Adopt an Obsolete Word, Save It From Extinction!

by Stephen J. Gertz

An archaic word is a terrible thing to waste and the Oxford English Dictionary is doing something about it, seeking foster homes for the abandoned senior-word set.

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language, cruelly kicked to the curb for no other reason than they’ve fallen out of fashion and are considered old codgers unfit to roll off trendy tongues or keyboards. They become as rare as the books we talk about here on Booktryst.

Old words, wise words, working-stiff words, words to live by, words to die for, words that "once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted." Victims of modern vocabulary, they wander the streets, homeless, derelicts in a twisted world that prefers its words in the lexicographical now, not the way back when. They don’t get enough exercise, have lost their strength and are losing their lease on life if they haven’t already succumbed to senescence to haunt the imaginations of the guilty for not doing enough to keep ‘em alive.

According to the good folks at the OED, everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words. We’ve all read examples where the writer seemed to have only fifty of them at their command (apologies to Kayne West), and listened to people who said the same thing over and over again in two words, often monosyllables (“That’s hot!”).

We need all the good words we can get. In language, nuance is everything and why waste ten vague words when one perfect one will do; avoid parisology at all or some costs. Not only do the good ones die young, they die old, their souls wandering aimlessly through the big dictionary in the sky, suicides that could not bear the loneliness of disuse, that were driven to despair and then drove themselves off the road and into eternal darkness. They are the over-the-hill symbolic salesmen of concepts, the Willy Lomans of Logosville.

Attention must be paid!

To prevent further tragedy, the OED has initiated an Adopt-a-Word program, Save The Words. Unlike Save the Children, no monthly stipend is necessary to keep them fed, off the streets, in school, and out of trouble, just your awareness and verbal and written support. You may even opt for a customized T-shirt to show the world you care, that this word – your word – is worthy of pride and slipping into everyday conversation or casual email.

The only downside is that you will never receive a letter from your word with news and thanks for all your help, accompanied by a photo of your word, doe-eyed and all smiles due to  your assistance.

You are not, apparently, limited to how many words you can adopt. If you so desire you can become the Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie of word adoption and continue adopting them until you run out of room in the house, don’t have enough to say or write to keep them occupied and feeling as wanted and valuable as your other adoptees, or they outnumber the paparazzi that follow your every move and hang on every word, obsolete or otherwise.

Parenthood has never been so painless, logolepsy so pleasant. Don't perendinate, adopt now!

Three cheers for logoresurrection.

P.S.: Same-sex couples can adopt, no problem.

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All images courtesy of Save the Words, with our thanks.

Thanks to LISNews for the lead.

A Booktryst bow at the waist to Luciferous Logolepsy.
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Feast Your Eyes On The World's Most Beautiful Grammar Book

By Nancy Mattoon

Frontispiece From: JONES, Owen.
The Grammar of Ornament.
London: Quaritch, 1910.
(All Images Courtesy of University of Wisconsin Digital Library.)

As Marcus Tullius Cicero famously remarked, "A room without books is like a body without a soul." A couple thousand years later, architect and designer Owen Jones took a page from that same volume and said, "Form without color is like a body without a soul." Since we'd all like to keep body and soul together, (at least until the time comes to sell the latter to Satan in exchange for eternal youth, big bucks, and turning Angelina Jolie and/or Brad Pitt into our devoted love slave), spending some time with Mr. Jones's gorgeous "grammar" of design seems like a good way to make sure our physical and spiritual selves don't end up sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Pompeian Designs.

London-born Owen Jones was the son of a furrier, whose real passion was collecting, recording, and publishing Welsh literature and folklore. Although his antiquarian father died when Owen was only five years old, a love of books, history, and the written word was in his blood. Young Owen became fascinated with the study of design and architecture across the centuries, and throughout the world. Having completed his education at the Royal Academy School in architecture, in 1832, Jones continued his studies with the Victorian gentleman's equivalent of the finishing school, the Grand Tour.

Moresque Ornamentation.

