The 1773 Committee For Tarring and Feathering Invites You To A Tea Party

By Stephen J. Gertz

On November 27, 1773, Philadelphia's Committee For Tarring and Feathering issued a playful yet very stern warning to a British mercantile ship captain that his arrival in the city's harbor might precipitate action by Colonists who harbor ill-will. 

A scarce copy of this extraordinary broadside is being offered by Sotheby's - New York in their Fine Books and Manuscripts sale June 15, 2012. It is expected to sell for $18,000 - $25,000.

The text reads: 

To the Delaware Pilots.

We took the Pleasure, some days since, of kindly admonishing you to do your duty; if perchance you should meet with the (Tea) Ship Polly, CAPTAIN AYRES, a Three Decker which is hourly expected.

We have now to add, that Matters ripen fast here; and that much is expected from those lads who meet with the Tea Ship ---There is some Talk of A Handsome Reward For The Pilot Who Gives The First Good Account Of Her --- How that may be, we cannot for certain determine; But all agree, that Tar and Feathers will be his Portioo, who pilots her into this Harbor. And we will answer for ourselves, that, whoever is committed to us, as an Offender against the Rights of America, will experience the utmost Exertion of our Abilities, as THE COMMITTEE FOR TARRING AND FEATHERING.

P.S. We expect you will furnish yourselves with Copies of the foregoing and following Letter, which are printed for this Purpose, that the Pilot who meets with Captain Ayres may favor him with a Sight of them.

To Captain Ayres,
Of the Ship POLLY, on a voyage from London to Philadelphia.

Sir,

We are informed that you have, imprudently, taken Charge of a Quantity of Tea, which has been sent out by the India Company, under the Auspices of the Ministry, as a Trial of American Virtue and Resolution.

Now, as your Cargo, on your arrival here, will most assuredly bring you into hot water; and as  you are perhaps a Stranger to these parts, we have concluded to advise you that of the present Situation of Affairs in Philadelphia --- that, taking Time by the Forelock, you may stop short in your dangerous Errand --- secure your ship against the Rafts of combustible Matter which may be set on Fire, and turned loose against her; and, more than all this, that you may preserve your own Person, from the Pitch and Feathers that are prepared for you.

In the first Place, we must tell you, that the Pennsylvanians are, to a Man, passionately fond of Freedom, the Birthright of Americans; and that at all events are determined to enjoy it.

That they sincerely believe, no Power on the Face of the Earth has a Right to tax them without their Consent.

That in their Opinion, the Tea in your Custody is designed by the Ministry to enforce such a Tax, which they will undoubtedly oppose; and in so doing give you every possible Obstruction.

We are nominated to a very disagreeable, but necessary Service --- To our Care are committed all Offenders against the Rights of America, and hapless is he, whose evil Destiny has doomed him to suffer at our Hands.

You are sent out out on a diabolical Service, and if you are so foolish and obstinate as to complete your Voyage, by bringing your Ship to Anchor in this Port,  you may run such a gauntlet, as will induce you to, in your last Moments, most heartily to curse those who have made you the Dupe of their Avarice and Ambition.

What think you, Captain, of a Halter around your neck --- ten Gallons off liquid Tar decanted on your Pate --- with the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your Appearance?

Only think seriously of this --- and fly to the Place from whence you came ---fly without Hesitation --- without the Formality of a Protest --- and above all, Captain Ayres, let us advise you to fly without the wild Geese Feathers.

Your Friends to serve,

THE COMMITTEE

The Tea Act of May 10, 1773 was not well-received in the American colonies. In September and October 1773, seven ships carrying a total of 600,000 pounds of East India Company tea were sent to America. Four were bound for Boston, and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In every colony except Massachusetts protesters were able to force the tea ships to return to Britain. In Boston, the tea hit the fan.

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Image courtesy of Sotheby's, with our thanks.

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The Case For Nutcase Literature

by Stephen J. Gertz

TYSON, Vivian. The Space Reports.
New York: Express Press, 1970.
First (only) edition. (Thank you).

In the Spring of 1970 a book from another planet fell to Earth. No one noticed.

