Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #149

Daily Dose

From The Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, by The Revd. Alexander Dyce

ONE OF THOSE DAYS

"During one of those days Sheridan, having observed Gibbon among the audience, took occasion to mention 'the luminous author of The Decline and Fall.' After he had finished, one of his friends reproched him with flattering Gibbon. 'Why, what did I say of him?' asked Sheridan. -- 'Luminous! oh, I meant -- voluminous.'"

From page 46

Clerihew for Ancient Romantic

SAMUEL ROGERS

Among the estimable codgers
Banker/poet Samuel Rogers
By rights should be,
As he went right on 'til 93.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Poems, by Samuel Rogers

TO AN OLD OAK

Radice in Tartara tendit. ~ Virg.

Trunk of a Giant now no more!
Once did thy limbs to heaven aspire;
Once, by a track untried before, 
Strike as resolving to explore 
Realms of infernal fire.

Round thee, alas, no shadows move!
From thee no sacred murmurs breathe!
Yet within thee, thyself a grove,
Once did the eagle scream above,
And the wolf howl beneath.

There once the steel-clad knight reclin'd,
His sable plumage tempest-toss'd;
And, as the death-bell smote the wind,
From towers long fled by human kind,
His brow the hero cross'd!

Then Culture came, and days serene,
And village-sports, and garlands gay.
Full many a pathway cross'd the green;
And maids and shepherd-youths were seen,
To celebrate the May.

Father of many a forest deep,
(Whence many a navy thunder-fraught)
Erst in their acorn-cells asleep,
Soon destin'd o'er the world to sweep,
Opening new spheres of thought!

Wont in the night of woods to dwell,
The holy druid saw thee rise;
And, planting there the guardian-spell,
Sung forth, the dreadful pomp to swell
Of human sacrifice!

Thy singed top and branches bare
Now straggle in the evening sky;
And the wan moon wheels round to glare
On the long corse that shivers there
Of him who came to die!

The Robin's Grave

Troppo Espresso

By no means representative, pictured here are some of the titles I've had reprinted just for me on the Espresso Book Machine.  These photographs are not new.  I found them floating around in the drafts for this blog.  I don't remember the reason for bringing these books back into the bookstore from whence they all came, but evidently I did.  I might as easily put up a picture of my shelves at home, but, here they are.  (The number of EBM books I now own, I could not rightly say.  Something less than one hundred, though not, I should think, by much.  I've been doing this for awhile now.)

The regular reader here, should there still be any, will know that this is not the first time I have hymned the mechanical wonder that is the Espresso Book Machine.  Do it all the time, here and elsewhere.  I talk about it at work, with potential users: people looking to self publish, as I have, with readers looking to reprint obscure titles, ditto.  I tend to enthuse about the convenience of the thing, how inexpensive it can be compared to other options, the value of having, in an hour or two, an actual book to read at one's leisure.  I don't know that I've had much occasion with potetial customers to actually describe my own growing library of EBM paperbacks, or how much I've come to value them as an integral part of my reading life, but then, who do I seriously expect to interest in the poems of Samuel Rogers, etc.?

That was one of the things I had thought we might do with the machine, actually.  I'd thought of reprinting lots of out of print titles, classics, some of them, others simply interesting if neglected or forgotten titles, perhaps with new introductions by meself.  The thought was to call them, "The Usedbuyer's Library." Each would have new covers, designed by the bookstore's resident designer/operator, and with perhaps with a caricature of the author, drawn by me.

We did do something like a couple of times, specifically linked to readings we'd done at the bookstore; a little book of Thackeray quotes for his Bicentennial, some out of print titles mentioned in Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road, when we did the very popular reading for that book's 50th anniversary of publication.  The titles reprinted from Hanff's library did okay, a couple of them, including Hazlitt's Essays and John Henry Newman's Idea of the University, curiously enough, sold more than once in the bookstore where I work.

The grander scheme, to date, has come to nothing very much, largely because of my own inaction rather than a lack of enthusiasm from the good people running the bookstore's EBM.  May happen yet.

Really though, what I was hoping to do was to use the EBM to fill what to me seemed obvious gaps in the store's inventory, books not available in Dover Thrift Editions, or NYRB, or otherwise in print and available as affordable paperbacks.  It was a noble thought.  We did, right at the beginning, make a small start, but the older, teal design on the Google Books was, frankly, a bit hideous (The new red and white is better, if rather bland.)  The first problems though arose from the condition of some of the interior reproduction, as for example in the available edition of The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb.  In addition to having copied a book full of annoying annotations from some long forgotten library patron, there was an accidental photograph of the copyist's thumb, as I recall, on the title page.  Not an auspicious beginning then.  My other eager suggestion was to make a copy of Madame de Sevigne's Letters, as there was none available new in an affordable edition.  Turned out,  at least when it comes to printing titles, Google Books does not speak French.  "Madame de Sevigne" came out looking like this:

"Mad@mee de S*$v**@&"

Not a happy experiment in publishing.

