Dear HarperCollins

An email that went to HarperCollins:

It was with dismay that I read of HarperCollins’ recent decision to put limits on libraries’ use of ebooks produced by the company.

I’m really puzzled that a publishing company I’ve supported for years doesn’t appear to understand how libraries are helping it financially and so obviously doesn’t care about the place a library has in a community.  This is where many of us born into the lower income brackets learn to love books—in my case, enough to pursue a PhD and become a literature professor.  The library is where we check out the books that we then decide we can’t live without, so we purchase them.  Here we discover the writers whose books we get into the habit of buying the instant they’re available.  In my case, it means that I now spend around $200 a month on books, many written by authors I discovered at my local library.  How is it that no one at HarperCollins understands the service that libraries are providing the company?

And, yes, that service extends to ebooks.  Like a lot of people who own a lot of books, I’ve realized how handy it is to carry around an electronic copy of a book I already own in paper.  The two ereaders I own make it very easy to make spur-of-the-moment purchases.  And, effortless as it is to check out an ebook from my living room, it’s just as effortless to buy an electronic copy of that book once I’ve realized that I like the book so much that I simply must have my own copy.

I’m surprised by the company’s action, because this will likely become a public relations fiasco.  Budget cuts are forcing libraries to close branches and cut back on service; that HarperCollins chose this time to squeeze more blood from the turnip is—put mildly—reprehensible.

Limiting ebook checkout to 26 on the supposition that paper books fall apart is laughable.  Paper books are much tougher than that.  HarperCollins paper books are much tougher than that.  I should know:  since the late 1980s I’ve used a number of your books in my university literature classes.

Which is why I’m rather pleased by the timing of this announcement.  We just got a notice that it’s time to order books for next fall.  I have 90 students buying several books apiece.  This semester, I’ve had good experiences with two of your titles.  Fortunately, I’ll have time to find titles to replace them—books published by other publishers.  So that’s 180 potential sales going elsewhere.

Actually, it’s even more sales going elsewhere, because now I’ll be much more careful about which publishers get my money.  I do wish your company luck; you have many wonderful authors.

I just won’t be buying their books.

Bartlett’s Americanisms

is now available in epub format at merrycoz.org, freshly proofread.  And proofread.

And proofread.

I read a dictionary.  The whole thing.  (And I’m betting that there are still typos…)

Another reason to love the Internet

Fred Clark (also the author of an entertaining shredding of the Left Behind books) posted Jourdan Anderson’s August 1865 letter informing Colonel Anderson that he probably wouldn’t be returning to work on the colonel’s plantation.  It’s a beautiful piece in the “screw you” genre which should be studied by everyone who wants to learn how to be polite and blunt all at the same time.

Just as good are the comments (as always on “slacktivist’s” blog), where some speculation that the letter isn’t genuine have so far led to a scan of the letter in the August 22, 1865 Daily Tribune, census information confirming that a Jourdan Anderson did live in the letter-writer’s town, and census information on the probable colonel.  Gotta love the Internet, which makes all this possible.

Handmade

I have succumbed to the lure of techno-gee-whizzery and have been playing with the little Nook I bought.  (And reading Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose middle-aged spinsters would be dandy to survey in an American lit class.)  Naturally, this means making everything I can get my hands on into some sort of electronic book, because what’s the fun of having a cool piece of gadgetry if you don’t get to make something with it? or for it?

The result is Ruth Hall in epub format, the first of the long books at my web site to be made available in that format.  You can snag a copy at merrycoz.org.

Earlier attempts to make ebooks available at merrycoz haven’t been a singular success.  “Plucker” puffed the html files into unwieldy digital blobs; and the only comments I ever got about the ebooks were complaints about one thing or another.  The books in pdb and prc format are certainly more usable (I happily read the books in eReader, on my 7-year-old Sony Clie), though I can’t tell if humans are actually reading the ones at the site, or if spambots are building their own library.  I hope people find the epub format useful.

The amusing thing about creating ebooks is that it seems that the best ones pretty much need to be made by hand.  I already do that for the books in pdb format, and it looks as if I’ll have to do it for the epub books as well.  I tried Calibre; I tried eCub; I tried to try Jutoh and Sigil (no success).  And none of them made a book that looked right (Calibre) or opened on the Nook (eCub).  Luckily, I found instructions and examples and hammered out a version of Ruth Hall that looks good in the readers.

Ruth Hall struck me as a good book to learn on, since it’s mostly text.  And, trust me:  once you’ve formatted 94 individual files into an ebook, most other digitizing projects are going to look like small potatoes.

But it amuses me that I’m surrounded by electronic equipment and basking in the dawn of the twenty-first century (you know–the one where we all get jetpacks and vacation on the moon); and I’m still spending an astonishing number of hours making digital files by hand.

