Other than a couple of posts on conferences, I've been absent from the lounge for weeks — I guess it adds up to several months now. The press of work has been more than usual this fall, which has left no time for talking about scholarship I'm enjoying — though I must say that hiring duties have kept me busy reading across a broad spectrum and enjoying it very much. I did want to talk about a couple of things related to books, though….
Anyone else like the Chronicle article on Marcus Boon's book reading that consisted of reading snippets from others' books? "Play it again, professor" talks about Marcus Boon's new book In Praise of Copying, which has just come out from HUP. Boon's reading, then, was pieced together from excerpts from other books to illustrate the point. Boon discusses the creative part of knowing what to copy from others. And you know the beauty of this? HUP is giving it away on their website.
All of this talk of book snippets reminds me a great deal of the commonplace book — particularly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — in which students copied select passages from works and organized them into a single book. We can learn a heck of a lot about people's mind by seeing how they organize information; what's important to them? (And though this is harder, what do they leave out?) And in fact last Sunday morning as I was reading the most recent issue of NYROB I was delighted to see Anthony Grafton's latest essay, "Jumping Through the Computer Screen," which talks about one of my most favorite commonplacers, Francis Daniel Pastorius. Grafton makes the point that Pastorius' massive commonplace book — which he called his Bee Hive — fused traditional knowledge with the most up-to-date literature and that Pastorius' Bee Hive, with its extensive index, "was Web enough for him: a vast handwritten search engine." Grafton's beautiful essay is here (subscription required).
Those interested in knowing more about Pastorius' "search engine" should consult Brooke Palmiere's University of Pennsylvania thesis, “What the Bees Have Taken Pains For:” Francis Daniel Pastorius, The Beehive, and Commonplacing in Colonial Pennsylvania," which details the mysterious workings of his indexes. I blogged some about Pastorius' legal thought here. For not only did Pastorius give us some sense of the ideas he found important in Quakers' writing on law, he also compiled the first legal treatise in British North America, which was essentially a form book.
All of this talk is so exciting — maybe one day I'll return to that essay I set out to write (on the model of Perry Miller's "From Edwards to Emerson,") which I was going to call "From Pastorius to Priestley," which was to be about the shift in ideas about jurisprudence from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Of course the shift from Edwards to Emerson was great — whereas the descent in thinking from Pastorius to Priestley made more sense, I think. That is, one could trace a sensible story of lineage between those two, without the jarring change we saw from Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson.