A better class of dirty books

It's a real bummer to love old books, but to also want your books uncensored. I'd much rather have old editions, but such ribald luminaries as Pepys and Chaucer were, not impossible, but difficult to acquire in unexpurgated editions, for a very long time. It's pretty much a given that classics for home and school, printed by major mainstream publishing houses, were edited for "taste" until well into the 1960's.

You may or may not think that this loosening up of standards was good. But cleaning up an important classic can misrepresent it. It can, in fact, make a literary icon out of a child abuser, which Samuel Pepys pretty much was, at least on one occasion. That, by the way, I learned not from my smattering of Pepys-reading, but from Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which is a terrific book on the importance and context of Pepys.

The top 2 books in the stack pictured above are typical major-publisher editions, sanitized for general public consumption; one of Pepys and one of Chaucer. Both were published by Macmillan. Sets like the Macmillan "Globe Editions" were offered by many other major publishers and buyers expected the text to be nicened up. To sell the full version to typical buyers was to invite returns, outraged letters, boycotts, and, if ordered by mail, prosecution under the Comstock laws forbidding the use of the postal service to send "obscene" literature.



This bowdlerized 1912 Modern Reader's Chaucer is worth owning for the many gorgeous illustrations alone. The editors say that they have departed from the true text:

...only to save their version from one or another of four possible stumbling blocks: rhyme and excessive rhythm, obscurity, extreme verbosity, and excessive coarseness. Their rare omission of words or short passages for the last reason has not been indicated; in the still fewer cases where a whole episode is incurably gross or voluptuous (yet Chaucer is never merely vicious), its omission is shown by asterisks.

This, I swear, is called, right there on its title page, 

The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 

If you can say nothing else good about modern morals, you have to admit that we needed to get honest about the definition of "complete."

The top book is a 1925 Pepys. LOTS of the material is included, 775 pages of double-columned small print. However, its editor has not only cleaned it up, but by the way, admonishes you for your interest in the smutty parts:

There is a certain pleasure in discovering a secret, and especially in searching, with the victim's aid, the further corners of his character. This pleasure is at bottom quite legitimate. But the same cannot be said of the Peeping Tom habit which seeks its sole entertainment in the dishabille of the diarist and his companions, and by so seeking has given his record an unenviable notoriety.

Since the full diary is multiple volumes, abridgments were the norm anyway, but while publishers were editing for length, they chose to leave out not only bad behavior but also tame and rather touching domestic information, like, the couple's yet-again failure to conceive a child, as sadly noted by Samuel when Elizabeth Pepys' menstrual period appeared.

But nice old books can sometimes be uncensored. An eBay seller offered both the Boccaccio and the Defoe, there in that stack, and made it pretty clear to potential buyers that they were unedited, by showing a couple of the illustrations.

Something tells me this isn't the
Hearth And Home Classics For Family Edification...

Learning the book business and book history is a lengthy process, but these purchases furthered my education. The Boccaccio set is an English edition "privately printed" for the Navarre Society. That got me interested in this group, but I can't find much of anything about The Navarre Society except book dealers showing what they published. And that may be the story behind them, right there. Unexpurgated literary works, probably sold by subscription to Society members. And possibly shipped in sets via other freight methods, to avoid the postal service laws.

Defoe's Roxana is a US edition, for something called the Bibliophilist Society. Also no information about them, at least under my fairly quick search, but it's a good bet that they were the same kind of organization. Publishers of works, largely literary and classical, that you couldn't get on the general market.

When I saw them on eBay I expected a buyer to grab them fast, but they stayed unpurchased long enough for me to think it over multiple times before I gave in and hit "commit to buy."

So if you're looking for tame editions, get the old editions put out by mainstream publishers. If you want the uncensored version, you'll probably want a modern edition, but if you like vintage books, you might not always need to choose between vintage and uncensored. Old and often beautiful editions from publishers who catered to the Don't snip my books! crowd are out there.

Books for sleepless nights

I have an insomnia problem.  My version of insomnia usually cuts the middle out of my night.  I'll sleep for awhile, but that 1 AM to 5 AM stretch could find me spending most of it awake.

I decided awhile ago to just go with it most nights (unless life's demands demand that I take a pill), instead of fighting it with over-the-counter drugs that make me feel lousy in the morning, and that (this is totally unsubstantiated) I suspect of making my dreams more unpleasant.

Insomnia advice often agrees with this.  If you can't sleep, just quit lying there in frustrated knots and do something till you're sleepy.

Reading is one of the best things for occupying a sleepless mind without pumping me up and making the mental hamster-wheel worse.

But I'm finding that not every book that I generally enjoy is right for this time of the night.

Your feelings may differ, but I would call craft and project idea books a no-no.  They are more likely to get me pumped up to take an idea get started on a project, than to lull me to sleep.  But if your mind works differently and finds that an idea to implement tomorrow helps you sleep, they might work for you.

I love mysteries, but they tend to gear my brain up.  I love historical novels, but some are depictions of the worst of human history.  Those will aggravate the hell out of me when I'm already restless, with wishing people hadn't been so violent, so power-mad, so shortsighted and that we'd show more signs of learning from the past.

