happened to have in his hands a tube such as boys use for bean-blowers. At the same time he had in his mouth a round piece of candy which dissolved rapidly. He playfully put one end of the tube between his lips and accidentally the candy slipped into the tube. He covered the lower end of the tube with his finger to prevent it from dropping. As soon as he felt it touch his finger he sucked the candy back and to his surprise it flew up the tube with such force that he thought he had fractured one of his front teeth. He lay awake nearly all the following night trying to evolve a plan to utilize the force so mysteriously concealed. The next morning he was at the machine-shop bright and early and within three days he had the pneumatic mallet complete.
What could be more worth knowing than this? We could do worse than accept the reading suggestions that fall unsolicited through our mail slots.
There is a surprising further development in the history of the book and the bookcase. Not only is the book the prop of commonest resort in the world of mail order; but objects that resemble books — nonbook items that carry bookishly antiquarian detailing — are suddenly popular. The book as a middle-class totem is in fashion to a degree not seen since Joseph Addison in 1711 encountered a private library containing dummy books of “All the Classick Authors in Wood,” along with a silver snuffbox “made in the Shape of a little Book.” (“I was wonderfully pleased with such a mixt kind of Furniture,” he wrote.) Catalogs now offer book-patterned ties, book brooches, and settees covered in trompe-l’oeil-bookshelf fabric. Pier 1 recently advertised a round glass-topped table whose base is a fake stack of nine large leather-bound books. The latest Horchow Home collection includes, for $869, an entire coffee table made in the image of two immense faux books hewn from chunks of beechwood; the top one is pretending to be Volume I of an Italian edition of Homer. The catalog for See’s candies sells the Chocolate Classics, a book-shaped box of candy bars. The Paragon gift catalog offers a fairly awful table clock with one fake gold-tooled book perched on top and two fake books underneath, bearing the legend, in gold script, “Times to Remember.” Paragon also has an ex-libris frame for snapshots, in printed fabric, showing many shelves of black- and red-bound books — black and red being the colors, we remember, of the poor scholar’s books in The Canterbury Tales. A catalog called Ross-Simons Anticipations has a three-hundred-dollar mirror whose frame consists of several “shelves” of artificial old-style book spines, so that when you check your tie you’ll be thronged with literary feelings.
And then there is the Eximious of London catalog, which began appearing in American mail pouches several years ago. (“Eximious” is an archaic word meaning “distinguished” or “select.”) It carries a four-volume set of book coasters (water-resistant), and a book pencil pot covered with precise replicas of Volume IV of an old edition of the collected works of Racine. I spoke with Cricket, of Customer Service, who told me that the Racine pencil pot was probably their best faux-book seller. And there is the so-called “scholarly magnifying glass with faux bookspine handle.” The handle is a vividly lifelike mold taken from a book called Ramsay’s Poetical Works. It’s a provocative choice. Allan Ramsay wrote verse in what to an American ear is intolerable Scottish dialect, but he also has the distinction of having opened, in Edinburgh, in 1725, the first circulating library — a place where, as in a modern video store, you rent what you can’t afford to buy. Ramsay thus initiated the great change in the demography of readership that takes us from eighteenth-century Gothic chambers of sensationalism to the nineteenth-century coronation of the novel as the preeminent literary form, and, eventually, to the complete subordination of leather-bound books of poetry like Ramsay’s own.
Finally, there is the Faux Book Cassette Holder. Several companies sell false fronts for cassettes, CDs, and videotapes, but this is the only one that made me want to read some Shakespeare. The product turns “an unsightly situation into a stunning bookshelf asset,” Eximious says. “The mellow row of books looks exactly like a set of leather-bound antique volumes, because the resin mould was actually taken from such a set.” What set is it? It’s the Pickering’s Christian Classics collection, published in the 1840s by the bibliophilic William Pickering, who had a thing for miniature books, or what librarians call “tinies.” His tiny of several Latin poets drew the attention of Gladstone himself, who noted with approval that it weighed only “an ounce and a quarter.” I couldn’t put my hands on a copy of Saltmarsh’s Sparkles of Glory, the eleventh volume in Pickering’s row, or on Hill’s Pathway to Piety, but I did read some of the ninth volume — Christopher Sutton’s Learn to Die, a reprint of a work first published in 1600, in black-letter type. Those embarrassing multicassette pop-music anthologies you may have bought (or, rather, I may have bought) on impulse, by phone, while watching Court TV — the ones with titles like Forever ’80s, or The Awesome ’80s, or Totally ’80s—can now reside, shielded from inquisitors, behind the binding of a book that contains morbidly helpful thoughts such as this:
Seeing therefore, that on every side, wee have such urgent occasion, to passe the dayes of this wearysome Pilgrimage in trouble, and pensivenesse of minde, may wee not thinke them thrice blessed, who are now landed on the shoare of perfect Securitie, and delivered from the burden of so toilesome a labour: May wee not bee refreshed, in calling to minde, that this battaile will one day be at an ende, and wee freed from the thorowes of all these bitter calamitites?
As for beauty, Sutton writes:
Doe not some few fits of a feaver, marre all the fashion? The inconstancy of all worldly glory! All this stately and pageantlike pompe shall vanish away, and come to nothing, as if it never had bene.
Just the right note to strike in a cassette holder. As I read Learn to Die, I began wondering whether Christopher Sutton had been spending time at the Globe Theatre: variations on phrases and metaphors from Shakespeare’s late plays, especially from soliloquies in Hamlet, kept cropping up. Even the opening words of the book—“That religion is somewhat out of joynt”—recall Hamlet’s announcement that “the time is out of joint.” So I got down a copy of Hamlet, and soon saw that I was mistaken. It wasn’t that Christopher Sutton had been hearing Shakespeare; it was that Shakespeare had been reading Christopher Sutton: Learn to Die came out in 1600, while Hamlet wasn’t produced until about 1602. And yet Sutton isn’t listed in any study of Shakespeare’s sources that I checked, or in the Arden Hamlet, or in the nineteenth-century variorum edition of Hamlet by Horace Howard Furness. Could the Eximious catalog be giving us, for only $51.50 plus shipping, an admittedly minor but nonetheless significant and as yet undissertationed source for Hamlet’s death-fraught inner sermons? Could a mail-order catalog be sending us to graduate school?