DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 260 430 CS 209 218

AUTHOR Tuchman, Barbara W.

TITLE The Book. The Center for the Book Viewpoint Series

No. 1.

INSTITUTION Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

REPORT NO ISBN-0-8444-0322-9

PUB DATE 80

NOTE 28p.; Lecture. sponsored by the Center for the Book in

the Library of Congress and the Authors League of

America (Washington, DC., October 17, 1979).

PUB TYPE Information AnaXyseS (070) -- Viewpoints (120) --

Speeches /Conference Papers (150)

EDRS PRICE 141701/PCO2 Plus Postage.

DESCRIPTORS *Books; History; Humanities; Information

Dissemination; *Literary History; *Literature;

Novels; Popular Culture; *Publications; *Publishing

Industry; World Literature

ABSTRACT

The first publication in the Viewpoint Series of the

Center for the Book, this booklet contains the first lecture

commemorating Luise Sillcox. The booklet includes a preface by John

Y. Cole, Executive Director of the Center for the Book, and an

introduction by John Hersey, President of the Authors League of

America. The lecture presented in the booklet, given by Barbara

Tuchman, focuses on the history of the book from its beginnings on

clay tablets and papyrus written by scribes and priests; follows its

development up to the present time; mentions some of the greatest

books written in the Western world, as well as some of its greatest

authors; and discusses early libraries, the pleasure gained from

reading books, popular books and authors from different historical

periods, the changing public taste, books with great political

influence, paperback books, and the advent of television. (EL)

***********************************************************************

Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made

from the original document. ***********************************************************************
THE, O

00K ! 7.;

A LECTURE SPONSORED BY THE CENTER FOR THE BOOK

IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

AND THE

AUTHORS LEAGUE OF AMERICA

PRESENTED AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

OCTOBER 17, 1979

by Barbara W Tuchman

with an introduction by John Hersey

U.S. WARMEST Of IDUCATION

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION

CENTER IERICI This document has been reproduced as

received from the person or organization

originating It.

0 Minor changes have been mode to improve

reproduction quality.

points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necseanly represent official PCE

position or policy.

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WASHINGTON 1980

2
The Center for the Book

Viewpoint Series

No. 1

Copyright ©1980 by Barbara W. Tiichman

First printed in 1980 in an edition of 4,000 copies.

Reprinted in 1984 for an additional 1,000 copies.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tiichman, Barbara Wertheim.

The book.

Supt. of Docs. no.: LC 1.14:T79

1. BooksHistoryAddresses, essays, lectures.

2. Books and readingHistoryAddresses, essays,

lectures. I. Center for the Book. IL Authors'

League of America. III. Title.

Z4.T85 028'.9 79-607962

ISBN 0-8444-0322-9

3
PREFACE

HE CENTER FOR THE BOOK

in the Library of Congress was established by an Act of Congress,

Public Law 95-129, approved on October 13,1977. Its purpose is to

stimulate appreciation of the essential role of the book and the

printed word past, present, and future. Barbara Tlichman's

splendid talk on "The Book" exemplifies one kind of center

activity: sponsorship of public lectures about books, reading, and

our society We are pleased that it is the first publication in The

Center for the Book Viewpoint Series, which will make a variety

of presentations available to a wide audience.

It is important to develop and sustain the relationship between the Center for the Book and those who create books, for all

parts of the book community from authors to readers must

work together if we are to solve our common problems. This

lecture gave the center the opportunity to collaborate with the

Authors League of America in honoring the memory of Luise

Sillcox, its longtime executive secretary. Other Center for the

Book events recognizing authors and their contributions have

included a reception for Chicago authors held in the Chicago

Cultural Center during the 1978 annual meeting of the American

Library Association and public lectures by two distinguished

authors of children's books Jill Paton Walsh and Elaine L.

Konigsburg.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress is a

privately funded organization that is nourished by a remarkable

public institution. Drawing on the resources of the Library, it

works closely with many organizations to explore important

issues, to encourage reading, and to encourage research. Its goal is

to serve as a useful catalyst among authors, publishers, librarians,

booksellers, educators, scholars, and readers. The 140 citizens on

its 1979-80 National Advisory Board serve as channels between

the center and their particular segments of the book and educational communities. They suggest projects, participate in programs, and provide advice about how we can dramatize the

5
importance of the book and the printed word. Contributions to

the Center for the Book, which are tax deductible, are welcome.

Proposals for lectures, seminars, programs, and research projects .re appreciated also. The interests of the Center for the Book

include the educational and cultural role of the book; the history

of books and printing; the future of the book, especially as it

relates to new technologies and other media; the international

flow of books; authorship and writing; the publishing, design,

production, and preservation of books; the distribution, access,

and use of books and printed materials; reading; literacy; and the

institutions of the book world.

Volumes based on the first two seminars, Television, the

Book, and the Classroom (1978) and Reading in America 1978

(1979), are now available. Each may be purchased for $4.95,

prepaid, from the Information Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540. Tom brochures, The Center for the Book: The

Planning Year (1978) and The Center for the Book in the Library of

Congress (1979) are available without charge from the Center for

the Book, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540.

6

5

John Y. Cole

Executive Director

The Center for the Book
INTRODUCTION

.&.HE AUTHORS LEAGUE

is delighted to join the Center for the Book in sponsoring the

first Silcox Lecture, and we who are writers are especially

happy that it should be delivered in this great treasure-house of

literature and history.

But why a Sillcox Lecture? What does the name Sillcox

stand for?

For many years the late Luise Marie Sillcoxwe don't

know for sure how many years, but we think forty-nine, or

perhaps it was a round fiftywas a presence in the office of the

Authors League of America. She served the league and gave

herself to the world of books and plays for half a century.

But for many of you who do not know the answer, perhaps

I should ask: What is this league?

