Books on Language: Part the Last. An Anecdote

Nah...

It was a bright and cloudy day; the breeze gently turned the pages of the pamphlet I was reading, as I sat on a bench in my garden in merry olde England ––Yes, merry olde England –– one of Karen Thomson's bookseller catalogues, it was; a catalogue of books on language; one of five catalogues I received that very day in the Royal Mail from London –– from Karen Thomson; at the time, the foremost bookseller of books on language in merry olde England.

But I am getting ahead of myself....

This post, my biblio buddies, I promise, is the last post about my Philology Collection. In July, it was all about dictionaries. In August, it was all about grammars, spellers, and writing guides,. And in September, it was all about books on rhetoric and quotation books. This month, as a change of pace, it is all about an anecdote.

The story actually begins in England; RAF Mildenhall, to be exact, approximately seventy-five miles north of London. It was the late 1980s, and I was serving my last tour in the United States Air Force before retiring to warm and sunny Florida. In my off duty time, my wife visited the antique shops in the towns and villages in the countryside of England, while I visited the bookstores. At that time, it seemed almost every town had a bookstore, and at least one antique store. Sometimes we attended village auctions, where we bid on and won several choice pieces of antique furniture. One day, in a village near RAF Mildenhall, there was something different up for auction –– something for my small but growing library:

I eyed this set. I was familiar with the Encyclopædia Britannica. I had considered buying a multi-volume set for my four teenagers –– until I saw the price. But I had never seen this three-volume set before!

I opened the cover of Volume I and saw this insert:

I turned to the title page of the first volume, and that's when I got confused. If I read the roman numerals correctly, why did the title page say the first volume was published in 1771 when the insert said it was first published in 1769? I looked at the title page of the other two volumes; all three volumes were dated 1771. This couldn't be a first edition.... or was it?

I noticed that the endpapers had the same old brown spots as the insert did. Foxing, I believe it was called.

There was even foxing throughout the text.

The foxing told me the book was old and worth a pretty penny –– or, considering my location, I should say "worth a pretty pence."

The auction was about to begin in a few minutes at 10:00 AM. I grabbed a seat in the first row. I was ready and waiting to bid. There weren't too many people attending this auction. And I hadn't noticed anyone else eying the Encyclopædia Brittannica set, which was soon to be mine.

I can't tell you how many items went up for bid beforehand; but I didn't bid on anything else. And neither did my wife. When it came time for the Encyclopædia Brittanica, I had my hand raised before the auctioneer even got the last words out of his mouth. But I wasn't the only one who bid!

I can't remember what the other bidder looked like. But when I glared at him, I saw right through him, knowing that he didn't have near enough money in his wallet to take that set away from me. But he sure kept on bidding....

I won't tell you exactly how much I paid for my set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But the auctioneer sure was smiling –– He's probably still smiling....

I bragged to all my friends about "my find." And I pored over the pages for a few days, marvelling at how much the "Society of Gentlemen in Scotland" knew in 1771. But then I got to thinking....

I could buy quite a few books if I sold this set....

I did a little researching, and learned that the London bookseller, Karen Thomson, was the leading authority of books on language. So I gave her a call, and told her about my find. She must have put those five catalogs in the mail that very day because I received them the very next morning: Catalogues Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven:

I pored over Karen Thomson's catalogues, making a list of books I would buy, including this set, one with a familiar title:

Karen Thomson suggested I bring the set down to London so she could evaluate it. But Cambridge was much closer so I brought the set to one of the booksellers in Cambridge a few days later. While the bookseller was upstairs evaluating my set, I was downstairs browsing the books, some of which I was already planning on adding to my library.

I still remember the look on that bookseller's face as he came down the stairs ––definitely not the kind of look I was expecting. And when he gave me his evaluation, all my expectations went out the window.

What I had, the bookseller told me, was a facsimile of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, printed sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. I was to learn later that it was most likely printed in 1971, the 200th anniversary of the printing of the first edition.

I didn't call Karen Thomson –– I was too embarrassed. And I didn't tell my friends about "my unfind" either.

