Assimilative Memory or, How to Attend and Never Forget, by Prof. A. Loisette. Published 1899, ©1896.

This is one of the last projects that the late Laura Wisewell post-processed. She is missed.

Bookp(h)ile

The Bibliotaph and Other People, by Leon H. Vincent. Published 1899.

Bookp(h)ile

It is almost grotesque, the contrast between the books themselves and the manner in which they are produced. One may picture the incongruous elements of the situation,–a young society man going up to his suite in a handsome modern apartment house, and dictating romance to a type-writer. In the evening he dines at his club, and the day after the happy launching of his novel he is interviewed by the representative of a newspaper syndicate, to whom he explains his literary method, while the interviewer makes a note of his dress and a comment on the decoration of his mantelpiece.

Surely romance written in this way–and we have not grossly exaggerated the way–bears no relation to modern literature other than a chronological one. The Prisoner of Zenda and A Gentleman of France, to mention two happy and pleasing examples of this type of novel, are not modern in the sense that they express any deep feeling or any vital characteristic of to-day. They are not instinct with the spirit of the times. One might say that these stories represent the novel in its theatrical mood. It is the novel masquerading. Just as a respectable bookkeeper likes to go into private theatricals, wear a wig with curls, a slouch hat with ostrich feathers, a sword and ruffles, and play a part to tear a cat in, so does the novel like to do the same. The day after the performance the whole artificial equipment drops away and disappears. The bookkeeper becomes a bookkeeper once more and a natural man. The hour before the footlights has done him no harm. True, he forgot his lines at one place, but what is a prompter for if not to act in such an emergency? Now that it is over the affair may be pronounced a success,–particularly in the light of the gratifying statement that a clear profit has been realized towards paying for the new organ.

Leon H. Vincent: from “Stevenson’s St. Ives” in The Bibliotaph, and Other People. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1899.

Dross, by Henry Seton Merriman. Published 1899, ©1896.

Thanks to Sankar Viswanathan for post-processing this project!

Bookp(h)ile

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the vast white-pine forests with which nature has covered large districts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has progressed at a rate with which nothing of a like character in the history of the world is comparable. It is also true, doubtless, that the clearing away of dense forest areas has been attended with some inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with some objectionable effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regularity of the flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the rapidity of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not especially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to acquire a prosperous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it there was a vast region of country which, though utterly treeless, was endowed with a marvelous richness of soil and with a climate fitted for all the staple productions of the temperate zone. This region embraced parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, southern Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of Montana–a region of imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre of pine land that has been denuded in Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota there are somewhere in the great treeless region further south and west two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pushing ahead of settlement out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from the gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries; and thus millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers who could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the pine forests. The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has simply meant the rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska.

The settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be statistical or exact, we might say that an acre of northern Minnesota pine trees makes it possible for a farmer in Dakota or Nebraska to have a house, farm buildings, and fences, with a holding of at least one hundred and sixty acres upon which he will successfully cultivate several acres of forest trees of different kinds. Even if the denuded pine lands of the region south and west of Lake Superior would not readily produce a second growth of dense forest–which, it should be said in passing, they certainly will–their loss would be far more than made good by the universal cultivation of forest trees in the prairie States. It is at least comforting to reflect, when the friends of scientific forestry warn us against the ruthless destruction of standing timber, that thus far at least in our Western history we have simply been cutting down trees in order to put a roof over the head of the man who was invading treeless regions for the purpose of planting and nurturing a hundred times as many trees as had been destroyed for his benefit! There is something almost inspiring in the contemplation of millions of families, all the way from Minnesota to Colorado and Texas, living in the shelter of these new pine houses and transforming the plains into a shaded and fruitful empire.