The Private Library

The Porcelain Throne, Inveterate Readers and The Private Library

Admit it ... you're a reader!  You sit down with a bowl of cereal, you know you're gonna read that box of cereal.  If you're in the doctor's office, you didn't bring a book, and People magazine is the only printed material on offer ... you know you're gonna suck it up and take the plunge.  And if you really, really have to use the bathroom....

Well, it helps to have reading material appropriate to one's situation.

One never knows just how long nature's call will be calling, so it helps to have reading material that doesn't require a lot of intense intellectual concentration.  We're not saying that In Search of Lost Time is inappropriate fare, but getting through a single sentence could require a lot more time than you may have allotted to your throne room foray.  Besides, being a book collector, we're assuming that you'd prefer that your copy of Proust's magnum opus be treated with a bit more respect.

Fortunately, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader is published for just such occasions:

  

Founded in 1987, this series of trivia books is one of the most successful boutique publishing ventures of the last quarter-century.  The idea, as the publishers' website tells it, was simple enough: gather together the best trivia writers you can find and charge them

...with the task of combing the worlds of science, history, sports, politics, and pop culture to compile dozens of interesting articles that could be absorbed in just a few minutes.  “Every article must be simple to read, ... and every page must either have an amazing fact or a good laugh—or both.”

The formula worked -- an amazing ten million+ copies of these little books of trivia are in print, including a number that are devoted to but a single subject: horses, hockey, history, Texas, quotations, puzzles, baseball, music, Minnesota, Hollywood, Christmas, cats, dogs, golf, New Jersey, trivia quizzes, and loads more:

  

These books are just the thing for the book collector in your family who also is a Trivial Pursuit fanatic.  Did you know, for example, that

Octopi have three hearts.

The first ever income tax was levied in Great Britain, to fund the wars against Napoleon.

The average bra is designed to last for only 180 days of use.

The boots eaten by Charlie Chaplin in "The Gold Rush" (1925) were made of licorice.

Cockroaches fart every 15 minutes.

Well, you'd know these facts and much more if Uncle John's Bathroom Reader was part of your daily reading.  Of course, it might be prudent to buy extra copies, should you plan to actually collect any of these titles....

Lankes, Frost and The Private Library

Many authors are intertwined, in the minds of their readers, with the illustrators with whom those authors are most famously associated.  Some of these associations are well-known even to the non-book-collecting public.  Duos that might come immediately to mind, for example, are Dickens and Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) or Carroll and Tenniel.  Less well known, perhaps, are author-illustrator associations such as James Fenimore Cooper and F. O. C. Darly, which we examined briefly in last Friday's post.

One of the most important such associations, though little remembered today, paired America's most beloved poet with one of America's finest woodcut artists:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year....

Robert Frost probably needs no introduction, even to today's general reader, who usually ignores poetry altogether, however gifted the poet.  But the illustrator with whom Frost most often is associated, J. J. Lankes, has disappeared over the past several decades into undeserved obscurity.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1884, Lankes came by his predilection for wood naturally -- his father, who worked at a lumber mill, often brought home scraps of wood with which the young Lankes would play. In 1917, Lankes produced his first woodcut, Flying Gosling, a harbinger of the nature themes with which most of Lankes' professional career as an artist would be concerned:

Although Lankes executed woodcuts for bookplates, greeting cards, portfolios such as Virginia Woodcuts (from whence derive the images below) and a variety of other purposes...

  

...almost 10% of the 1350+ woodcuts that he executed over a career spanning four+ decades were connected with the poetry of Robert Frost.  As a recent exhibition of the Frost-Lankes' collaborations points out,

Robert Frost and J.J. Lankes' forty years of friendship and collaboration began in 1923 when Frost first saw a print by Lankes and then chose him to illustrate his poem "Star Splitter" for The Century Magazine. Although this event served as their formal introduction, Lankes was already familiar with Frost's poetry, and had even drawn on it for inspiration in some of his early prints. Welford D. Taylor, a prominent Lankes scholar, describes the appreciation that the poet and the printmaker had for each other's work: "What had impressed each man was a recognition of the aesthetic and thematic values he shared with the other -- a 'coincidence of taste,' as Frost put it. Both based much of their work on rural subjects, employed understatement and symbol and explored the question of human significance in the over-all scheme of nature...."

 

In addition to his well-regarded illustrations of Frost's poetry, Lankes executed woodcuts for the works of a number of other authors as well:

 

As can be seen from the above titles, Lankes was as well regarded in his day for his architectural woodcuts as for those inspired by nature.  In fact, his personal favorite among the many woodcuts he executed was a series he did of Pennsylvania Dutch barns for a projected (though, sadly, never published) book.

Of course, to fully grasp the extent of Lankes' talent, one should collect not only the many books he illustrated, but also the many stand-alone prints that he executed.  Sunday Afternoon, for example, was published by the American Artists Group in 1936 (image via Art of the Print):

The detail in many of Lankes' woodcuts is fine enough that a cursory glance often mistakes them for wood engravings rather than the woodcuts that they are....

  

Pilgrims, Pedlers and Pioneers at The Private Library

It's no secret that the stories we choose to tell ourselves about ourselves go a long way towards creating a sense of national identity.  In America, in the 19th century, such stories were told by authors like Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper.

Of course, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves draw not only upon language, but also upon art.  When works by authors such as the above are particularly well illustrated, such illustrations -- given sufficient time and distribution --become part of our national iconography.

Interestingly enough, as many collectors of 19th century American literature are well aware, all four of the authors noted above were illustrated by the same artist:

  

Felix Octavius Carr Darly (frequently credited as F. O. C. Darley), has as good a claim as any to the title Father of American Illustration.  Born in Philadelphia in 1821, Darly -- though little remembered today -- was America's pre-eminent illustrator for a large chunk of the nineteenth century. 

Darly began his artistic life as a staff artist for a Philadelphia publishing company, but it was not until he moved to New York that his career began to skyrocket.  In addition to illustrating the authors noted above, he created numerous illustrations for Harper's Weekly, designed a wide variety of banknotes, and illustrated Dickens, Poe and Clement Clark Moore (for the latter's  A Visit from St. Nicholas he created America's first iconic Santa Claus):

Darly was the only artist to ever illustrate all 32 of Cooper's novels (for which he produced 64 steel engravings and 120 wood engravings):

Darly also is responsible, perhaps more any other American artist, for much of the iconography associated with George Washington.  Much of this may be attributed to his numerous illustrations for Irving's 5-volume Life of Washington, but much also is due to the numerous stand-alone prints of Washington that Darly produced over the course of almost four decades (the print below is by way of The Phildaelphia Print Shop):

The above notwithstanding, it was in books like Benson Lossing's 4-volume Our country : a household history for all readers, from the discovery of America to the present time (for which Darly produced over 500 illustrations) that Darly really can be said to have "invented the American past:"

His depictions of pioneers and Pilgrims, pedlers and the pious, have long since passed into this nation's collective consciousness as exemplars of what it means to be American:

Folks interested in exploring Darly's work in more detail may wish to visit the the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery, which provides access to many of Darley's illustrations for Lossing's Our History. NYPL also published the best work to date about this artist:

Happy Thanksgiving from The Private Library

The Signing of the Mayflower Compact, Bas Relief Plaque, Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown, MA

An Ode to the Ode at The Private Library

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 

The earth, and every common sight

                 To me did seem

            Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;--

             Turn wheresoe'er I may,

              By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more....

William Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807; first published in this version in 1815)

  

It often is difficult for folks who do not read poetry on a regular basis to grasp that the poetic tradition that embraces Wordsworth's magisterial ode, above, also embraces Barbara Hamby's more modern Ode on Dictionaries, below:

A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page

one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge

begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,

one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock

clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape

the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape

disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon

of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon

ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito

of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto

found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag....

But the ode is many things to many people:

   

As the Academy of American Poets points out,

"Ode" comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and belongs to the long and varied tradition of lyric poetry. Originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments, the ode can be generalized as a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present:

  

There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. The Pindaric is named for the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who is credited with inventing the ode. Pindaric odes were performed with a chorus and dancers, and often composed to celebrate athletic victories. They contain a formal opening, or strophe, of complex metrical structure, followed by an antistrophe, which mirrors the opening, and an epode, the final closing section of a different length and composed with a different metrical structure.... [The Wordsworth ode is an example of the Pindaric ode.]

      

The Horatian ode, named for the Roman poet Horace, is generally more tranquil and contemplative than the Pindaric ode. Less formal, less ceremonious, and better suited to quiet reading than theatrical production, the Horatian ode typically uses a regular, recurrent stanza pattern....

A fairly modern example of the Horatian ode is Allen Tate's somber Ode to the Confederate Dead:

...The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;

 In a tangle of willows without light

 The singular screech-owl's tight

 Invisible lyric seeds the mind

With the furious murmur of their chivalry....

It is the Irregular ode, though, that is home to Hamby's ode, above.  Interestingly enough, the Irregular ode also is the home of more classic odes such as Keats' Ode on A Grecian Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste, 

    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

  'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all 

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Folks interested in collecting examples of this poetic tradition have many options.  Odes are represented in the works of numerous individual poets, such as those depicted above, as well as in a wide range of poetry anthologies, such as those depicted below....

   

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

 

Scatter, as from an extinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unwakened earth

 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelly, Ode to the West Wind

Homographic Homophones and The Private Library

Here at The Private Library we are especially fond of book collections that don't take themselves too seriously.  This doesn't mean that such collections are not put together with serious intent, nor does it mean that such collections are unlikely to have scholarly or marketplace value.  It merely means that the collector forming such a collection has not been suckered into believing that really expensive books bought at really important auctions are the only books worthy of a private library.

As a case in point, consider the inexpensive, quite extensive book collections that might be built around a little wordplay.

English is one of the most difficult languages in the world for a non-native speaker to learn.  One of the reasons why this is so is that English has a large number of words that are pronounced the same as other words (i.e., they are homophones) even though they have quite different meanings.  Homophones such as pare, pair and pear, for example, have the same pronunciation but are spelled differently and have different meanings (heterographic homophones).  Other homophones -- tender (locomotive), tender (feeling) and tender (resignation), for instance -- are spelled the same and pronounced the same (homographic homophones) but have different meanings (i.e., they are homonyms).  

Got all that?  Wikipedia has a nice Venn diagram that may help you sort it out:

So what the heck does this have to do with building an inexpensive but extensive book collection?  Well, just think what an interesting private library you could build by focusing on books about subjects which are homographic homophones (spelled the same and pronounced the same, but having different meanings).  Bat and bat, for example...

  

...or row and row...

  

...or skates and skates...

  

...or bank and bank and bank...

     

...or fly and fly and fly and fly...

       

Or....  

The books depicted above do not begin to exhaust the meanings of each of the homographic homophones with which they are concerned.  And there are hundreds of other such homographic homophones in the English language.  Depending upon one's inclination, time and financial resources, such a collection could span the entire history of the printed book and cover virtually every genre imaginable.  Linguists take note...!

Bookends and The Private Library

It's been quite a while since we covered any sort of library furniture here at The Private Library. Accordingly, we thought we might stray a bit from our usual fare to celebrate that unsung hero of many a private library, the bookend.

Even the largest and best organized private libraries occasionally have need of a bit of extra support when a row of books does not quite fill up a shelf.  One could, of course, simply stack books up vertically against the last book on the end, but that is rarely attractive and, quite often, not particularly effective (since the books in the vertical stack frequently slide out of place).  A bookend, being of single-piece construction, is much more likely to keep that row of books from toppling over.   Moreover, if one avoids the purely utilitarian bookends (upright metal stands and the like), bookends can add an attractive decorative touch to the otherwise lonely end of one's not-quite-filled bookshelf.

We thought it might make things more interesting if we could locate bookends appropriate to one or more of the topics that we've covered over the past 18+ months. Herewith, what we found.  (To preserve the thrill of your hunt, we deliberately have not identified the sources of today's images.  You might want to begin your search, though, at Google Images....)

One of the earliest genres that we covered, the western, has given rise to all kinds of bookends, but we were especially enamored of these bookends, which sum up the genre in a minimalist sort of way:

We've also covered the literature of a number of members of the animal kingdom here at The Private Library, though we have yet to cover the literature of the order Anura:

Our recent series on archaeology could be tied to any number of decorative bookends, including those with an Egyptian theme (such as Bastet, depicted below)...

...as well as those with an Asian theme:

Our posts on space travel also could be represented by any number of decorative bookends, such as these armillary bookends...

...or the globe bookends depicted below:

Folks interested in the writing life have any number of bookends from which to choose...

...as do folks interested in humor:

 

Actually, Laurel & Hardy come in more than one style of bookends:

Finally, all you fans of horror, mysteries, detective fiction and the like might well find find the pair of bookends below particularly handy....

This brief survey, of course, does not even begin to cover everything that's available.  A diligent search will uncover many, many more such examples....

Witches, Nazis & the Elders of Zion at The Private Library

Amongst the millions of titles that have been published over the centuries are books so notorious, so infamous, that they belong in a class of their own.  

Of course, hundreds of thousands of titles have achieved a modicum of notoriety.  Such titles have thumbed their noses at prevailing sexual mores, have argued against the general political consensus, have revealed unflattering truths about the human condition.  Over the centuries, many such books have been (and continue to be) banned.

But beyond those books which titillate, beyond those books which upset political applecarts, beyond those books which reflect an image of ourselves that we would rather avoid, are a handful of books whose influence has been truly malign.  Books whose adherents have pillaged and raped and tortured and murdered in allegiance to some purported "revealed truth."  

