Booking Pleasures

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Overview

"The covetous foraging for old and rare books," is how Matthews defines "booking." It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world. The understanding that books are intrinsic to civilized living is wisdom as old as civilization itself; it is affirmed here, in their various ways, by the people who inspire and inhabit these pages: the quasi-literate clerk of the steamboat Science on the Ohio River in 1835; a young fiction ...
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More About This Book

Overview

"The covetous foraging for old and rare books," is how Matthews defines "booking." It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world. The understanding that books are intrinsic to civilized living is wisdom as old as civilization itself; it is affirmed here, in their various ways, by the people who inspire and inhabit these pages: the quasi-literate clerk of the steamboat Science on the Ohio River in 1835; a young fiction writer who got drunk one night and stole the bust of Edgar Allan Poe from the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia; and a guru of the computer age, who writes: "Books have always been important to me and to the people around me." Matthews explores the collecting of old dictionaries, whose definitions can be read as a sort of poetry; an 1840s rhyming book once used as a mnemonic tool for small children; and the wildly scrawled annotations of an exuberant painter in a battered copy of Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America.
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Editorial Reviews

Booknews
In 15 essays, writer Matthews (English, Ohio U.) shares some of his sense of adventure and discovery in collecting old and rare books. He describes old dictionaries, an 1840s rhyming book, scrawled annotations by a painter in An Artist in America, and other treasures; and compares his passion to Charles Darwin's for collecting beetles. No index or bibliography. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780821411292
  • Publisher: Ohio University Press
  • Publication date: 11/15/1995
  • Pages: 191
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.23 (h) x 0.74 (d)

Table of Contents

1 Books and Beetles 1
2 Good Old Ways of the Good Old Days 14
3 A Sheep in Wolfe's Clothing 27
4 Waiting for the Steamboat Science 39
5 Colloquies in a Pagan Land 49
6 The Poetry of Definitions 66
7 The Library is Whose Apple? 76
8 Feasts of Rhyme 87
9 How Life Should Be on the Hilly Plains 99
10 The Original Giant and the Jack of Games 112
11 Life in the Intersections 124
12 Borderland Booking 141
13 Honest Abe Martin's Saxophonophobia 153
14 The Raven Caper and the Writing Curse 162
15 How Did They Live in Those Days, and How Cuss? 174
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