In early 2010, Kevin Johnson, proprietor of Royal Books, a rare book shop in Baltimore, turned over a rock and discovered - lo and behold! - the alien book in question, The Space Reports, a narrative purportedly written by researchers from beyond our galaxy; their official report to HQ on Earthlings. He offered the volume in one of his catalogs and thus became, as far as I've been able to determine, the first dealer in the history of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America to offer a book under the rubric "(Nutcase)."

Yet is it really a nutcase book? Close, very, very close. But books based upon alien- and/or UFO-weirdness are as plentiful as the Octomom's ova. No, what sets this book apart from the pack and casts it into the  sparkling firmament of nutcase lit. is the way it was printed. A laid-in slip from the publisher explains:

Some Kind of Nut

Like chillaxin’, the word nutcase has gotten a heavy  workout within the last few years, used so indiscriminately that its true meaning has become lost and the word worn thin. It is often confused with and substituted for wing-nut, a subspecies of Homo Politico, recently flourishing on the far Right of the political spectrum but not exclusive to it. As my old friend from Texas, the self-proclaimed and proud Librarian to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, relentlessly enjoys pointing out to me, it was the far Lefties of the 1960s and their antics that were the  real wing-nuts. There’s enough truth in her assertion that what remains are mirror images blind to recognizing their flip-side reflection.

What, then, constitutes a nutcase book?

Singularity and oddity. It can’t be the current flood of titles from Tea Partiers and Rightward media commentators. There are too many of them, too similar, and issued in huge print runs by mainstream publishers. By definition, a nutcase book cannot appeal to a large, popular audience. Possessing a strange title is not enough, nor, necessarily, a strange subject. The anonymously written How To Boil Water in a Paper Bag (1891) is out there but not so far that it is utterly implausible.

A nutcase book must be in a class by itself, possessing a certain  j'nais se WTF? quality that sets it apart and screams,  I am the power and the glory, I am truth, and I am so out there and outlandish that even Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner can nod their heads in agreement. In sum, a beyond the fringe book bouncing off the walls into a world of its own, whose very existence is just short of a miracle, issued in a small print run, and almost, if not completely, unnoticed by the population upon its publication by a publisher (often privately printed by the author) so small that they’re off the Publishers Weekly, or anyone else's, radar.

A New Genre of Collecting

Rare booksellers are often asked by budding collectors on a modest to moderate budget, What should I collect? The answer is, collect what interests you, preferably in an area that isn’t crowded; you are limited only by your imagination.

Sensing a latent collecting trend ripe for development, a few years ago I began to annoy my colleagues in the trade with the idea that we could add a lot of fun to book collecting if one of us assembled and offered for sale books reflecting the far, farther, and farthest shores of human thought, where, in the guise of rationality, lunacy took flight. Books with an essential loopy quality, relatively or completely unknown to the general public but that we, as old and rare booksellers, have had pass through our hands and consigned to the dead book pile, shelf-fillers with rigor-mortis, curiosities that no one is particularly curious about unless someone with a bent for the peculiar stumbles across them and  is tickled.

BURR, Timothy. BISBA.
Trenton, NJ: Hercules Publishing Company, 1965.

BISBA is certainly one such. The author. Timothy Burr, presents his unique and utterly bizarre method for pegging a woman’s character by the shape and size of her breasts, the Burr Identification System of Breast Analysis. By means of  his “gynecomammology” - breast science! - any woman’s true nature will be revealed and her behavior predicted by close examination and evaluation of her rack, a sort of mammarymancy of those out of the training-bra stage and into the full blossom of womanhood, however their blossoms have bloomed, for those stuck in adolescence, particularly Timothy Burr.

Recently, Garrett Scott, a rare book dealer in Ann Arbor, MI, independently in Jungian syncronicity with my own thoughts on the subject, rose to the challenge and issued a catalog chock full o’ nuts. Titled Printing and the Mind of Cranks in homage to the essential reference book based upon the celebrated 1963 exhibition, Printing and the Mind of Man (a survey of the most important and influential books of Western civilization), it features books that are the exact opposite, by authors who light up the word nutcase in flashing neon.

As Scott proclaims in his Introduction:

“To cleave fast to an opinion when it is neither popular nor profitable (nor even particularly plausible) should not doom an otherwise entertaining author to be forgotten, and one mission of this catalogue might be to give these few forgotten advocates of the hollow earth, or of novel schemes of perpetual motion, or of the historical evidence that the Garden of Eden was located in Michigan, or of the evident designs of the Illuminati upon our republic, or of the efficacy the Weltmer method of absent medical treatment, etc., etc., one more opportunity to make their cases before a sympathetic audience.”

