Look these guys up in your Funk & Wagnalls!

I can't stop grabbing books that others bypass. Like this :

The New Archeological Discoveries : and Their Bearing upon the New Testament and upon the Life and Times of the Primitive Church. By Camden M. Cobern, D.D., Litt.D. Third edition: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918.



The used bookstore valued it at $12.50. They know their business and I usually find their prices distressingly fair and realistic. From what I see of used copies on amazon, the price is about right. Mass-printed undergraduate or popular level archeology books this old don't seem to sell for much, I guess because more recent discoveries have made many old finds obsolete. But while original copies of its several editions are dirt cheap, an academic reprint company made it available last year. For big bucks.

The photos alone (all pix in this post come from it) were worth 12.50 to me!


Cobern covers a lot of other finds, but Oxyrhynchus is one of his book's major focuses. I'd never heard of it, nor of Grenfell and Hunt, who thought the place might be a worthwhile dig, while other archeologists passed it by. I decided Nag Hammadi, Qumran and the like must have eclipsed Grenfell-Hunt's then-revolutionary finds, and that Cobern's enthusiasm was kind of an endearing display of Academic Nerd joy from a more innocent era.

In that I did the find, and the author of this book, a great injustice.


This fragment of Matthew from the third century is now only one, and no longer the oldest, of several gospel fragments from the early centuries when Christianity was an outlaw religion. But in 1897 it was the first one, the only one, and to scholars of the topic it was a real "Where were you when __?" event. Cobern was one of many who were blown away by the find:

The writer was working in London University when the first sensational discovery was made of a leaf from a pocket Bible which had been carried by an Egyptian Christian of the third century. [...]

Only those who have come personally into close touch with supremely important discoveries can understand with what eagerness this discolored leaf was examined by every one interested in the authenticity of the New Testament writings. It had been written generations before the great council of Constantine.

Another Very Big Deal at the time was the finding of fragments of previously unknown "sayings of Jesus" gospels. Grenfell and Hunt found an 8-verse fragment in 1897, another in 1903, and other small non-canonical gospel fragments over the years. Here's one verse, from the 1897 find :

Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye make the sabbath a real sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.

Dr. Cobern loves the whole 8-verse passage, and explains what this verse meant theologically, which was to keep pure in heart and act, not to merely observe the seventh day. And he says:

When properly understood, this new "saying" seems an eternal word, a word for all time, and is in beautiful harmony with the teachings of Jesus recorded in the gospels.

They didn't know it for sure until years later, but this passage turned out to be -- uh-oh! -- the Gospel of Thomas! Banned and (a different, complete, copy) buried at Nag Hammadi, along with many Gnostic texts, where they were found in 1945.

Cobern likes it so much. The 1903 fragment was clearly from the Gospel of Thomas, and even then, some experts thought that the 1897 bit might be the same document. Cobern dutifully reports this, but you catch his tone. He's moved by the 1897 passage and really wants it to not be associated with that known-to-be-heretical Thomas thingy. However, he's a true scholar and doesn't close his eyes to the fact that it could be from Thomas.

At this point I still thought this delightful book about artifacts was pretty much an artifact itself. It was fun to visit a time when these discoveries were a glimpse of first light, when no Christian testaments earlier than Constantine's era had been seen, and when so little was previously known about life in those days, presented by a writer who manages to be both scholarly and emotionally engaged with it.

In search of more, the Wiki articles on Grenfell and Hunt are mere stubs, but an article on the site is pretty informative. Over on amazon, I used "search inside this book" and was kind of surprised to find only brief mentions, or none at all, of Grenfell, Hunt or Oxyrhynchus in Werner Keller's The Bible as History, Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities, or Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church. It's a spot-check only, but, still...

More scholarly books cover Oxyrhychus more often. I didn't expect to be familiar with them, especially at scholarly book prices. Others more affordable still were specialist publications and flew below my radar.

But the short shrift given to Oxyrhynchus and to Grenfell and Hunt by the popular literature seems odd. The academic books make it sound important. OK, OK, discoveries that are "revolutionary at the time" do get superseded, but Edison and the Wright Brothers are still famous.

