I’ve had a wonderful morning today, though in truth the wonders started several weeks ago.
The heavy snowfall and cold temperatures of the past few days prompted a friend, Dan Miller, to post a sad and depressing poem about winter weather. I responded with a more upbeat poem by John Clare titled “Snowstorm” that I found in Harold Bloom’s “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages.” Okay, that was fun, but the only information about John Clare that Bloom provides is that the poet lived from 1793 to 1864.
Aha! I thought, I can look him up in my trusty “Ridpath Library of Universal Literature.” This is a shelf worn and deckled set of 25 volumes curated and edited by John Clark Ridpath, copyright 1899; my “Edition de Luxe” was printed in Philadelphia by Avil Printing Company in 1903. I bought the set years ago at a University Women of America used book sale, probably for $1 or $2 a volume, and only rarely looked at it until the past few weeks.
The Ridpath Library consists of brief bios and short excerpts from the works of thousands of “the world’s most eminent authors,” as judged by Ridpath and his team of “most capable scholars.” For my taste (at the time I rescued the set from a dumpster) the bios were too brief, the excerpts too skimpy, and 9 out of 10 entries were of obscure nineteenth century clergymen producing tomes about Jesus and collections of awful poetry. But a few weeks ago I finished reading a book recommended by a friend (Jameson Campaign) about the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal (“A Summer with Pascal” by Antoine Compagnon), which had prompted me to read for the first time in its entirety Pascal’s “Pensees,” the text of which I found in volume 33 of my trusty “Great Books of the Western World.”
I was curious of what The Ridpath Library had to say about Pascal and did find his bio and a few excerpts in volume 18 (“Norr – Pope”). Pascal merits only 3 pages in The Ridpath Library … so much for the man Compagnon calls “a cornerstone of Western philosophy”! This seemed to confirm my rather low opinion of Ridpath, but I turned the page and read the entry after Pascal for one Walter Pater, “an English critic of the aesthetic school, born in London, August 4, 1839: died at Oxford, July 30, 1894.” Mr. Pater merits 16 pages! I had never heard of him before, and I suspect you haven’t either. But his bio and excerpts were fun to read, as were those of the next author, Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore, “an English poet, born at Woodford, Essex, July 23, 1823; died at Lymgington, Hampshire, December 26, 1896.”
Well, you have probably already seen where this is heading. I read (sometimes out loud for Diane’s entertainment) from George Washington Patten to Alexander Pope, learning new things about Edgar Allan Poe and Marco Polo along the way, and then went to the beginning of the book (John Norris, “an English clergyman, metaphysician, and poet, born in Collingbourne, Kingston, Wiltshire, in 1657; died at Bremerton in 1711.”) and read the whole volume, some 577 pages. And now I plan to read other volumes, maybe the whole set!
(I determined to learn more about John Clark Ridpath, the editor of this marvelous reference work, and was delighted to find online a master thesis about him written by Tyler Archer, then a student at DePaw University in 2011. It turns out that Mr. Ridpath is a kindred spirit for sure, a kid from a farm in the Midwest who by sheer determination and hard work became one of the great popularizes of history and literature in the 19th century. Archer’s long paper makes the case for viewing Ridpath as a “public intellectual” working outside the elite circles of academics in the East, unjustly overlooked by today’s historians of ideas. Ridpath was so prolific and his works on U.S. history so groundbreaking that Archer never even mentions The Ridpath Library, as though this monumental work, easily the capstone of any other academic career, doesn’t compare to his other work.)
As I was starting to tell you, this morning I turned to The Ridpath Library to learn more about the poet John Clare. I discovered that his entry is in volume 6, but that volume (and volume 9, it turns out) are missing! All these years and I didn’t know I had an incomplete set! Oh horrors. This cannot stand. So this morning I sought volumes 6 and 9 for purchase online. I learned that the series went through many editions, including a reprint edition (print on demand) produced by Forgotten Books (https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/about). It would be best if I could match the bindings of my 1903 Avil Printing Company edition, but I may have to settle for the reprint…
Anyway, the special treat today that I actually meant to lead off this missive with was the discovery that the final volume of The Ridpath Library, volume 25, contains an amazing special bonus. That volume, by the way consists entirely of a “comprehensive index” that is actually a half-dozen indexes — a list of authors with pronunciation, authors classified by genre, titles of extracts, analytical index, and more — an incredible feat of scholarship from an age without computers. One could easily spend years just perusing these indexes and then looking up the authors and excerpts they guide the reader to. I may, in fact, do just that. It is similar to Mortimer Adler and William Gorman’s “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), the two-volume guide to the 54-volume aforementioned “Great Books of the Western World.” I can only suppose that it was an essential reference for Adler and Gorman as they commenced upon their immense scholarly endeavor.
But I have digressed yet again because the real treat I discovered just this morning was not these indexes, incredible and useful as they are, but what comes AFTER the indexes, a “Synchronistic Review of the World’s Literature” from 2000 BC to 1898, printed on five oversized tissue thin pages carefully folded accordion style and glued to the final signature of the book. If you are familiar with the “Timetables of History” books, which display for example the breakthroughs of technology and science and important political events of the day side-by-side on a timeline, then you have a good idea of what this presentation looks like. Again I wonder if the authors of today’s “Timetables” didn’t rely on Ridpath’s pioneering work.
Now maybe you are thinking that I am overly excited about stumbling on some academic research and there must be other more recent books and things that deserve your attention. I won’t judge the depth of your intellectual curiosity.
But consider this: many of the pages of my edition of The Ridpath Library were still deckled (if I might use that adjective as a verb), meaning you can’t read them without sliding a knife or envelope opener through the fold that connects one page to the next. (I learned only today that this was most likely not a printers mistake, as I had long assumed when I encountered it in other books, but a deliberate practice in the late 19th and early 20th century to add character to books!) The fact that the pages of my edition were still deckled — uncut — probably means this volume at least and volume 18 too were never read until now.
The carefully folded parchment paper “Syncronistic Review” had probably never been unfolded even once since it was manually inserted in the book in 1903, 122 years ago. When I discovered this, I handed volume 25 of The Ridpath Library to Diane so she could be the first person in 122 years to open the Synchonistic Review. Seeing the excitement in her face was more than enough reward for not making the honor my own.
So that is what happened to me this morning. I hope you read something as interesting as this!