What works, then?

It will be different for everyone, but here's what I've discovered:

1.  A booklight. I read in the dark with a booklight, EVEN if I don't need to - even if I'm out in the living room and a lamp would not disturb my husband.  The surrounding dark keeps me from shifting into daytime mode and I'm more likely to get drowsy after awhile.

2.   Vintage children's books that soothed me as a kid.  The Secret Garden (that's my childhood copy, above), despite its tragic beginning, is about finding that serene place and letting it heal you, and it makes a great book to revisit in a small circle of reading light in the dark. That's just one example - there are lots of them, from Little House to Daddy-Long-Legs.

3.  Gentle, nostalgic humor.   The Peanuts  comic strips that I read and re-read as a kid return me to that safe happy time in my life.  BUT I stay away from biting, dysfunctional humor like Dilbert (which I love as a daytime read), and from anything political.  Dilbert takes me back to the total frustration of the workplace I used to inhabit, and even politics I agree with send me into that stressed feeling about the state of the world.

4.  Comfort Classics.  This will really vary from person to person, but here's what calms me down, and why:

       Jane Austen.  Emma is a delightful book, but takes concentration.  That's good.  In the middle of the night, I have the quiet around me to let me apply my mind to it.  I avoided this novel for years, until I made it an insomnia book, and found that the whole process of concentrating on it stopped the noise in my mind, and the novel was funny and warm while it did so.

      Robinson Crusoe.  One of my favorite books of all time.  Adventure is generally a bad idea, when it comes to sleep-aid books.  But most of Robinson Crusoe is a quiet journey of solitude and slow building.  Like being alone in the dark, Crusoe spends his time learning what matters and what he values, learning how to best use resources, and, most importantly, learning that the long hours alone are NOT useless time, but time when seeds are growing, and the future is building itself between human plantings and prunings and harvestings.  It's OK for nothing to seem to be happening.  It's OK to be alone with one's thoughts.  And it's OK for a store of grains and goods to grow at a natural pace, not all at once.  Crusoe's life is about making that happen over many years, not about having it in place all at once and then sitting and wondering  Now what do I do with my life?

5.  Poetry.  This one is impossible to make suggestions for, since different poets and types of poetry will speak to different people.  Classic poetry anthologies are good for me.  So are Denise Levertov's The Stream and the Sapphire,  and Mary Oliver's prose and poems, which often bring me serenity.

6.  Certain psalms.  I like the psalms in general, but many are cries of terrible pain and might not help with sleeplessness.  This varies from person to person, and some people might find that the psalms of cries to God really help during difficult life issues.  They certainly help me feel less alone, like others have made it through their own hard times with honest surrender to their need for help.  I prefer peaceful ones like the 23rd, for insomnia help.  I bookmark favorites to turn right to, in the middle of the night.

7.  Nature and science.  Now here's a category that you've really gotta personalize.  If there's some aspect of science and nature that fills you with serenity, a sleepless night is a great time to visit it.  Pictures of mountains?  Herbs and flowers? The vastness of the cosmos?

I love glaciers.  Where ice takes on a life of its own, where time slows to a crawl.  The same photos that might make you feel cold and stressed, make me feel calm.   You may prefer volumes on landscape gardens or penguins or wildflowers.  Find what works!

An awful lot of a good thing

Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen novel. I appreciated her more with my mind than with my heart, until I got to this one, and it's the book I recommend to people who say they can't get into Austen. It's quiet and dark and more about inner life than about outer, although, as in every Austen book, it's about both, the interplay of the two.

The story is driven by what I think of (in negative moments) as the plague of having to live in linear time. You can't know the future so you have to make the best choices you can without knowing for sure whether they really are the best, and you can't change the past once you've made them. Not an uncommon dilemma in stories but wonderfully realized in this tale of a young woman persuaded not to marry the love of her life, not by those who have no concept of true quality (Anne's or her beloved's), but by the person who loves and respects her the most and who genuinely fears for her happiness. Right and wrong choices are so very hard to define sometimes, even after the fact.

I love this book. So when I saw that there was an Annotated Persuasion, I jumped on it.

And it's really a cool resource. It's not perfect. I can't imagine that anybody reading Austen's books at all, much less this one, needs a note telling them what "amiable" means.

But there was great stuff in it. I now understand the relatively lowly status of a curate, and of an attorney as opposed to a barrister. The idea that for widows to remarry -- I don't mean in haste, I mean, ever -- was considered not...quite proper was new to me.

It's got some nifty illustrations too.

So that's what a "pelisse" is.

But i was hoping it would replace my nice, mundane little copy of the novel, and it won't. It's too much, as a reading copy. This is absolutely great for students, or for anybody who just wants more, but that's studying, not reading. The format -- text on the left-hand page and notes on the right -- bothers me. If that were reversed, I could possibly read a novel only on right-hand pages. Turning the page when I come to the end of a right-hand page is very natural, but not when I've just finished a left-hand page. I think the publisher should have reversed this.

So much for not expanding my book collection. (grumble) I'll be keeping both copies. The extras in the Annotated are too good to discard, but it's too hard to just read for pleasure.

Bread and peace

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