100-109: Life, the Universe and Anything: General Philosophy

Oh, joy! I finally get to dig into the actual disciplines, starting with the most ambitious, philosophy. More ambitious even than theology, because it also undertakes to study the nature of God, and without benefit of any kind of revelation or Scripture! As I mentioned before, I am reading books from our church library whenever possible, so my selection for this decade is Will Durant's classic introduction The Story of Philosophy. It is available at just about every librare on the title page, and apparently many of the newer print editions are also not very well-made. It is available at just about every library in the old-fashioned, 450-page version.

There are many introductions to philosophy available; I think this one is still attractive because Durant is opinionated and therefore less dry than his subject might suggest. Of course some of his opinions may seem dated, and his choice of whom to cover is a bit idiosyncratic. He himself apologizes for omitting all Eastern philosophers, and of course he can't cover any developments in philosophy past 1920, the date of the book. But the ones he does include, being dead, are unlikely to have changed much in the last 100 years, so I look forward to reviewing them over the next few weeks.

Miniature Books: An Old Tradition Still In Vogue

You can see from this picture that miniature books can be things of beauty. They were first made by those who prepared other illuminated manuscripts and were functional as well as elaborate: missals could be easily carried in a pocket or even worn at the waist or around the neck for convenience of prayer throughout the day. They also were used as practice pieces for apprentice binders-- a use they still have in art school, where students produce books that, if not strictly 'miniature,' are certainly small.

This was a really beautiful book to look at and read parts of. Every imaginable subject and style of miniature book is mentioned, from the aforementioned hand-written prayer books to those novelty items that come packages with a magnifying glass. Certain publishers are famous for their teeny yet readable versions of the classics, which collectors buy for shocking prices: http://www.lorsonbooksandprints.com/raheb.html. This book really focuses on these limited-edition collector's items, but many books, especially children's books, were originally designed to be small. Ant and Bee, Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library, and the Beatrix Potter books come to mind. Small books are maybe not as useful as they used to be-- with the advent of e-readers, any book becomes portable-- but making something smaller will always make it somehow both cuter and classier, and one advantage of collecting miniature books is that they don't take up much space!

After reading this book, I got a little inspired and ended up spending a few hours and a few dollars at eBay, where miniature books for the casual dollhouse furnisher, the curious collector, and the serious antiquarian are all available. One could start a collection fairly reasonably, for example with items from the Little Leather Library. Of course this house is full of books already, so I suppose I don't really need to take up this hobby, but it certainly is a charming one to read about!

90-99: Books about Publishing Curiosities

In the 090's in a typical library for general use, turns out you can read about all kinds of oddities of publishing: rare books and the people who steal them; weird books and the mysteries surrounding them; banned books; and the two things I chose: literary hoaxes, and books bound in an unusual manner.

Literary Hoaxes is a series of brief articles about all kinds of forgeries and falsehoods, organized by time period or topic (Native Americans and Australians seem particularly to attract printed tomfoolery, for some reason). I'm not a fan of sitting down and reading straight through compendiums like this, but I may need to just read the few pages that reveal that Go Ask Alice was a work of fiction.In fact, I had better at least flip through the whole book, lest I be fooled by more too-lurid-to-be-true autobiographies!

As a former calligrapher and student of medieval books, I am more excited about Miniature Books. What a fun thing to collect! I suppose you could put them on a miniature bookshelf! If you wanted to do it cheaply, you would end up with a lot of children's books-- Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak have particularly popular boxed sets-- and a lot of those things they sell near the check-out line at Barnes and Noble. I suspect this book is more about collecting exotic, rare miniatures-- it does seem to be full of pretty pictures. It's also, ironically, pretty big- a coffee-table book about matchbook books!

Three Books about Everything by CSLewis, David Rakoff, and Leo Tolstoy

Well, C.S. Lewis is indeed a great writer, although I can't recommend Present Concerns as a starting point. It's really mainly interesting as a window into Lewis's own particular interests, some of which do not seem very contemporary at all: the bad effect that coeducation has had on "serious argument about ideas; why an appalling boarding school is an important experience; the possibility of the elimination of English departments in universities.... Lewis is always literate, always genteel, but sometimes just so idiosyncratic or so much a product of his own times that a collection of ephemera really doesn't hold up all that well.

David Rakoff, on the other hand, is very of the moment. I didn't give him much of a chance, so please feel free to make up your own mind. In my very briefly formed opinion, Rakoff is a great example of that kind of journalism where the reporter is the story, and I'm afraid I just didn't like Rakoff enough to want to read a whole book about him and his adventures. Especially since I did read David Foster Wallace's famous long piece about cruise ships, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." The piece I read by Rakoff just seemed to be doing the same kind of thing only with more crudity, and I just didn't feel like it.

And poor Leo Tolstoy-- I really wanted to like his project, but in my opinion he should have stuck to original writing rather than anthologizing. I might say this collection of excerpts, quotes and original paragraphs was inchoate-- still in a state of preliminary chaos. There were lots of good parts, but they didn't cohere from day to day. The chief difficulty, though, I think is that the selections were not sacred enough to form a devotional, but not secular enough to be attractive to someone who doesn't use devotionals. So the dear old man fell between two stools and ended up with a product that, well, I guess the librarian who bought it liked it...

Spoiler alert: the main topic of the 90s is "Books with interesting bindings". I doubt my library maintains such a collection, and what would be in it, anyway, besides maybe S, that weird novel-within-a-novel that comes packed with inserts...