Amen, brother.

The nutcase lit. of yesteryear remains as fresh and meshugah today as when originally foisted upon the public. A few highlights from Printing and the Mind of Cranks, with Scott’s notably  and thoroughly well-researched descriptions gently edited for reasons of space:

Brutus. [pseud. of Samuel F. B. Morse]. Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. The Numbers of Brutus [pseud], Originally Published in the New-York Observer, Revised and Corrected with Notes, by the Author. New-York: Leavitt, Lord & Co. [et al.], 1835. First edition. “The writer entertaining these views has deemed it an imperative duty, at any sacrifice, to warn his countrymen, of a subtle enemy to the democracy of this country, and to conjure them as they value their civil and religious institutions, to watch the Protean shapes of Popery, to suspect and fear it most when it allies itself to our interests in the guise of a friend. Mistrust of all Catalogue Thirty that Popery does, or affects to do, whether as a friend or foe in any part of the country, is the only feeling that true charity, universal charity, allows us to indulge.”

The painter and inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, was, in his youth, relatively neutral on the question of papists—at least until a visit to Rome in 1830 changed his views: During a papal procession a soldier struck Morse’s hat from his head and (as historian Ray Allen Billington notes) the “episode changed Morse’s point of view. Heretofore his artistic nature had led him to admire the beauty of Catholic ceremony; now he saw only the harshness of a despotic religious system. His trampled hat was to make him a life-long opponent of Rome.”

Vahey, J[ohn] W[illiam]. The Visible and Invisible Worlds. By Rev. J. W. Vahey, Ridgeway, Wis. Milwaukee, Wis.: Hoffmann Bros., 1890. First edition. “I was further induced to write [this book] from the force of negative judgments I more than once expressed in controversies against conclusions deduced from speculation, which affirmed that, not only the bodies which form our solar system, but those that compose star systems, are inhabited by human beings. I was still further induced to write it, in order to furnish some of my readers with philosophical arguments through which they could refute the silly systems of agnostics, evolutionists, positivists, atheists, pantheists, materialists, communists, socialists and anarchists, which deny the existence of God, the omnipotent fiat that created the universe, complex man, the animal and vegetable kingdoms. After writing a few pages, I determined to give up the undertaking, owing to the difficult nature of the subjects I had to treat, but through perseverance I succeeded in my project.”

(Nautical Safety). The World’s Greatest Safety Device. It May Save Your Life, or the Life of a Relative or Friend. It May Make You a Fortune. (Tacoma: The Pacific Printing Company), [ca. 1915-1920?]. First edition. The investment prospectus for a “dry swimming suit,” an elaborate rubber and canvas contraption intended as a personal floatation suit for victims of shipwreck; the enterprising (and unhappily for prospective investors, anonymous) inventor includes a table of the royalties one might have expected had the ill-fated Lusitania but carried this novel invention—some $30,000. With illustrations of the complicated suit and its features (condensed food packets, roman candles), as well as the dark admonition, “WE ALL REMEMBER THE TITANIC.”

Warner, Captain S[amuel] A[lfred], Fair Play’s a Jewel: A Narrative of Circumstances Connected with my Mode of National Defence Against the Whole World. London: J. & W. Robins, Printers, Tooley Street; Sold by John Ollivier, [1849]. First edition. “I now submit my Narrative to the candid perusal of my readers. In it I have not advanced one word which I cannot substantiate and prove, if necessary. I have deemed it right to lay before the world, that my country may not have to say they were unacquainted with the facts previous to whatever course I may now think proper to adopt, so as to realise that for my inventions which I think I am entitled to, and which I was offered years ago, could I then have brought my mind TO DESTROY MY COUNTRY. Ingratitude may, however, wean even Patience and Patriotism"... The captain long maintained that he had secretly developed a novel “invisible shell” capable of immense destruction, the formula for which he was willing to allow the War Department to have in exchange for a mere £200,000.