Jones had been trained in the plain, vanilla style of Neoclassical architecture. In the 1830's, however, studies began to suggest that Ancient Greek buildings were originally multi-colored. Owen Jones was one of many ambitious, young scholars who were delighted with the new found concept of "architectural polychromy." After spending four years visiting Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey, he found his true inspiration in Spain, beginning a complete study of the Alhambra Palace in roughly 1835. Documenting this 14th century Moorish citadel that overlooks Granada became Jones's obsession for the next 10 years.

Grecian Motifs.

Spellbound by the beauty of Spanish Islamic design, Jones spent six months observing and meticulously recording every design element of the palace, producing hundreds of drawings and plaster casts. (He was aided in this task by fellow architect Jules Goury, who tragically died of cholera in 1834.) Upon his return to London, he faced a new obstacle. The current state of color printing could not accurately reproduce the intricate detail of his drawings. Undaunted, Jones worked with chemists and printers, and produced the first book to make significant use of the new process of chromolithography. Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra was printed in twelve parts over ten years (1836-1845), and established Owen Jones as an expert in the theory and practice of architectural design and ornamentation.

Egyptian Ornamentation.

Galvanized by the tilework of the Alhambra, Jones began to study mosaics, collages, and the natural formation of tessellations in honeycombs and on the ocean shores of Tasmania. This work became the basis for Jones's original tile designs, which in turn led to a commission from Prince Albert to design the interior of the 1851 Great Exhibition building. Jones devised an interior that was as simple as it was radical: only the three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, would be part of the design. This extreme departure from the usual Victorian aesthetic was highly controversial, and sharply criticized during its planning and development. But once the building finally opened, it was a huge success, viewed by over six million visitors.

Turkish Design.

When the Great Exhibition ended, Jones was given the task of selecting its finest objects for study at London's first Government School of Design. He then used these hand-picked examples to create a teaching collection based on his own concept of an all new "modern style" for the 19th century. The School of Design collections, collectively known as the Museum of Ornamental Art, were eventually moved to a site in South Kensington that had been bought through profits from the Great Exhibition. This in turn eventually became what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Renaissance Motifs.

As Owen further refined his design theories, he became frustrated at his inability to reach beyond the classroom. He saw the design world around him slavishly recreating classical and Gothic motifs with little understanding of their cultural and religious connotations. He became convinced what was needed was a sourcebook of the best designs of ornament and decoration from other cultures and eras based on the sound use of color, geometry, nature, and abstraction. This became his seminal and hugely influential book, The Grammar of Ornament.

Arabian Ornamentation.

Owen Jones created a whole new language of modern design that applied equally to wallpapers, textiles, furniture, metalwork, and interiors. It was eclectic, democratic, and global, drawing on nineteen different cultures from tribal Oceania, ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Turkey, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, and Celtic Clans to his beloved Moorish Spain. His design philosophy can be seen in microcosm in the frontispiece he created for The Grammar of Ornament, which combines Greek key scrolling, medieval manuscript lettering, Celtic interlacing and Islamic ribbed motifs into a harmonious whole. The volume contained over 100 meticulously lithographed color plates, the original drawings for which are held, fittingly, by the Victoria and Albert Museum's Library. Since its publication in 1856, the book has never been out of print. Throughout the second half of the 19th century it was the single most influential design sourcebook in the world.

Chinese Designs.

Along with his painstaking and precise color plates, The Grammar of Ornament also contained 37 strict guidelines for the proper use of design elements in art and architecture. These included the belief that decoration must arise organically from architecture, ("Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed."), and that architecture and the decorative arts must "possess fitness, proportion, harmony the result of which is repose." The final of these "propositions" states, "No improvement can take place in the Art of the present generation until all classes, Artists, Manufacturers, and the Public, are better educated in Art, and the existence of general principles is more fully recognized."

Illuminated Manuscripts.