Oxyrhynchus is actually very important. Even now. More googling turned up a great website, Oxyrhynchus Online.

The director of the publication project at Oxford clearly has access to some great personal materials on Grenfell and Hunt. I liked Grenfell's not-so-adventurous brother who wrote to him that he must be off to that "beastly" Egypt again.

It looks like the attention Oxyrhynchus got at first was for its Biblical texts. When later finds pushed them to the back burner, the site's fame died off, when, in fact, it yielded unique material about non-Biblical matters. They're still publishing Oxyrhynchus texts. According to wiki, the project is up to 71 volumes. They're still deciphering things they couldn't read before, thanks to new imaging technology. Some of its classical lit is still the one-and-only source: part of an unknown play by Euripides, and a biography of him; a play by Menander; unknown poems by Pindar and Sappho - one was published for the first time in 2005.

And the everyday life documents (wills, deeds, lawsuits, wedding invitations, horoscopes, and lots of personal letters) which make up the bulk of the papyrus, are loaded with light on real people and how they lived, loved, complained, prayed, begged, and sued.

A little boy named Theon writes to his father, who did not take him along on a trip :

It was a fine thing of you not to take me to the city! If you won't take me to Alexandria [next time] I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you.

But his father had better bring him back a lyre, or else!

If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now!

Another scholar of typical Victorian sensibilities finds Theon to be a rather impudent child, but Cobern delights in this letter too, and thinks the boy and his father had a wonderful relationship.

And I delight in Cobern. Maybe I've just caught his infectious enthusiasm for Grenfell and Hunt's finds, but it sure looks to me like a lot of it still stands. I think Grenfell and Hunt deserve a holiday. Or at least a postage stamp.

Book therapy

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]

--

No, this book is not therapeutic. Interesting, yes, but uplifting ... no.


This absolutely charmed me in the bookstore. Then I read it.

It's categorized as a graphic novel, though it has pages of straight-out text. Makes it look like a kids' book which it absolutely, emphatically IS NOT. Graphic novels is the best category for it.

It has a totally cool concept. A discontented young woman roams the streets at night and, one night, encounters a mysterious bookmobile that runs only at night.

It's her own personal magic bookmobile, run by her own personal otherworldly librarian. It contains every book she's ever read. Actually, it has everything she's ever read, including letters, cereal boxes, etc. Only what she's already read, nothing she should, or wants to, or would want to read. Just her past.

Is this an awesome idea? What a great way to get in touch with her lost self.

So I think it's going to be a charming story about...what? the healing power of books? revisiting your past and reconnecting with your old dreams and fantasies, and how that can help you get your life unstuck?

No. It's about how avoiding Real Life relationships and achievements by book obsession, like any retreat from reality, can be sick and destructive.

And though charming, it's not, it is food for thought, which is what a book should be. But, while getting the message, one of my thoughts was, Boy would I write a different story if I came up with this idea.

If it were up to me, the heroine, when told she really cannot just leave the regular world and live in the bookmobile, would buy an old RV and start her own, everyday-life Bookmobile.

And if she didn't go that route, still, I'd have the otherworldly librarian suggest it when she expressed her discontent with her life and asked to stay.

She couldn't supernaturally amass the books of someone's life, but she could stock her 'mobile with all the books that she loved, books that helped her and fed her soul through hard times, and she could set out to help unhappy night-wanderers by finding just the right book for them.

This, of course, is my concept, not the author's. Freedom of speech, right to say what she wants to say, yadda yadda, but I like my concept vastly better.

What I would put in such a bookmobile could be a whole post, but here's where I'd start:

The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.

I often say that writing a novel doesn't mean I know diddly about literature. It's not modesty, it's the truth, and when I have an impression of some genre or period in literature, I'm likely to be simpleminded in the extreme and to embarrass myself by voicing it, but I'll go out on a limb and say this :

18th century poetry is, like, the Intermission in literary history, where you can take a break between the religious poets and their Journey to Death, and the Romantics and their "My Love is in The Grave" and Life's Fragility, and just go have a Coke and candy bar in the warm light of the lobby.

