Crusoe's Books

IN A PREVIOUS blog we looked at the phenomenon of Anti-Social Reading, the way in which individuals use reading to fend off the unwanted attention of others. Here we consider the way that reading can be used as a form of self-invention through the deployment of performative literacy.

Certain regimes of culture and class, observed Pierre Bourdieu, require codified repertoires of behaviour in a game with sometimes simple, often subtle, rules. Such rules, concluded Bourdieu, must be followed if individuals are to earn and maintain their advantage in their chosen sphere of symbolic capital. Books and libraries, and the performance of reading, have long played important roles as such markers of distinction.

Two days after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, delivered the following panegyric: “He was a thoughtful man, deeply interesting and fiercely intelligent. He was a serious bookworm – which I am too – so talking about the books that we were reading was often, for me, a highlight of our conversations.” For many months in the Scottish press, Sturgeon had been characterized as a “bookworm” based on the regularity with which she publicly tweeted about the many books she had read. In her reading endorsements, Sturgeon has always been careful to avoid overly popular titles, her recommendations tending to fall on the worthy side of middlebrow. What Sturgeon has always performed in her declared reading choices, and with impeccable consistency, is a proud Scot, cosmopolitan in outlook, with a healthy regard for social justice.

A Victorian Common Reader

In an age that valued educational attainment, nineteenth century memoirists also advertised their personal virtues through their familiarity with an extensive literary repertoire, reeling off the books that had influenced them throughout their lives. This was particularly so in the case of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in Victorian Britain, skilled workers with social aspirations. What today we would call virtue signaling was the modus operandi of the nineteenth-century autobiographer, particularly those that set out to tell the story of their lives as journeys from rags-to-riches.

The Melbourne sheep farmer, George Russell, had begun life in Scotland as a humble ploughman, settling in Victoria in the 1820s. Like many he arrived with only a handful of books, mostly religious and with a Scottish emphasis. Because Russell was in the habit of entering the date of acquisition in the fly-leaf of each volume, we are able to catalogue his changing patters of book collecting in the years that followed. Over the next three decades, Russell’s fortunes were on the rise and by the 1850s he oversaw the building of a new homestead and briefly returned to Scotland to marry his cousin and to acquire a few necessities with which to furnish his new Antipodean home. Visiting the second hand booksellers of Edinburgh he bought himself a homely library, practical in nature and with a distinctly Scottish flavour.

After two more decades of financial success, Russell was to take his place as a member of the Melbourne elite. In the 1870s he ordered a consignment from the London bookseller Henry Southeran with which to furnish the library of his newly built mansion. Around the same time, he hired a Melbourne cabinet maker to fashion a set of imposing cases to display his new acquisitions. Unlike the 1850s books, the 1873 titles include a conspicuous number of uniformly bound sets of classical literature and British and imperial history. Thus can Russell’s desire to advertise his ascendancy from his origins as a farm labourer to a member of the colonial elite be traced through his book collecting. That this was a library for display rather than reading is evident in the fact that the volumes show little signs of wear and many remain uncut.

As Russell well understood, in a class conscious society an impressive library could confer instant respectability. Like the grand libraries of earlier aristocratic households, the personal library, for the great industrialists of the twentieth century, continued to be a place in which to perform their cultured status. Having made his fortune in the world of modern media, this was certainly important for a magnate like William Randolph Hearst, whose library in California is pictured here. For Hearst, who had made his millions through sensational headlines, it was important to advertise his cultured credentials, and one way he did it was through his spectacular library and collections.

Performative Reading Now

Those who no longer have the means nor the will to amass prestigious book collections can instantly and easily acquire them. For a mere £270, Books by the Yard will sell you “an absolutely beautiful, hand-picked selection of books bound in distressed leather to bring a feeling of elegance and antiquity onto any bookshelf.” Other companies cater for those who might want to create a less expensive bookish aura even without the inconvenience of actually dealing with dusty tomes. For £40 a roll you can display your intellectual pretensions with Book Grunge wallpaper (pictured here) that its manufacturer claims “showcases hundreds of books on shelves that will make an incredibly wonderful addition to any study, office, or any space in an educational environment.”

Many academics will have been struck by the frequency with which interviewers insist on filming them in front of their bookshelves, presumably as a guarantor of scholarly integrity. Such gestures are the legacy of a time-honoured painterly and photographic tradition of the learned scholar in his study. In the age of zoom, academics frequently pose themselves in front of bookcases, a performance that some manage to achieve with varying degrees of success: a sparsely populated bookcase with intermittent pot plants can have the opposite effect. If in doubt, get yourself a Vintage Bookcase Magic Screen (pictured above) from the American supplier for a mere $15.60.

One witty conceit that plays with such kinds of performative reading can be seen in this 1997 portrait of Ian Mowat, formerly Librarian to the University of Edinburgh. The absence of books and the dominance of the computer screen speak volumes about the way in which the reader finds himself at a moment of transition between the established realm of bibliographical librarianship and the brave new world of information technology. The refusal to play by the established rules of symbolic capital, combined with the surreptitious attention to the book on his desk, perhaps hints at what this busy administrator would rather be doing.