We're not talking about the world's major religious texts, though these texts have much to account for. No, the titles we're talking about are much more ... specific.

From roughly 1480-1700, it is estimated that some 40,000-60,000 women were put to death as witches in Europe and North America.  Many factors contributed to this violence against women, not least popular superstition and the rabid intolerance of competing religious camps during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation:

  

Scholars continue to debate, though, about the extent to which this violence was instigated by the publication, in 1486, of Malleus Maleficarum.  Penned (supposedly) by two Dominican priests, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Witches' Hammer asserts the reality of witchcraft, describes known forms of witchcraft, and suggests ways to confront and combat witches.  The book's detractors argue that [t]housands of people (primarily women) were judicially murdered as a result of the procedures described in this book, for no [other] reason than a strange birthmark, living alone, mental illness, cultivation of medicinal herbs, or simply because they were falsely accused (often for financial gain by the accuser):

  

This accusation is true, and it is the primary reason why this title is considered among the most notorious books ever published.  It has been (and continues to be) translated into numerous languages:

  

However, there is much about the book that is little more than myth and legend. Popular belief notwithstanding, Malleus Maleficarum was never approved for official use by the Inquisition.  In fact, the Inquisition had strongly cautioned members not to believe everything the Malleus said, even when it presented apparently firm evidence. It was civil courts that made the reputation of The Witches' Hammer.  Small consolation to the tens of thousands of women that were put to death....

Women have always been convenient scapegoats.  So have Jews.  And it is Jews who are the focus of our next two notorious books.

Antisemitism has a long and ugly history.  The publication of a work like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion should not, therefore, come as much of a surprise.  What does surprise is how many people continue to believe this title's purported revelations of a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, decades after the The Times (London) ran a series of articles proving that the work was an utter fabrication:

  

Adherents of this title's "revealed truth" argue, of course, that any and all attempts to disprove the work are in fact evidence of the very conspiracy it alleges.

First privately published in Russia in 1897, The Protocols are supposedly the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders held near the close of the 19th century.  In fact, the book is largely a pastiche of an 1864 French satire and a chapter from an 1868 German novel. Research in the only-recently-opened Russian archives suggests that the fabrication may be the work of Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian exile living in France at the time of the work's first publication.

The work has been (and continues to be) published in an enormous number of languages...

  

despite the steady flow of books that have consistently detailed its fabrication (such fabrication has even been the concern of a graphic novel):

  

The Protocols' noxious brew has been used to justify everything from Russian pogroms to Nazi death camps, and its influence today remains as strong as it ever was.  A notorious book if ever there was one....

The influence of the previous title is readily seen in the last of our notorious books, Adolph Hilter's Mein Kampf:

   

Ostensibly an autobiography, Mein Kampf is equally a chilling exposition of the ideological development of one of history's greatest tyrants.  Originally published as two volumes (1925-1926), by the time Hitler gained the Chancellorship of Gemany in 1933 the book had already sold over a quarter-million copies. During Hitler's years in power, the book was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front.

The book's publishing history may be somewhat complicated, but its malign influence is not....

The book remains in print to this day, in a multiplicity of languages.  Perhaps one reason for this is that much of the book's advice appears to still be heeded by politicians:

...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes....

Git yer Woody on at The Private Library

As we have noted previously (see, for example, our posts of 7 September 2009, 8 July 2010, 12 October 2010 and 15 November 2010), there is a great deal of ephemera associated with book collecting.  Much of this ephemera is quite small -- trade/business cards, bookmarks, stationery, printers' medals, booksellers' tokens, etc.  You'll find excellent examples of many of these at Exile Bibliophile.  Also, Book Hunter's Holiday and BookTryst, among several other blogs that come immediately to mind, have posted about biblio-ephemera on a number of occasions -- a search on "ephemera" will bring up the relevant posts.

It is not this small stuff, however, with which our post today is concerned.  It's the big stuff ... the really big stuff!  We're talking broadsides and posters.  'Cause this type of biblio-ephemera is one of the few places left where the average book collector is likely to encounter letterpress printing from wood type in the sizes in which this type actually was cut:

As can be seen above (image via the Leeds Playbill Gallery), the largest sizes of wood type were cut for use on circus posters, playbills, billboards and the like:

   

The Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin (from whence come the circus images above), is the only museum we know of that is devoted exclusively to the preservation and study of wood type in all of its various manifestations.  The museum's founding type collection came from the Hamilton Wood Type Company, founded in 1880 and at one point the largest manufacturer of wood type in the United States.  The museum is in fact staffed with a number of former employees of this company, which closed its doors in 1985.  A recent movie about the company's death, and it's eventual re-birth in museum form, is available here (wood type poster below):

The museum has a very nice introduction to wood type here, wherein it notes that

[w]ith the expansion of the commercial printing industry in America in the first years of the 19th century, it was inevitable that someone would perfect a process for cheaply producing the large letters so in demand for broadsides. Wood was the logical material because of it's lightness, availability, and known printing qualities.

Darius Wells of New York found the means for mass producing letters in 1827, and published the first known wood type catalog in 1828. The usual procedure was to draw the letter on wood, or paper which was pasted to the wood. Then cut around the letter with a knife or graver, gouging out the parts to be left blank.

Wells however, introduced a basic invention, the lateral router that, in combination with a pantograph introduced by William Leavenworth in 1834 constituted the essential material for mass-producing wood type.

In the preface to his first wood type catalog, Wells outlined the advantages of wood type. They were half the cost of metal type and when prepared by machine they had smooth, even surfaces. Unequal cooling causes large lead type to distort....

Book collectors who would like to add specimens of this type of printing to their bookshelves, but who are reluctant to cope with the storage demands of items like posters and broadsides, should recall that most of these type manufacturers, like their metal type counterparts, produced type specimen books. Although Fine copies of such books tend to be quite scarce and expensive, the presswork within usually is worth the time and expense of trying to ferret them out.  Thankfully, Unicorn Graphics has digitized a few of these specimen books for its Web Museum of Wood Types and Ornaments, from whence come the images below (Hamilton Wood Type Catalog #14:)

   

The real wood type devotees out there will want to add WoodTyper to their blogrolls.  And they also will want to add the titles below to their bookshelves:

   

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Herringbones...at The Private Library

Probably no leather bookbinding is as easily recognized, even by novice collectors of bindings, as the so-called herringbone binding:

   

This type of binding was enormously popular in Scotland during the 18th century, and is in fact sometimes encountered on titles published as late as the 19th century. (The titles above are both Bibles.  The one on the left was printed in London in 1685 and is now in the collection of the University of Glasgow; the one on the right was printed in Edinburgh in 1715 and is now in the collection of the National Library of Scotland.)