Given that the original books were set by hand from hand-written manuscripts, before being bound by hand, I guess that’s appropriate.

Mr. Peale’s mastodon

I’ve been working recently on updates for the online exhibit of works on fossils published for American children before 1873.  (Seven months.  It’s been seven months since I scanned the first illustrations.)  Mostly it was so I could put up an illustration from 1831 of the mastodon skeleton on exhibit in Charles Willson Peale’s museum.

Charles Willson Peale founded his museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1786. It contained an eclectic collection of natural history specimens, portraits of admirable historical figures, and human artifacts from various countries–all intended to edify visitors and to show the place of human beings as part of the animal kingdom.

His most famous display, however, was the mastodon skeleton he obtained in 1801. Eleven feet high at the shoulder and fifteen feet from chin to rump, it was huge and strange and confusing: was it carnivorous? Was it an elephant? If so, what were elephants doing in North America? There were a lot of questions to be answered about the “Great American Incognitum.”

Samuel Griswold Goodrich is the focus of a lot of my research.  He tried to mix education with entertainment in his books on geography, history, natural science–just about anything he thought children might need to know about.  And he knew that if you were going to introduce something as new-to-readers as the mastodon, it helped to have a picture of the thing.  So he provided one.

Well, sort of.  No one seems to have figured out what the living animal must have looked like, but there were illustrations of the skeleton put together by Peale.  So in his discussion of Peale’s museum in The Child’s First Book of History, Goodrich included a picture of the mastodon on display in the museum.

The image is tiny (two inches wide and 1.5 inches tall) and the skeleton is almost lost in the background.   It’s tuskless, and, to us, the head is oddly misshapen.   But the illustration certainly gets across its point:   the skeleton is huge–the human visitors barely reach the first leg joint–and it’s evidently part of a wide-ranging collection.  What appears to be a stuffed alligator (or crocodile) is suspended in the background, with two statues (a message-bearing Hermes and what appears to be a “Dying Gaul”) nearby.  Was the illustration wholly accurate? in other words, were there classic statues on display nearby? Probably not.  But it’s a charming visualization of the major themes of Peale’s museum:  education and variety.

The skeleton pictured here greatly resembles one drawn by Titian Ramsay Peale II, which appeared in American Natural History, by John D. Godman (1826-1828).  Strange as the skeleton looks, the illustration is fairly accurate. The head is flat on the top because the top of the skull hadn’t yet been discovered.  And where are the tusks? Tusks seem to have confused naturalists of the time; there were arguments that the tusks curved up, like those on elephants, and there were arguments that the tusks curved down, so the mastodon could dig for mussels (and a wood engraving by Alexander Anderson appears to have the tusks inserted in the eye sockets). Leaving off the tusks may have seemed the safest option.

What’s puzzled me is why this illustration hasn’t been mentioned in the secondary works I’ve been looking at, and that’s made me notice (yet again) how often researchers seem to copy from each other.  Paul Semonin’s American Monster:  How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity has been invaluable to my research into how the mastodon was perceived in early America.  And he does mention The Child’s First Book of History.  He doesn’t mention the illustration, but he does say that “In 1831, he [Goodrich] reproduced Charles Willson Peale’s broadside advertising the exhibition of the ‘mammoth’ … introducing his young readers to the American monster as the ‘uncontrouled Monarch of the Wilderness’ and the ‘largest of all Terrestrial Beings!’” (p. 378).

Now, I have three copies of various early editions of that book; and I’ve seen the copy of the first edition at the Internet Archive, and that broadside isn’t anywhere in any of the copies.  And reproducing an entire broadside isn’t the kind of thing Goodrich tended to do.  But from what I can see on google books of Charles Coleman Sellers’ Mr. Peale’s Museum, the broadside is reproduced in that book, with the caption to the illustration I’ve put at the top of this piece, and the words “from Child’s First Book of History“.

Was there a misprint?  No idea–I haven’t seen a copy of Sellers.  But presumably Semonin did; and he copied the info from that into his profoundly confident sentence.  Looking at his bibliography I don’t find that he managed to track down the First Book of History.

And this is why I manage to produce so little:  I’m always redoing other people’s research before I use it.  Good habit–when you have a really good research library at your disposal.  Lousy habit, though, if you want to actually finish anything.

How I love this illustration.  Those tiny human figures pointing out various parts of the skeleton; the skeleton itself, looming so huge in the dark gallery, that sprightly little eye-catching statue of Mercury/Hermes; the slightly chubby dying Gaul (or is it an odalisque?); the mysterious shape in the upper left-hand corner–so much in such a tiny rectangle.  Goodrich liked it too:  he used it at at least twice more that I can find.

It’s just a shame Peale’s museum didn’t put it on their broadside.