Sure, some poets of other eras get happy and some get serious here too, but so much of the book is loaded with humor --often deliciously biting humor-- joy, and hope. There's a whole, admittedly "the Titanic is unsinkable," kind of feeling that the amazing discoveries we're making about the cosmos are the beginning of our mastery over pain, wear and decay, injustice and conflict, everything. Life still hurts but there's light ahead; Reason will banish it all.

So far, all that optimism is quite unfulfilled, but mostly, reading this poetry is a joyful interlude.

So I'd certainly have a bunch of copies of this in stock. "Feeling low? Dip into this."

Bread and peace

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
-------


Universal Prayer
Alexander Pope, 1738

Father of All! In every Age,
In every Clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my Sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art Good,
And that myself am blind;

Yet gave me, in this dark Estate,
To see the Good from Ill;
And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will.

What Conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.

What Blessings thy free Bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when Man receives,
T'enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to Earth's contracted Span
Thy Goodness let me bound,
Or think Thee Lord alone of Man,
When thousand Worlds are round:

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy Foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish Pride,
Or impious Discontent,
At aught thy Wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy Goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's Woe,
To hide the Fault I see;
That Mercy I to others show,
That Mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholly so,
Since quickened by thy Breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe'er I go,
Through this day's Life or Death.

This day, be Bread and Peace my Lot;
All else beneath the Sun,
Thou knowst if best bestowed or not,
And let Thy Will be done.

To thee whose Temple is all Space,
Whose Altar Earth, Sea, Skies!
One Chorus let all Being raise!
All Nature's Incense rise!

Book mending: repair that repair!

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]

--


Another book-repair post, largely information that my regular readers have run into here before, or knew anyway. It may be new to passers-by.

This is a case where I took a book apart because the bad repair job someone did on it was driving me nuts.

I try not to let people who repair books badly annoy me so much, but years as a librarian, facing well-meaning ladies who would put stripes of Scotch™ tape across the pages on each side of a binding break, and hand it to me with a beatific smile and an "I helped you by fixing this poor book" -- while I tried not to dive across the desk and conk them with it -- depleted my stock of patience. Which was never high.

Tape on pages doesn't hold a book together, it only pulls on the pages it's attached to, crumples and rips them, it makes a mess, why do they think it will help??

But anyway, this is different, and I ought to have a little more tolerance for people who glue the text block into the spine. It's wrong, but I grudgingly admit that it seems logical to them.

To any readers who don't know this :

The actual spine of a hardbound book is, 99% of the time, not supposed to adhere to anything.

This seems counterintuitive but it's true. The text block has a backing that extends onto the book cover, and attaches there only. Then the attached part gets covered up by the endpages.

Yes, really, trust me. Pull down any hardcover book and peer down inside its spine. You can. You can even hide notes and paper money in there if you want to. That's because it's unattached, OK?

Allow me to illustrate with a 2174-page 1935 Lincoln Library, which is huge enough for its structure to show clearly in a photo :



Back to the problem book I worked on: someone, many years ago, glued it back together by gluing the text block to the spine, and not only that, but didn't even place the text block correctly inside the cover. He/she slud (past tense of slide - implies sloppiness, as opposed the too-neat word "slid") it down to the bottom edge.

URGH.

Here, I'm gently separating the spine from the text-block (the text-block is the complete bundle of actual pages). It's worth a very careful try, though in most cases, they won't separate and you need to leave it as is. In this case, the repair job was so old that the glue had become nice and brittle, and released the spine intact :





Fixed now. As well as I can fix it. The spine is now free from the pages, shown by the inserted dollar. It's more obvious in the Lincoln Library photo, further above. I can only make the book so neat after what it's been through, but handling it doesn't drive me nuts anymore.

Potentially hazardous

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
--


Twice a week we pack the items we've sold and take them to the post office, where they know us well by now, and know that most of our packages contain books. Still, they are required to ask the standard question about our shipping : "Are any of these liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?" After we made the joke about how "Haha! Books are always hazardous! Ideas are dangerous!" a few times, it got old, but the truth remains. They are.

