At my age, with eyes creeping toward macular degeneration darkness, I don’t need many books in my house. Certainly not the number I own; especially not the chick lit I gobble up on politically fraught days. My Kindle compensates.
But as long as I live in this space, real books will remain. And I prize some so much that a few will likely become props under the frame of my nursing home bed. Emotional ballast; physical heft; tethers to memory; writing too gorgeous to discard.
There’s one that might qualify on size alone, coming in at 3 inches deep, 7 inches wide, not quite 10 inches long, and weighing as much as my cat at 10 lbs. Its print so small that I can read it now only with a magnifying glass. Its pages tissue-paper thin. In fact, the book included a little note card explaining how best to treat its fragility. It’s:
The Lincoln Library of Essential Information
An up-to-date manual for daily reference, for self-instruction,
and for general culture,
named in appreciative remembrance of
Abraham Lincoln
the foremost American exemplar
of self-education.
The first such tome was published in 1924. My parents bought the green, one-volume, Fabrikoid-bound, seventeenth/1947 edition in 1949 for $20. A sum worth over $200 today. A frigging king’s ransom for them—as my de-mobbed Navy dad struggled to settle into secure employment. I was three at the time; my sister eight.
The publisher, The Frontier Press Company of Buffalo, New York, promised that the volume was “thoroughly revised at each new printing.” I would put money on it being, in my parents’ minds, as close as they could come financially to buying a set of encyclopedias.
Divided into a dozen domains of knowledge (e.g. The English Language, Geography and Travel, Science, Economics and Useful Arts, Biography), carefully tabbed for easy use, each primary subject began with an introduction explaining the importance of the topic. As promised at the outset, “the United States of America is always discussed first in a department.” Contributors and editors are identified, with credentials, before the table of contents. The volume boasts 800 educational pictures, an index offering 22,000 subjects, sample test questions by subject, and more than 300 time-saving tables (e.g. Tables of Common Logarithms, Governors-General of Canada since Confederation, Table of Latin Literature). Wrung dry of extraneous verbiage, the Lincoln Library is interspersed with tiny images crowding the occasional page. Volcanoes on one side; Waterfalls on the flip side. Cocoa and Cotton Growing sharing another coated paper insert. The only full page color image I can spot depicts da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
The receipt that my mother signed for the book was a small pamphlet which cleverly included a three-page quiz to demonstrate how best to use the reference guide. It offers a glimpse into the era of the book’s production and the preferences and partialities of its creators. American exceptionalism, the great man theory of history, a fondness for political order, an emphasis on natural wonders. All on full display, as in this sample.
Who was the first president of the United States to proclaim a national Thanksgiving Day? [Page 2074]
“In what state is the most northern point of the United States? The point farthest south? [Page 651]
Name five aims of the American Legion. Who are eligible for membership? [Page 2047]
What is a caterpillar? [Page 1016]
Why do days and nights vary in length at different seasons of the year? [Page 914]
We patronized McPherson’s Carnegie Library often and with great love and knowledge. So, as I grew old enough to write reports, I gathered much of the information I needed there. There were, of course, times when I failed to announce my need for a library trip – or didn’t find enough material. And the Lincoln Library gave me something to check at home. Always a source of both first and last resort. With it, I learned to use an index. I grew to understand that there might be multiple ways to search for a subject. And I always dawdled over photographs of ancient somber faces and odd beetles.
But here I am, 70 years after my parents purchased this reference work and 1,200 miles from McPherson. And for all its bulk, I cheerfully toted the Lincoln Library home to Montana with me when my dad relinquished our home. I also brought me with a 1917 edition of Familiar Quotations – Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to their Sources by John Bartlett. The two kept each other company on our bookshelves in Kansas, as they do now here, next to the computer.
Of course I don’t need them. At this age and in this time, I am the incredibly fortunate beneficiary of Google and Wikipedia, of essays and blogs and columnists, of professional journals available online, of digitized newspapers—among millions of other primary sources. I am not a skeptic or a snob about the worth of the Web’s resources. Sound historiography always insists that no single source is perfect; that all information reflects the context of its era and author.
But, lord, we live in time of informational riches. Where once I could hold all that “essential information” in my arms, now I can’t imagine its reach. The “Print Wikipedia Project,” already outdated, estimates that were Wikipedia to be printed, it would comprise something on the scale of 7,000 volumes of a 1,000 pages each. I ponder the chutzpah and naivete of the Library’s editors and authors: that they could corral the world’s “essential information” in a single volume no matter how fat.
And that’s perhaps one reason I hang to both weighty volumes: they remind me that the world of information and study and analyses and writing has expanded beyond measure. Just in my lifetime. Akin to the 1920s mind-blowing, explosive revelation that we lived not just in a universe of one galaxy, but of billions. Of a number beyond our comprehension. Every map, every presidential salary, every scientific discovery, every lauded poet, every disease, every invention so tersely described in the Library is now forgotten or functioning in a vastly different landscape.
Maybe more important, I’m reluctant to part with Bartlett’s and the Lincoln Library because they document my parents’ abiding wish to send us out into the world glimpsing that complexity. And being invited—encouraged—to learn. My sister and I were given the incomparable gift of curiosity and study. Of the thrill of the chase for information and explanation. To assume responsibility to learn. To teach ourselves—to be our own educators. To witness just a few of the dazzling details of the universe and all its creatures. If not in a 2200 page tome, then in whatever resources life presented us. ©