The Authors League is the professional organization of the

writer in the United States. It has some eighty-five hundred

members, and I dare say almost every author whose books you

care to read, or whose plays you care to see, is a member The

league has two constituent guilds. One is the Authors Guild,

which serves the concerns of novelists, poets, historians,

essayists, critics, journalists, and so onwriters of books. The

other guild is the Dramatists Guild, whose name defines the

craft of its roster.

The parent body, the Authors League, has as its business

the great issues that touch all writers and that affect all books

and plays: copyright, freedom of speech, censorship, taxation,

and other matters of law and thought that govern the written

word. We had for nearly fifteen years a most cordial and, we

believe, constructive association with one wing of the Library

of Congress, its Copyright Office, in offering our views to it and

to Congress during the long task of shaping the new Copyright

Act that finally became law last year.

In her time with the league, Luise Sillcox became the

memory, the spur, the conscience, the will, and the cheerful

heart of this organization. Her story incidentally provides a

7
fascinating study in how a woman of ability was obliged to

make her moves during the first half of this century.

At birth, two days before Christmas, in 1889, in New York

City, Luise Sillcox weighed two and a quarter pounds. She

spoke of having been "a teentsie thing"; and even when she had

become a quite generously full-sized lady, she habitually

represented herself, in her overmodesty, as small. Daughter of a

sewing-machine salesman who later became a successful

exporter of agricultural tools, she graduated from Barnard in

1911 and was soon offered a clerkship in a textbook publishing

house, Silver Burdett.

But her father thought it not nice or proper for a young lady

to go into trade. She once told me: "Daddy said I could go if I'd

be good at it, but not otherwise. I told him that was absurd.

How could I guarantee I'd be good? 'You just have to be,' he

said, 'because you're carrying my name.'"

Finally, but reluctantly, he gave his permission, and Luise

went to work for the publisher for three dollars a week. In 1912

the Authors League was founded, and about three years later it

hired Miss Sillcox: I'm glad to say all trace of what we paid her

then has been lost. She was hired to lick stamps. Up to then, the

author members of the executive committee had licked stamps,

and they had had enough of that. The man who interviewed her

for the job was an author by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.

Luise chased about New York as a courier for a manuscript

delivering service the league ran then and served as file clerk

and bookkeeper. At a board meeting a director dropped a word

about double-entry bookkeeping. "What's that?" Luise said. "I

just put the figures here and put them thereand, well, they

come out."

"Think!" Teddy Roosevelt roared at her at another meeting.

"Think, child! You have to walk to think. You can't think sitting

in that armchair. On your feet, girl! Move about! Think!"

After the achievement of the Dramatists' Minimum Basic

Agreement, one of the great accomplishments of her early years,

she rode back to the office one day with Arthur Garfield Hayes,

then the league's attorney. "We've got to find a secretary to run

this thing," Hayes said.

"Secretary?" Luise said in one of her tones of voice, that of

8

7
the dainty uncertain slip she once had been. "What about me?"

"Oh, you'll work for him," Hayes said.

Then suddenly out came Luise Sillcox's other voice, the one

so many of us remember having heard in later years at

moments when Luise's authors were threatened in any way. "Oh, I will, will II"

Needless to say she, and not Hayes's him, became the

executive secretary of the league. She helped form the Screen

Writers Guild and Radio Writers Guild, both of which, because

they had become labor unions, separated from the league. With Sidney Howard, she hit upon the idea behind the Dramatists'

Play Service, which handles amateur rights for many

playwrights. In the late forties she worked with Richard

Lockridge and Christopher LaFarge in negotiating a book

contract with Random House which met many Authors Guild

standards and paved the way fora later model contract devised

by the guild for its members. Withrare tact she managed the

Authors League Fund, which lends money to authors who are

in times of trouble, or sickness, or particular need, and have no

collateral but their talent.

These things may sound to anyone but a writer like

humdrum matters, but the point about Luise Sillcox was that

in these and her myriad other labors at the side of authors

authors like Rex Beach, Arthur Min, Alice Duer Miller, Sidney

Howard, Oscar Hammerstein, Rex Stout, and many others it

was always the well-being of the writer as a person that she

cared about, not the professional technicality, not the fine

contractual point for its own sake. For she understood that

behind and in front of every book stand two mortals who need

each other, the author and the reader; backstage and out front

at every play two others, the playwright and the witness. It was

whatever would affect the quality of the transactions between

those pairs of partners that she cared about, and workedfor.

So it is that every writer in the country, whether a member

of the Authors League or not, owes an indirect debt to Luise

Sillcox. And since we are celebrating the book here tonight, one

could say that she has left her small mark, even if it cannot be

seen by the naked eye, a kind of invisible colophon, in every

book published in recent decades in the United States.

9
How it would have thrilled Luise Sillcox to know that an

author of the distinction of Barbara Tlichman would one

evening speak in the Library of Congress in her honor! And how

fitting this is.

We all know of the accomplishments ofthis remarkable

historian. She has rightfully won many of the highest honors of

her profession: the Pulitzer Prize, the Gold Medal for History of

the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, recently, the

presidency of that academy and institute; she is the first

woman ever elected to that office. It honors the Authors League

that she is a member of its governing body.

What is the quality that has won her not only these honors

but also that greatest of all prizes a writer could havethat rare

combination of the highest literary eminence and an immense

and devoted audience? What is the strange linkage between

books as diverse in subject matter and theme as The Guns of

August, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American

Experience in China, and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous

14th Century?

It is not simply her staggering industriousness and

impeccable scholarship, impressive as they are. It is, I believe,

the passion that lies behind her restless curiositythe

passionate insistence that life should have meaningand high

value. A word we often hear from her is "civilization." She

brings to bear the great civilizing giftsintelligence, judgment,

memory, humor, and a sharpness, too, a scathing tongue for

nonsenseso that in reading her we learn something about

living as civilized beings.