Guest blog by James Yeku

We are delighted to reproduce this version of an online article in which Dr Yeku offers a poignant reminder of the loss of books as one of the many effects of the mobility of African scholars, not least when they travel permanently for education in the West.

WHAT does it mean to travel and leave your books behind with only the faintest hope of any reunion? I did not leave only Lagos behind in 2013 when I travelled to Canada for a doctoral education; like many people, I left my books too, a forced decision that still haunts today. But isn’t one of the often-overlooked conditions of migrancy the loss of books and personal libraries? Or to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, don’t the diasporic trajectories of the African scholar sometimes involve the loss of piles of volumes that may never see daylight again after years of darkness because of the collector’s willful displacement?

It does not have to be the case but, most of the time, certain economic anxieties impose choices on African scholars who seek knowledge outside the continent. His book collection in his new location is almost never complete; his library constantly vulnerable to absence. We don’t want to carry too much luggage when we travel, or we promise ourselves to retrieve them later, even if we never do. As genuine collectors and book lovers, when we pack our bags we want to take along the best of a collection that contains our memories and that catalogues our scribbles and communion with texts, but the uncertainties ahead often mean we must prioritize other symbols of survival, of arrival.

Some must wonder if African urban spaces even have leisurely subjects that worry about the many pleasures of books and bookstores, or that walk in the city as a practice of everyday life; whether there exist flâneurs that delight in sauntering around public spaces in which they encounter different objects. In their many instances of subversive loitering, the flaneur, in moments of walking contemplation of cities like Lagos, produces narratives that are often based on the ancient habit of collecting used books from the dusty grounds of street bookstores and highbrow book spaces. But what happens when, as academics, they have to travel abroad? How should we read the meanings encoded into the collecting of books, a process that is sometimes the pastime of cosmopolitan African subjects? And how must we unpack, or perhaps recover, “a library languishing” in the homeland, in the words of a Nigerian scholar in the US academy? Are there any meanings to the hastily discarded books in our personal collections just before we leave home to study elsewhere?

The art of collecting books and building a library are longings of the soul for many a woman of letters who leaves home to study abroad—often permanently. And many of leave behind books so meticulously packed after many years of sentimental collecting. So, with a stab to the heart, we are forced to forgo the cherished texts collected over the years, together with the memories, histories, and attachments they evoke. And the economic calculus that determines what we must pack remains long after we have settled in our new location and faced again with a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder, in Benjamin’s memorable phrasing. “Thus is the existence of the collector.”

In his 1931 short essay, “Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting,” Benjamin explores readers’ relationships to their books, using the occasion of unpacking his many books from their boxes to offer insights on a reader’s possessions and on the art of collecting itself. Being then “at the threshold of forty and without property, position, home or assets,” Benjamin assigns usefulness and agency to his books as they provoke critical reflections through the process of unpacking them. The “chaotic memories” that is the passion of the collector overwhelm the room, with memories of cities and bookstores, of bookshelves at conference venues, of the disorder of used books on the streets of Ibadan or Accra. The ownership of these books, the most intimate entanglements that one can have with objects, invites us to disappear into them. Not that the books possess us, but that we own them sufficiently for the renewal of the self, or our existence each time the moment of packing and unpacking reveals itself.

Of course, like Benjamin I speak here of my own close scrutiny of books and the social facts that organize our relations with, and memory of, them. Although when Benjamin notes that the acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money, I would think there is a class dimension to book buying and the ability to transport hundreds and thousands of books to the West when one has to leave. Our libraries are unpackable because of the forces of capital, something to which the bourgeois class is impervious. My meditation chiefly applies to the, mostly, young scholar who leaves home for the first time to study in the West. Unable to pack all of his books or any of them for that matter, he sets out on a journey of knowledge, with gaps and silences in his personal archive screaming from behind; with his best books left behind, so are the memories of his collecting and collection. Benjamin is right when he says “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner”, in this case, as it loses its owner to another location.

Unpacking is not just a symbolic ritual of remembrance and performative identification with books, therefore, but is also a site of loss, of rememory and affective belonging. But as we disappear into new collections and memories in the West or elsewhere, the markings of the past yet unfurl themselves to us. In new editions that contain emendations. In new copies that remind us of past annotations. This too is chaos. One wonders if the few among us who are truly able to leave home behind do indeed leave their books too. We may say then that unpacking never ends. And we never can truly unpack a library that was once never indeed packable.

What happens when African scholars travel for education in the West? One of the many costs of this mobility is the loss of books, and we need to talk about this more. So, having collected and accumulated more books by now, my colleague whose library is still languishing in Ibadan will probably gift his once-prized possessions to an institutional library. For now he must continue to contemplate how his books must be unpacked.

James Yeku is Assistant Professor of African Digital Humanities in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. One of his recent journal articles explores questions of textuality, bibliography, and materiality in literary digital humanities. James is the author of the collection of poems, Where the Baedeker Leads, out in fall 2021 at Maweni House Publishers in Toronto.

FOR over three centuries, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has engaged some of the most influential literary and philosophical minds. At the same time, few other fictional texts have provoked so many idiosyncratic readings. J.M. Coetzee, who attempted himself to rewrite the classic, thought about the many ways that Defoe’s book had been encountered over the generations. Coetzee has the castaway describe his readers as a cannibal horde, waiting for an opportunity to consume him, gnawing at ‘the very substance of truth.’

Rousseau’s Crusoe

One of the most influential early attempts to tame Robinson Crusoe is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile; ou de l’Education, his 1762 work on model education. Rousseau recommended the novel as the exemplary text for his hothouse pupil for whom it would constitute ‘his whole library’. Divested of its ‘irrelevant matter’, according to Rousseau it would furnish his pupil with a fund of literary material, ‘both for work and play.’ As an emblem of the solitary life, the novel would teach the child independence of mind and self-reliance. Thus would Émile be encouraged to dress and act, to imagine himself, as Robinson Crusoe, but only after the abridged narrative was ‘disencumbered of all its rigmarole’. More crucially, it would be stripped of its religious content.

Rousseau intended to adapt the novel in line with this prescription but never did. It was left to one of his German admirers, Joachim Campe, to fulfil the ambition in his Robinson der Jüngere (1779-80). In accordance with Rousseau’s prescription Campe was to render the novel down to what he saw as its narrative essentials, at the same time supplementing the story with many pedagogical lessons for his child readers, not least to correct one of the central problems for educators, namely Robinson’s disobedience to his parents. While there is no indication that Defoe intended it as such, through the influence of Rousseau and his best-selling German disciple the novel had, by the early nineteenth century, achieved European-wide status as a children’s classic.

Marx’s Pocket Watch

Compelling as it remained for educators, the novel was soon finding favour with social  commentators, many reducing it to a tale about Protestant self-reliance and the rewards of labour.  ‘Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,’ remarked Marx in Das Kapital, ‘let us take a look at him on his island’. What results is one of the most willful readings of the novel, Marx’s forceful rendering of Crusoe as homo economicus causing him to employ strategies of both supplementation and redaction. Like Rousseau, Marx relegated the significance of the religious content, divesting it of the providentialism that drives the narrative: ‘Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation.’ So central had Crusoe’s piety been to Defoe’s intentions that it is difficult to imagine what kind of work Marx might have been imagining. Transforming Crusoe into a model capitalist, Marx’s Crusoe is portrayed as an early devotee time-and-motion studies:

This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him.

Defoe may have had Crusoe rescue many items from the wreck but a watch and ledger book that Marx finds were not among them. Could Marx have misread it? Was he relying on a liberal adaptation, or simply a bad translation? Did he just make up Crusoe’s inventory to suit his argument? Either way, Marx’s whole understanding of Crusoe as an emblem of modern industrial man was founded on textual details that were not included by Defoe.  Thereafter Marx goes on to rewrite the story of the solitary castaway fighting for personal survival in favour of a community of social beings

carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual.

Thus it was that Marx presented 1860s audiences with yet another radical reinvention of Crusoe, and one bearing little resemblance to the original.

Coleridge’s Semi-colon

While Rousseau, Marx, and others may have taken extreme liberties with the story, censoring and supplementing the text in ways that suited their purposes, one of the most unfortunate nineteenth-century readings was to be found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s praise for the novel in 1830, in which he offered fulsome evidence for Defoe’s stylistic brilliance. In the passage that describes Crusoe’s indecision about the rescue of money from the sinking ship, Coleridge transcribes his remark as follows: ‘However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas’, a passage that Coleridge judged ‘worthy of Shakespeare; and yet the simple semi-colon after it, the instant passing on without the least pause of reflex consciousness is more exquisite and masterlike than the touch itself.’ The fact was that this exquisite punctuational detail did not appear in the text until almost a century after the original, introduced by an anonymous compositor as he prepared Charles Whittingham’s 1812 edition for the press, on which Coleridge was relying. As Irving Rothman concludes, Coleridge may have ‘appreciated Defoe’s . . . powers as a narrative artist’, but unfortunately ‘he just did not have the best text available to him when he read Robinson Crusoe.’ Coleridge’s glaring error is only the tip of a hermeneutic iceberg that has been haunted for generations by the bibliographical instability of its object of study.

Difficult as the novel is, perhaps the most strange and surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe are therefore to be found in the many postumous lives of the text. That there should have been so many idiosyncratic and at times wilful readings over the generations should not surprise us. It is a complex narrative, composed of a multitude of generic forms. Virginia Woolf, an admirer, suggested as much when she reflected how its readers, in seeking a key to its multivalence, often found themselves reducing it to what they believed were its bare essentials. For all its brilliance, the novel was for Woolf still fraught with unresolved hermeneutic mysteries: ‘However we may wind and wriggle, loiter and dally in our approach to books,’ this otherwise confident reader confesses that ultimately ‘a lonely battle waits us at the end.’

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Guest blog: Innes M. Keighren

THE DECISIONS we take about the books we pack when we travel are often informed by three factors: 1) practicality (“Will this book help me to travel safely, agreeably, and productively?”) 2) pleasure (“Will this book provide entertainment or diversion when required?”) and 3) portability (“Can I accommodate the space and weight of this book?”). These same considerations were entirely familiar to travellers in centuries past.

