Over the past few years my old friend and colleague John Thomson of Bartleby’s Books (far left in the photo) has adopted an adage that gives me pause. We might be looking at a fascinating bibliographical discrepancy, or a dense manuscript, full of promise but chaotic. As I reach for my checkbook he turns away, intoning, “I don’t buy work.”
His point is that at this stage of our careers, with so much available and so little time, it doesn’t make sense to tackle projects that will probably require many more hours of work than their market value will justify. And he’s right. I just can’t help myself.
In Pasadena last month I purchased a messy little journal or commonplace book, or family diary, or… I didn’t know what it was, except that there was a ship in it and the Massachusetts port town of Duxbury was mentioned throughout. It took me all morning to figure the thing out and I only put $250 on it. But it was fun.
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Manuscript. Accounts and Commonplace Book of the Soule Family, Duxbury, MA 1830-1883. Pre-lined ledger book, 20 cm. Unpaginated, about 175 pp. manuscript entries.
There’s an interesting story behind this rather chaotic little book. Primarily, it documents several voyages of the merchant brig “Ceylon” and her captain, Charles Soule (1782–1868) of Duxbury, MA. According to Brewington’s “Marine Paintings and Drawings in the Peabody Museum,” the “Ceylon” was a 196-ton brig built in Duxbury, MA in 1834 and wrecked on the south side of Nantucket in 1837. Most of the entries in this book center around the finances of this vessel and her several merchant voyages as recorded by captain Soule.
However, these notes occupy only the upper portions of pages spread throughout the journal. The rest of the book was used to record miscellaneous family expenses, labor and wages of a family laundry business in the 1870s and 1880s, and – most obviously – to serve as a writing practice book for Soule’s children and their friends, who managed to fill most of the pages with their signatures and nonsensical fragments.
From what I can gather, there are records from “Ceylon’s” 1830 voyage to Antwerp, Paris, and Liverpool. In 1832 she was in London; in 1835-36 her itinerary included Leghorn, Messina, and Smyrna. The 1835 voyage either ended there and began anew in 1836, or proceeded from the Mediterranean to St Thomas and Martha’s Vineyard. In 1837 she was in the Caribbean, putting in at Carthagena and Haiti. These are followed by records from 1838-39 in Apalachicola, New York, Smyrna, and New York. And finally, in 1841, entries from Boston. Some of the records are quite revealing. For example, “August 1, 1839 – To my wages as master of brig Ceylon from New York to Smyrna / 10th Febry 1839 to 16th August 1839 / 6 mo 6 days @ $75 per mo 465.” After deducting for private and operational expenses and hospital money, his final tally was $402.80.
However, Brewington states that the “Ceylon” was wrecked off Nantucket in 1837. How could she be sailing around in 1841? Gardner’s “Wrecks Around Nantucket” clears up this discrepancy. He writes, “1837 – April 8th, brig Ceylon… from St. Domingo to Boston with assorted cargo of coffee, hides, honey, mahogany, logwood, etc., went ashore at the south side of the island and bilged… She was subsequently screwed up and repaired, ways built under her, and she was launched the following June…” This is verified by the final entry in the journal for “Labor on board brig Ceylon at Nantuckett 4 weeks 5 days…”
Larded in with this straightforward mercantile information are bits of family and local history. For example, expenses for the funeral, including grave-digging – of Charles’s father, Ezekiel in 1844. Bound in worn cloth over boards. Entries legible. $250
I’m losing money but feeling like a genius.
I know all three of you to be scholarly dealers. Perhaps I am younger than all of you by a tad, at 66.
But, my theory that people in our field were granted immortality turned out to be false.
I am slowing down and speeding up simultaneously, like you guys.
Somebody should have told me when I started collecting 60 years ago, that, I was not going to live forever.
That might have saved me a lot of work, time, and money!
But 2 R’s come to mind who did this foolishness right until the end…Rocky and Rex! RIP to both friends, and, perhaps we deserve some rest and peace too…but this is so damned fun!
Amen to that. This collector also does not buy work. I once tried buying distressed books and fixing them up or rebinding or rebacking. Bad plan. I learned my lesson early on and gave that up.
Our curiosity (often credited as intellectual, granting it a status that it may or may not deserve) might be diminished or slowly bleeding out, and while it’s undoubtedly pragmatic and sensible to not buy work, we remain trapped in our past. All, at least most, or many of us anyway, have bought things solely to learn about them, to write about them, at least to justify our fascination and interest, as well as to satisfy what we might grandly refer to as our academic calling. I have often noted book collecting (and dealing) as a form of self-expression, and there we are. Not much to hang your hat on, but it’s all we have.
Hear, hear to Peter’s comment.
Curtis
Ditto to “Self Expression”