10

John Hersey

President

The Authors League of America

9

4
SILLCOX LECTURE at the

Library of Congress, October 17, 1979

THE BOOK

10
0 COMMEMORATE LUISE SILLCOX,

who did so much for authors, I could do no better than to yak of

their product the book. And in these halls founded or, Jefferson's library, I could find no more fitting text than the third

president's simple statem.m. "I could not live without books."

For one of history's supremely civilized men, it could not have

been otherwise, for books are the carriers of civilization. Without

books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled,

though. and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the

development of civilization would have been impossible. They

are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has

said) "lighthouses erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.

Books are humanity in print. "All the glory of the world would be

buried in oblivion," wrote Bishop Richard de Bury, chancellor of

England in the fourteenth century, "unless God had provided

mortals with the remedy of books."

That seems to me to have rather overlooked another participant: the author. However, Bury may be forgiven this oversight

because his Philobiblon, written about 1345, before the invention

of printing, was one of the earliest and greatest celebrations of the

book. If he thought its origin divine, he could cite as authority the

opening line of the Gospel according to John: "In the beginning

was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God."

While biblical exegetists cannot agree what this means, John's

strange statement had a sacred character in the Middle Ages

when its first words, In principio, used as a greeting, were regarded

13

ii
as a charm against evil. Whatever the phrase means, it clearly

gives precedence to the word, of which books have since become

the embodiment.

Whether history or literature can claim the earliest book that

we know of is arguable. It is a Chaldean story of the Flood

inscribed on a clay tablet in about 4000 B.c., thus antedating

Genesis by some two thousand years. The next survivor is Egypt's

Book of the Dead, of which the earliest version dates from about

3600 B.c. For many centuries thereafter, copies of the Book of the

Dead, written on papyrus by priests or scribes, were placed in

tombs to serve as safe-conduct for the soul on its journey through

the afterworld. As such, I suppose, the Book of the Dead could be

classified in the how-to category, still a very popular one in our

time. Judging from the inscription, "Hospital of the Soul," engraved over the entrance to the book-room of Rameses II, circa

1350 B.c., spiritual therapy remained a primary purpose of Egypt's

written word.

Among the Jews, as we know from Ecclesiastes, "of the

making of many books there is no end." Books containing the

name of God, which meant practically everything both in and

outside the biblical canon, were not allowed by Jewish law to be

discarded or destroyed. Worn-out scrolls (and in later times volumes) were buried in the Genizah or book cemetery laid under the

foundation stone, or in the attics and cupboards of synagogues.

When these were full, burial took place in the ordinary

cemeteries, sometimes to the accompaniment of music and

dancing in festive rather than funereal celebrations. When still in

use, the scrolls were kept in chests or earthenware jars. Since

books were regarded as true wealth, it was a recognizt,d charity to

lend them. In times of war or persecution and forced conversion,

the !ews hid their books in tombs and caves like those at Qumram

where the Dead Sc, Scrolls were found. Rabbis determined the

preparation of writing materials from papyrus and skins and of

ink made from lampblack mixed with various gums and resins. In

the Book of Numbers it is told that the ink used to inscribe curses

against a woman suspected of adultery was afterward dissolved in

water and given to the suspect to drink. This was how-to in a

rather direct form.

Books as records documenting irrigation, agriculture, astrol14

12
ogy, trade, and war survive from the Assyrian kingdom of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal of 750-650 B.C. Religion and literature

were also represented in psalms, prayers, and narratives of the

Gods. Incised with a pointed iron rod o; stylus on clay tablets, the

Assyrian books ranged in size from nine by six inches down to

miniatures of an inch square whose characters could only be read

with a magnifying glass. Glass lenses were in fact found in the

ruined palaces of Babylon and Nineveh.

Meanwhile, Homer had burst upon the Aegean world and

from that spring Western literature begins its flow. In the age of

Homer, books consisted of sheets made from tile papyrus plant

glued together to form a roll sometimes twenty to forty feet long,

fastened to a wooden roller. The whole of the Odyssey, according

to Herodotus, was on one such roller. For convenience, the rolls

were later divided in :0, sections of prescribed length and stored in

ja s, until they gave way to the codex or bound volume which

could be kept on a shelf. The Greel-s assembled large libraries at

Ephesus and Pergamum, in what is now Tinkey, and of course at

Alexandria under the Ptolemies, Alexander's successors as the

rulers of Egypt. Books represented prestige if one may judge from

Ptolemy Epiphanes who, being jealous of the library at Pergamum, embargoed the export of papyrus in about 190 B.c. with

the result that Pergamum developed parchment, an improved

form of dressed sheep or calf skin which took its name from the

city. When, 150 years later, Mark Antony presented Cleopatra

with the library of Pergamum as, presumably, the then equivalent

of a diamond necklace, it contained, according to Plutarch, the

startling figure of 200,000 volumes.

At about this time, the Chinese invented paper made from a

mixture of bark and hemp, and about a hundred years later, in the

first century A.D., invented printing from wooden blocks. One

cannot help speculating what might have been the effect on

Western culture if block printing had replaced the laborious hand

copying of manuscripts in Europe as early as the first century A.D.

A millenium passed before the Chinese made the leap to movable

type in about 1100 A.D., 350 years before Gutenberg. They

fashioned the type first of clay, later of porcelain, copper, and lead.

In Europe, two developments of the thirteenth century

paper and eyeglasses gave reading a momentous boost.