In approaching the ways books were read by British travellers in the nineteenth century, I propose to draw on two examples: first, the en route reading practices of the scriptural geographers Edward Robinson and Eli Smith as they sought biblical truth in the Holy Land and, second, the shipboard library of the Arctic exploration vessel HMS Isabella.

Books in the sand

For the scriptural geographers Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, travel and text were intimately related. The purpose of their journey, to locate biblical sites in the present-day Holy Land, necessitated travelling not only with books to hand, but often literally with books in hand. In their account, Robinson and Smith were assiduous in detailing the contents of their travelling library. Doing so was both practical (they were effectively ‘field testing’ books for the purposes of recommending them to other travellers) and rhetorical (as evidence of their scholarly credentials):

First of all we had our BIBLES, both in English and in the original tongues; and then RELAND’S Palæstina, which next to the Bible is the most important book for travellers in the Holy Land. We had also RAUMER’S Palästina, BURCKHARDT’S Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, the English compilation from LABORDE’S Voyage en Arabie Petrée, and the Modern Traveller in Arabia, Palestine, and Syria. Were I [Robinson] to make the journey again, considering the difficulty of transporting books, I should hardly add much to the above list, excepting perhaps a compendious History of the Crusades, and the volume of RITTER’S Erdkunde, containing Palestine in the second edition (I, 48).

Complaints about portability notwithstanding, theirs was a relatively small library: six texts and a number of bibles. Nevertheless, this catalogue of in-the-field reading matter was an important warrant of their status as credible scholars. Their need for a travelling library was further evidenced by their working method. They had adopted a specific principle to guide their investigations: “to avoid as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks”. Better, they thought, to “examine everywhere for ourselves with the Scriptures [and other texts] in our hands”. Books, then, were not just empirical sources, but were part of a rigorous method allowing them to make ready checks on the veracity of these portable authorities. Confirming (or correcting) the work of others was the means by which Robinson and Smith could quantify their intellectual and geographical contribution on the spot.

Books on the water

While a travelling library may have been useful for Robinson and Smith, its heft presented practical problems. Questions of transportability mattered less for those who travelled by sea, and shipboard libraries were commonplace by the nineteenth century. The reading material available to the officers and crew of naval ships and to civilian passengers on commercial vessels reflected practical requirements of navigation, the needs of correct scientific investigation, and concerns about the morals and the morale of the crew.

In his account of the unsuccessful 1818 Arctic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, John Ross offered a detailed description of the provisioning of his vessel, HMS Isabella. Under Ross’s direction a number of books were supplied for “the use of the officers, and quarter-deck petty officers.” The ship’s library included travel narratives, scientific texts, and astronomical and navigational guides, together with “Thirty Bibles and sixty Testaments.” All told, the library held twenty-five titles across fifty-four volumes. Of the ship’s compliment of fifty-four men, fewer than twenty had access to the library by dint of their rank. The ship’s crew had to make do with the religious tracts or their own private collections.

The library’s narratives fell, broadly, into two categories: those such as Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal (1801) and Samuel Hearne’s A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay (1795), related specifically to the territory the expedition was to navigate, and those, such as Thomas Falkner’s A Description of Patagonia (1774) and William Dampier’s Voyages and Descriptions (1699), to be read for pleasure and for the examples they might provide for seamanship, observation, and description. Volumes on mineralogy, geology, and botany constituted the ship’s scientific collection. Isabella’s library was, together with sixty or so scientific instruments recommended to it by the Royal Society, part of the expedition’s scholarly apparatus.

That Ross took the trouble to detail his ship’s library and scientific collections was partly for the sake of credibility. In the leadup to the publication of his narrative, Ross’s own observational skills had been called into question in a dispute over the existence of a mountain range that had seemed to make the Isabella’s passage through Lancaster Sound impossible. With his own aptitude and leadership in doubt, Ross’s decision to offer a full-scale account of the literary and scientific equipment of the expedition was part of a deliberate (although ultimately inadequate) strategy to show careful planning, sound scholarship, and the production of relevant knowledge at sea. For Ross, books had a potential practical value in affording protection against criticism.

Where next?

Because reading (and, more specifically, citation) was so centrally implicated in the demonstration of credibility on the part of nineteenth-century travellers, we know in very many cases what travellers read, why they read, and (sometimes, but less often) with what effect. Whilst a significant body of scholarship exists on the way travels were mediated as they became text (in the processes of authorship, editing, and publication), more work needs to be done on the mediation of travels by texts and how reading, whether en route or in situ, informed the nature and practice of travel itself.

Innes M. Keighren is a historical geographer with research interests in geography’s disciplinary and discursive histories, in book history, and in the history of science. He is based in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Bringing geography to book: Ellen Semple and the reception of geographical knowledge (London, 2010) and co-author of Travels into print: exploration, writing, and publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago, 2015). His most recent book is an edited collection about the geographical significance of the popular TV programme, Landscapes of Detectorists (Axminster, 2020).

