July Update

A List--Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean 125/481
B List--Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy 411/874
C List--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling 244/428

A good trio of books--I am finding Dreiser especially to be unexpectedly absorbing--though not delivering great variety in terms of genre, year of publication, fame/status solidly established in the old Anglo-American tradition. At least I have one woman author, and her book, while old and celebrated, is a departure from the kinds of books I normally read, though not in a politically challenging sort of way. The Yearling in fact takes place in the old, now almost unimaginable America where rural people truly lived pretty much on their own, with scant contact with government institutions and laws, including schools. Even I thought it was slow-going at first, and I still think it would be difficult for any young person without an unusually well-developed discipline for reading long books to make it beyond the first couple of chapters, but the story gathers a accumulative weight as it moves forward, though perhaps this is characteristic of all successful books that are primarily concerned with the natural (or the purely spiritual) over the human world.

I will do a long write-up about the Dreiser book here when I finish it, which will probably be around the time the next update is due.

  

Addenda to the Edward Bok Post

I forgot to mention the episode of the egret feathers, which I found to be darkly humorous. The feather of the egret for the adornment of ladies' hats was fashionable at the time, and Bok took up as one of his crusades an expos-e of the pointless cruelty involved in obtaining these feathers in the hope of shaming his readers to abandon this fashion. However, when Bok went to the hat manufacturers a month after the appearance of his article in the magazine to see how much orders had declined he was 'dumbfounded' to discover they had increased fourfold, his middle class readership in the provinces not having realized until then the 'desirability of the aigrette as the hallmark and wealth of fashion.'

The book itself was a very handsome edition printed, with great illustrations, in 2000, from the Lakeside Press as part of an annual series that began in 1903 and continues, with the addition of one book a year, down to the present. Most of the books are autobiographies with relevance to American history, and are mostly titles and authors I have never heard of, the exception being a number of writings by presidents. Sample titles include The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike (1925), The Border and the Buffalo by John R. Cook (1938), My Experiences in the West by John S. Collins (1970), Fighting the Flying Circus by Capt. Edward V. Rickenbacker (1997), and And They Thought We Wouldn't Fight by Floyd Gibbons (2014). I bought my Bok book for $20 at a used book, supposedly the largest in New Hampshire, about twenty miles from where I live. They have a whole wall of these Lakeside Press books, it must be close to the full set. It does not look as if many of them have been sold. I had been keeping tabs on the Bok book for a long time, more than ten years at least. I could have gotten a copy of the same volume on Amazon for $3 but sentimentality and the excuse to go out to the store overcame my love even of a bargain.