The Private Library

Mr. Carnegie's Legacy at The Private Library

It's difficult to envision any individual becoming a book collector without first having had considerable exposure to printed books.  

For a fortunate few, this exposure begins at home.  For others, printed books are first encountered at school.  For yet others, this seminal encounter first takes place in a public library.

And thereby hangs a tale.

From 1888 to 1929, some 1700 public libraries were built in the United States using funds contributed by Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie:

  

The son of a handloom weaver, Carnegie began his working life in a cotton mill at age 13.  A half-century and several increasingly responsible jobs later (not least of which was creation of the Carnegie Steel Company), Carnegie was "the world's richest man," from which pinnacle he devoted the rest of his life to large-scale philanthropic projects.  In addition to funding construction of some 3000 or so libraries worldwide, Carnegie funded the establishment and/or construction of Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now known as the Carnegie Institution for Science), the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh ... well, you get the idea: a list of his philanthropies is quite extraordinary.

In the United States, most Carnegie libraries remain standing to this day, and well over half of them still serve the purpose for which they originally were constructed:

Built in Braddock, PA in 1888, the United States' very first Carnegie library still serves its original purpose. (1910 photo via USGenWeb Archives.)

As a number of recent books explain, these libraries were all constructed to a formula, a formula which required (among other things) that communities seeking to build such libraries provide the land on which the libraries would be sited:

 

A number of communities refused Carnegie's generosity, although -- as Robert Martin pointed out in the 1993 βφμ chapbook Carnegie Denied: Communities Rejecting Carnegie Library Construction Grants -- such refusals were rarely for the reasons most folks' suspect (e.g., that these communities didn't want to take "tainted" money from a robber baron).

In fact, the Carnegie formula required that communities annually set aside a sum equal to 10% of a Carnegie library's original construction cost in order to fund the library's continuing operations.  Because a number of communities faced legal or financial restrictions that prevented them from taxing themselves to support a library, they refused Carnegie's offer.  In other cases, communities simply did not see a need for a library, regardless of how construction might be funded.

  

In addition to public libraries, Carnegie funded some 800 additional libraries (mostly academic libraries) in the United States, as well as another 1000 or so libraries in countries as far flung as Great Britain and Fiji.  (The very first Carnegie library was built in 1883 in the town where Carnegie was born, Dunfermline, Scotland.)

Carnegie library interior, early 20th century (via California Digital Library)

Who can say how many book collectors, over the decades since Carnegie's institution of these public library construction grants, started collecting books because of an encounter with printed books at a Carnegie library?  How many book collectors have yet to begin collecting due to such an encounter? 

Yet another reason to support your local library....

ChocoLit and The Private Library

As we have noted in several previous posts, fiction often revolves around food or drink. This sometimes presents the diligent book collector with a deliciously appetizing dilemma--e.g., should one collect culinary mysteries or Coffeehouse Mysteries?

Virtually any beverage or comestible that has long been cultivated or manufactured is likely to have figured in a wide range of fiction.  That certainly is true of a toothsome sweet that often is associated with the coming holiday season, chocolate:

  

Consumed primarily as an unsweetened beverage for most of the cacao bean's 4000-year history, chocolate, like coffee (a beverage with which it frequently is associated), has spawned an enormous body of literature.  Much of this literature is concerned with the cultivation and processing of the cacao bean.  Even more of this literature is concerned with consumption of the cacao bean's processed progeny, cocoa powder and chocolate:

  

However, it is with but a small subset of this literature that today's post is concerned.

How best to characterize this subset?  The Skokie (IL) Public Library, like the Morton Grove (IL) Public Library, seems to prefer the term chocolate fiction.  We have a number of problems with this terminology, not least of which is that this term already is applied by some readers and collectors to various titles of African-American urban fiction.

David Barnett, in a recent article for The Guardian, suggests Choc-Lit, which has the added benefit of being a cute near-homophone for the substance(s) with which our subset is concerned.  Unfortunately, this term also may lead to confusion among readers and collectors, as Choc-Lit is the corporate name of a respected British publisher of romance fiction (Where heroes are like chocolate - irresistible!).

In the absence of more attractive terminology, The Private Library respectfully proposes the following term and definition:

ChocoLit: any type of fiction in which cacao, cocoa or chocolate is a major thematic element

ChocoLit actually is a closer homophone than Barnett's term (at least for folks who pronounce all the syllables).  While our term excludes fiction in which the cacao bean or its processed progeny make only a cameo appearance, our term makes no distinction as to whether an author's thematic concern is primarily with the cultivation, production or consumption of same.  Our term encompasses literary fiction as well as genre fiction...

