Comments on: Why study old books?

By: Robert C.

Robert C. — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:40:26 +0000

(Sarah #9: I’ll pass on the weightlifters, but where are these fascinating chess books you mention? AND in Russian?!)

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 03:24:39 +0000

Oh, and yeah, love old books. But not the ones in Russian that fill the shelf at Half Price Books. They’re all about weightlifters and chess (there’s one that’s definitely pre-WWII currently in stock. I just can’t stand books about chess.)

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 03:21:48 +0000

I didn’t know my grandparents’ full names until I was 15 or 16, and then I was being paid a penny a sheet by my mother to read and categorize all of her (thousands of) pages of genealogical information. In between she gave me enough information to fill out my five generation chart, except for the surnames of my great-great-grandmothers on my father’s side, which no one is entirely sure of (I love researching deeply religious families from countries where their respective church and state records were burned, in a revolutionary riot and by the Nazis, respectively — especially tracking the mothers of women who never spoke English and never gained US citizenship. Ugh.)

Anyway, I’d be shocked if the average college student knows his or her grandmothers’ surnames (for the record, mine are Molloy and Bower; my father’s maternal grandmother was a Feeny, and there the trail has yet to be rediscovered. Greatly complicating matters, 50% of my great-grandmothers were also named Sarah — both the Jews and the Catholics — with no known middle names. Double ugh.)

By: William Morris

William Morris — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:18:33 +0000

Great question, Jonathan. I don’t know if there were American missions to Romania. Most of the flow was in the other direction, and Ohio (Chicago and Toledo) was the major destination for Romanian emigration — whether Catholic or Romanian Orthodox, ethnic German or ethnic Romanian.

My best guess is that it was a gift from a rich (relatively speaking) American relation.

By: Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:01:57 +0000

William Morris, that’s quite an interesting book. I’ve come across a good number of 19th-c. Lutheran editions printed in the US to serve the large German-speaking populations of the Midwest, so the place of publication isn’t too surprising, and Romania is still home to a dwindling German population that was quite large until the mid-20th century. But how does the book get from one place to the other? Probably not as an import, since there were more convenient places to import German Bibles from. Were the US synods sending clergy in some capacity to Transylvania in the 1880′s or 1890′s? One of the interesting things about book history is how changes in book ownership can mirror the currents of history.

By: Kevin Barney

Kevin Barney — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:24:31 +0000

I can believe it, Rosalynde. When I was a boy of about 10, my Sunday School teacher called me at home and asked me for the first name of my grandmother (I only had one living at the time). I thuoght for a moment and realized *I didn’t know it*! She had always just been “Grandma” to me, and that is what I always called her. (I assume I didn’t know her maiden name at that time, either.)

My SS teacher, an older woman who had joined the Church later in life, was absolutely mortified that I didn’t know my own grandmother’s first name. I felt the shame of it for awhile, until I thought about it more and realized that I wasn’t sure in what context I was supposed to glean that information. What is obvious for adults isn’t always so obvious for a child.

By: William Morris

William Morris — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:18:28 +0000

While on an LDS mission to Romania, I was quite surprised to find a Luther edition of the Bible in a used book store. I was even more surprised to discover that it was published in Toledo, Ohio in 1880-something. I decided to repatriate it.

I would love to know how it ended up in Romania, but as a I recall the family pages hadn’t been filled out and there were no other obvious clues.

The edition came bundled with some interesting maps and commentaries, but I haven’t spent much time with it for a long time. I only dabbled in German so I can read the fraktur type, but it’s incredibly slow going.

By: Rosalynde Welch

Rosalynde Welch — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:05:50 +0000

Do you think most college students are ignorant of their grandmothers’ maiden names? That’s sort of incomprehensible to me, and I am not AT ALL into genealogy.

Since I’m an early modernist, you’d think I’d have a healthy acquaintance with old books. Alas, one of the many injuries inflicted on my graduate career by my children was my immobility; I just couldn’t go anywhere further than the library. So I became very proficient with the microfiche reader, and thanked heaven for EEBO (Early English Books Online).

We don’t own any old books, but we do have a few adolescent ones, including lovely midcentury art editions of Paul Bunyan and Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and an early 20th -c Cross and Crown put out by a midwestern publisher with a fancy leather cover that deeply impresses my kids.

By: Ardis

Ardis — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 15:56:51 +0000

Your student’s book is not really a book anymore, is it? if the current and future owners are unlikely to read it, I mean. It’s a thing, an object. But how lucky he is that his artifact is one that almost everybody thinks is okay to mark the way they have. I look at the few objects I have from ancestors, imperfectly documented, to the point where I’m not entirely sure which branch of the family owned them — by the time I thought to ask my dad, he could no longer remember. Nobody has scratched names and dates into the blue glass bread plate, or indicated why they liked the sugar bowl well enough to keep the shattered pieces. How lucky your student is, to have the book and to have you suggest that it has a value beyond cash. I hope he listens.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 15:21:23 +0000

My bibliomania does not extend, I think probably unfortunately, to old books. I prefer new editions to old (unless there have been major changes between the editions, in which case I want a newly printed copy of both); I prefer fresh pages to ones marked up or covered in marginalia. Looking around my office right now, a four or five hundred books, I have to conclude I don’t own one that was printed before 1960, and most were probably printed much later than that. I have some very old texts, but almost no old books.