Thomas Nast draws a pig

It’s still weirdly startling to find a name I recognize contributing to the periodicals I study, whether it’s Winslow Homer illustrating for Our Young Folks or F. O. C. Darley illustrating for the Riverside Magazine for Young People.  So I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to find that Thomas Nast illustrated the entire first issue of The Little-Pig Monthly (1859).

Nast drew for Harper’s Weekly; he’s probably best known for his enduring images of “Boss” Tweed and his roly-poly Santa Claus.  But he drew for children, too, most notably a picture of the mascot of The Little Corporal rising from the ashes of the Chicago Fire, which had destroyed the Corporal‘s editorial offices:

A single illustration is one thing.  But Nast drew all the illustrations in the first issue of Little-Pig Monthly.  Don’t let anybody tell you mid-nineteenth-century periodicals for children had few illustrations:  they were a selling point.  The May issue of Little-Pig Monthly was 104 pages and had 45 illustrations of animals and people (and pig tails–two, at the “tail end” of two works apparently intended for young readers), every one of them drawn by Nast.  This is a good one:

an editorial pig

He also probably drew the original illustration for the cover, at the top of this piece.  The number of colors on the cover is unusual, given the expense of printing in color.

Unfortunately, the magazine failed pretty quickly–if it got off the ground at all.  Publishers often published sample issues, to gauge interest and to advertise the magazine (I have a unique issue of Youth’s Pictorial Magazine, which failed to launch in 1848; the editors are very clear that this is a sample issue and that the actual magazine will be much better printed).

Little-Pig Monthly did have a weird sense of its potential audience:  it wasn’t for adults or for children, but for both.  This meant that half the magazine might appeal to adults, and half the magazine might appeal to children.  Given that a subscription was $3 a year, when a subscription to another magazine might run you $1, it’s easy to guess why the magazine failed to thrive.

Not that the editors didn’t try.  The first issue is dated “May.”  It advertises the July issue.  The Library of Congress web site has a scanned advertisement describing what the advertisers say is the June issue; the description is of the May issue.  In September, a notice of the July issue appeared in Godey’s magazine.  Still no takers, apparently.

It was a tiny blip in the career of Thomas Nast.  But it’s the kind of thing that makes opening a magazine I’ve not seen before a lot more fun than most people expect.

For June 1831

I like this sprightly little hand-colored illustration from the second edition of Infantine Ditties (Providence:  Cory, Marshall and Hammond, 1831; originally 1830).  It’s a tiny chapbook of poems by Elizabeth C. Jones, who will not be remembered for her poetic gifts.

The illustrations are the best part of the book, which has some of the best hand coloring I’ve seen in an early children’s book.

Remembering Private Older

One of the charms of Robert Merry’s Museum (1841-1872) is the letters column, which introduced subscribers to each other and to readers in every century after that.  So as the Civil War progressed, editors occasionally informed subscribers of the activities of fellow subscribers serving in the military.

Adelbert Older was a popular subscriber and a budding poet.  He enlisted in the Union army early in the War, but was discharged due to illness.  When he enlisted again, his younger brother enlisted with him.  Both died in 1864, after action at Turner’s Farm, Virginia.  Adelbert lived long enough to be taken prisoner; he died in Richmond, probably of his wounds.  He was not quite 24.

Adelbert was the only subscriber to Merry’s Museum to receive a memorial page in the magazine:  one of his poems, a poem about him, and a stanza from the then-popular “Mustered Out,” by the Rev. William E. Miller.

On this late incarnation of a day originally set aside to remember fallen Union soldiers, let’s think of Private Adelbert Older of the 36th Wisconsin Volunteers.

The zephyrs, idle vagrants,
Come filled with sweetest fragrance;
They shake the blossoms down in showers,
And steal the fragrant breaths of flowers.
The bee, the bright-winged rover,
Is wandering all over
The fields of blooming clover;
He dives deep down in the lilies' bells,
And sips the sweets from their hidden cells.

The brook steals down the meadow,
Through sunshine and through shower,
By buttercups and daisies,
In deep and shady places;
Then, with a sound of mimic wrath,
It leaps along its pebbly path.
Beyond, the green-clothed hilltops lie,
And smile to see the smiling sky.

Deep in the leafy woods,
The shady solitudes,
The timid little rabbit peeps,
The squirrel on the branches leaps.
Each tree stands dim and solemn,
Like some old temple's column,
And through those arches vast and dim,
The wind is chanting a grand old hymn.
We half forget the primal curse,
And peace reigns through the universe.

–Adelbert Older, May 21, 1863

              I'm mustered out!
God of our fathers, our freedom prolong,
And tread down rebellion, oppression, and wrong!
Oh! land of earth's hopes, on thy blood-reddened sod
I die for the Nation, the Union, and God!
              I'm mustered out!
					

True Researcher Stories #1

For Memorial Day:

This one is too good not to share, and far too good to let be forgotten.