Owen Jones did not live to see his ideas taken to heart in the more streamlined, multicultural aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau. Instead, he saw many of his contemporaries adapt the most extravagant elements of book's color plates into the overstuffed, over-decorated, and overwhelming drawing rooms of the Victorian nouveau riche. But over time his grammar did become more fully understood, and it remains a core text for interior designers to this day. As novelist Anthony Powell once said, "Books do furnish a room." The Grammar of Ornament alone has furnished thousands.

Italian Ornamentation.

The full text of the 1910 edition of The Grammar of Ornament has been digitized by University of Wisconsin's Digital Library for the Decorative Arts. And some of Owen Jones's original drawings have been digitized by the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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How to Rake Up 500 Yr. Old Leaves, or Taking a Page From History

by Cokie Anderson

The Gutenberg Bible owned by the Library of Congress

Why bother turning over a new leaf when you can turn over an old one--a very old one--build a collection and save money at the same time?

Some of the most desirable antiquarian books to collect are incunabula, that is, books printed before 1501.

Incunabulum, the singular form of the word, literally means "cradle" in Latin, and these books are the babies born in the earliest days of printing. The most famous, by far, is the Gutenberg Bible, generally recognized as the first substantial book printed with movable type in Western Europe. It was produced in Mainz, Germany by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1455.

There are 48 known copies of the Gutenberg Bible (a number imperfect, some comprising one volume of two, and a few of those imperfect). All but three are in institutional collections. The last substantially complete copy at auction sold in 1978 for $2,000,000, and the Doheny copy of volume one, consisting of 324 leaves of the Old Testament only, sold for a hammer price of $4,900,000 in 1987 .

The opening of the Gutenberg Bible at Harry Ransom Center*

The British Library copy on paper...

While complete copies are very rare, single leaves from Gutenberg Bibles appear on the market with some regularity. Volumes that survived the centuries but lost some pages along the way have been broken up by dealers and collectors for sale as individual leaves. These still fetch in the neighborhood of $45,000--no bargain, but a long way from the millions a complete copy would command.

...and the copy on vellum. Which do you like best?

Other books to printed soon after the advent of movable type were various histories, the letters of St. Jerome (translator of the Vulgate Bible), Jacobus de Voragine's medieval bestseller The Golden Legend (an imaginative account of the lives of the saints), and other Bibles--lots and lots of Bibles. A number of such leaves are available on the market, many for under $500 and some for less than $100. It's a very affordable way to own a piece of early printing.

Der Edelstein (1471), a collection of morality tales whose title means "The Precious Stone"

The price of printed leaves is determined by the desirability and rarity of the book from which they came (thus the high prices for the Gutenberg leaves), the reputation of the printer and the rarity of his work, and the decoration and condition of the leaves themselves. Some incunables (the Anglicized form of the word) were decorated much like illuminated manuscripts, with large initials or miniatures painted by hand. Printers would sometimes leave a space for these embellishments, printing a small version of the initial to be supplied as a guide to the illuminator.

The Nuremberg Chronicle

Later, printers began inserting woodcut illustrations in the text. Sometimes, these would be colored by hand. One of the earliest and most extensively illustrated books was Hartmann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles), published by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1493 and commonly called the Nuremberg Chronicle. It is a history of the world from "God created light" to the early 15th century, and is illustrated with hundreds of woodcuts (some of them repeated) that depict everything from small portraits of popes and princes to the family tree of Jesus to 15th century German cities.

Constantinople, as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle
(Note: all cities pictured bear a remarkable resemblance to medieval German towns)

The vast majority of incunabula were printed in Germany, where moveable type was invented and first used, and in Italy, particularly in Venice. Some of the "Italian" printers, such as Sweynham and Pannartz, were in fact Germans who had migrated south. German printers generally used gothic type, based on the handwritten script commonly used in manuscripts of the day. Italian printers were more like to use a roman font, such as that employed by Nicolaus Jenson, or an italic typeface, like that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. When printing arrived in England, the most commonly used type was a variation on the Gothic style called "black letter" and the most important printers were William Caxton and the wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde.