From time to time, we hope to include items by some of the leading scholars in the field. It gives us particular pleasure to launch the first of our guest blogs with this contribution by David H. Stam. David is best known as a distinguished scholar in the fields of bibliography and polar history. His career as a librarian took him to the Newberry Library, Johns Hopkins University, eventually as Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library, and for several years the Librarian at Syracuse University. He is famously responsible for  An International Dictionary of Library Histories (2001) and is more recently the author, with the assistance of Deirdre C. Stam, of the excellent Adventures in Polar Reading (Grolier Club, 2019). He has also written a memoir, What Happened to Me (2014). In this article, he offers a personal take on reading in unusual circumstances. – BB

My old friend Bill Bell, who is responsible for this blog, is about to publish Crusoe’s Books, his long-awaited book on reading in extreme situations. I’ve been waiting to see this book for most of the 21st century, ever since the SHARP Annual Conference of 2001 in Williamsburg, VA, where we first met following his paper on the books of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott on his first expedition to Antarctica in 1901 aboard Discovery. We’ve been friends and reading partners ever since.

A lot has happened in the intervening twenty years. With my wife Deirdre’s collaboration our own work on reading in polar settings has been published by the Grolier Club: Adventures in Polar Reading: The Book Cultures of High Latitudes (New York: Grolier Club, 2019). By the coincidence of a large number of Polar centennials early in the century, interest in the so-called “Heroic Age” of Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, and many others has mushroomed, both among the general public and specialists in all aspects of Polar history.

My own experience of reading was turned upside-down in late 2008 by a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, known in Britain as motor neuron disease). A disease without a cure, symptoms are very variable among its patients, often including a significant loss of finger dexterity (sometimes ironically called digital dexterity). It was not long before my ability to button a shirt had all but disappeared, a phenomenon mentioned in King Lear where on his deathbed he pleads, “Pray Sir, undo this button.” It’s now our favourite line of the Bard who understands so much of life and its vicissitudes.

As far as I know the Americans with Disabilities Act does not deal with discrimination against disabled readers like me, nor do I intend to hire a lawyer to find out. For the record I want to provide a list of factors that affect me in reading the printed word in physical form. These conditions vary a great deal from patient to patient and there is no standard norm among various neurological diseases. This is a personal list, though I suspect several would be widely shared. Some of these problems could be avoided by an attentive publisher or printer, as fortunately happened with our recent book.

1. Weight: in this era of the mega-tome memoir, historical masterwork,  and exhaustive biography, weight is an obvious problem. I sometimes need some help in positioning a book for reading, usually with an aide resting the book on a pillow on my lap. None of my four devices for holding a book open work with a heavy book, and regular adjustment of legs, pillow, and book (for example, to turn pages) are a distraction, and often a danger to the page edges. One alternative is to place the volume on a flat surface at chest height and read standing up. That takes energy already at a premium and most heavy books in that position would need to be held open with two hands.

Contributing to the weight problem sometimes is the use of calendared paper, especially for glossy illustrated books. Apart from the weight, reflections on the page require constant adjustment of the page if not the whole volume.

2. Openability: I simplistically divide books into three categories: one, two, and three-fisted books. The first can lie flat, or open on a reading device, with ease of page turning. The pages remain open while taking notes by hand (if possible) or computer. In my case I have no legible handwriting, though I can still compose on a computer. The second requires two hands to hold the work open, though turning pages or taking notes is much more difficult. The third category is impossible for the disabled: typical these days is a tightly bound perfect binding with excessive glue and very narrow inner margins. On-demand publishers often err in this direction. Most desirable is Smythe sewing with adequate inner margins.

3. Footnotes vs endnotes: Endnotes in two and three-fisted books virtually are guaranteed to go unread. Imagine trying to move with the hands of a true klutz to the back of the book while holding it open with largely inoperative fingers. For me footnotes are preferable and needn’t be in a smaller font.

4. Margins: Some disabled readers retain handwriting ability. I don’t recommend they deface their books (or library books), but for those needing the convenience of annotations, wide inner margins are a boon.

5. Type size: For an octogenarian like me type size makes a great difference, though a small tightly spaced face will not deter me from reading. It is fortunately still possible, though I wonder if my impression is correct that university presses are increasingly moving toward more words per page. Perversely, the Times Literary Supplement has already made the move, a betrayal of Stanley Morison and Times New Roman.

6. Newspapers: For me a tabloid is much easier to manipulate than any of the hard copy alternatives. Online versions of the news are another matter, but old habits die hard. Newspapers. Literary journals like NYRB, LRB, and TLS are a good size, except when their inner margins (verso and recto) yield paper pressed over the type. Would that the publishers put all their advertisements there, however much their advertisers object.

7. Time: It might not be obvious from the complications listed above that almost everything with ALS takes more time, often more than twice as much: bathing, drying, dressing, eating, walking, exercising, writing, typing, sleeping itself, even reading. The assault on our reading ability is insidious: it distracts our attention, it destroys the rhythm of the prose (not to mention poetry), and involuntary sleep requires re-reading many passages in seeking the place to resume.

All that and old age does not terminate the addiction and we go on reading as long as we can. Mechanical aids keep advancing the ability to read, write, and communicate, even as the end of those abilities gradually arrives. My own hero is Tony Judt who wrote four or five significant books in the two or three years of his disease with the kind of help I can’t imagine. A reader and an amanuensis at a minimum. Among other things, it begins to get expensive. With considerable help I’ve been lucky enough to complete two full books in the thirteen years since diagnosis, and another since the probable onset twenty years ago.