As the National Library of Scotland points out, this design

likely it owes its existence to a desire to fill the rectangular centre-panels that had by this time become a feature of so many designs. The herringbone usually consists of a vertical stem placed in the centre of the cover with 'ribs' of paired tools placed symmetrically on either side. A variety of tools including fleurons, stars and 'fishscales' were used to adorn the space between the centre and the borders....

Bibles were a popular title for such bindings, as were legal titles such as this 1788 Clarendon Press edition of King Alfred's Will (currently residing at the National Library of Scotland)...

and this 1776 Edinburgh printing of Joannes Anstruther's Disputatio Juridica (currently held by the British Library):

The British Library's Database of Bookbindings holds a number of additional examples of herringbone bindings, including the exceptional bindings below. (Both of the titles below are Bibles, and both were printed in Edinburgh in 1716:)

 

All British Library images © The British Library Board

Folks interested in pursuing such bindings for their own libraries might find it useful to track down one or both of the following titles: Sommerlad, M. J., Scottish 'wheel' and herring-bone' bindings in the Bodleian Library: an illustrated handlist (Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication, 1967) and Morris, John, Wheels and herringbones: some Scottish bindings 1678-1773 (Dunblane: offprint from Vol. I of The Bookbinder, 1987)....

Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and The Private Library

California, Labor Day weekend ... early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur ... The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches ... like Ghengis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know....

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967)

Anyone who collects books about true crime and/or crime fiction must eventually encounter in their peregrinations a number of tomes devoted to the subject of outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs):

      

As defined by the U. S. Department of Justice, these are

organizations whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises. OMGs are highly structured criminal organizations whose members engage in criminal activities such as violent crime, weapons trafficking, and drug trafficking. There are more than 300 active OMGs within the United States, ranging in size from single chapters with five or six members to hundreds of chapters with thousands of members worldwide. The Hells Angels, Mongols, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Sons of Silence pose a serious national domestic threat and conduct the majority of criminal activity linked to OMGs, especially activity relating to drug-trafficking and, more specifically, to cross-border drug smuggling. Because of their transnational scope, these OMGs are able to coordinate drug smuggling operations in partnership with major international drug-trafficking organizations ....

     

These are the so-called 1%ers, that tiny minority of motorcyclists who reject mainstream norms and live outside of the law:

     

OMGs have a schizophrenic relationship with writers and other artists.  Many romanticize OMG members as misunderstood outsiders (think The Shangri-Las 1964 hit Leader of the Pack).  Others go overboard in the opposite direction, especially when it comes to movies:

  

The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in between, as folks who have escaped from OMG culture sometimes suggest....

  

Keepsakes and The Private Library

One of the side benefits of membership in various Bookish Organizations (see the several dozen listed under this heading in the sidebar to your left), is that it becomes relatively easy to amass, in a short period of time, all types of printed ephemera. Such organizations frequently promote and reward membership, for example, by publishing keepsakes:

  

Keepsakes are printed to commemorate these organizations' special programs or events, significant anniversaries, festive occasions, and much, much more:

  

But many of these keepsakes also are printed simply as a way of saying "thank you" for your membership. (The item depicted below right is a keepsake that was printed for distribution by Paul Romaine, American Printing History Association, to commemorate a presentation by Matthew Carter at The Grolier Club):

  

Some of these keepsakes are quite simple: a broadsheet or poster, for example, oft times made more special by being printed letterpress.  (The broadside below was printed by Lead Graffiti as a keepsake for the 33rd annual conference of the American Printing History Association:)

More often, though, such keepsakes take the form of booklets or pamphlets:

  

These booklets and pamphlets often sport covers that belie the substance within:

  

Whether one prefers to collect broadsides and posters, or booklets and pamphlets, enough keepsakes are printed annually to keep the average book collector quite busy trying to keep up with it all:

To manage the deluge, some book collectors deliberately restrict their collecting efforts to keepsakes produced by one or two entities.  Folks who collect Californiana, for example, frequently make it a habit to collect the long-running series of keepsakes produced by the Book Club of California.  Likewise, folks who collect book arts titles often make a habit of collecting the long-running series of keepsakes produced by The Typophiles.  

If you love letterpress and can afford a subscription, one of the best ways to amass some truly outstanding keepsakes is to subscribe to the deluxe edition of publications like Parenthesis (Fine Press Book Association)...

...or Matrix, the much-beloved annual publication of The Whittington Press (the deluxe edition of Matrix 23 [Winter 2003], below, is by way of Vamp and Tramp):

Whether you collect such ephemera broadly or deeply, you'll likely be richly rewarded for your time and effort....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part X

Of all the types of fiction that have been influenced by archaeology, perhaps none have been so heavily influenced as the mystery...

  

and science fiction:

  

This actually makes perfect sense, since archaeology has always been about uncovering things, both literally and figuratively:

  

This sort of fiction has always been heavily influenced by major archaeological finds.  An enormous amount of such fiction appeared in the decade after Carter's find of Tut, as well during the decade after the Boy King's artifacts made its first major tour of the New World (1970s).

A number of writers manage to make a pretty decent living penning mysteries that are tied to archaeological pursuits, including a fair number who pen series.  Sarah Wisseman, for example, writes the Lisa Donohue series of archaeological mysteries.  Wisseman is herself a practicing archaeologist, and her recent fiction reflects well on both her "day job" and her increasing skill as a crafter of fiction:

   

The best known practitioner of this sort of series archaeological fiction, though, probably is Elizabeth Peters, whose durable fictional archaeologist Amelia Peabody has been featured in 18 titles:

   

Peters (one of the pseudonyms of writer Barbara Mertz) is well regarded for the accuracy of what she writes, a trait she attributes to the research skills she picked up training to be an Egyptologist:

Positions in Egyptology were few and far between, and in the post-World-War II backlash against working women, females weren't encouraged to enter that or any other job market....

It has taken me over a quarter of a century to realize that I love to write, and that this is what I should have focused on from the beginning....  The research skills I learned can be applied to any field; I have used them to collect background material for novels that deal with the Peasants' Revolt, Etruscan archaeology, vintage clothing, the Risorgimento, the chartist movement, and innumerable other subjects. Accuracy is very important to me as a novelist; not only does my own professional pride demand it, but I have many readers whose expertise in various fields is at least as great as my own. They can and do chastise me when I make mistakes. To err is human, but to err through carelessness or laziness is inexcusable....

Another popular author of this sort of series fiction is Mary Anna Evans, whose mixed-race fictional archaeologist Faye Longchamp allows Evans to explore with some empathy the distrust that some folks have of archaeologists' intent:

  

Evans, who holds degrees in both physics and engineering, turned to fiction after the birth of her third child.  A good move, since she has since won a slew of awards for her fiction.

