Epistle Binding Machine

I've discovered yet another use for the Espresso Book Machine at the bookstore where I work. To tell the truth, it is not so very different from what I've had from the EBM before. To date, I've caused essays, and anecdotes, ghost stories and criticism, nonsense verse and biographies to be reprinted for me. Many of the biographies have been in the old style; consisting largely of letters, the writer and correspondents profiled at greater and lesser length as they might have been due, the times and settings and occasions explained, but the whole being made up for the most part in the words of the subject. I like this. At least three books of letters distinct from biography have also been reproduced at my request. So it isn't really that I've asked our EBM, Homer, to do something new, so much as I've found that of all the books I've asked for, the books of letters would seem to be the likeliest to have been the least read, at least the least annotated or otherwise marred and defaced, and most often available complete, even when originally published in multiple volumes. So now I've gone mad for letters, and I've come to think of the machine not so much as a thing that makes books, as a a means of retrieving lost letters.

The irony of this is that far from being lost, the letters I've been getting have been among the best and most famous letters ever written in English. Letters though, as a species of literature, while not wholly forgotten, have acquired a kind of supplementary character, so that even on the increasingly rare occasions that new books of letters are now published, only the reputation of the author for other achievements, in other literature or elsewhere, seems to merit the collection seeing print, and then only as a pendent to biography. Saul Bellow or Samuel Beckett may still rate a book of letters, and be reviewed, but it seems no one would think of reading even their letters but as a compliment to their other work. Few reviews make much mention of even these important new books in any light but that they may reflect on the novelist's or playwright's other, presumably more important work. Some notice may be made of the style of the letters, as it reflects or confutes the style of the author's other prose, and, as with diaries, there is always some reviewer eager to snuffle out any ripeness as to sex, or low opinions of contemporaries or the like, and make much of that. But of letters as belles-lettres?

There are precious few survivors still in print to represent the best of all the letters that were once read for pleasure by a public once so large that it was letters that gave birth, at least in form, to some of the first important novels in English. (Anyone forced to read Richardson in school should know that there are other, less tedious examples from which Richardson drew. Pity the poor college freshman who is led to believe that the whole 18th Century was quite so dull as Clarissa might make it seem.) Swift, and Walpole, Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu may still find readers in new printings, but precious few others are to be located in a bookstore -- which is to say nothing of the French!

This is a sorry thing. Readers will not know what they are missing. I didn't, until I looked.

Now I have Cowper's letters, in two editions, reprinted on the EBM. To these I've just added a volume of the letters of Thomas Gray, and a small anthology, tracing the whole history of letters, selected and introduced -- at length -- by the great English critic, George Saintsbury. I am consequently drunk with letters!

Now William Cowper, and Thomas Gray, it may be argued, were both of 'em poets, and their letters therefore no different from any others that might still be read to better understand what the poets did in verse. The point for me however has been less to do with reading further on the poets' poetry, than in discovering that both wrote memorable, even great prose, at least in their letters. Neither of these most recent examples lived lives that could be described as adventurous or large. Both withdrew from the world by middle age, and both chose to lead thereafter remarkably quiet lives. Neither, like Lamb, had much to do with London, and while Gray kept more famous friends, like the great Walpole, whom he had known since their school days, the letters that either poet wrote have mostly to do with smaller views, common days, daily life. True, both men still read many books and mentioned these, had opinions, and told them in their letters, but one would not read the letters of either man for the length or quality of their literary criticism. Neither would seem to have had much to say regarding the practice of their art. Both are worth reading, and this is true of Cowper specially, because they were as kind as they were clever, as pleasant as they were profound, and because they rank among the best company one is likely ever to find in the pages of a book.

So now I think I am quite lucky to have the means of retrieving all these letters, and at so little cost, without doing so much as leaving the bookstore where I work, despite none of the books I crave just now being stocked on the bookstore's shelves. I found a pretty little set of Edward Fitzgerald's letters, at a favorite used bookstore just down the street from where I work. I am unlikely to be so lucky again any time soon. For this sort of reading, I will have to continue to turn to our magnificent Epistle Binding Machine, from whence, it seems, may come nearly every letter I may ever find myself in want of again. It's like opening an attic trunk and discovering inside it, among all sorts of neglected papers and stray books, a perfect bundle of perfect letters, all done up in teal ribbons.

When was the last time you got such a gift?