But, you ask, how will I know what book or printer a leaf came from? How can I verify it is what the dealer says it is? Where can I locate these desirable and affordable objects? [Hint: it's not e-bay, but ABAA.]

Well, boys and girls, tune in next week, when all will be revealed: the mysteries of Goff and BMC, the joys of line counting, and the thrill of typeface identification. Bring your rulers and magnifying glasses.

Class dismissed!
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*Luckily, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has digitized their copy (shown above) so you can view it online and get some idea of what this treasure is like. That perennial show-off, the British Library, which owns a complete copy on vellum as well as one on paper, allows you to view images of the two versions side by side so you can decide which one you like best.

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A Bad Hair Day In Tibet

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1903, fearful that the Chinese were on the verge of granting Tibet to Russia  and endangering their Raj in India, the British sent a military expedition into Tibet to prevent the rumor from becoming a reality.

The commander of the expedition, Sir Francis Younghusband, brought along British civil servant and photographer John Claude White to document the campaign. White took a series of seventy photographs which were collected in an album c. 1905. Amongst the platinum prints and two folding panoramas is this striking image of Tibetan nuns.

Considering that Buddhist nuns are required to keep their hair cropped short it is unclear why this group allowed their hair to grow to such impious length. As recently as 2002, the Chinese were imprisoning Tibetan nuns and forcing them to let their hair grow out, the least offensive of their many humiliating punishments.

The Tibetans were none too happy with the British incursion, the Chinese even less so, and the British were none too kind to the Tibetans. Brigadier-General James Ronald Leslie Macdonald, leading a military force of over 3,000, including Nepalese Gurkhas, faced off against 3,000 Tibetan troops armed with muskets at the Battle of Guru, and a very short battle it was. After  negotiations to head things off failed, confusion ensued and the shooting began. The British, armed with Maxim machine guns, mowed down between 600-700 Tibetan troops. The rest were allowed to peacefully retreat. Younghusband, who now assumed command of the British army, marched into Lhasa and negotiated a treaty with the Regent, who declared, "When one has known the scorpion [China] the frog [Britain] is divine."

The British military mission ended in 1904, unpopular at home and everywhere else.

This album was recently at Bonhams for auction. It sold for £38,400 ($61,592), inclusive of buyer’s premium.
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[WHITE, JOHN CLAUDE]. An album of important images taken by John Claude White during Sir Francis Younghusband's Tibet Mission of 1903-1904. 70 platinum prints and 2 folding panoramas, images approximately 160 x 210mm., captioned on the mounts, contemporary half green morocco, lettered 'TIBET' on the upper cover, sailcloth chemise, oblong folio, [c.1905]
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Image courtesy of Bonhams.

Booktryst thanks Bookdealer for the lead.
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Custer's Bible At Little Bighorn to Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

It’s Custer’s last Bible and it survived his Last Stand. Custer died with his boots on and this Bible just a yonder. 

Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s signed and inscribed personal Bible, which accompanied him on the Little Bighorn Expedition, will be auctioned on November 16, 2010 at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, TX.  It is estimated to sell for $25,000 - $50,000.

"G.A. Custer/ US Army/ Fort Abraham Lincoln Dacota [sic]/ Oct. 1st, 1874."

It is an intimate, personal relic of a tragic chapter in nineteenth century America, the possession  of one of the most colorful - and controversial - military personalities of his time through ours. Custer’s Last Stand, firmly a part of the American David v. Goliath heroic mythos, proved to be the Native-Americans' last heroic military triumph in their struggle to remain on their homelands and practice their way of life. The inevitable came soon enough for the U.S., too soon for the Great Nations of the Dakotas.

This Bible was clearly of great importance to Custer. After a somewhat wild youth of dubious faith and much drinking,  he became a devout Christian during his experience of the Civil War. He swore off whiskey and committed himself to God.

Upper board, elaborately blindstamped.