Although she writes for adults, Evans' titles have found a particularly receptive audience among educators:

[her books are] being used to teach non-literature subjects like social studies, math, and science.  The social studies link was no surprise to the books' author, since her protagonist is an archaeologist, but she swears that she never once purposely included math or science in her stories.  (And her readers have never once complained that the laws of physics operate properly in her books).  Learning that she's done this unconsciously has been an inarguable example of the axiom that writers write about who they are....

Archaeology-themed science fiction also is quite popular, especially since archaeological discoveries usually revolve around ancient alien civilizations (a hypothetical form of archaeology known as Xenoarchaeology):

  

As with mysteries, much of this fiction is penned as part of a series:

  

Folks interested in pursuing this type of fiction more avidly may find the titles below useful....

   

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part IX

Archaeology has grown exponentially since the days of Schliemann, Evans and Stein. Developments in numerous other disciplines have fed into archaeology's own growth--geology, geography, statistics, linguistics, paleontology, paleobotany ... the list could be extended several times over.  As archaeology has absorbed the lessons of such contributing disciplines, it also has put such lessons to use by becoming increasingly more specialized over time.  One often is no longer a practitioner of mere archaeology, but is instead a maritime archaeologist or an archaeoastronomer or an ethnoarchaeologist:

   

Most of what archaeologists do, however, has only rarely ever been on the radar of the average Joe and Jane.  There is a very good reason for this.  If, as one Civil War soldier wrote to his wife, "soldiering is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror," it would not be too much of a stretch to replace terror with exhilaration and get something akin to the life of the typical archaeologist.  McSweeney's in fact recently alluded to this in a clever piece titled So You Wanted to Be an Archaeologist:

You had envisioned study abroad programs at Giza or Angkor Wat. What you ended up with was a summer in the swamps of central Florida, uncovering arrowheads numbers 15,234 through 15,416 left abandoned by yet another well-studied and well-documented pre-Columbian native tribe. Every day was an exercise in being hot, getting bitten by mosquitoes, and carefully sifting and cataloguing two cubic centimeters of soil. Every time you found an arrowhead, which was about once per hour, you tried to envision historically appropriate ways of driving it into your skull. The bow and arrow was a bit unwieldy for the task, and you concluded that modern man's greatest technological achievement was the creation of weaponry compact enough to be easily used on oneself....

In short, archaeology generally goes unremarked by the general public unless one finds something that is pretty dang extraordinary.  We have looked at several such finds over the course of the past ten days. All of these finds generated considerable public interest.  None, however, has ever so captured the general public's imagination and interest, or had such an impact on the fictional depiction of what archaeologists do, as Howard Carter's discovery of the Boy King way back in 1922:

   

Carter almost didn't make the discovery.  As usually is the case with modern archaeology, Carter was using someone else's money to finance his excavations in Egypt.  That money, and his patron's patience, were just about to expire (after several years of fruitless digging) when Carter's water carrier found the steps leading to Tutankhamun's tomb.  The rest, as they say, was history:

It was, beyond any question, the sepulchral chamber in which we stood, for there, towering above us, was one of the great gilt shrines beneath which kings were laid. So enormous was this structure (17 feet by 11 feet, and 9 feet high, we found afterwards) that it filled within a little the entire area of the chamber, a space of some two feet only separating it from the walls on all four sides, while its roof, with cornice top and torus moulding, reached almost to the ceiling. From top to bottom it was overlaid with gold, and upon its sides there were inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, in which were represented, repeated over and over, the magic symbols which would ensure its strength and safety. Around the shrine, resting upon the ground, there were a number of funerary emblems, and, at the north end, the seven magic oars the king would need to ferry himself across the waters of the underworld....

Carter recounted the find in three volumes (1923, 1927, 1933), though complete original sets in anything approaching Fine condition are rarely available in the marketplace (the set below is via The Manhattan Rare Book Company):

Fortunately for less well financially endowed book collectors, the work has been reprinted many times:

   

Many of these reprints are abridged, so if you have the bucks and want the full story (it took ten years to completely excavate the tomb), be prepared to shell out something in the low- to mid-four figures.

As we shall see in tomorrow's post, the last in this series, Carter's discovery had a huge impact on the world of fiction....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part VIII

The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open; heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly 10 feet and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet - an unparalleled archaeological scoop....

Aurel Stein (1907)

Roughly 25 km southeast of Dunhuang, a strategic oasis along the Silk Road from the 4th-14th centuries CE, lies a system of caves.  For over a thousand years, countless pilgrims, monks and scholars who passed these caves settled nearby to meditate and translate sutras.  Many of the caves were turned into temples, and murals were painted on the caves' walls to assist devotional contemplation.  Numerous donors paid for these murals, as it was believed that such a meritorious act would help the donor enter Paradise after death.  

As centuries passed, the murals painted within the caves changed to reflect the political and religious fortunes of those occupying the caves.  Some murals began to take on a more narrative function, often illustrating well-known stories from the life of the Buddha.  Such illustration reached its zenith during the Tang Dynasty.

As sea routes replaced the Silk Road as a means of transnational transportation for merchants, this system of caves gradually fell into disuse. By the 14th century, all the caves had been sealed and abandoned.

And there they lay, for almost 600 years....

In 1900, a wandering Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu re-discovered the caves by accident. Fortunately for the rest of our story, this wandering monk recognized he had found something significant.  The International Dunhuang Project tells us what happened next:

[Wang Yuanlu] become an unofficial guardian of the caves and went on fundraising tours to raise money [for restoration]. In 1900, while clearing sand from [a cave], his workmen accidentally discovered a hidden door which, when opened, led into a small cave filled with ancient documents and paintings dating from the fourth to eleventh centuries....

The full significance of [this] cave's contents was not immediately recognised in China after its discovery. Wang went to the county town to report the discovery to [the] local county magistrate..., taking two manuscripts with him as proof. The official was not particularly learned and regarded these two yellow manuscripts as useless old paper. Three years later, a new county magistrate came to Dunhuang.... Wang Yuanlu hoped [the new magistrate] would be more interested in the preservation of the ... cave's content but, after visiting the cave, the new magistrate simply took away a few manuscripts and told Wang Yuanlu to guard the cave, without making any further arrangements. The monk did not give up however. He took two crates of manuscripts to Suzhou....  The magistrate there was a scholar but he did not ascribe any great value to the manuscripts shown to him by Wang....

Hmmm ... seems to be a pattern.  But a British archaeologist would soon disrupt it.

Born in Hungary in 1862, Aurel Stein had been fascinated as a child by the adventures of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo.  He later studied Persian and Sanskrit, eventually becoming an Indo-Iranian scholar while he pursued his dream of exploring ancient trade routes.  He was especially interested in the meeting of cultures — Iranian, Indian, Turkic, and Chinese — along the Southern Silk Road.

Stein's passion had been heightened by reading the works of the great Swedish explorer Sven Hendin, and thus it was that in 1900 he undertook the first of what eventually would be four major archaeological expeditions to Central Asia (1900, 1906-8, 1913–16 and 1930).  It was on his second expedition that he encountered the now-settled Wang Yuanlu.