Despite the trials outlined here, I have been extremely lucky in my encounter with ALS, having lived far longer than most fellow victims, and having the excellent care of the US Veterans Medical establishment. But I do wish that the world of publishing would accommodate some of the desiderata outlined here.

World Book Night 2020 coincided with the beginning of Covid lockdown in the UK. At a moment when many public events were being put on ice, The Reading Agency, an organization dedicated to promoting wellbeing through reading, announced that the celebration would go ahead anyway. But April 23 would be a World Book Night with a difference. Because ‘reading connects a nation in self-isolation,’ the Agency offered a suite of alternatives: virtual parties, digital activities, and author broadcasts. An approved list of books was provided and members of the public were encouraged to turn collectively to print because reading was not only proven to ‘improve mental health, self-esteem, empathy, concentration, sleeping patterns and more.’ As one organizer put it, books have ‘the power to . . . connect us up in these difficult times.’

Reading has long had an important part to play in building social relationships, mediated with others through the intimate psychological experience of the sharing and discussion of print. Benedict Anderson famously characterised reading audiences as ‘imagined communities’. Even when they were separated by thousands of miles with no hope of meeting, Anderson maintained that colonial readers of the past could connect with one another through print.

But this is only half the story. Back in the 1960s, the Canadian sociologist, Irving Goffman (1922-1982) talked about the importance of what he called ‘civil inattention’ to describe the processes of social disengagement that can take place in public spaces. One aspect of the way in which individuals regulated their relations with others, Goffman observed, was through the use of media. As an ‘involvement shield’ its ultimate purpose was not to connect with others but to inhibit intimacy. Anyone who has been on the London Underground at rush hour as strangers around them are immersed in their books and newspapers will know what Goffman was talking about.

There is nothing new in this form of behaviour of course. Nineteenth-century emigrants, finding themselves for weeks and months in the company of strangers, used books as protection against other shipboard passengers. Richard Altick remarked that common readers in Victorian working-class communities were often ‘subjected to the ridicule, or at best the well-meant disapproval, of those who failed to share one’s inclination.’ How much more would similar social pressure be brought to bear in the close confines between decks? Stephen Colclough and David Vincent’s observation that ‘entering the secret world of print amidst the bustle of the crowded household required immense concentration and a capacity to withstand resentment at the withdrawal from its sociability’ might be applied, perhaps even moreso, to strangers in steerage. There is evidence of passengers on more than one emigrant ship suffering ridicule for time spent reading and writing.

On the British National Antarctic Expedition (1901-04) an extensive library was used by the men on board Discovery. It was a communal resource, often resorted to for mutual entertainment, argument, and conversational exchange. Just as often, though, it served many solitary pursuits. In the close quarters of the ship, men would often retire to their cabins, making reading the pretext for finding time alone. Elizabeth Leane finds an analogy for Antarctic reading in the way that splinters of ice break away from an iceberg to form their own independent bodies: ‘text acted like ice in Heroic-Era expeditions, at times insulating expedition members from those around them, calving off little imaginative islands on which they could maroon themselves; and at other times solidifying the gaps between them.’

Today we have considerably more sophisticated means of tuning out the presence of others than our forbears. For all their online reading groups and social networks, today’s travelers have their Ipods, Kindles, and mobile phones, all suggesting that Goffman’s involvement shield has never been more relevant.

There are a lot of myths surrounding the history of reading. From time to time, we aim to correct historical misconceptions that have entered the realm of received wisdom. This one relates to the most celebrated trench newspaper to be printed on the Western Front during the First World War.

The title of The Wipers Times is a combination of the soldiers’ common parlance for Ypres and a scatalogical joke about its ultimate destiny, the pages filled with clever humour and subversive jibes at the ‘expense’ of officialdom. Its notoriety is due largely to its subsequent circulation during the war in facsimile, issued by the London publisher Herbert Jenkins, and in several editions since. Among other duties, Jenkins was an informant to the Official Press Bureau whose archives indicate that from the beginning of the war Jenkins clandestinely reported to the authorities on the activities of his book trade colleagues. On 31 March 1916, he had written to the Bureau to say that ‘If at any time I can be of any assistance, I hope you will not hesitate to make use of me.’ Shortly afterwards he sent the Bureau a list of publishers and newspaper proprietors for closer government scrutiny. When he applied for permission to reissue The Wipers he assured the Bureau that it had been cleared by the censors before its original appearance, ‘each and every number’ having been ‘submitted to and approved by the Army Authorities in France.’

This is very different from the popular story that has tended to exaggerate the subversive nature of the Wipers. The story told by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman in the 2013 docudrama, for instance, presents it as the epitome of subversion, a real-life combination of Oh! What a Lovely War and Private Eye. In fact its closest affinity was with the society magazine, The Tatler, with which it had humorous sport in both of their correspondence columns throughout the war years. Its pages may be peppered with jocular references to the censor’s incursion, lending the paper an ironic air of mock insubordination, but, in practice, The Wipers was far from subversive.