In May of 1864, he wrote to wife Libbie during the Wilderness Campaign of the Civil War:

"On the eve of every battle in which I have been engaged, I have never omitted to pray inwardly, devoutly. Never have I failed to commend myself to God's keeping, asking Him to forgive my past sins, and to watch over me while in danger... and to receive me if I fell, while caring for those near and dear to me. After having done so all anxiety for myself, here or hereafter, is dispelled. I feel that my destiny is in the hands of the Almighty. This belief, more than any other fact or reason, makes me brave and fearless as I am."

The Bible was a gift from his dear mother, and the only reason it survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn is due his leaving it in his personal wagon, which remained with the pack train guarded by Captain Benteen, the commander of the regiment’s scouting column. After the remnants of Custer's forces returned to Fort Lincoln, this Bible was returned to his widow, Libbie, and remained in possession of the Custer family until the late 1980s, when it was part of a large group of artifacts released by the descendants of Nevin Custer, Armstrong's sole surviving brother.

The battle occurred June 25/26th 1876.

Without question one of the most dramatic episodes in United States history, the Battle of the Little Bighorn (The Battle of the Greasy Grass to Native-Americans) was the central action of the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. Custer, leading the 7th Cavalry regiment of the U.S. Army, met the combined forces of the Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse and spiritual guidance of Sitting Bull. After a series of grievous assumptions and miscalculations thirty-six officers and 566 enlisted men were annihilated by an estimated 1,800 Native-American warriors. In its aftermath, Custer leaped into American history, became an instant legend, and is now part of the great American narrative, though the humiliation of the Army, the anger of the citizenry, and the desire for revenge did nothing to improve the quality of further relations, certainly not the quality of  mercy in further encounters with Native Americans.

Custer's Last Stand by William Reusswig.

Many books have been written about Custer and this battle. Hollywood has adapted it to film. It's a great story, no matter who you're rooting for.

Published by the American Bible Society, New York, in 1872, its binding had suffered over the years and has undergone painstaking conservation efforts  by a talented professional. The interior pages are untouched and in excellent condition, including the boldly inscribed and signed flyleaf page.

As a collectible this Bible, in and of itself, has little if any value. This is an example of provenance, inscription, and back-story being everything. The Bible was last seen in 1995, when Butterfield & Butterfield (now Bonhams) offered and hammered it at $46,750. 

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Are Banned Books Really the Lowest of Literature?

by Stephen J. Gertz

Yesterday, the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader printed a letter to the editor titled Banned Books Are Lowest of Literature.

"Regarding the brouhaha over 'banned' books: The people who want their kids exposed to 'authentic adolescent' thoughts, words and actions via literature are incensed that anyone would question them. That there might be thousands of years of literature that is edifying, uplifting and pointing young minds in a morally healthy direction isn't on their radar screen.

"What isn't being taught in our schools is as disconcerting as what is being taught. We have mountains of wisdom collected over eons of time from Plato, Augustine, de Tocqueville, Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington ... but we give our students drag queens, deranged people, bestiality, obscenity, vulgarity. Why are we giving our kids the darkest crumbs of humanity in lieu of knowledge derived at great sacrifice that improves our human condition?"

“The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next." Who said this? Abraham Lincoln. What kind of government will the classrooms of today bring us as a nation?

“Conservatives, these are our schools, too. This is our money, these are our kids and we can do better than sit back and get run over by the biggest mouths with the lowest standards. And a technical point: it isn't a ‘ban’ when you can order the questioned books online or go get them at the public library.”

Technical point, albeit pedantic: If the book in question is not allowed in the school library it is, by definition, banned; it doesn't matter whether the book can be bought down the street. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "To prohibit especially by legal means; also: to prohibit the use, performance, or distribution of: ban a book, ban a pesticide."

But perhaps the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is not the best place to seek the definition of a word: The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary was banned from the Menifee, Calif. Union School District earlier this year after a parent complained about the inclusion of “oral sex” in the dictionary. The words fellatio and cunnilingus - both in the same dictionary -  did not, apparently, bother them. Go figure.