For the most trifling of sums, Stein acquired from Wang YuanLu some two dozen crates of manuscripts, together with four cases of relics  and paintings. Included in this haul was what turned out to be the world's earliest known (datable) printed text, the so-called Diamond Sutra (868 CE):

Although the Dunhuang manuscripts, paintings and relics were far and away the most (in)famous of Stein's finds, his four archaeological expeditions uncovered much more besides: relics from Dandan Oilik, a Silk Road oasis which had been discovered, lost, then re-discovered numerous times due to shifting desert sands; manuscripts in the previously lost Tocharian languages of the Tarim Basin at Marin; and a huge number of Chinese, Tibetan and Tangut manuscripts, Prakrit wooden tablets, and documents in Khotanese, Uyghur, Sogdian and Eastern Turkic which now form a large part of the British Museum's collections in Central Asia.  The murals from Dunhunag, however, remain among the best-known of all his finds:

Stein, however, was not the only archaeologist to benefit from his encounter with Wang Yuanlu.  The French actually made off with more valuable documents, thanks to the efforts of Paul Pelliot, who was much more thorough about documenting the caves and their contents.  It is largely thanks to Pelliot that the Chinese government finally recognized the importance of Wang Yuanlu's re-discovery. Unfortunately, by the time the Chinese government roused itself to action, most of this patrimony had been disbursed to museums around the world.

Stein wrote a number of volumes about his expeditions, and First Editions of all of these are quite rare and expensive in anything approaching Fine condition. Fortunately, several of these have been reprinted, and all of the major texts associated with the finds at these caves and elsewhere along the Silk Road have now been digitized for scholarly use by the Digital Silk Road Project (from whence came the images below)....

  

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part VII

It is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue....

Evelyn Waugh, on seeing the reconstructed frescoes at Knossos, in Labels (1930)

At best, [Evans] has seemed a dupe of his own obsessions with a particular vision of prehistory....  At worst, he has been presented as a rich, upper-class racist, working out his sexual hang-ups and his British imperialist prejudices on the archaeology of Minoan Crete....

Mary Beard, Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery, New York Review of Books (13 August 2009)

It's easy to criticize in hindsight.  Both Schliemann and Evans have been the butt of much disparagement by modern archaeologists, yet their excavations need to be understood in the context of their own times if we are to fully appreciate what both men, their many errors notwithstanding, actually managed to accomplish:

   

Even as excavations in the Mediterranean proceeded apace, archaeology elsewhere began to put the discipline on firmer, more modern footing.  Augustus Pitt Rivers, for example, was much more meticulous than either Schliemann or Evans in the excavations of his own properties at Cranborne Chase in southern England in the 1880s:

  

Rivers' approach is detailed in the very rare work for which he is best known, Excavations in Cranborne Chase (4 vols. + Index, privately printed, 1887-1898, from whence comes the image above right):

It is hardly necessary to insist upon the large amount of evidence of early times that lies buried in the soil upon nearly every large property, which is constantly being destroyed through the operations of agriculture, and which scientific anthropologists have seldom the opportunity or the means of examining. To render this evidence available for anthropological generalization is well-worth the attention of the owners of property, who may thus render great service to an important branch of science, provided always that it is done properly, for to meddle with and destroy antiquities without recording the results carefully, would be a work as mischievous as the converse of it would be useful....

Rivers' greatest contribution to archaeology, and the basis for his often being hailed as the Father of British Archaeology, was his insistence that all artifacts, not just the beautiful or unique ones, needed to be properly collected and cataloged.  This remains a major distinction between modern archaeology and the treasure hunting and antiquarianism which preceeded it.

Similar attention to the smallest details of the most mundane objects also would characterize the excavations of the so-called Father of Egyptian (and Palestinian) Archaeology, Flinders Petrie:

 

Petrie had cut his archaeological teeth, so to speak, on excavations at Stonehenge when he was only 19 years old.  He traveled to Egypt in the 1880s, where he became the first person ever to rigorously analyze and record the ruins of the Giza plateau (so accurate was he that much of the basic data he recorded remains in use to this day).  His development of the concept of seriation would prove to be especially influential.

Petrie later made significant finds in many other areas of the Near East, recording the results in nearly one hundred published volumes (and a further 1000 or so published articles):

   

All of the excavations that we've surveyed over the past couple of posts were taking place at the same time that the last great explorations were taking place in "parts unknown."  The explorations of folks like John Lloyd Stephens in Central America and Sven Hendin in Asia would lay the groundwork for major discoveries that would further advance the discipline of archaeology, not least of which would be the discovery of the world's earliest known (datable) printed text....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part VI

The ruins at Hisarlik (see last Friday's post) contain eleven different settlement layers that span over 3000 years of human habitation.  Schliemann believed the fabled city of Troy was represented by the second of these layers (Troy II), which modern archaeology now dates to roughly 2600–2250 BCE, over a thousand years too early for the events described in Homer's The Illiad.  The most likely candidate (thus far) for fabled Troy? -- layer VIIa, dated to roughly 1300–1190 BCE.  But the very existence of an historical Troy remains very much a matter of debate:

   

While Calvert and Schliemann were excavating at Hisarlik, another wealthy devotee of ancient pre-Classical Mediterranean civilizations was studying undeciphered seals in his position as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  In 1894 Arthur Evans visited Crete to try and decipher two unknown scripts that showed up repeatedly on many of the seals he was studying at the Ashmolean.  (He published the first results of his study a year later, terming the unknown hieroglyphic script Linear A and the unknown pre-alphabetic script Linear B.  More about these shortly.)

While in the general area Evans had visited Schliemann's excavations.  At the time, both he and Schliemann were aware of excavations that had been undertaken along the north coast of Crete near the Kefala hill (Knossos).  First excavated in 1878 by an Herakleion merchant and antiquarian named Minos Kalokairinos, the site had been shut down a year later by Ottoman authorities, but not before U.S. Consul William Stillman had suggested this might be the location of the fabled Cretan labyrinth.

Schliemann had tried to buy the site, but refused to pay the exorbitant sum requested. When Evans inherited his father's estate in 1899 (nine years after Schliemann's death), he bought the site himself.

A 2003 article in Athena Review tells what happened next:

Using a sizable local work force, Evans began large-scale, systematic excavations at Knossos in 1900, and by the end of 1903 had uncovered ... foundations of [several] large, sprawling structures....

...Evans drew heavily from post-Bronze Age, ancient Greek mythology to postulate the site as the palace of the legendary King Minos. This conclusion is now much disputed..., but early on gained solid footing among many archaeologists as well as in the popular imagination....  Evans interpreted the complex layout of the palace at Knossos as "labyrinthine," and connected this with the double-axe symbol or labrys found engraved on columns at the palace.  [H]is identification of Knossos' civilization as Minoan made a compelling if (at times) somewhat strained metaphor, given the associated myths of King Minos, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur.