Trench journals were not just tolerated but were sanctioned as part of the campaign for morale, both at home and at the front. They often portrayed themselves to their readers as autonomous, home-grown anarchic publications but they were regarded by the authorities as an outlet for potential discontent. The fundamental role of such magazines, observes Graham Seal, was to engender the ‘willingness of soldiers to endure the palpable insanity to which they were consigned by forces beyond their control.’ Three decades and a world war later the debate was still raging about the political efficacy of a free press among allied troops. In the face of Churchill’s attempts to impose a more patriotic and conservative tone on newspapers ‘produced from below’, surviving censorship reports indicate that ‘what troops liked was not necessarily what senior military figures believed should be given to them.’ Despite their employment of a dissenting tone, many understood that such publications were actually good for building esprit de corps. In giving voice to the disaffected, through irreverent jokes about commanding officers and frank satires on day-to-day conditions, front line print culture offered a public sphere that provided catharsis, or what Field Marshal Montgomery, who gave a free hand to such publications in the 1939-45 Eastern campaign, referred to as a ‘valuable safety valve’.

Before he published his facsimile, Jenkins approached General Haig to write a foreword. That he declined is not necessarily evidence of the old man’s disapproval but that it might have compromised one of the most sophisticated kinds of frontline propaganda deployed by the authorities in the First World War.

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‘I have no books’ Robert Louis Stevenson complained to one of his correspondents shortly after he arrived in Samoa in 1890.  A full six months later he was able to report, not without a little ambivalence:

Our books and furniture keep slowly draining up the road, in a sad state of scatterment and disrepair; I wish the devil had had K. by his red beard before he had packed my library.  Odd leaves and sheets and boards – a thing to make a bibliomaniac shed tears – are fished out of odd corners.  But I am no bibliomaniac, praise Heaven, and I bear up, and rejoice when I find anything safe.

Stevenson may not have classed himself as a bibliomaniac but we do get a sense from this statement of the intimate relationship that he had with his library. In a passage from the Ebb Tide, one of the final works he wrote before his death in 1894, he meditates on the importance of reading to the condition of exile:

One, as he sat and shivered under the purao, had a tattered Virgil in his pocket. Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession; but the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. Or he would pause on random country walks; sit on the path side, gazing over the sea on the mountains of Eimeo; and dip into the Aeneid, seeking sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way of oracles) replied with no very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England at least would throng upon the exile’s memory: the busy schoolroom, the green playing-fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and the fireside, and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and become native in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student’s own irrevocable youth. 

It was of course not England that haunted Stevenson’s own memories in his final years at Vailima, but his own early years in Scotland.  ‘Scotch is the only History I know,’ he wrote in 1891, ‘it is the only history reasonably represented in my library’. Throughout his time in the Pacific we find him returning in his reading to what he referred to as the ‘Auld Lichts’, and in particular the Covenanting writers of his youth to whom he claimed he turned most often for ‘consecration and remembrance.’ 

An annotated virtual inventory allows us to reconstruct RLS’s personal library at the time of his death. Of the over 1200 titles identified, many are association copies. Drawing together items of correspondence and marginalia it documents a life punctuated by the acquisition of books. Early items include a copy of James Aikman’s Annals of the Persecution in Scotland bearing an inscription of the young Stevenson’s name by his father. On 7 September 1868 the eighteen year old had written to his mother to thank her for this addition to his library: ‘This morning I got a delightful haul,’ he wrote, ‘a precious and most acceptable donation, for which I tender my most ebullient thanksgivings. I almost forgot to drink my tea and eat mine egg.’

Even when he was far away from his books, they were very much on his mind. He referred to the volume by name in a letter from San Francisco written to his friend Charles Baxter in 1880: ‘Among my books there is one . . . in the shelves immediately behind one as one sits at the business table on which I think you will find my name written by my father; if it is so, please keep it.’ In such acts of giving and receiving, Stevenson reinforced his personal relationships and his sense of his own past through the many books he had owned.

Curiously, RLS confessed to having based a number of details in Treasure Island on his reading of Robinson Crusoe, going on to identify the specific appeal of Defoe’s novel for him:

It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why Robinson Crusoe should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and had, in so many words, to play at a great variety of professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so much.

Stevenson’s own copy of the novel, an edition of 1851, was given to him when he was eight and is bound in with a Life of Alexander Selkirk. It was heavily annotated and the illustrations appeared to be coloured in by RLS himself.

Ever since the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Janeites’ – a short story about a secret society of officers in the First World War with an overwhelming devotion to the works of Jane Austen – it has been rumored that Tommy Atkins was a big fan. It is an idea that appears to have been given historical credibility 70 years after the war. In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (3 Feb. 1984), Martin Jarrett-Kerr recollected having been told five decades earlier by his non-combatant tutor at Oxford, H.F. Brett-Smith, that the latter had been employed to recommend suitable works for the rehabilitation of shell-shocked troops. Brett-Smith had apparently confided to his student that ‘His job was to grade novels and poetry according to the “Fever-Chart”. For the severely shell-shocked he selected Jane Austen.’ In the 1930s, when Jarrett-Kerr was an undergraduate at Oxford, the relatively young subject of university English Literature still had a relevance problem. This was also a period when the scars of another battle at Oxford (between Eng Lit and German Philology) were still raw. All in all, the conditions were rife for peddling a belief in the patriotic credentials of Pride and Prejudice.