I, too, hate being run over by the biggest mouths with the lowest standards, specifically the lowest standards of critical thinking. The biggest mouths are currently (but not exclusively) being opened by Conservatives, some of whom express beliefs anathema to true Conservative thought; extremism (“Any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies”) is not, by definition, Conservative: “Cautious, avoiding excess; resistant to change.” A political movement that wishes, in one fell swoop, to undo eighty years of social and economic legislation passed in good faith by the elected representatives of the majority of the citizens of the United States and validated, when necessary, by the judiciary is not conservative; it is radical.

Perhaps a return to the first principles of classical primary education is in order, as the letter writer seems to suggest: Grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And to those of classical secondary education: the sciences, mathematics, music and history And also an exclusive return to the great canon of Western literature. But maybe not.

• Silas Marner
• Huckleberry Finn
• Tom Sawyer
• Macbeth
• Twelfth Night
• King Lear
• The Merchant of Venice
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin

These classic books and plays, at one time or another (and within recent memory), have been challenged and/or removed from public school library shelves for questionable language, behavior, sentiment, and morality. While they've never been banned, the books of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë were criticized by some upon their publication for reasons of dubious morality.

I was educated during the 1950s-1960s and the works of Plato, Augustine, Tocqueville, Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington were not assigned reading in the public elementary, junior and senior high schools in New York City and California that I attended, nor, I think, in any other public school in the United States of the era. My generation managed to make it to adulthood with moral compass intact. “Drag queens, deranged people, bestiality, obscenity, vulgarity” would have made the syllabus a lot more colorful, to be sure, but far less so than the dark hued specter of nuclear annihilation which had already predisposed children of that era to question whether future was a viable concept. Drag queens, deranged people, bestiality, obscenity, and vulgarity would have been a relief. And a lot more hopeful than "Duck and Cover!"

 
I first heard the word bastard when I was five years old. What did I do? Before my moral cookie crumbled I asked my parents what the word meant. At the dinner table.

“Where did you hear that word?” Dad asked, darkly.

“From Barbara!” (my older sister).

Aside from learning how to get my sister into trouble (as I knew it would; I understood that it was a  bad word even if I didn't know its definition), I learned that it was possible to talk about touchy subjects with my parents who, when asked a direct question, usually gave a direct answer. Pretty much all that is objected to in juvenile and adolescent literature then, as now, could be and was  learned on the streets, from friends or siblings, and always with a low-standard of credibility. A thirteen year old girl I knew in junior high school c. 1964 thought that you could get pregnant from oral sex. Her friend told her. Her friend was pregnant, apparently ashamed of the truth. Better to hear about this stuff in the classroom where it can at least be intelligently discussed and explained; many families do not have a tradition of adults and children talking about the world in all its glory or messiness.

Does a member of the far-Right really want the work of those esteemed individuals cited by the letter-writer taught in public school classrooms?

Plato was unhappy with the way Athenians allowed themselves to be blindly led by values unexamined by critical analysis. He saw human nature guided by rationality and believed that civilized life be lived according to rational principles. The irrational in whatever manner it manifests itself is the way to chaos; live by facts, not feelings.

Augustine was a Catholic and you don’t want Papists to lead in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, gushed about the intimacy of Christianity and public life in the U.S. -

“In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth”

- but he was also a critic of our extreme individuality. Tocqueville also believed that the natural elite class, those possessing superior talent and intelligence, were the only virtuous members of American society but didn’t have much of a chance against the general mediocrity of the masses. This elitism was to be respected not denigrated; it is natural and desirable to aspire upwards, not downward to the lowest common denominator.

Hamilton believed in the primacy of a strong central government. Jefferson was considered an atheist in his time; he was certainly dubious about allowing religion to guide public policy. George Washington was and remains something of a cypher but was, without question, a member of Colonial America’s elite. All of the above were highly suspicious of the passions of the mob and its behavior. Read the mob as average Americans; the Founders did. Political populism is dangerous; it is irrational and does not appeal to our higher selves but, rather, our baser instincts. Perhaps if the Founders were actually read instead of simply referred to the confusion would be resolved.

