At the top of the photo, the red volume with gold
lettering is Mars As the Abode of Life by the great astronomer
Percival Lowell, published by The Macmillan Company in 1909. Lowell had
become especially interested in Mars after reading work by the Italian
astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli believed he had observed
channels (canli, in Italian) on Mars, and perhaps the translation
of canli as canals helped Lowell to believe that the surface of
Mars was covered by a network of intelligently engineered canals. In any
case, Lowell’s book certainly popularized the idea that Mars was, or had
been, inhabited by intelligent beings, perhaps beings much like ourselves.
The paperback book to the right of the red book
is Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, a fictionalized account
of the not very parallel lives of two great German scientists, Carl
Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. You'll find that title in our
Book Reviews list.
Still further around to the right, almost
concealed, is a very old copy of The Damnation of Theron Ware by
Harold Fredrick, published in 1897, eight months after the first edition.
It’s a witty and entertaining story of a Protestant minister who loses his
bearings when he meets a learned and sophisticated Catholic priest.
Near the center of the heap is the dark brown,
embossed volume stamped with gold letters, THE CONSTITUTION. It was
published in 1855 and bears the signature of its original owner, William
Fell Giles, consul Des Etats Unis d’Amerique a Genevè.
The large volume filling the lower right of the
photo is, clearly, The Adams Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester
Cappon and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1959.
Although this is the complete correspondence, students and lovers of the
early years of the republic will probably be most interested in the
remarkable correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, former
friends and then bitter political enemies, an exchange of letters that began
on January 1, 1812, and ceased only upon the death of the writers, both
dying on July 4, 1826 – surely the most astonishing coincidence in American
history. You should wait until you’re about 70 years old before reading
these letters; even if you’re thoroughly informed about Adams and Jefferson,
this correspondence is richer as the reader ages.
In the lower left of the photo you can see a
fresh edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as translated by the spirited
Arthur Golding in 1567. If you read Latin tolerably well you know Ovid’s
Latin isn’t very difficult, but the point of reading Golding’s translation
is to relish his hearty Elizabethan power and gusto. This is the boisterous
Ovid of Shakespeare’s time published by Paul Dry Books in Philadelphia in
2000.
The green paperbound edition in the center of the
pile is Vladimir Nabokov’s sensational Lolita in its first edition
published by The Olympia Press of Paris in 1955, a press most widely known
for publishing “dirty" books, such as those by Henry Miller. The novel was
published in two volumes, and that’s volume two. Though now celebrated for
its intellectual gymnastics and regarded as a classic of post-modern
writing, the only publisher who would touch it was The Olympia Press. And
like any other writer, Nabokov went where he was welcomed.
Almost buried under Lolita and Mars
As the Abode of Life is The Book of the Milky Way (A Brief but
Complete Account of the Voyage by Russell Snow Bridget Malone from
Gloucester, Massachusetts, to the Milky Way, by Sail, in August of 1912)
, a whimsical little thing published by Spring Harbor Press in 1996.