Campbell, George. A Revolution in the Science of Cosmology: The Keystone to the Arch of Science. Topeka: Crane & Company, 1902.  Second edition, preceded by Campbell’s 157-page privately printed Oswego, Kansas edition of 1900. A convoluted and somewhat muddled attempt to take what Campbell understands to be modern scientific thought and reconcile it to the Mosaic account of the creation. Campbell touches in part on the Symmes hollow-earth theory, evident Martian writing on a meteorite in Rochester, N.Y., electricity as the basis of all weight (supported by his experience of being borne aloft in a tornado), etc.

Goodwin, Rev. T[homas] A. The Duty of Literary Men. An Address Before the Indiana Branch of the Society of Alumni of the Indiana Asbury University [wrapper title]. New York: Burnz & Co., Publishers of Phonographic and Phonetic Books, 1878.  First edition. And what is the great duty of the literary men of the Mississippi Valley? Spelling reform—or as Goodwin would have it, “a more formidabl rong than African Slavery ever woz.” The publisher, Eliza Burnz, is an overlooked figure in American reform—an English-born American abolitionist, woman’s suffrage activist and pioneer stenographer, she was so wedded to the cause of spelling reform that she named her daughter Foneta.

[Carpenter, W[illiam]. One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is Not a Globe. Dedicated to R. A. Proctor, Esq.... “Upright, Downright, Straightforward.” Baltimore: Printed and Published by the Author, 1885.  “That the Earth is an extended plane, stretched out in all directions away from the central North, over which hangs, for ever, the North Star, is a fact which all falsehoods that can be brought to bear upon it with their dead weight will never overthrow: it is God’s Truth the face of which, however, man has the power to smirch all over with his unclean hands.”

Fitch, Theodore. Our Paradise Inside the Earth. [Council Bluffs, Iowa?: Theodore Fitch, ca. 1950]. First edition? An uncommon work from Brother Theodore Fitch (1893-1991) of Council Bluffs, a zealous gospel worker evidently allied with the Oneness Pentecostal movement... Fitch argues here—with much Biblical support—that the earth is hollow and open at the poles, and with a habitable interior peopled by a pre-Adamic fallen race of small brown men who pilot the flying saucers which were then plaguing the nation. “Before the flood these very angels and their offspring worshiped Satan and sex. They have never changed one bit. The things we hear about the little brown men and women are not fit to print.” Happily, the saints shall soon possess this interior Kingdom—to the obvious betterment of the human race: “Let us suppose that YOU will be preaching a revival in St. Louis... Nowadays, it usually takes 30 to 60 minutes to travel from home to our work. But, in a flying saucer you could travel to your home in the New Jerusalem in less than 30 minutes.”

Patterson, Rowley. Rowley Patterson’s Grand Theory of the Progression of Mankind, Animals & Planets. Dansville, N.Y.: Bunnell & Oberdorf, 1885.  First edition. An argument that man was first created on a lesser planet in the solar system and that progressive evolution will lead our species from planet to planet until the coming of the final judgment on Jupiter... “My firm belief is that the three rings of and eight moons of Saturn are Paradise, the place that Christ and the thief went after their crucifixion, and the place where the good folks stay till they are wanted on another planet.”

Ardetha, the Voice from Atlantis.

Fuller, G[eorge] W[ashington] and F. Corden White. Ardetha, the Teacher. A Series of Lessons Given through the Mediumship of F. Corden White to G. W. Fuller. Prescottville, Penn.: Published by G. W. Fuller, (1902). First edition. “The name of the Author is Ardetha. She was one of the inhabitants of the Continent of Atlantis, which was sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean by some great cataclysm, many thousand years ago. I first met her in July 1898, when she materialized at a seance given by Mrs. Effie Moss, and said she was my guide.” 
  
Sanborn, Arthur. The Long Lost Land. Billerica Massachusetts. Private Copy. [Billerica, Mass.?: n. p., before 1939]. First edition. “If the question is put—‘Where, in all the world, is the spot most favorable to the existence and development of the human race?’ the answer must be, without a dissenting voice—‘The region of the Great Lakes of America.’” The four-part river of Eden is identified as the Great Lakes, Adam and Eve were residents on the shores of Lake Huron, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was the wild American grape, the flaming sword was a natural gas vent near Saginaw, the Deluge was caused by the gravitational influence of the planet Vulcan (now in the asteroid belt), etc.