Don’t get me started on that libertine Benjamin Franklin. He’s the bum who insisted that Jefferson change “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence to make the document an assertion of rationality, not religious view.

“The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next." Somebody said that but it wasn’t Lincoln, who was an extremely reluctant censor of newspapers and the telegraph in the U.S. during the Civil War. That wise proverb was written by an anonymous sage who, wherever he is, is probably not pleased that his words have been emancipated into the Great Emancipater's mouth and out again. And that they have been co-opted by one arguing in favor of the kind of censorship that Lincoln abhorred.

A philosophy of the classroom that includes forbidding otherwise fine books because they may contain something morally objectionable to somebody; that cherry-picks science to exclude that which is offensive to a faction’s belief; that champions a literary curriculum that no matter how timeless may be completely out of touch with the times we currently live in or, if not, completely foreign to modern students by the cultural landscape it illuminates those eternal verities within and thus potentially lose the readers it wishes to develop; and that wishes to institutionalize the cultural values of one class of citizen at the expense of the majority and Constitutional  principle  will produce a philosophy of government that no true lover of American liberty can tolerate.

It is one of the great ironies of the American narrative that the United States Constitution, written by an elite class to democratically (with limits - hence representative democracy) govern a necessarily well-educated citizenry by embrace and protection of our citizenry’s basic rights, has, in its brilliance, transcended its place, time, and creators to embrace and protect those who have come afterward, no matter their race, religion, or point of view. That it is often being used as a weapon by many on the current political scene to do just the opposite in the name of traditional values is not just hypocrisy and travesty, it is a mockery of those traditional values.

America has always depended upon the new and the novel; we are the New World, exciting, experimental, and a work in constant progress. We are intrepid, courageous, and we do not allow our fears to overwhelm our hopes. Part of our national ethos has always been forward movement beyond the traditional, whether the desire of the Pilgrims to find a place for themselves away from the religious intolerance of the Old World, or minorities seeking respite and succor from political intolerance in their homelands.  We make our own history, it is not made for us. The Constitution is bigger than the men and milieu by and in which it was created. It is America's gift to the world. Like Samuel Johnson on second marriages but without the cynicism, it is the triumph of hope over experience.

These are the traditional values that we should be instilling in our children at home and in our schools to insure that the subsequent philosophy of our government remains true to its ideals. Rigid ideological orthodoxy was foreign and distasteful to the Founding Fathers, who wished to avoid political parties altogether.

In his Farewell Address in 1796, George Washington made it very clear where he stood on the issue.

"[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.”

That’s a true Conservative point of view. We don't hear much of it these days.

Live and let live is perhaps the greatest tacit message of the Founders and the Constitution. These days, however, a little too much emphasis is placed on the live and not enough on the let live part of the equation.

Or the let read.

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Over 18,000 people have read The Dirty Dozen: Twelve Books Guaranteed to Turn (Almost) Anyone a Censor by Booktryst's Nancy Mattoon. Have you?
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Textbooks Even The Texas School Board Could Love

By Nancy Mattoon

Author Joy Masoff's Inaccurate Textbook,
Passed For Use In Classrooms

By The Virginia Department Of Education.
(Image Courtesy of Five Ponds Press.)

The controversy about what should and shouldn't be included in American textbooks has been front page news recently. Virginia students were being taught history from Our Virginia: Past and Present by Joy Masoff, a book which erroneously claimed that "Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson." (In fact it was illegal for blacks to join the Confederate army until after Jackson's death, and no one has any idea how many blacks served in the Southern army, but most at the front were servants or laborers brought by their masters, and were never allowed to be armed or to wear uniforms.)

But the problem with this book goes beyond one factual error. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor for The Atlantic, "The offending section begins by explaining that 'The war between the states was a war between peoples of all colors, on both sides of the fight. White men, and enslaved and free African Americans all those sides [sic]. Most American Indians did not take sides during the Civil War.'" The implication being, of course, that The U.S. Civil War really didn't have anything much to do with race...