In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. It was mainstream news, not "mere" book news, and got a lot of attention, with the local paper interviewing all in the book business to see if we were brave enough to defy any violent militants who hopped into town.

20 years later Rushdie is alive and so are all the booksellers and librarians 8~) who were brave enough to declare they would stock it anyway. It was truly scary, at least in major cities, at the time. Nobody knew what could happen. I kept this issue of the Barnes and Noble catalog, explaining their commitment to intellectual freedom, and I still admire their courage.

During Banned Books Week, here's to book peddlers everywhere who keep the light burning.

More book repair stuff

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
--


Since I was fixing these 2 books anyway, it occurred to me (after I'd gotten started, of course) to document and post another book repair entry, this time showing what I do when a book has completely split apart.

For anyone who happens by -- I talked about the basic materials in my first post on repairing books -- so I won't repeat that here, I'll just refer any interested readers to that post, but I will repeat one thing which is too important to skip:

NEVER repair a book unless you are willing to destroy its value. Repair pretty much does exactly that. If you want to sell it, collectors would rather have it in disrepair. Really. Repair only no-value books that need to be used and handled.

OK. You'll see 2 books here, but i'll show the repair steps for the more complicated one.
It's complicated mostly by my choice. I want to keep the original bookplate and to keep all of the original paper of that ripped endpage.

You may not want to. It would be simpler and would, in fact, look neater to discard the torn paper and make a big, neat, new pastedown. But I like the plate. I like the personal history in an old book. And I also tend to keep as much of a book's original material as possible ... just ... because!

The general idea is to secure the text block to the cover.

The first step requires a decision. There's paper backing against the bound page edges.

The bookbinding guide calls this the "hollow back." It is NOT hollow, it's thoroughly glued to the bound edges, but they call it that.

Is that backing secure? Or is it shredding, or peeling off?

If it needs fixing or replacing, this is the time to do either one, by gluing it down, or peeling it away and replacing it, the same way I have placed new paper on this one.

Two views, one from each angle:

But in this case, the old backing was very securely glued down already and needed no attention, so I just placed the new piece on top of it.

Now -- BEFORE gluing the book together, it's a very very good idea to close the book on the new piece.

This shows me exactly how the piece will conform to the cover. AND when I DO put glue on the pieces, they will already be shaped to each other and will fit together in their natural position, without pulling against each other.

All I need to do now is glue the new piece onto the cover.


IMPORTANT : NOTE that I have put NO GLUE ON THE SPINE. The cloth spine is not supposed to stick to the back of the pages. The text block, as it's called, just kind of hangs into the spine like a hammock, attached ONLY at the hinges.

Press it together. Since glue always oozes out around the edges, lay wax paper between the repair and its facing page, till the glue dries.

If I were discarding the old torn edges, I'd pretty much be finished, but I chose to trim the new piece to fit around the plate ... and to glue the torn paper back onto the pastedown. It looks kind of yucky, since it's been crumpled down into the spine, probably for decades, and darkened. But I wanted to put it back where it belonged!

And here are both books. In the other one you can see that this technique makes a pretty neat repair, especially if you sort-of color match new paper to the old paper.

This is another book I should sell. I'm not sure that a real booklover should even be in this business. I should sell collectible thimbles or something.

Marvels of Insect Life, by Edward Step. NY:Robert M. McBride, 1916.



Loads of amazing photos. as well as the spectacular color plates. This photo close-up of a honeybee's tongue is amazing. Maybe I'll sell it ... um ... later.

Sue me. I love Peyton Place

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
--

Our friend Leila often spends holidays with us and brings interesting videos when she comes. On Christmas day this year, after the Big Dinner with my folks, we came back and watched an episode of David Halberstam's documentary series, The 'Fifties.

Specifically, we watched the episode about Grace Metalious and her phenomenal bestseller, Peyton Place.

I'd never before felt any interest in Metalious or her book, but her personal story grabbed me. Her complete lack of emotional or educational background for writing, and her determination to do it anyway, drew me in. And then, she didn't just do what her soul longed to do, she did it successfully, at least in terms of sales and celebrity. And never had more than a moment's happiness from it.

