
Although stipple illustrations are known as early as 1510, the technique did not really come into its own until the late 18th century, and even then it was used primarily to produce stand-alone prints.  Probably the outstanding British book so illustrated was the 9th edition of poet James Thomson's enormously popular poem The Seasons (1797), engraved primarily by Francesco Bartolozzi and his pupil Peltro William Tomkins:

Another major instance of stipple book illustration was John and Josiah Boydell's Graphic Illustrations of the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, which consumed the publishers for the better part of 15 years (1791-1803) .  Published in nine folio volumes (1802) and two elephant folio volumes (1803), the work was subscribed to by some of the wealthiest and most influential art patrons in Europe (a good thing, since it cost the publishers some £350,000 to produce, an enormous sum for that era):

Among the more notable efforts at color stipple illustration were Francis Wheatley's printed paeans to "the peddlers, charlatans, street hawkers, milkmaids, and grocers who made their living on the city streets," Cries of London (published in book form by Conalghi, 1792-1797):

 

Sadly, very few of the above titles survive with all volumes intact, most having fallen victim long ago to the pernicious practice of book breaking (removing the illustrations so they could be sold as stand-alone prints)....

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy and The Private Library

Finely grained and delicately textured, the colour of the leather binding is a dirty fawn flecked with spots of darker pigment. The pages are edged with gold, as are the margins of the leather where it has been folded over into the inside of the cover. When I open the book, the first thing I see is an inscription, underlined and in a neat flowing hand: Bound in human skin....

Though quite rare, this rather...interesting...example of the bookbinder's art dates back to at least the 17th century, when one sometimes found anatomy texts bound with the skin of dissected cadavers, volumes created as a bequest and bound with the skin of the testator, and copies of judicial proceedings bound in the skin of the murderer convicted in those proceedings:

 

Only a few libraries admit to having such volumes on their shelves.  The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, for example, "has four such books, including one with a visible tattoo."  London's Wellcome Library also has one.  And at least four such volumes rest on the shelves of Harvard libraries: two at the medical school library, one at the rare book library and one at the law school library.

The volume in Harvard's Langdell Law Library is a 17th century treatise on Spanish Law, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias Hispaniae..., and it carries the following faint inscription on the last page of the book:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King btesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.  (The WaVumba were an African tribe from the area of present-day Zanzibar.)

A more detailed review of this somewhat macabre practice may be found here and here....