15

13
Hitherto, for most people, acquaintance with literature was

gained through listening. The manufacture of paper from rag pulp

or a mixture of flax and hemp, by facilitating multiple copies,

greatly extended the spread of a given work, while eyeglasses,

perhaps even more importantly, extended the years in which a

reader could become acquainted with books and a scholar could

study. When one stops to consider what life would be like without

the ability to read after age forty or thereabouts, and the consequences for the life of the mind in general, eyeglasses suddenly

appear as important as the wheel.

Given the labor, skill, and cost of materials involved in

handwritten and illuminated manuscripts, the physical book was

a precious possession. A ninth-century monk exhorts readers to

"turn the pages gently, wash your hands, hold the book just so,

and place something between it and your gown" which incidentally suggests, as I have often suspected, that medieval clothes

suffered from a paucity of washing and must have been normally

grease stained.

It is astonishing how wide a distribution certain books

achieved in the age of manuscript. The 'Ravels of Sir John Mandeville, so-called, a celebrated hoax whose author was in fact a

physician of Liege named Jean de Bourgogne, attained a rapid and

amazing popularity. Written about 1360 and immediately translated from French into English, Latin, Italian, and other languages, it was copied in innumerable editions, of which no less

than 225 manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

survive. For books like this of popular information, for encyclopedias, romances, the classics, and the church fathers, professional scribes were kept busy filling the demands of rich patrons,

universities, clergy, and booksellers. Cosimo de Medici employed

forty-five copyists who turned out 200 volumes in twenty-two

months. His contemporary Federigo the Younger, duke of Urbino,

employed thirty to forty copyists for fourteen years, and although

he lived to see the printing press, his library, according to his

biographer, contained "not a single printed book; he would have

been ashamed to have one."

In the post-Gutenberg world, books naturally achieved a

much wider audience than before and reigned as the mind's main

source of pleasure, knowledge, and information for the next four

16

14
hundred and fifty years, until the advent of an easier alternative,

namely, of radio in 1921 and TV, which came into public use about

1948. As the conveyor of nonvolitional materials to a passive

consumer, that is, of material not self-selected and received

without active participation, the airwaves rather than the printing press mark the greatest change since the invention of the

alphabet. Before reaching that historical divide, I should like for

the moment to consider books as a unified subject from Homer to

the twentieth century, without shifting gears at Gutenberg.

During this period were written the books that have become

permanent possessions of the Western mind, beginning with the

Iliad and Odyssey, the Old and New Testaments, the Greek

tragedies, the works of Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and

Thucydides, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, the Confessions of St.

Augustine, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, Dante's Divine

Comedy. Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales, Macchiavelli's Prince,

More's Utopia, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Shakespeare's plays,

Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, Gibbon's Rome, Boswell's DE Johnson. I am being selective, not comprehensive, and I

have no intention of inflicting on you another of the conventional

five-foot lists on which great books being what they are the

same titles tend to reappear.

Yet to recognize the place of books in our race memory, one

must include the characters whom we are bona knowing, so to

speak; whom the great writers have created as the personification

of a concept or an aspect of mankind, or simply as the focus of an

immortal story. Among them are Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe,

Gulliver, Candide, Becky Sharp, Madame Bovary, Tom Sawyer

and Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes. Each has

become part of our bloodstream, at any rate for those of us on the

fortunate side of thirty; I do not know who today peoples the

minds of the young.

Each of us can fill the remaining shelves with his or her own

nominees; I with Jane Austen, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Measure

Island, The Three Musketeers, The Just So Stories, and for perfection of language, The Importance of Being Ernest but to play

this game is to take unfair advantage if being up here as speaker.

My tastes will not be yours, nor yours your neighbor's. Henry

James could not finish Crime and Punishment while Robert

17

15
Louis Stevenson thought it the best book he had read in ten years.

Coleridge thought Gibbon "detestable," whereas Adam Smith

thought The Decline and Fall a classic that put Gibbon first

among writers of his time. Charles Lamb could read neither

Gibbon nor Josephus, which I find odd because although I too

cannot read Josephus, I am a Gibbon enthusiast. Emerson said

Shelley was "never a poet." Edward Fitz Gerald was bored by

Browning, not to mention Mrs. Browning, and could not relish

George Eliot at all. For this he would be snubbed by the literary

arbiters of today who have suddenly elevated Middlemarch as the

absolute benchmark of educated taste. I have to confess that I find

it a female Moby Dick, one of those mysterious books that critics

admire and few readers can push their way through. Melville's

epic may collect the critical hosannas, but as Harold Ross once

remarked, many of us, if put to it, could not quickly say whether

Moby Dick is the captain or the whale.

By no coincidence, the great works were written in an age of

passion for books, when people read with emotion, devotion, and

insatiable appetite. A learned German in an eighteenth-century

spa had his Homer printed on rubber so that he could read in the

bath. Books moved readers in their deepest feelings, and sometimes to action that altered history. Reading was regarded by its

true devotees as a human need as basic as food or love. A book,

after all, was required underneath that famous bough, along with

bread, wine, and the beloved, to make a paradise of the wilderness.

Learning to read was formerly less of a problem than it is

today when the difficulties of teaching it are owed, I suspect, to

the existence of that easier alternative. Formerly reading was

learned rather than taught, and the precocity was startling. We all

know about the prodigious infancy of John Stuart Mill, but he was

not unique. Swift was reading the Bible, and Dr. Johnson the Book

of Common Prayer before each was three. Byron read constantly

from the age of five, and from the moment he could read, his grand

passion, I am happy to say, was history The most voracious and

omnivorous of all was Macaulay, who too began at three, lying on

a rug before the fire, reading while eating bread and butter, and

afterward expounding to his nurse what he had read. As he grew

he read at all hours, sitting, standing, and walking, climbing a

18

16
gate, crossing a street, Greek and Latin equally with English and

modern languages, consuming mountains of volumes, and dying

in his library with a book open on his lap. By the time they were

seven, the early beginners h d absorbed incredible kinds and

quantities of books, besides reading aloud and reciting from

memory reams of poetry, and imbibing in the process the sounds

and construction and beauties of their native language. This was

what made writers and is one reason why, now that memorizing

and reciting have been more or less abandoned, command of prose

structure is so feeble today.