Besides his pioneering work in excavating the main palace site, among Evans' most significant discoveries at Knossos was the recovery of about 3000 ancient Linear A and B writing tablets. Linear B eventually proved to be an early form of ancient Greek from a later, Mycenaean occupation of the site. Linear A, a script representing the language of the Minoans, still remains largely undeciphered.

Evans recounted his finds in a number of books, the First Editions of which are both rare and expensive in anything approaching Fine condition.  The first volume of his Scripta Minoa (depicted below, via the Internet Archives) was published in 1909.  Although two further volumes were promised, a second volume was in fact not published until 1952, eleven years after Evans' death (1941). The second volume, which contains elements of what Evans originally had proposed for both volumes 2 and 3, takes Linear B as its focus:

  

Evans' own account of the excavations at Knossos were published as five volumes (in seven) over a 15-year period (1921-36).  The original set below currently is on offer at Librairie Herodote.  The set was reprinted in 1964 by Biblio & Tannen (there also are modern on-demand reprints which do not include illustrations or the Index):

Many titles about Evans and his finds have been published over the past century:

    

Modern titles tend to be much more critical of his interpretations than earlier titles, based as they are on decades of additional archaeological work in the area:

   

Evans' methodology usually receives less criticism than his interpretations, and both seem to receive less criticism than his heavy-handed attempts to reconstruct parts of the site:

Restorations and reconstructions of portions of the walls and foundations often used reinforced concrete..., with reconstructed timber frames and other wooden structures painted in a pink or buff color. Numerous examples of the now famous frescoes, discovered mainly as small fragments, were boldly restored....  These restoration methods have been often criticized for both over-interpretation of sometimes scanty remains, and for using materials foreign to Minoan architecture....

What greets the modern visitor to Knossos is very much one man's vision of what once may have been....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part V

...so long as the city of Priam remained untaken, the great wall of the Achaeans stood firm; but when the bravest of the Trojans were no more, and many also of the Argives, though some were yet left alive--when, moreover, the city was sacked in the tenth year, and the Argives had gone back with their ships to their own country--then Neptune and Apollo took counsel to destroy the wall, and they turned on to it the streams of all the rivers from Mount Ida into the sea....

Homer, The Illiad: Book XII (trans. Samuel Butler, 1898)

Numerous attempts were made in the late 19th century to prove and disprove the theories of Lyell, Thomsen, Darwin and others (see yesterday's post).  Excavations cropped up all over the planet.  Some of these excavations advanced the cause of archaeology.  Others did not. Some, as we shall see below, proved to be a mixed blessing.

For many centuries, it was widely believed that the events recounted in Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey did not reflect actual historical events.  Of course, there also had always been others who believed otherwise.  One of those who sought to prove that an historical Troy actually had existed was Frank Calvert:

   

Born in Malta in 1828, Calvert spent a large part of his adult life as a consular official in the Dardanelles. He lived in the Troad, where he spent some 15 years excavating in and around a site that had been proposed as the possible location of Troy (Homer's Priam) as early as 1822.  Calvert and his family had bought several parcels of land in this area, known then (as now) as Hisarlik.  This site, a tell located about 6.5 km from the Aegean Sea in modern day Turkey, would prove a thorn in the side of archaeology for well over a century.

Calvert first came into possession of some 2000 acres near the site in 1857.  In 1864 he came into possession of part of the tell itself.  Although Calvert excavated in and around these sites methodically and with some precision, he lacked the financial resources to excavate the sites fully.

In 1868, Calvert met a recently retired German businessman who had made very large fortunes as, successively, a stock market investor, a banker during the California Gold Rush, by cornering the market in indigo, and by cornering as well the markets in saltpeter, sulfur and lead.  Fluent in over a dozen languages, Heinrich Schliemann was able to retire by age 41.  Long interested in Troy himself, and with money to spare, Schliemann and Calvert seemed like a natural fit for each other.  But appearances can be deceiving.

Schliemann basically took over the excavations. Where Calvert had been precise and methodical, Schliemann was anything but. Schliemann published finds. Calvert published rebuttals to Schliemann's finds, both in terms of methodology and interpretation.  

Schliemann disparaged Calvert in print.  He also exported several finds without license from the government to do so.  The symbiotic relationship between Calvert and Schliemann became increasingly frayed.

In 1874, Schliemann published his famous claim that he had found the ruins of Troy (in 1873) and he had the treasure to prove it.  This generated a firestorm of publicity, which backfired against Schliemann when the Ottoman government revoked his permission to dig and sued him for a share of the so-called Priam's Treasure.

Later scholarship rejected much of Schliemann's claim.  In the late 1990s Calvert's heirs sought title to that part of the find recovered from Calvert's properties.

  

This story has been recounted in numerous titles over the century.  The earliest such titles often bought into Schliemann's own accounts of what transpired, while later titles have sought to correct the historical record: 

     

What is beyond dispute is that Schliemann would not have accomplished what he did without Calvert, and vice-versa.  And what also is beyond dispute is that Schliemann's excavations damaged a lot of the historical record at Hisarlik.

As we shall see on Monday, this was but one of many burdens that archaeology would have to bear while it matured as a discipline...

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part IV

As the examples below suggest, many books have been published that cover one or more facets of proto-archaeology:

   

What one is left with, after perusing many such volumes, is the very strong sense that treasure hunting, antiquarianism and accidents might well have accounted for everything we now know about past human societies, were it not for three books published over a three-decade span around the middle of the 19th century.  These three books profoundly changed the way most people thought about the past, and it was from such change that archaeology as we know it today was born.

The first book was published in three volumes from 1830-1833.  Penned by an independently wealthy former lawyer, the title proposed that (1) geologic change was an accumulation of tiny changes over enormously long spans of time and (2) such changes are still going on and are thus subject to interpretation by direct observation (i.e., the present is the key to the past):

Charles Lyell was not advancing his own original scholarship in this suggestion, but rather popularizing an idea, uniformitarianism, advanced previously by James Hutton. Lyell's synthesis would have an enormous impact on the author of the third book we are examining here.

The second book to profoundly influence how people thought about the past was first published in 1836, though not translated into English until 1848.  Like Lyell's great work, it was a synthesis of others' work and theories, especially that of the great French antiquary Nicholas Mahudel:

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen had used the work and theories of Mahudel and others to re-organize the antiquarian collections of the National Museum of Denmark.  Previous theories had suggested that humankind's earliest history had been one of progress through three successive ages: stone, bronze and iron.  But such theories had not actually suggested a reliable way of dating actual finds. Thomsen, using his museum's vast collections, was able to group similar artifacts with similar artifacts in closed finds, thus establishing an evidential basis for the three-age system of early material culture.  His Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (Guide to Northern Antiquity) gave Hoare's followers (see yesterday's post) and others one of the keys to deciphering finds like Stonehenge.