Maybe Joy Masoff Could Have Avoided Some Controversy
By Sticking With This Tried and True Format.
Annie Cole Cady.
History of Pennsylvania, In Words of One Syllable.
Chicago, New York: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1889.

(Image Courtesy of University Of Delaware Libraries.)

That revisionist view would probably sit well with Arizona State School Superintendent Tom Home, who along with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, banned ethic studies courses in Arizona public school's because they encouraged "ethnic chauvinism." And with the Texas State School Board who recently banned history textbooks which it claimed "devoted more lines of text to Islamic beliefs and practices than to Christian ones." And further maintained these books were being financed by "Middle Easterners [who] buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly."

Vocabulary Words From:
The New England Primer,
or, An Easy and Pleasant Guide to the Art of Reading:
Adorned with Cuts: To Which Is Added the Catechism.
Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, [after 1836].
(Image Courtesy of Harvard University Libraries)

All of these groups would probably be more than happy to throw out modern texts in favor of some of the good, old-fashioned books that can be found on a massive digital collection created by Harvard University. Reading: Harvard Views of Reading, Readership, and Reading History contains 250,000 pages from 1,200 books and manuscripts, ranging from poet William Wordsworth’s private library catalog to old pedagogical works explaining how reading should be taught.

Those teaching materials include hornbooks and battledores, ABC books, and spellers, which taught children the rudiments of reading: letters of the alphabet, numbers, and syllables. Once those were mastered a child moved on to primers and readers, which ostensibly taught vocabulary and sentence structure, but in fact included enough moral and religious instruction to make the members of the Virginia, Arizona, and Texas State Boards of Education swoon with delight.

Moral Lessons Masquerading As Alphabet Letters.
The New England Primer,
or, An Easy and Pleasant Guide to the Art of Reading:
Adorned with Cuts: To Which Is Added the Catechism.
Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, [after 1836].
(Image Courtesy of Harvard University Libraries)

The ideal child in 19th century America was essentially an obedient "mini-me" of a responsible, unquestioning, God-fearing adult. The hornbook, the earliest form of children's primer, common in both England and America from the late 16th to the late 18th century, contained the letters of the alphabet, simple words, and, invariably, a Bible verse. There was no separate category of books for children before the 18th century. The Bible and epic tales of saints and martyrs were among the first printed books available to children. Books of the 18th and 19th centuries written for children were really meant to mold the mind of the student into accepting without question the values of teachers and parents. Not surprisingly, the word "primer" originally referred to a prayer-book.

The Pictorial Primer.
New-York: C.P. Huestis, 1845.
(Image Courtesy of University Of Delaware Libraries.)

Some 19th century authors even went so far as to condemn any children's book containing stories not based in reality. Lyman Cobb, author of Cobb's Juvenile Reader (1835) maintained, "The practice of giving children dialogues between wolves and sheep, cats and mice, etc, ...containing statements and details of things which never did, and which never can take place, is as destructive of truth and morality, as it is contrary to the principles of nature and philosophy." So much for Aesop's Fables... Similarly, Irish author Maria Edgeworth opposed adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, warning that "the taste for adventure is absolutely incompatible with the sober perseverance necessary to success." In America, even more than in Europe, the influence of Puritanism led to moralistic stories intended to teach young savages that death and damnation were the wages of bad behavior.

A Is For Adam...
The rhyming alphabet, or,
Sarah Bell and Fanny Blake.
Philadelphia :
American Sunday-School Union, c1851.
(Image Courtesy of Harvard University Libraries)

In his introduction to Harvard's Reading website, Robert Darnton, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, states "reading lies at the heart of our most intensely human activity, the making of meaning, and therefore deserves study as a crucial element in all civilizations…" How we read, and what we read, largely determines what, and how, we think. No matter what political or religious philosophy is found in the books that children read in school or for pleasure, the important thing is that parents and teachers encourage children to look at everything they read with a critical eye. The blind acceptance of information, printed and online, is what leads to blatantly false books like Our Virginia: Past and Present being found acceptable, and spreading lies disguised as historical truths.

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