Our forefathers in colonial America, if too busy conquering a

continent to produce creative writers, were eager readers of the

classics, the latest verse and novels from England, and political

philosophers from the Continent. "To read the Latin and Greek

authors in the original," said Jefferson, "is a sublime luxury," nor

was it his alone. The Virginia planter William Byrd added Hebrew

and on rising customarily read one or another of the ancient

authors in the original before prayers. Colonial Charleston,

Williamsburg, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston all had booksellers and, beginning in the 1740s, circulating libraries. Boston's

first of its kind was established in 1756 with twelve hundred

volumes of history, travel, biography, drama, fiction, poetry law,

and the useful arts. Its founder, a bookseller named John Mein,

advertised it as designed to "amuse the man of leisure, to afford an

elegant and agreeable relaxation to the minds of men of business,

and to insinuate knowledge and instruction under the veil of

entertainment to the fair sex." Was it Mr. Mein's secret object,

one wonders, to insinuate knowledge in ladies' minds without

their knowing it, or to offer them a way of acquiring knowledge

without showing it?

Then as nowand perhaps more then than nowbooks had

the power to transport a reader to another time and place, and

certain books could so deeply involve him that he felt himself

engaged in their events. Richardson's Pamela, rather inexactly

called the first English novel, was one of these. Published in 1740,

its tale of seduction resisted and villainy thwarted by innocence

absorbed virtually everyone who could read, in America and

France no less than in England. In one village where the inhabitants listened to the local blacksmith read it aloud day by day, their

19

17
interest in the heroine's defense of her virtue became so intense

that work was neglected, village business came to a standstill, the

smith was kept reading till light faded, and, when at last Pamela

won through to marriage, the auditors in their excitement rushed

in a body to the church to ring a peal of wedding bells.

Historic power lies in the book that by the force of its ideas

moves men to action or so alters the climate of thought as to

become itself a factor of history. Locke's Essay Concerning

Human Understanding, opening the gate from the old regime

into the modern world of political democracy and ultimately

creating the Anierican Constitution, was such a factor. Not long

afterward, Rousseau's Social Contract combined with his Confessions and Emile proved among the most influential works ever

written for the development of the modem mind, even if the

author, as I think, was a stinker. In that succession, the eloquence

and thrust of Tom Paine's Common Sense, published in 1776, "is

working," said George Washington, "a powerful change in the

minds of men." Selling an estimated 150,000 copies in its first

year, the equivalent of eight million today, it convinced the

doubtful of the logic of independence and persuaded many to take

up their muskets.

Equaling if not surpassing Paine in public effect, the most

influential book ever written by an American was the work of a

woman who had previously written only domestic sketches for

magazines. Published in 1852 in two little black cloth volumes

with a cabin stamped in gold on the cover, Uncle 7bm's Cabin

sold out its first edition of 5,000 in a week, 100,000 before

Christmas, 500,000 in five years, and eventually by the end of the

century, a total, including European sales, of 6.5 million, the

largest number of readers ever reached by an American book

before the mass circulation of paperbacks in our time. Mrs.

Stowe's husband gave it to a congressman who was departing by

train for Washington. Enthralled from the first word, he became

embarrassed as he read on by the attention he was exciting among

other passengers because of the tears he could not restrain.

Leaving the train at Springfield, he took a room in a hotel and sat

up most of the night, reading and weeping as much as he wished.

Emotionalism may account for the book's initial effect but

beneath some of the most egregious mid-Victorian molasses ever

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committed to writing in all seriousness and sincerity, there were

ideas and a genuine passion, and it is these that account for the

depth of its influence and for Lincoln's acknowledgment, even if

facetious: "So this is the little lady who made this big war."

Without the passion that kept Mrs. Stowe writing at her kitchen

table after a day's caring for her five children, the passages on the

saintliness of Little Eva, the ineffable goodness of the Quakers

who shelter Eliza and George, and the devotion of Uncle Tom to

his Bible would have become intolerable within ten years. It is an

author's passion, whatever its form, whether embodied in Mrs.

Stowe's molasses, or Swift's satire, or Poe's lurid imagination,

that makes a pulse beat in the printed page and keeps a book alive

through its readers long after the writer is dust.

As readership widened in the ninteenth century, the pleasure

that books gave evoked a gratitude from readers amounting in

some cases almost to worship of a particular author. Walter Scott

was an object of this mass admiration, though not on the whole

that of the more highbrow among his fellow writers. Coleridge

found him passionless, able to amuse without requiring any effort

of thought; to narrate with more vivacity and effect than anyone

else but not "to create characters that move us deeply" glue

enough. There are some books that require the reader to reach, to

stand on tiptoe, as it were, to read them. There are others that do

not necessarily have to make one think to be worth reading and

enjoyable. Scott's were unquestionably both, for their story, their

vivid scenes, and their reconstruction of history as a living past.

They pleased all ranks and classes of men, acknowledged Thomas

Love Peacock. When each new Waver ley novel appeared, he

wrote, "the scholar lays aside his Plato, the statesman suspends

his calculations, the young lady deserts her [embroidery] hoop,

the critic smiles as he trims his lamp, and the weary artisan

resigns his sleep for the refreshment of the magic page." What

writer could ask for more? "The refreshment of the magic page"

condenses in six words all that I am talking about; it should be the

motto carved over some appropriate doorway of this building.