The problem really though was me.  What I think necessary to a representative collection of literature, hardly conforms to the new "lean and mean" retail environment.  As even a cursory glance at the titles pictured, let alone my shelves at home would prove, my taste runs to the minor, the missing and the mostly unpopular, often even in the day.  At best, I would have to admit, I've only ever managed to really sell Charles Lamb to maybe half a dozen, often rather reluctant if polite friends.  Imagine how well we'd do with a few titles from the oeuvre of James Anthony Froude? I'm not wholly devoid of sense.  It's not like I'm new to the business of selling books.  I am however still disappointed that no one could be bothered to buy the De Quincey I had reprinted for the Hanff event.  Nobody.  Even when the book ended up on the clearance table at 90% off, nobody bought it.  That's right, Thomas De Quincey, he of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, nobody could be bothered to read his essays even at the asking price of $1.29.

Safe to say, I was discouraged.

Meanwhile, I've clearly done my best to keep the EBM's glue-pot hot and the trimmers clipping along, just printing up stuff for me.  The self-publishing continues apace.  We still do a brisk business in special-occasion titles for classes, family reunions and the like.  Lord knows, I'm still grateful to have such immediate access myself to so many inexpensive books.

I am however thinking there may not be much point in leaving my Espresso Book Machine reprints to anyone in the will.  Sorry, my once and future heirs, you'll have even more to haul away, hopefully, when I die.

Daily Dose

From Anecdote Lives of the Later Wits and Humourists, by John Timbs

SAMUEL ROGERS

"Captain Gronow relates that, at an evening party, at Lady Jersey's, every one was praising the Duke of B---, who had just come in, and who had lately attained his majority.  There was a perfect chorus of admiration to this effect: -- 'Everything is in his favour; he has good looks, considerable abilities, and a hundred thousand a year.'  Rogers listened to these encomiums for some time in silence, and at last remarked, with an air of great exultation, and in his most venomous manner, 'Thank God, he has got bad teeth!'"

From Samuel Rogers

A Nice Curiosity: Samuel Rogers

I have a friend who works in the other side of the bookstore, a very talented woman, with a gift for arranging small things beautifully.  In fact, she is our display artist -- for want of a better job description.  She takes all the things that we old-hands in the book business used to call, in our arrogance, "sidelines": bookends and candles, soap and soap-dishes, bells and scarves and little stone statues and what-not and what-all, and she makes from this welter of items, displays of great complexity and retail attractiveness such as will make even the least likely browser stop and explore.  She is the mistress of the bookstore's curiosities; of all the things one might never have thought to want or buy until one's seen them artfully arranged; like with like and like without, in great constructions of multiples and singularity, in witty and whimsical and even magical relation one to another and one to the next.  No one has ever made, for example, a rather haphazard pile of recently reduced "merch" into such a fascinating concatenation of desirable stuff.

She is also, in her leisure, a photographer and finder of curiosities of all sorts.  She can take a bit of gum on a lamp-post, or rocks in a ditch, find a doll's head in a patch of moss or a fallen bird's nest just by the root of a tree, put a scrap of one thing next to another, and make the viewer see something new and beautiful and wonderful; a discovery made, a color reconsidered, detritus transformed -- if for just a moment and only by her art -- into treasure.

I've known a lot of people make displays.  I've never known anyone with quite her sorcery.  Treasure indeed, she is herself.

Tempted by her tables of things, I was set to musing on curios and the curio-cabinets I remember being in every grandmother's parlor when and where I grew up.  Remember those homely, glass-fronted bureaus?  Not the stately china-cupboards that displayed the unused mass of every lady's better bone and silver, but the smaller furniture, often as not a "corner-cupboard", or even just a narrow box of glass shelves.  The curios displayed, as I remember them anyway from my own grandmothers' houses, might be china figurines, and delicate dolls, cut-glass dishes and baby's shoes cast in brass, but just as likely tourist trash from otherwise forgotten trips; like a fringed, silk pillow from Rehoboth Beach, or a celluloid elephant that walked in a wobbly way on weird, rectangular feet if bumped gently enough from behind.

Literature tends to be taught, and rightly enough, from the china cupboard; all that weight of important books, the great masterpieces and collateral sets; Austen and Dickens stacked, with Richardson and Tolstoy, displayed like massy punch-bowls and soup-tureens.  I've always had a certain affection for the curios, myself.  One of the wonders of having access to an Espresso Book Machine has been the ability to browse among the lesser shelves of literature and dust off forgotten titles and the barely remembered authors now largely confined to footnotes, even in the big Nortons.