In 2009, Brian Southam wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement asking whether anyone had documentary evidence for Brett-Smith’s ‘fever chart’. No reply appears to have been forthcoming. Since which time the myth of the First-World-War-Austen has been reproduced, recycled, and embellished countless times. John Mullan, picking up on Jarrett-Kerr’s anecdote, wrote in The Guardian in 2013 that ‘It is impossible not to speculate as to his reasons for thinking Austen the best solace for those who were severely traumatised.’ From The Telegraph to The Daily Mail, newspapers were soon jumping on the bandwagon and Oxford professors were happy to oblige them with soundbites: ‘She was read in the trenches. She was a prescribed script for tortured, troubled souls . . . . She’s always been adored by the academic community and the popular community and there are few people who do inspire that kind of devotion.’

Soon the same myth was being peddled with ever greater confidence, a story that became truer in the retelling. In 2016 an exhibition at The Folger Library on Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity took for granted the novelist’s special status in military circles, dedicating a section on ‘Will and Jane go to War’. While admitting that the ‘fever-chart’ story has ‘very little evidence to go on’, one critic in the following year went on to write a whole book chapter on ‘Conscripting Gentle Jane’ speculating why Austen might have been popular with troops. The collision of the novelist’s bicentenary and the memorialization of the First World War made the connection almost irresistible to copy writers in and around 2017. Since which time, the dubious story of real troops with an overwhelming passion for her works was being taken for granted in certain quarters.  

Anyone who knows anything about the changing fortunes of the ‘immortal Jane’ can be forgiven for their skepticism. Although it is not impossible that there were some Austen devotees among the millions of men at the Front, there is scant evidence for a Janeite cult in the trenches: in soldiers’ accounts I have found only two references, one of which includes ‘Austin’s [sic] Pride and Prejudice’ among an otherwise long list of titles that one man encountered. All of the evidence would seem to suggest that Austen’s fiction held far less popular appeal among troops than Charles Dickens, Rider Haggard, and Nat Gould, who figure in their diaries and letters with far greater frequency. And that, of course, was the whole ironic purpose of ‘The Janeites’ which was not meant to document the way that soldiers identified with the Gentil world of Georgian middle-class respectability but was, in fact, Kipling’s conceit on the anomaly of polite tea parties and marriage proposals in the heat of battle.

It seems that Kipling scholars have always got the joke. In 1959 J.M.S. Tompkins remarked about the way that the horrors of war ‘contrast in every way with the exquisite art of Jane Austen, the strange but natural resource of the men whose duty it is to deal familiarly with carnage.’ In 1971, Charles Carrington remarked that ‘the story would have the same point if it had been called The Trollopians.’           

After the war Kipling himself sent a consignment of books to the Western Front for the entertainment of the occupying force, a full inventory of which can be found in the YMCA Archives at the University of Birmingham. Margaret Ballie-Sanders, Violet Jacobs, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Stanley Weyman and a host of other popular writers were sent, but Kipling didn’t think to include a single volume of Jane Austen.

One of the most poignant meditations on the intimacy that can exist between the exile and his books was written by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. After the breakup of his marriage he found himself alone in a new city and, having spent years drifting from place to place, he reflected on the way that his books evoked in him deeply personal memories. Describing the sensation of opening his crates, Benjamin writes in ‘Unpacking my Library’ that ‘Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.’ Like a latter-day Crusoe, Benjamin the exile describes it as a magical event serving ‘to renew the old world’, invoking past times and geographies, allowing for the reconstitution of an otherwise vulnerable psyche.

Turning to this episode, Alberto Manguel describes the way in which the act of unpacking a familiar book after a separation of time and distance can suddenly transform it into ‘a token, a keepsake, a relic, a piece of DNA from which an entire body can be rebuilt.’ Manguel, the son of a diplomat, reflecting on his own itinerant childhood, recalled how reading provided ‘a permanent home, and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt, at any time, no matter how strange the room in which I had to sleep or how unintelligible the voices outside my door’. Every book that accompanied him on his travels was ‘a world unto itself’, reflects Manuel, ‘and in it I took refuge.’

The image of the exiled reader reconstituted through books was of course familiar long before Defoe took up the theme. That famous Shakespearean castaway, Prospero, who prized his library above his dukedom, tells us that the precious books with which the faithful Gonzalo has furnished him in his island solitude is a source of magical power. A century earlier, Thomas More’s fictional envoy, Raphael Hythloday, not expecting to see home any time soon, loaded a collection of the finest classical editions on his fourth voyage. When he arrived in Utopia, he bequeathed them to his hosts along with a printing press, thereby establishing a new canon of learning far from Europe, based on the best examples of early sixteenth-century knowledge. So resilient was the idea of the library in exile that, in the 1840s, the solitary Henry Thoreau was still keeping a familiar copy of The Iliad at his bedside during his sojourn at Walden Pond. Turning to his well-worn copies of Homer and Aeschylus in an age of mass circulation, he reflected on how they seemed as ‘solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.’

The library as a cultural carapace for the individual against the tyranny of distance is a trope that has not only repeated itself time and again in literature and visual culture but is an idea which has appealed to generations of itinerant readers.

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