Lyell had expended a considerable amount of ink in the second volume of his Principles of Geology attempting to refute the evolutionary theories of J. B. Lamarck.  (Lamarck's theories were not well known at the time -- they were in fact not translated into English until 1914.)  But Lyell's objections, and -- more importantly -- his synthesis of uniformitarianism, were both important grist for the idea mill of Charles Darwin:

Darwin's theory (that all forms of life descended [with modifications] over time from common ancestry) formed -- along with the works of Lyell and Thomsen -- the building blocks for archaeology as we know it today.  

Excavations would be undertaken around the world to prove or disprove the theories of Lyell, Thomsen and Darwin, as well as the host of theorists who followed in their wake. The more contemporary of these excavations were necessarily flawed by today's standards, and were usually profoundly Eurocentric in their interpretations.  

Two of the more "notorious" such excavations focused on Aegean civilizations during the Bronze Age. These were not excavations conducted by highly-credentialed peers working as teams.  They were basically one-man shows.  The excavators were wealthy and self-taught and, above all, passionate....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part III

In 1764, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann published a work that not only would profoundly influence art history, but also the development of archaeology as we recognize it today.  Even though many of his assessments were based on copies or medals, and much was based on personal feeling rather than hard scholarship, Winckelmann's attempts to draw reasoned conclusions about the stylistic development of ancient art from empirical observations lay the groundwork for modern archaeological methodology.   (The first edition of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [History of Ancient Art] is depicted below left; a modern reprint, below right):

   

While noted antiquarians of previous centuries -- think John Leland and William Stukeley -- had often included in their surveys of specific geographic areas any ancient ruins they encountered, their excavations were primitive by today's standards, and they rarely understood the true significance of what they had found.  Winckelmann's more scientific approach was similar to one utilized a few decades later by Richard Colt Hoare, who recorded a number of neolithic barrows he encountered in surveys he made of the Stourhead estate he had inherited from his grandfather in 1785.   Hoare, along with William Cunnington, made the first recorded excavation at Stonehenge, eventually excavating almost 400 barrows on the Salisbury Plain.  But he was unable to date his finds, a proposed solution still a couple of decades away.  (The image below is from his 1812 publication Ancient Historie of Wiltshire:)

History is littered with great archaeological finds that were not made through the systematic application of archaeological methodology.   Aside from the discoveries made by treasure hunters (see yesterday's post) and various antiquarians, many such discoveries were made entirely by accident.  The Rosetta Stone, for example, was discovered in 1799 during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (his soldiers found it while digging foundations for a fort):

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1946 by the Bedouin shepherd Muhammad Ahmed al-Hamed, who accidentally fell into one of the caves where the scrolls had been buried for almost two millenia:

  

X'ian's Terracotta Warriors were discovered by a group of seven farmers digging a well on their communal farm in 1974:

Such serendipitous finds might be the norm even today were it not for three books published around the middle of the 19th century....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part II

Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things....'

Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tutankhamen (1923)

Most folks are unaware that written records do not exist for roughly 99% of human history.  What little we know (or surmise) about most of humankind's existence -- the first use of fire, the beginning of religions, the advent of agriculture -- come from the close study of physical remains (bones, tools, etc.). Even for the 1% of human history for which we do have written records, such records often are fragmentary and biased.  (Recall that until just a couple of centuries ago, only elites could read or write, and the records they preserved reflect but a very tiny bit of lived human experience:)

  

The excavation of ancient sites, and the collection of various antiquities, were already thousand-year-old endeavors when archaeology began to be formalized as an academic discipline in the 19th century.  As early as the 9th century CE Arab scholars had attempted to decipher Sumerian cuneiform script and Egyptian hieroglyphics.  In his encyclopedic work Al-Iklil (of which only the 8th volume survives), Abu al-Hassan al-Hamadani advocated a proto-archaeological method that included

• observing and describing the site
• excavating and recording of finds with exact provenance, descriptions and measurements
• using knowledge of ancient writings to read ... inscriptions
• analysing the finds in light of religious and historical texts and oral history

Ahmad ibn Ṭūlūn, founder of Egypt's Ṭūlūnid dynasty, had given his blessing to such early antiquarianism, although he was more concerned with its application to treasure hunting. Stories of such treasure hunting are recounted in The City of Brass and other tales recorded in the One Thousand and One Nights. Several centuries later, the 13th century Arab scholar Al-Idrisi expanded and refined earlier proto-archaeological methods:

  

Chinese scholars also were early proto-archaeologists.  As early as the 9th century CE they had begun to seek out ancient relics for use in state rituals.  This sort of treasure hunting was criticized as early as the 11th century CE by the Chinese polymath Shen Kuo.  In his influential Dream Pool Essays (1088), in which the magnetic needle compass is first described, Shen argued for an interdisciplinary approach to antiquities, the better to understand their manufacture and function. His contemporary, Ouyang Xiu, pioneered early ideas in epigraphy that would also prove important to archaeology:

 

Other important proto-archaeologists include the 15th century Italian humanist Flavio Biondo, who systematically explored and documented the ruins and topography of ancient Rome, and his contemporary, Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli, who recorded similar observations in Italy, Syria, Egypt, Greece and the Ottoman Empire:

   

But archaeology as we know it today properly began to stir only in the 18th century, with the German art historian who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art....

"They Gave Their Lives for Tourism"--Archaeology and The Private Library: Part I

King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man,
He never thought he'd see
People stand in line to see the boy king.

(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?
(funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (King Tut).

(King Tut) Now, if I'd known
they'd line up just to see him,
I'd trade in all my money
And bought me a museum.... (King Tut)

Steve Martin & The Toot Uncommons, King Tut

Archaeologists are frequently the rock stars of academia.  Their spectacular finds often elevate them to instant worldwide fame ... and just as frequently make them persona non grata in the countries where they do their fieldwork.  Some folks idolize them all as an Indiana Jones, while others think they extrapolate entire worlds from very little concrete evidence:

  

A heady mix for such a young discipline.

Actually, in the United States archaeology is only considered a sub-discipline (of anthropology).  It developed, in the 19th century, from antiquarianism in Europe (where it is considered a stand-alone discipline).  It is one of the most cross-disciplinary of all academic disciplines, drawing upon numerous other disciplines to make sense of past human societies.  Not surprisingly, then, archaeology is one of those rare academic disciplines that is claimed by both the humanities and the sciences:

  

Its young age as a recognized academic discipline notwithstanding, archaeology has produced a vast literature.  Over the next several days, we intend to survey this literature from a number of different perspectives.  We will look at the literature produced by real archaeologists working around the world. We will look at the biographies of some of these practitioners.  And we will look at not a few fictional works whose focus is archaeology....