The Waverley magic brought Scott crowds and ovations

when he traveled and streams of visiting admirers from royalty

down when he stayed home. On his death in 1832, public subscriptions were raised in England, Scotland, and the United

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States, not merely for statues and memorials but to pay his debts

and preserve the home he had built at Abbotsford that had been so

intense a part of his life. The same kind of personal devotion was

felt for Jane Porter, whose Scottish Chiefs captured the reading

public, though denounced as "rubbish" (which it was not) by the

literary potentate George Saintsbury. In 1842, more than thirty

years after it was first published, an American committee sent to

Miss Porter in Edinburgh "an elegant carved armchair trimmed in

crimson plush" to express the "admiring gratitude of the American people." Her book was still being read some eighty years later

by, among others, myself at age ten or twelve in the edition with

the N. C. Wyeth illustrations. In the death of Wallace, Scottish

Chiefs introduced me to tragedy and accomplished that fusion of

reader and subject, regardless of sex, age, and seven hundred years'

distance, so that I went to my first costume party in kilt and black

velvet tam, a rather incongruous Wallace among the Cinderellas

and Snow Whites.

Dickens succeeded to Scott's crown, though faring no better . among the critics, who found much to admire and more tt, excite

distaste. He was more successful than any other novelist who

ever lived, declared Sir Leslie Stephen, "in hitting off the precise

tone of thought and feeling that would find favor among the

grocers." This appropriate sneer by the father of Virginia Woolf

disapproves for the wrong reason: the more grocerspresumably

middle-class lowbrows who read the better. The real flaw in

Dickens is that for all his creative genius in story and character, he

is a sloppy writer; for style I would rather read Somerset

Maugham, who can at least handle the English language. And for

slush, Dickens could equal Mrs. Stowe.

The public adored Dickens's novels and transferred their

adoration to his person. He was cheered in the streets on his first

visit to America, trailed by multitudes, entertained at splendid

balls and banquets, visited by committees bearing gifts, and

greeted when he went to the theater by the whole audience rising

to its feet. For almost thirty years, each of his sixteen successive

books was the best-seller of its day, and when he died in 1870 the

general grief, according to one journal, was greater than "if half

the monarchs of Europe had been smitten down.... He was so old

a friend, so dear a friend," it continued, forgetting Dickens's

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animosity toward America and remembering only his work.

"There is no living man who in the last thirty years has given such

cheer and joy to so many millions." That was what books could

do, and why authors were loved.

Surprisingly to us who are nearer to him, the crown passed to

Kipling, who, at the height of his popularity, was said by William

Dean Howells to be "at this moment possibly the most famous

man in the world." When he fell critically ill with pneumonia in

New York in 1899, bulletins were issued from his bedside to calm

the public, and when he recovered the rejoicing was worldwide.

An entire Kipling issue was published by an American journal

whose readers were reminded that they had just passed through

ten days of anxiety and suspense in which they were threatened

"by the greatest calamity that could fall upon English literature."

For some reason not clear to me, comments about Kipling

tend to extremism. I have never understood the animosity of

some critics toward him, for at his best, apart from lapses, he was

a brilliant writer. "It is odd, this hostility to Kipling," writes P. G.

Wodehouse. "How the intelligentsia seem to loathe him, and how

we of the canaille revel in this stuff." I suppose the reason is that

the canaille love Kipling for his dingdong ballads and the intelligentsia hate him for his attitudes. Yet a puzzle remains: if the

highbrows can stomach, indeed admire, Ezra Pound, who was a

fascist and technically a traitor, why do they foam at Kipling

because he was an imperialist, a perfectly normal thing to be in

his time and place? Was Jefferson a "racist" because he owned

slaves or King Solomon a "sexist" because he had a harem? These

labels represent attitudes of our time, and it is quite absurd, not to

say unhistorical, to apply them retroactively, especially as a form

of literary criticism.

Adulation for Kipling in his own time was also extreme. "Is it

too much to say," rather wildly asked an American journal called

the New Voice, "that in his hands more than in the hands of any

other one man, lies the destiny of the world for the next quarter

century?" It certainly seems like too much, and what this writer

could have had in mind is hard to fathom. Nevertheless, extravagant as the comment may be, the fact of an author being accorded

such hyperbole is at least a measure of the influence believed to

lie in books.

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Book-burning is an opposite testimony to the same

phenomenon. When the Nazis or any other authoritarian group

makes bonfires of books, it is because they fear them as an

alternative voice a voice not necessarily of dissent but of

difference, which is dangerous to the single-minded. Because the

book is written by an individualand only so long as it continues

to be so written because it is conceived by a single mind and

single volition, it will always be different in some way from

received doctrine and will always remain the voice of the individual, which, as I see it, is the voice of freedom.

Of course, as we all know, books can be trash, and the public

goes for trash as well as for quality. The odd thing is that it goes for

both indiscriminately, as is vividly presented in Golden Multitudes, a record of best-sellers compiled by Frank Luther Mott on

the basis of sales estimated by him to have reached one percent of

the population in the decade in which a given book was published. The authors who dominated the ninteenth century before

the copyright law, each with four or more books fulfilling Mott's

criterion, were successively Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens,

and Thackeray, Mrs. E. D.E. N. Southworth, Mark Twain, and

Kipling. Robert Louis Stevenson and Conan Doyle reached the

mark with three each; Bulwer-Lytton, Victor Hugo, Dumas pore,

Poe, Eugene Sue, Hawthorne, Louisa Alcott, Jules Verne, Marie

Corelli, H. Rider Haggard, and J. M. Barrie reached it with two

each. Of this group, it is notable that most of them are still read

today. All benefited in their time from very enterprising pirate

publishers who often had reprints on sale in the streets within a

few days of the arrival of the original. Pages were divided among

printers, run off overnight, assembled, cheaply bound, and ready

for distribution in as little, in some cases, as forty-eight hours.