Health Appliance Co. Health . . . A Treatise for Men Only. Showing How to Restore Complete Manhood, in all That Term Implies, by a Single Natural System of Home Treatment. San Francisco: Health Appliance Co., 1904. First edition. “It is a well established scientific fact that all our great statesmen, orators, ministers, musicians, financiers, pugilists, etc., are men of STRONG SEXUAL POWERS. Well developed sexual organs manifest themselves in the clear, ringing voice, the glossy hair, the sparkling eye, personal magnetism, and force of character.” An uncommon and extensive advertisement and trade catalog for penis enlargement, impotency treatment and prostate health, all easily obtained from the Health Appliance Co. with any of its various models of Dr. Lawrence’s Improved Vacuum Developers (now with the “Perfect Diaphragm”). Includes graphic illustrations on the proper use of the company’s products.

Weltmer, Prof. S[idney] A[bram]. The Weltmer Method of Absent Treatment. Parsons, Kansas: Foley R’y Printing Co., 1898.  First edition. “The only method on earth that will cure sexual decline is the Magnetic or Mental Method of treatment. I have cured thousands of cases of the worst character, and after the persons had taken barrels of medicine and thus broken down their entire nervous systems. There is no good reason why a man should suffer with this kind of weakness and if he but knew it, he could cure himself much quicker than I can. If every man knew what I know, he need not suffer with weakness 24 hours.” The terms for treatment here are $5 per month, payable in advance.

Richard Griffin, the Bug-House Poet.

Griffin, Richard. Bug House Poetry: The Complete Works of... New York: n. p.],(1919). Second edition, expanded, of the collected works of the eccentric Bug House poet (expanded over the 293-page edition of 1917). The latter-day discovery of Griffin as a sort of lunatic crusticidal Dadaist generally dates from the two brief appreciations published by Eric Korn in the Times Literary Supplement in 1986 (indeed, it is Korn to whom we are indebted for that characterization), though later appreciations in scattered literary journals would suggest a small coterie of enthusiasts has existed since at least the early 1970s.

Brief extracts do scant justice to this enigmatic poet who went forth with a facile pen and somewhat fevered imagination; his minor epic “The Lobster’s Gizzard” recounts the murky quest of one Mike O’Hara to scale the Hill of Tara at the behest of a wizard to consume the gizzard of a magical lobster, while other pieces touch (in Griffin’s strange way) on violence, political corruption, Mormons and fashion. Most, however, defy easy categorization—viz. “The Elm of Nax” (“The famous tree is spelled either Nax or Nacks. I use both ways,” notes Griffin) or “Notional Nimrod”  (“Under the sod / Notional Rod / Nimrod poor clod / In his green pod— / Say—does he fry? / I don’t know, why, / Do You?”). Evidence abounds that Griffin spent time in an institution; the lengthy poem “Water on the Brain” makes detailed reference to life in “the captivating nuttery.”

Page from Man v' Ape in the Play of Ear-Ce-Rammed.

 [Samuels, Philip]. Man v’ Ape in the Play of Ear-Ce-Rammed. (Boston): Samuels-Bacon, ‘sam ls-ot, (1933). First edition. A prime contender for the title of most eccentric entry in the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, Man v’ Ape is Samuels’ heavily (even tortuously) annotated edition of Hamlet. Using a numeric cipher and a host of obscure symbolic, linguistic and Biblical interpretations, he here proves that Francis Bacon had prophesized the coming of Philip Samuels as the incarnation of Jehovah, and that Samuels is charged with leading the Jews to an independent state in Palestine. Among the many arguments: attacks on Darwin that give this volume its name (“The image of God did bury Malthus-Darwin under a heap of dust never to rise again”), allusions to Hamlet’s encoded attacks on the Roman Catholic Church (“Ham=21. Ham plus Pope=70,” etc.) and even perhaps the murky claim that Samuels is Bacon reborn.

Houser, J[ames] A[lfred], M.D. Sparking in the Dark. Arcadia, Ind.: n. p., 1878. First edition. The moderately slangy title of Houser’s work is perhaps best explained by his contention that “society would be far better, morally, if calls upon young ladies, by gentlemen, were made in daylight, or when in the evening would end at ordinary bed-time, there can be no doubt.”

