Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles
Through the green lanes of the country,
Where the tangled barberry-bushes
Hang their tufts of crimson berries
Over stone walls gray with mosses,
Pause by some neglected graveyard,
For a while to muse, and ponder
On a half-effaced inscription,
Written with little skill of song-craft,
Homely phrases, but each letter
Full of hope and yet of heart-break,
Full of all the tender pathos
Of the Here and the Hereafter;
Stay and read this rude inscription....
Our mission at The Private Library is to convince folks that it's entirely possible to put together a very nice private library of one's own without spending a lot of money. Our 414 posts to date have focused on tips and strategies for doing just that. Our mantra is simple; if you want to put together a very nice library of your own for very little money, collect what others do not.
As we have suggested in numerous previous posts, this can be accomplished in a variety of ways. One can, for example, focus on "obscure" authors or subjects, or--as in the case of today's post--one can collect the works of authors who once were popular but have long since fallen out of critical favor. If an author was once extremely popular, lots and lots of titles by that author usually still circulate, and thus such titles make not infrequent appearances at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like. Because most critics no longer show such authors any love, you're likely to pick up much of an out-of-critical-favor author's oeuvre for very little money.
Mind you, these are not likely to be First Editions in Fine condition. But often they are fairly well-preserved later editions that most folks would be happy to have on their bookshelves. And when you're ready to move on to the more expensive stuff, you'll find a large number of independent booksellers ready to help you out (see Regional Independent Booksellers Associations in the right-hand column of this blog).
The poster child for American authors who once were extremely popular, then plunged rapidly and almost completely out of critical favor, has long been the poet whose snippet of poetry (from The Song of Hiawatha) begins this post. If there is any poet whom many Americans can still recite the words of, it is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year....
No doubt because most folks could actually understand Longfellow's poetry, he achieved during his own lifetime what we today most probably would call rock star status. By 1874 (his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Night, had been published in 1839) he was earning over $3000 per poem--in those days, an enormous amount of money! During the same period, schoolchildren celebrated his birthday as if it were a national holiday. He was equally popular in Europe. (Longfellow remains the only American poet ever honored with a memorial bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.) John Greenleaf Whittier, no mean poet himself, once observed that Longfellow's poetry illustrated "the careful moulding by which art attains the graceful ease and chaste simplicity of nature."
Others, of course, were less kind, and Longfellow's reputation took quite a critical tumble during the decades after his death. Lewis Mumford suggested that Longfellow could be completely removed from the history of literature without much effect. The most common criticisms leveled against Longfellow were that he was too imitative of European poets and that his poetry was too sentimental and too geared towards the masses.
It remains to be seen if works like Charles Calhoun's Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004) will be able to restore Longfellow's once luminous reputation....
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