Several years ago, I bought a few issues of Youth’s Companion from 1865 and became enamored of pieces by “Uncle James.”  They’re gritty, sometimes-intense vignettes and anecdotes about slavery and the American Civil War.  I found copies of almost all the pieces and put transcriptions up at the site.  Who “Uncle James” actually was was anybody’s guess, since that name isn’t in any of the reference books I consult.

A few years later, Judy Albergotti Hines — a researcher in South Carolina — wrote to me. She’d been researching the history of Decoration Day — the early Memorial Day.  And she suggested a bit diffidently that “Uncle James” might have been James Redpath, an abolitionist and journalist who admired John Brown.  Surely, she wrote, this had been noticed by many people.  To which my response was, Well, if it had, they’d certainly kept that information to themselves!

When I wrote to historian John R. McKivigan, he agreed that — yes — given the biographical info Ms. Hines had noticed in the pieces, Redpath probably did write them.

This is what I love about the Internet:  I’d never heard of Redpath; Dr. McKivigan had (probably) never looked at the Companion; Ms. Hines — who knew about both — put them together.  And not only have there been additions to the list of Redpath’s works, but another writer for the Companion has been identified.  (And I’ve been handed a hmmm…, because these pieces and some others appearing in the Companion at that time are very different from other works on the War being written for children; and just why is that?)

Since the identification, I’ve gone through some later volumes of the Companion and realized that Redpath wrote quite a lot about the War — well into the late 1860s.  (He also wrote a short story not about the War.  I think he should have stayed with nonfiction.)  I like his writing about the War:  it’s much less sentimental than other pieces on the subject appearing in periodicals for children at the time.  Perhaps the pieces were read mostly by older readers (early American periodicals weren’t compartmentalized the way we expect), but Redpath wasn’t writing for children as if they were frail panes of glass; he was presenting the truth as he understood it — never a bad thing in writing for children.

Merrycoz is new to blogging, though merrycoz.org has been online since 1999. (Eleven years! And people still can’t spell my name correctly!) The site is a growing anthology of works for (and sometimes by) children, from 1788 to 1873. Some works for adults also show up there, in a collection of whatever I feel like transcribing.

For the last 30+ years, I’ve cultivated an enduring interest in children’s literature, past & present. I teach children’s lit of the present in the English department of a state university. I collect American magazines and books for children of the past — hence the web site. It’s a place where I can post things, connect things, point out things.

I thought it might be fun to try a blog. Here I plan to announce changes to the merrycoz site, to keep track of what I’m working on for the site, and to comment on things having to do with children’s lit, past and present.

About me: I’m an English prof. I’ve been a reader since childhood and earned a B.A. in English lit from the University of Missouri–Columbia, mostly so I could read and earn a degree at the same time. Rummaging through the library stacks, I found Eleanor Cameron’s The Green & Burning Tree and realized that children’s books could be analyzed in the same way I was analyzing Shakespeare & Milton.

After a brief stint taking ID pictures at Mizzou, I went to Eastern
Michigan University, to earn an M.A. in English with an emphasis in
children’s lit. My last project there was an independent study project
annotating C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books — the manuscript of which I tried
to get published. Too late for that project (a couple guides were already being published), but it led to my first scholarly book: A Reference Guide to Modern Fantasy for Children — still in print; you should buy a copy.

The Reference Guide was written during my first two years earning a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. It was a nice, big project (the typing alone took an entire month of 11-hour days — soap operas helped) which made writing my doctoral dissertaion seem like an interesting little paper (written in six months — and, yes, soap operas helped). Switching from the program in English to the program in American Studies turned out to be one of those marvelous life-changers: American lit! American culture! American (gulp!) history! All those lovely, lovely books! (And an excuse to read E.D.E.N. Southworth novels!)

Meanwhile, I’d had another pivotal moment. Writing a piece on the
Youth’s Temperance Advocate for R. Gordon Kelly’s Children’s Periodicals of the United States (never have I wanted to drink as much as I did while researching that little temperance magazine, which kept mentioning “ruby wines” & “sparkling wines” & tempting liquor…), I realized that I absolutely adore this stuff. It’s poorly written, it’s sometimes-outlandish, and it’s just the most fascinating stuff on the planet. So my dissertation just had to be on a 19th-century children’s magazine.

I chose Robert Merry’s Museum. (The updated dissertation is online at merrycoz.org.) And I’ve continued to choose it, again and again. It’s the nucleus of my research and of my book collection. Since 1985, I’ve collected pre-1873 American magazines and books for children; works by and about the Museum‘s founder, Samuel Griswold Goodrich; little bits and pieces created by 19th-century American children; and works that appeared in the Museum. I spend far too much money on the collection and far too little time on research.

But, hey: I get to read.