A curious work of marriage reform, dress reform (he has sharp words on tight lacing) and divorce reform (“As long as persons are dissatisfied with their husbands or wives they will ask divorces and have them, and so they should”) from this phrenologist, lecturer and proto-eugenicist. While Houser seems resigned to the foibles of human sexuality (“There is nothing more reasonable than that every man and woman wants some person to love and caress, and if that person is not the husband or wife it will be another”) he certainly wastes no sympathy on those who are the ruin of young women:

“I once met a man that had slain the seducer of his innocent daughter, and as I shook his hand with the warmest grasp of friendship, I took off my hat to do him especial honor for his noble deed. The State should give that man a golden medal, with engraved upon it ‘Hero!’ and when he dies should build him a monument, and upon it place a majestic lion, by his side a torn and bleeding lamb, and near by a dead tiger.”

• • •

After the laughter subsides you will recognize certain patterns emerging from this group. Religio-political-conspiracy, sexual anxiety, anti-immigration, anti-science, the righteousness of the just, the out of this world (and inside of it) are themes as emotionally charged now as they were when these books were written by their crackpot authors. (Crackpot Lit. is a close cousin of Nutcase Lit., the terms often used interchangeably). Americans do not have the market cornered on nutcase thinking but our national ethos of rugged, if often stubbornly wacky, individualism, in concert with the First Amendment and Internet, has provided us with special license to spout whatever nutty theories are caroming around our craniums to an audience; our only fear is to be ignored.

Fringe thinking has always had a comfy home in the U.S. That it has mainstreamed into American culture is, however, a phenomenon new to us and worthy of study. The bar for true nutcase has risen. As Rare Book Special Collections librarians have acquired most if not all the standard and non-standard warhorses of fiction and non-fiction, they are beginning to creatively look beyond the traditional to form collections from disparate  books within their holdings and with new acquisitions that when gathered together reveal an overlooked yet compelling story. Nutcase literature is surely an area worthy of investigation, for collectors, scholars, and curators alike. It is at once an extremely humorous and deadly serious subject.

Yet it is a genre that will undoubtedly resist attempts to circumscribe  it; it is  too subjective. But that, in the end, is what will make it a rewarding area to take an interest in and collect. As always, the best collections reflect the collector as well as the books collected.

It is wise to remember that one's man's nutcase is another man's prophet. Just be wary of the  guy who thinks prophet, whatever the prophecy.

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Booktryst invites readers to submit their own favorite nutcase books in the Comments section below. We can't get enough of this stuff; hoping you feel the same.

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With thanks to Garrett Scott for images from Printing and the Mind of Cranks.

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The Isaac E. Leibowitz Monastery Of Rare Books

The rare book shop at the abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, 
in the Southwest United States.

"550 years after Gutenberg's invention of mechanical movable type...much of the infrastructure that has girded the vast ecosystem of the book – bookstores, new and used, the book section at Costco, libraries that you actually have to visit, the book sale in the church basement – vanishes. Meanwhile, the 'monasteries' of the 21st century will be the rare-book libraries and special collections in universities, antiquarian booksellers working out of their homes or in shops on the margins of downtown" (The Globe and Mail, The Future of Books, Part 3).

Or, perhaps, a monastery in the American Southwest in a world where learning and advanced knowledge are scorned and to even read is considered a subversive activity. A world where illiteracy is the proud norm, ignorance is worn as a badge of honor, and to be called a Simpleton is an honorific, a  desired title of respect. The power of books to raise civilization has become their curse and so they must be, and are, razed.

The brothers of this Order of Rare Books have little if any knowledge of the contents of the books they protect; those who had understanding are long gone. The content could be liturgical texts, cookbook recipes, or glorified shopping lists for all anyone knows, each held with equal mystery and veneration by the friars, all perceived as objects of fear by the general populace and its leaders who want nothing to do with anything that smacks of intellect, which undermines and erodes traditional values, natural law, and simple common sense. The world has become flat again and would prefer to stay that way.

Welcome to the future monastery of rare books, the abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, established by electrical engineer and radical book collector Isaac Edward Leibowitz to husband what little is left of written knowledge, to hide and protect books and surviving scraps of ephemera from the latter-day Philistines who would destroy them.
 

 First edition, 1960.

Dust jacket design by Milton Glaser.

It is the world created by Walter M. Miller Jr. in A Canticle For Leibowitz (copyright 1959; issued in 1960), one of the finest novels of science/speculative fiction ever written, winner of the Hugo Award (1961), and a book that has never been out of print since its initial publication, with countless printings, reissues, translations, and adaptations since released.