  

...adult fiction as well as juvenile fiction...

  

...short-form fiction as well as long-form fiction:

  

Something to collect in case your cookbooks are getting lonely....   :-)

 

Unfinished Books and The Private Library

The term completist, as applied to book collectors, has always struck this writer as something of a misnomer.  In one sense, the term certainly is applicable: i.e., it describes the attempt to collect everything a particular author ever wrote, or everything a particular publisher ever published, or everything ever written about a particular topic.  On the other hand....

One can only collect what is published (or otherwise becomes available) during one's lifetime.  If a particular publisher or author survives you, "completist" becomes a much more limited signifier.  (This encompasses not only an author's physical, or a publisher's corporate, survival, but also the survival of material, the existence of which may be unknown at the time of your own demise.) 

Ditto the applicability of completist re particular topics you may have been collecting, as such topics are likely to continue to generate literature after your demise.

As for material published during one's own lifetime, completist suggests only your side of the equation.  It says nothing about the content-producing side of the equation: all those outlines and rough drafts and other fragments that an author left behind, for example, are by definition incomplete. 

And what about all those books that have been knowingly published although they were unfinished at the time of their authors' respective deaths.

  

So many unfinished titles have been published that, were one so inclined, one could put together a nice little private library that included only unfinished books.

One could start with Kafka.  None of Kafka's full-length novels were finished during his lifetime.  In fact, Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, had specific instructions from the author to burn all manuscripts that remained unpublished at the time of the author's death. That Brod ignored Kafka's instructions has proved to be something of a mixed blessing: The Castle, for example, stops mid-sentence.  (Images below via Wikipedia:)

  

The longest epic poem in the English language (below left, via Classic Books & Ephemera) was only half-finished when Edmund Spenser died.  The Mystery of Edwin Drood was only half-finished when Dickens died.  Twain wrote three different versions of The Mysterious Stranger (below right, via Leura Books) over a twenty year period, none of which was finished at the time of his death.  Balzac's La Comédie humaine was only 2/3 complete when that great French novelist died.  Yet a completist thinks nothing of adding such unfinished titles to his or her shelves (because a literary executor and/or publisher somewhere, at some time, deemed the available material "fit to print":)

 

Interested in Hemingway?  Although all three titles have been published, neither The Garden of Eden, nor Islands in the Stream, nor A Moveable Feast were finished at the time of the Nobel Laureate's suicide in 1962.  Tolkien worked on The Silmarillion for decades, leaving the title unfinished at his death. Gogol died without finishing Dead Souls.  Aquinas died without finishing his Summa Theologica.  Marlowe died without finishing Hero and Leander.

  

Can one be a completist if one collects only unfinished books...?

From The Private Library's Archives: Fleurons and The Private Library

Book designers looking to spruce up an otherwise dreary page often turn for help to a group of typographic glyphs known broadly as ornaments.  Among the most common glyphs in this group are borders, cartouches, rules, tail-pieces and, the subject of today's post, fleurons (aka printers' flowers):

Fleuron refers specifically to stylized forms of flowers or leaves (what Robert Bringhurst called horticultural dingbats), as demonstrated in the examples above (most of which were cut by Robert Granjon), and in the more close-up examples below:

   

Few good histories of the fleuron exist.  Among these are John Ryder's A Suite of Fleurons, which was later revised, enlarged and published as Flowers and Flourishes (both titles are depicted below, via The Happy Dragons' Press)...

and Mark Arman's Fleurons: Their Place in History and in Print:

  

Of course, more general works about typographic ornament usually also include quite lengthy sections on fleurons, even though the focus in these often is less on history and more on cataloging specimens:

  

For folks interested less in the history and more in actual specimens, any number of early type specimen books include pages of fleurons and other typographic ornaments, and many outstanding examples of fleuron usage continue to be printed.  For a real treat, track down a copy (only 36 were printed) of Leonard Baskin & Sidney Berger's Fleuronologia: Divers etchings formed from fleurons (Gehenna Press, 1996).  Similar specimens of fleurons and other typographic ornaments have been published by such distinguished printers as Richard Hoffman and David Esslemont (to name but two of the more recent). (Fine presses in general are a great source for books that showcase fleurons.  As this post is being typed, many fine press collectors are anxiously awaiting the debut of a title that likely will bring renewed fame to printers' flowers.)

(By the way, the poster below, by Paul Grabowski for the 54th Type Directors Club Show, only appears to incorporate typographic glyphs such as fleurons and other ornaments. Look closer....)

Closer...

(Clicking on an image will usually enlarge the image for you....)