Possibly because of the endless TV series, which seemed to be on nearly every night when I was a kid and bored me then, I'd also never had any desire to read the novel. My assumption was that it was both trashy and tame, an artifact of its time that may have been an "adult book" in 1956, but had neither the wickedness nor the literary merit to make it interesting reading now.


I was wrong.

Not entirely. The book is amazing and often awful. It's a crazy-quilt of the lurid, the overly campy, and the insightful. Some of the vignettes in it delighted me, and the best of those are the smallest, not big plot points.

In an early one, two friends, twelve-year-old girls, spend an afternoon together. That's it. Allison is from an (outwardly, but with secrets) proper home. Selena is from an abusive home in a tarpaper shack on the wrong side of the tracks. Their friendship depends on their shared dream of a someday in which each can control her own destiny. But on this occasion, Allison wants to share with Selena a previously hidden aspect of her inner life. She wants them to take, not the usual walk downtown where they buy Silver Screen magazine and dream of pretty dresses in store windows, but one to the wooded glen where Allison goes to daydream about a bohemian literary future. Allison and Selena both feel like outsiders. The glen, outside of and above the town, is Allison's symbol of how outsider status can be superiority, a breaking away. Selena wants to achieve insider status, and can't relate at all to this place or its meaning for Allison.

The afternoon is a disaster. They wander back downtown. In a little chapter in which the pacing is crucial to the depiction of these two mending their friendship by reentering the part of their lives that they can meet in, Metalious nails it. Through ordinary window shopping and ice cream, they gradually find common ground again and part as friends, but as friends who have grown up a small notch by confronting their separateness.

This isn't the only passage in the novel that Metalious handles with intelligence and delicacy. Sometimes she takes you through a character's thought processes, as he or she wrestles with a big inner conflict. The town doctor, a good man, has to help the completely innocent Selena, who has been raped by her stepfather, and faces the ugliness of both of his choices. The nurse he enlists to help him has a little chapter of her own, the only few pages she gets in the book, but the whole interplay of her religious faith, her professionalism, her admiration for the doctor, her astute perception of his conflict, her knowledge that she's made a decision herself and can't pin it on anyone else -- all this makes her real.

This isn't a book review, in the sense of my trying to be Fair and Balanced. I'm neglecting the novel's flaws. It's intentional, because they are well-known, its reputation bad and its merits neglected.

So. I love Metalious's affection for her main character, Allison, yet her willingness to make gentle fun of Allison's earnestness, immaturity and melodrama.

I love the dialog between Allison and the repressed, pale, poetic boy she likes, on a picnic, where their conversation is about beliefs, plans, picnic garbage, sex information from a secretly-purchased mail-order book, all braided together with skilful naturalness.

The violent and awful passages can range from so-so to ghastly, but Metalious did know how to weave such passages over and then under again, with a quiet aftermath. Selena has worked hard to make their poor little shack into a home, and places a fresh log on the fire one winter night -- then gets attacked by, and kills, her stepfather. As she comes out of that trauma-induced altered state, she notices that "the fire made a crisp, crackling, friendly sound as the log she had placed across the andirons began to burn," and that this was all the time that had passed.

There aren't a whole lot of such nifty little passages. She was no Harper Lee, and the weird and grotesque in this little town don't come off with anything like the insight or compassion that a better novelist could have brought to it.

The deck was stacked against Grace Metalious from an early age and still she fought to become a real writer, and had the brains to do it. She set out to be sensational, and succeeded, but she also set out to write well, and did in places. She understood both description and dialog, and how to flesh out character and event using both. I read this thing and it nearly breaks my heart, the "if onlys" of her life and her achievement. With the support and direction that guide and train a writer, she could have been absolutely fantastic, and it shows in her awful-yet-wonderful, rather amazing novel.

So maybe I don't love Peyton Place so much as I love its author for her determination to be who she wanted to be against all odds, and for her even succeeding at it, not in fame but in the novel's Yes! moments.


OK, maybe I really do love Peyton Place.