After the copyright law closed down the pirates in 1891,

public taste, I regret to report, took a sudden and noticeable slide.

Since the law could not have operated selectively against quality,

the decline in taste was, I hope, a coincidence reflecting some

other aspect of the time, perhaps increased population and spreading literacy. In a complete shift from Europe, the new champions

of the first two decades of the twentieth century were all American, and not good American. Gene Stratton Porter, who wrote

wonder-girl adventures, and Harold Bell Wright, who wrote Chris24

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tian Westerns, hit the highest mark with five books each, accompanied, in varying degrees, by Zane Grey, Edgar Guest, Elinor

Glyn's Three Weeks, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes,

Pollyanna, by Eleanor H. Porter, and The Sheik, by Ethel M. Hull:

in other words, a blanket of mush with a heavy mixture of the

spurious exotic. Short of a sociological study of the taste, manners, economics, and demographic statistics of the era, which I

have not ventured upon, I find it hard to explain this sudden and

striking change from the reading taste of the previous era, unless

it be that there are always several reading publics and that a lower

one was coming up. One must also remember that the topmost

sellers by no means represent a unity of taste: mush was also read

in the ninteenth century and honest literature read and appreciated in the twentieth. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,

a truly superb novel, was a best-seller for two years running in

1905-6, just preceding the even greater enthusiasm for Three

Weeks.

With the invention of book clubs in the 1920s and of modern

paperbacks with glazed colored covers in the 1930s, trends fly off

in all directions. Beginning with Dale Carnegie on How to Win

Friends and Influence People, how-tos take the lead, with Dr.

Spock's total of 23 million copies ultimately the winner by many

lengths. He is followed by a galloping herd of cookbooks interspersed with Kahlil Gibran and multiples of Erle Stanley

Gardner and Dr. Seuss, the children's equivalent. Towering

among these is the solitary miracle of Gone with the Wind, and

not far behind appear The Good Earth, All Quiet on the Western

Front, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Babbitt, James Hilton

and Erskine Caldwell with several books each, and Faulkner,

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and John O'Hara with only one each.

Then comes World War II followed by our present era of sex,

slaughter, and slop, otherwise Peyton Place, The Godfather,

Jacqueline Susann, Micky Spillane, Ian Fleming, Love Story, and

that feathered born-again Christian, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Unexpectedly in this company appears T1) Kill a Mockingbird, doubtless reflecting national attention focused on desegregation and the South. Next march the heavy males Wouk

and Michener and what I think of as the Irwin phalanxthat is

to say, Irwin Shaw, Irving Stone, Irving Wallace, and Leon Uris

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along with occasional sports like Catcher in the Rye and Orwell's

1984. Literary types who break into the upper sales levels with

one book apiece are not there for literary reasons. In the case of

Lawrence's Lady Chatter ley, Faulkner's Sanctuary, Nabokov's

Lolita, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Jones's From Here to

Eternity, Updike's Couples, the reason is content: sex or war. But

what categories fit the equal popularity of The Diary of Anne

Frank and Doctor Zhivago? One appealed, I imagine, for its own

sake, the other because of the film.

What is one to make of all this? When, nurtured by movie

versions, the vulgarest like The Godfather and The Exorcist sell

the most, are we then, as the Cassandra claim, sinking into a

slough of mass culture in which trash will eventually drive out

literature? This is not a new fear. When the printing press was

invented, Lorenzo di Medici's librarian foresaw a fearsome decline: "You will put a hundred evil volumes into a thousand

clumsy hands," he warned, "and madmen will be loosed upon the

world." What he evidently feared was demagoguery arousing the

populace, whereas the specter today is vulgarization reducing all

values in art to the level of the most popular. The unworried will

say that the lover of literature is free to make his own choice; no

one is forced to read trash or watch it on TV But the question

arises whether we will have anything worthwhile to choose from

in a society conditioned by mass entertainment.

I am not among the worriers, or perhaps only, let us say, for

two days a week. The rest of the time I believe that quality always

bubbles up somewhere, that true writers will always be born and

will create, even if the contemporary welcome is discouraging.

Certainly in literature and art we are going through a shoddy

period, and twice a week I cannot help worrying that the rewards

in money and celebrity of following the pop fads must inevitably

corrupt the craftsman, as indeed they already have but then

they always did. History has taught me that pessimism about

one's own period is perennial; that people have always seen

decadence lapping at their feet and have yearned for a golden past,

just as the inhabitants of that past condemned their times and

themselves looked back in nostalgia to still older values.

Today, as ever, the priests of literature continue the theme

that Dickens or his current equivalent is for grocers. They

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have staked out a high culture and a mass culture, bridged for the

convenience of Dwight MacDonald by a midculture whereon to

exercise the brilliant swordplay of his invective. But, in fact, the

levels mingle, the divisions are fluid. I do not know on just which

level the arbiters would place Gibbon, but if their criterion for

greatness is appreciation by only the most refined minds the

immediate success of the Decline and Fall would render it

suspect. "My book is on every table!" reported Gibbon gleefully

when the first volume came out in 1776. Though priced at a

guinea, it sold, his publishers told him, like a three-penny pamphlet and was sold out in a fortnight. "I am enjoying the compliments of women of fashion," wrote the happy author, "for I have

had the good fortune to please these creatures." That a book could

both please these creatures and be one of the major works of our

culture is hard for the critics to swallow.

The eighteenth-century reading public was doubtless better

educated than today's, but public taste in any time is an uncertain

standard because it is not a monolith. Some people like slop and

some likeand recognizeliterature. Today, despite our worship

of egalitarianism, vox pop is not vox dei. A best-seller is not ipso

facto a good book, but neither is it, as the highbrows would have

you believe, necessarily trash because the populace embraces it.