Samuel Rogers (1763 - 1855) was a poet between two times.  As a boy, he twice went to knock on Dr. Johnson's front door.  The first time he was told the Doctor was not home.  The second time, he lost his nerve.  That would be perhaps the last times Samuel Rogers failed to meet a famous man.  The son of a successful banker, and despite his own youthful leanings to both poetry and the pulpit, Rogers would himself follow his father into the bank.  Though he abandoned all thought of preaching, young Samuel did publish his first book of poems at 23.  (He would publish his last original work fifty years later.)  When he inherited his father's fortune, the banker's son promptly retired from trade, built a fine house in London and became one of the literary lions of the age.  An invitation to breakfast was a sign of arrival for new writers. An invitation to his more intimate dinners was a more singular honor.  Rogers published a book with Byron, unlikely as it sounds, counted both Shelley and Edmund Burke as friends, and lived to read, meet and like Charles Dickens.   He used a considerable part of his personal fortune to relieve artists and writers down on their luck.  He paid to keep Richard Brinsley Sheridan from dying in utter want.  When his friend Wordsworth died, Rogers declined the post of poet laureate due to his great age, and happily endorsed his friend Tennyson's appointment in his stead.  His own early style owed more to Thomas Gray and Goldsmith than to his Romantic contemporaries, but his latter writing might be said to be representative of a high-minded Victorianism.  Neither quite fish nor fowl then for the anthologists, though he still figures in at least the history of English literature, if nowhere else.  I confess, I'd never read him until just now.

So... where'd he go?  In his day, as I've already suggested, Rogers' poetry was much admired by many poets now better known -- his' "Jacqueline" was published with Byron's "Lara" in 1814 --and a number of Rogers poems, like "Human Life" were once as popular as anything by Shelley or Keats.  Critics as late as the turn of the last Century could still be understood when using only his surname.  Even now, I would be hard pressed to think of another poet more often sourced in the biographies of his contemporaries.  Nonetheless, I suspect that the answer to where he went is as much in his biography as in his poetry.  Rogers did not have the mixed blessing of dying Romantically young, like "Byron and Shelley and Keats," in Dorothy Parker's memorable line.  Instead he lived and wrote to a ripe, and largely contented old age.  More importantly still, and unfortunately for his later reputation, the poetry of Samuel Rogers was nice.  (He was himself invariably kind, but not always nice.  Fanny Kemble said, "He certainly had the kindest heart and unkindest tongue of any one I ever knew."  He said of himself that having such a small voice, no one listened when he said pleasant things.)  Here I mean nice in both the Eighteenth Century sense of an elevated subject expressed in a well regulated line, and the Nineteen Century sense of poetry suitable to be read by virgins.

 Witness this, from the aforesaid "Human Life":

Now, seraph-winged, among the stars we soar;
Now distant ages, like a day, explore,
And judge the act, the actor now no more;
Or, in a thankless hour condemned to live,
From others claim what these refuse to give,
And dart, like Milton, an unerring eye
Through the dim curtains of Futurity.

That is as well-turned as the leg of of Georgian secretary, and as smoothly pleasant.  Hardly the sort of thing to inspire much in the way of new dissertation on his inoffensive metrical form or his equally unremarkable morals.

To the extent then that Rogers has survived it has been because of his conversation; the "table-talk" recorded in not one, but two separate and distinct volumes and comprised of the kind of casual remarks and reminiscences of his contemporaries and friends that make him such a bottomless well of anecdote and quotation for modern biographers of the Romantics and early Victorians alike.  (As I learned from one of the volumes I had reprinted on the bookstore's EBM, Wordsworth, for brief example, had a strained laugh.  No surprise there, egh?)

That's how I found the old boy myself.  Dickens scholars invariably make mention of the novelist's first success and celebrity being recognized in an invitation to breakfast with the old poet.  Rogers also figures in the memoirs and journals of the Irish poet, Thomas Moore -- likewise a great source now for writing mostly about other people.  So, like Henry James later when he was at the height of his dining out, one meets the man everywhere.

The grand thing about having access to these inexpensive but sturdy reprints is the opportunity afforded to poke around in some of the dustier corners of English literature; to shop, as it were, from the back shelves and among the smaller treasures.  Having found not one, but two versions of Rogers' "Table-Talk" and reminiscences, I can for roughly a sawbuck more, have the old boy's Poems - most of 'em, anyway, as well. 

The last great literary success of Samuel Rogers came from the volumes of expensively illustrated narrative verse he made of his trips with his maiden sister to Italy.  As it stands, I might have those as well whenever and if I ever feel the want of them.  For now though, I am content with the very good poems -- some of 'em -- and the heaping notebooks of his talk, large and small.  (I even had reprinted for me a short biography Rogers in a volume of Edwardian essays on various subjects.  At about 50 pages, that proved about right for my attention to the poet.)

And all these curiosities now home with me, snug in just the pocket of my bathrobe of a warm, new Summer's evening. 

Daily Dose

From Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers

SPEAKING OF

"Speaking of composition, Coleridge said most beautifully, 'What comes from the heart goes to the heart.'"

From page 204, this ed., 1856

Daily Dose

From Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers

ATTEMPTS

"A man who attempts to read all the new publications must often do as the flea does -- skip."

From page 199, this ed., 1856

Daily Dose

From The Poems of Samuel Rogers

SMALL

"Small change of scene, small space his home requires,
Who leads a life of satisfied desires."

From Epistle to a Friend