But I did learn a valuable lesson early in my book collecting career: Do some research, if possible, before you buy. But surely do some research before you brag about an "unfind."

There is a sequel to this anecdote. In August 2012, I noticed an eBay auction for over 60 of Karen Thomson's bookseller catalogues. This time, I knew what I was buying. And this time, I was the only bidder. What's more, Karen Thomson's bookseller catalogues are collectible items listed on various book search engines for from five to ten dollars apiece. Here's a few images of the covers of some of these catalogues"

Eloquent Words, Written and Spoken

phi-lol-o-gy

I love the way the "LOL" rolls off the roof of my mouth!

The word, philology, paints a picture in my mind of a professor standing in the front of a classroom. He says one word. The word is relevant to the topic this month: eloquent words, written or spoken. The word is rhetoric.

Samuel Johnson defined rhetorick as "The art of speaking not merely with propriety, but with art and elegance." The OED expanded the definition to include eloquent writing.

The professor in my picture has a name: Jeremiah Farrell, professor emeritus of Mathematics at Butler University. He is a man in love with words as well as math. He is the former owner of over 60 bookseller catalogues of books on language now in my Philology Collection, the cover of one of which is the illustration above. More on that illustration shortly. And more on the bookseller next month.

Jeremiah Farrell is best known for creating crossword puzzles, particularly the election day crossword puzzle which appeared in the New York Times in 1996. Crossword Unglued has a screenshot of the election day puzzle on its website. In this puzzle, the answer to 39 across is the name of the person who would win the presidential election the next day! Jeremiah Farrell is currently the editor of the online periodical, Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

While researching the illustration above, I came across some rather disturbing information "About That Engraving By William Kneass . . ." in last month's My Sentimental Library blog post.   Kneass did not deserve the praise I gave him.

Also in my blog post last month, I included a link to My Elements of Style Collection. This month I have a play to add to that collection:

Eloquent words, written and spoken, for sure! The setting of the play is a place called Effingham. LOL! In the play, E.B. White, with Strunk's backing, helps Alice, a first-year college student, rewrite an essay she got an "F" in.

I should have asked Jeremiah Farrell, the math professor, to help me on the next one:

Ward Ritchie (1905-1996) was a printer, bibliophile, and writer who wrote rather eloquently about book collecting and the printing business. His broadside containing a quotation by Douglas MacArthur below a square and a diagonal had me researching for hours on end trying to determine the significance of the diagonal and the square. The quotation was seemingly from MacArthur's farewell address at West Point, an address eloquently spoken; however, MacArthur said the word "memory" and not "memories."   Here are the last paragraphs:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.

Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.

I bid you farewell.

I listened to all thirty-one minutes and forty-six seconds of MacArthur's speech on the American Rhetoric website, and then I read it from beginning to end. But at no time did I ascertain the symbolic meaning of the square and the diagonal. I then researched unit insignias, campaign badges, and even the history of West Point, but to no avail. Finally, I researched Ward Ritchie's connection with either Douglas MacArthur or with quotations, and I found this listing at Oak Knoll Books:

The broadside containing MacArthur's quotation is but one of a collection of abstract drawings containing famous quotations, with the geometric figures, as Shakespeare would say, "signifying nothing."

Not all diagonals and squares are meaningless –– and I didn't need Professor Farrell's help on this one!

The square and diagonal in the above illustration from William Scott's Lessons in Elocution . . . are used to illustrate the position of a boy's right arm as he prepares to speak:

The position of the arm, perhaps will be best described, by supposing an oblong, hollow square formed by the measure of four arms, as in Plate 1, where the arm in its true position, forms the diagonal of such an imaginary figure. So that, if lines were drawn at right angles from the shoulder, extending downwards, forwards, and sideways, the arm will form an angle of forty-five degrees every way.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that dictionaries were among the first books I collected. Books on oratory were the other books I first collected:

Friends of old will recall my mention of carrying the ten volumes of Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence across the parade grounds in Cambridge, England.

And yes, I typed up a forty-one page index of the authors and titles of Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence as part of the first catalogue of my library:

I sold the Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln books in 2006 to hold me over financially until my disability retirement was approved.