Pilgrim's Progress, a popular favorite and prototype of midnot

to say massculture from the start, endured to become, despite

the disparagement of Joseph Addison and some others, the most

widely read book in English after the Bible. When the educated

minority differs from the common people in opinion of a book,

according to Macaulay, the former usually prevails, but Bunyan's

book, he pointed out, was a rare case of the reverse. On the

tercentenary of Bunyan's birth in 1928, the New York Public

Library exhibited 500 editions from its own collection, including

translations into forty languages. This may not make Pilgrim's

Progress literature in the eyes of, let us say, F. R. Leavis or the late

Edmund Wilson, but it does make it a classic. A book that has

carried genuine meaning to large numbers of readers over three

centuries has validity, which is what counts.

High culture's guardians, nevertheless, protect their turf as

exclusively as if it were Timed° Park and with much the same

result: few may enter and the society inside is dull. In the high

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culture park one is hardly allowed to read anything but T. S. Eliot

and Henry James, with perhaps a peep into Proust. I:1 history Vico

has the most chic because no one can explain what he meant; one

is also permitted a purge of Hannah Arendt. The park contains not

much scope for reading for pleasure.

One cannot help feeling that its guardians sometimes miss

the point of literature, which is not to cut gems of flashing and

exquisite rarity but to communicate, to convey a meaning, an art,

a story, a fantasy, even a mystery to someone. The writer must

have a reader as the yin must have a yang. Literature does not exist

in a vacuum; indeed, if it is not read, like music without listeners,

it cannot be said to exist at all. Yet the high priests today appear to

find merit in proportion to impenetrability. In a recent questionnaire by the New York Times Book Review, asking critics their

nominees of books published since World War II which could join

the company of the one hundred or so most important books of

Western literature, esoterica seemed to be the criterion of

many of the replies. Samuel Beckett won the most mentions and

while I liked Waiting for Godot myself, I would not quite put it up

there with the Iliad or King Lear. Among other choices were the

following (and if you find them incredible, you may check for

yourselves in the issue of June 3, 1979): Eric Hoffer's The Rue

Believer, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, John Wheelwright's Collected Poems

andhere is a real sleeperSabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah

by Gershom Scholem. Are these answers serious? This kind of

pretentious nonsense only confirms one in the belief that literature can exist without critics, if not without readers.

Books are made for pleasure and knowledge (and, of course, in

large numbers for information, but that is an extraneous category). "A desire for knowledge," pronounced Dr. Johnson, "is the

natural feeling of mankind." Readers will seek it and may even

acquire it subliminally in the despised territory of mass culture. I

suppose it is not impossible that the readers of Love Story or

Seagull may have learned something, if only about Harvard or air

currents. If Dr. Johnson is right, they will move on.

I have now bumped into the present, where I cannot avoid the

question that dominates all these discussions of books versus

the airwaves. My qualifications in this area are meager because I

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most enjoyed the airwaves some twenty -five years ago when our

family listened to Fred Allen and Senator Claghom and Mrs.

Nussbaum while driving or crawlinghome through Sunday

evening traffic from weekends in the country. The next best show

in my experience was the Watergate hearings under Senator

Ervin, who shines as the unsurpassed star of whatever TV I have

watched, admittedly not very much. From this narrow base, I will

venture two not very original observations, one concerned with

mediocrity, the other with free speech.

The essential nature of commercial TV is that its program is

designed not for self-expression but to sell something other than

itself to the greatest number of viewers. Even public broadcasting

has its discreet corporate sponsors whose purpose is to make you

see Mobil or Weyerhauser or whatever as Santa Claus, otherwise

known as "goodwill." Government subsidy, similarly motivated,

produces "The Adams Chronicles," evidently designed for an

eighth-grade textbook that might be followed by "novelization."

Now books, being self-selected by the consumer, can keep pace

with his growing maturity in age and taste, whereas the media on

the whole must remain at a level that its programmers believe

palatable to the widest possible audience. Exceptions of excellence shine here and there, but the general fare is popcorn. Books

too may be aimed at a mass audience and they too can be false,

mediocre, or vacuous, but there will always be a good proportion

and an infinite variety at the tiptoe level.

Secondly, books by their heterogeneity can never represent a

managed culture, whereas the airwaves by their nature and control by licensing might. That is their problem, however, and a

political one which is not our subject tonight. The book remains

the carrier of civilization, the voice of the individual, the "refreshment of the magic page."

29
COLOPHON

The Book, by Barbara W. Mchman, has been printed in an

edition of 4,000 copies. The woodcut initial B on the cover was

drawn and cut by Fritz Kredel (1900-1973). The cover type,

71ajanus, was designed in 1940 by the distinguished graphic

designer, type designee and author Warren Chappell.

The cover was printed from a zinc photoengraving produced

by the Sun Crown Company of Washington, D. C., and foundry

type cast by the Stempel Foundry, Frankfurt am Main, West

Germany. It was printed letterpress by the Acorn Press in Rockville, Md., on Strathmore Paper Company Grandee Duplex.

On the title page, Old Face Open type, which was originally

shown in Fry's specimen sheet in 1788, is used for the title. It was

cast by Stephenson Blake in Sheffield, England. The highly refined ?lump Medieval type used for the text, created in 1954 by

the versatile German type designer Georg Thump, was cast by the

Weber Foundry in Stuttgart, Germany. Its roman letters are

classic in on,,W, but the italic lowercase exhibits a remarkable

contemporary quality.

The text was printed by offset lithography at Stephenson,

Incorporated, of Washington, D. C., after it was set on a Mergenthaler VIP machine at General Typographers, Washington, D. C.

The paper, Sunray Vellum, was manufactured by the Hopper

Paper Company. Folding and binding were executed at Stephenson, Incorporated.

Design of The Book is by John Michael.

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