This earth all spann’d with iron rails, with lines of steamships / threading in every sea, Our own rondure, the current globe I bring. (from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman). Photo: Eugene de Salignac, 1913.
I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our town that old Mr. M—-, our librarian–a gentle, furtive, silent man–a man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books–had been caught dancing one day with his wife.
From Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading, a collection of essays currently being proofed at Distributed Proofreaders for inclusion at Project Gutenberg. The New York Times wrote in 1903 about this book and its author:
Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, whose book on “The Lost Art of Reading” deserves further consideration, is a preacher of the gospel of “fullness and leisure and power of living”; of unconscious, of “not knowing what time it is.” He is an enemy of the modern forms of culture, reading, and especially of “analysis.” His whole attitude toward modern literature—he says so himself—is grouty and snappish, a kind of perpetual interrupted “what-are-you-ringing-my-doorbell-for” attitude. His book is not really all about reading; it has a good deal in it besides about various philosophies of life. But Mr. Lee connects it all with reading by processes of his own. He has a love for unconventional expression, and likes nothing better than to say things that are calculated to shock his readers.
Or as the project manager at Distributed Proofreaders writes:
Lee is a philosopher of the poetry of machines. His works are odd-seeming (nearly crack-pot) yet often quotable.
The Toziers got their hands on a number of Lee books, and are readying them for Project Gutenberg. In the meantime they quote liberally from mr. Quotable: Bill Tozier here, and Barbara Tozier here.