Last month, I displayed and discussed my copies of Noah Webster's grammar and speller books. And the month before that, I displayed some of my copies of his dictionaries. This month I will display three other books by Noah Webster:

The book on the left is the third edition of An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking ,Boston, 1793, Part III of The Grammatical Institute of the English Language series. The book on the far right is an 1833 edition of The Prompter

And the book in the middle is one I bought on eBay back in 1999:

I acquired it for a measly sum because the author's name is not on the title page, and the seller couldn't identify the author.

The title of the next book should be familiar to most people:

But again, the author's name is omitted from the title page of this work. Care to guess the author's name?

If you guessed John Bartlett, you would be wrong. The name of the author is L.C. Gent. At first, I believed the name to be a pseudonym, but there was a bookseller by that name who had premises in London and Manchester. L.C Gent's book was first published in 1852. Bartlett's book of quotations wasn't published until 1855.

One quotation book I refer to quite a bit is Cassell's Book of Quotations, containing a monstrous 1256 pages:

I have more than a handful of other quotation books I haven't mentioned, some old, some new. You can view them on Library Thing.

In the last three months, I have given you a view of my dictionaries, grammars, spellers, writing guides, and some of my books on rhetoric. I will conclude my presentation of my Philology Collection next month with more books on language.

Grammars, Spellers, and Writing Guides

Here are some of the "moldy oldies" in my Philology Collection. At least that's what my wife Linda calls them. And since her allergist agrees with her, you won't find any of them in our bedroom.

These books are old, but they're not moldy. Some of them are over two hundred years old. The oldest grammar in my Philology Collection, a second edition of Hermes, by James Harris (1709-1780) was published in London in 1765. The work was first published in 1751:

In his book, Harris tells us that the God who was the Inventor of Letters and Regulator of Language was known to the Egyptians as THEUTH, and to the Greeks as HERMES. The frontispiece above, by Basire, displays the winged head of Hermes. The head without a body signifies that no other part of the body other than the head was deemed "requisite to rational Communication." The wings on the bonnet represent words, the medium of Communication, winged words, as Homer described them.

A glimpse of the Table of Contents will give you an idea of the subject matter of Hermes:

Hermes, Or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar is divided into three books, but published and bound as one. My copy is currently divided into sections. I have removed all of the the old thread, and the book is ready for resewing and rebinding. Samuel Johnson, by the way, was no particular fan of Harris and his book. According to Johnson, Harris didn't understand his own system. Moreover, Johnson alleges that Harris's fourteen-line dedication contains six grammatical errors.

I have another book by James Harris that was published in 1781, the year after he died: Philological Inquiries in Three Parts:

Part III is bound in this book as well, and with a separate title page. This book is a writing guide on Samuel Johnson's other definition of philology: criticism. But it is written on a level that is well over my head.

Speaking of Johnson, there was a grammarian named John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) who believed Johnson's Grammar, History, and Dictionary to be "most truly contemptible performances." But then there are a number of grammarians who don't think much of John Horne Tooke either. There were a number of politicians who felt the same, but that's a different story. The more I read about John Horne Tooke the person, –– not the grammarian –– the more I like him.

If John Horne Tooke were living during the time of the American Civil War, he most certainly would have fought for the Confederacy, for he was truly a rebel. John Horne –– we'll get to how he took the name "Tooke" later –– was an early supporter of John Wilkes. Horne was a political reformer who, like Burke, publicly supported the cause of the American colonists. But he went a little too far, posting the following notice in The Public Advertiser on the 8th of July 1775:



Because of that article, John Horne was tried and convicted of libel on the British Government in 1777, was fined, paid court costs, and served a year in prison.

While in prison, John Horne corresponded extensively with the political reformer, John Dunning, soon to be known as Baron Ashburton. The topic, believe it or not, was grammar!  In fact,  when  Horne got out of prison he published a book about his grammatical conversations with Dunning. The work was aptly titled, A Letter to John Dunning.