The novel began life as three short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1955-57. The magazine was not a cheap rag featuring wild spaceship rides and aliens. It was "high-class sci-fi pulp," according to novelist Walker Percy. Miller added connective tissue and an enormous amount of additional material to provide  layers of complexity and depth when adapting the stories to  a full-length novel. There is much symbolism to decode, and a lot of Latin and a little of Hebrew to translate. A knowledge of the Old and New Testaments is helpful. We are, to a large degree and to the point, as mystified as the friars.

Though radical, it's not too far an imaginative leap from what is currently occurring  in general and in the contemporary rare book scene in particular.

The cultural climate is changing, moving away from the printed word and the book. A grass-roots movement of the angry and intellectually inchoate is challenging education, politics and the complexities of modern life to return to a plainer, more homey, and neatly arranged order, a return to once dependable certainties that have weakened if not wizened and died within the exponential growth of information and its availability.

There are fewer and fewer rare book shops; they appear to be headed for extinction. More than a few rare book dealers these days have little idea about the intellectual content of the books they sell; they've never read the books for pleasure or learning. They know the book's sales history, bibliographical minutia, and place within the collecting world. The book is a commodity and not much more.

Fewer and fewer enter the trade with a sense of vocation. And it is a calling, involving sacrifice of long hours for (mostly) income unequal to the effort, study, and thought. A love of learning for its own sake is important; the professional rare bookseller is in a constant state of learning about the books they offer; it's  always  wise to  know  more  about  the books you sell than the people you sell them to.

 21st century rare bookseller at work cataloging his stock.

And the modern rare book shop is a monastery. Silent, save for some quiet music in the background or telephone murmurings, employees sit at their desks, pouring over the books in front of them like medieval scribes, carefully examining and cataloging them. It is the rare pilgrim who enters a rare book shop in 2010.

For his efforts, Leibowitz is canonized by the Church. But while there are no saints in the rare book trade there are many whose dedication and commitment to books is holy, the books on their shelves held in a sacred trust from the past through the present and into the future, the evidence of humankind's progressive striving toward enlightenment and deep understanding of who and what we are, the world we live in and its nature, and how we fit into it.

Rare book sellers and special collections librarians are members of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, brothers and sisters in service to books, their preservation, availability, and the knowledge and wisdom that they provide. And book collectors are the laity of the Order, a congregation of pilgrims who privately preserve the written products of the collective mind of humanity.

Now, dark forces with loud, strident voices, wearing light and bright-colored clothing wish to return to those halcyon days of yesteryear, an imaginary place where all was right, before  folks too smart for their and our own good  took over, when advances in human knowledge were never a threat to moral and social certainties, and textbooks didn't need to be corrected to excise dissonance and assure consonance with long-held traditions that often come up short when weighed against the drive of human curiosity and the inexorable march of intellectual inquiry and its integrity.

 Albertus Magnus (1193 CE -1280 CE).

Detail of fresco by Tommaso da Modena, c. 1352.

It is no accident that Miller chose the friars of the abbey of Leibowitz to be of the Albertian Order. Saint Albertus Magnus was the  medieval Dominican bishop and philosopher renowned for the breadth and depth of his knowledge and belief in the peaceful coexistence of science and religion; there was no conflict. It is ironic that A Canticle For Leibowitz takes place in and around Texarkana. Miller could not have foreseen that one day the Texas School Board would vote to revise educational standards and public school textbooks to reflect a wishful reality  rather than the one bequeathed by rational human  investigation. It is a dishonest truth lit by a dimming torch that will extinguish if the goal is reached, leaving a darkness the torchbearers will call light and celebrate.

It's a post-apocalyptic world, the apocalypse born not of powerful nuclear arms but of hamstrung intellectual legs.
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MILLER, JR. Walter M. A Canticle For Leibowitz: A Novel. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1960. First edition. Octavo. 320 pp. Publisher's cloth. Dust jacket by Milton Glaser.

National Book Award winner Walker Percy declared A Canticle For Leibowitz "a mystery: it's as if everything came together by some felicitous chance, then fell apart into normal negative entropy. I'm as mystified as ever and hold Canticle in even higher esteem."

It is a modern masterpiece.

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The header photo is of Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery, Chamas River Valley, New Mexico.
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