In 1786, Horne, now John Horne Tooke –– he took the name of his benefactor, William Tooke –– used his Letter to John Dunning as a jumping board into an imaginary conversation about grammar between himself and two other individuals, one of whom was his benefactor, William Tooke. The title of the work was Epea pteroenta; or, The Diversions of Purley. Translated, the Greek phrase in the title means "winged words." Sound familiar? And Purley was the location of William Tooke's estate, where John Horne Tooke was a frequent visitor.  John Horne Tooke published a second volume of  imaginary conversations about grammar in 1805.

I have the two-volume First American Edition published in Philadelphia in 1806:

The chapter, The Rights of Man,"isn't about Thomas Paine's work; it is about the many definitions of the word "right."

Of note* is the frontispiece of the first volume, an illustration of prepositions. It was engraved by William Kneass (1781-1840), who later became the Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, a position he held from 1824 until his death in 1840.

Every American knows about Webster's American Dictionary, first published in 1828. But how many Americans know about his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, first published in three parts in the 1780s? Webster (1758-1843) published a speller in 1783, a grammar in 1784, and a reader in 1785. He changed the name of the speller to The American Spelling Book in 1786, and to The Elementary Spelling Book in 1829. There were literally millions of copies of Webster's spellers sold in the 1800s.

My earliest Webster speller is the 1822 Albany edition of The American Spelling Book:

Yes. Wooden boards with paper covers.

I also have two copies of The Elementary Spelling Book published after 1843. One copy was published in New York, and the other in Montpelier:

I have a copy of the sixth edition of Part the Second containing the Grammar, published in Boston by Isaiah Thomas in 1800:

I have a copy of the 1793 sixth edition of the Third Part of Webster's Grammatical Institute of the English Language covering reading and speech; but I will discuss that copy next month when I talk about my books on rhetoric.

I have several other spellers in my Philology Collection:

A C1829 edition of The Speller and Definer; or, Class-book No. 2. This book was designed to eliminate the use of a dictionary in the classroom:

And I have two British spellers, an 1835 edition of Guy's British Expositor, and an 1859 edition of Eves's Classical Spelling Book.

Here is a little grammar book published in 1814: The Grammatical Alphabet:

I fully intended to collect additional early grammars, and to assist me, I acquired the following bibliography:

But acquiring this bibliography has had an adverse effect on my collecting of grammars. The sheer number of grammars listed in Gorlach's bibliography –– over 2300 of them in the 19th century alone –– has caused me to reconsider my book collecting wants. I am more than happy with my sampling of early grammars.

One grammar I would like to add to my Philology Collection isn't listed in Gorlach; it was first published in 1640 as part of Ben Jonson's works. I'm talking about Ben Jonson's English Grammar. Addendum:  I acquired a copy in January 2015.

Of modern grammars, I have a few, along with a number of English usage and writing guides:

I highly recommend The Glamour of Grammar. Here is my review.

If you believe Bryan A. Garner, the author of the last book above, some of the other books listed above are nothing but trash. He reviewed some of them in his book, Garner on Language and Writing. Now Garner's book struck a nerve, a fact which is reflected in my review of the book.

While I was in the Air Force, I wrote or revised more than a few Squadron Maintenance Operating Procedures (MOIs) and local Air Force Occupational Safety and Health (AFOSH) briefings. And here was my primary writing guide: An Air Force pamphlet with its front cover long gone:

One of the "Helpful Books for Writers" listed in the attachments to the Guide For Air Force Writing is described as follows:

Gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. Distinguished by brevity, clarity, and prickly good sense, it is one of the best books on the fundamentals of writing –– timeless as a book can be in this age of volubility.

Do you know the name of that book?



If you guessed The Elements of Style, you are correct.

Although I was first familiar with the Strunk and White editions, I became more familiar with the Strunk sans White editions. My oldest is the 1919 edition:

And here is my Elements of Style Collection.

This collection rests comfortably on its own shelf in the bookcase containing my Philology Collection. The other shelves, however, are overflowing with philology books, some of which aren't really worth reading. In fact, I need to cull the collection. And soon! The title below says it all!

* See  About That Engraving by William Kneass . . .