By Stuart Mitchner

Book love is your pass to the greatest, the purest, the most perfect pleasure….The habit of reading is the only joy in which there us no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.

—Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

The quotes about “book love” and “the habit of reading” spearheading this introduction to the upcoming Friends of the Library Book Sale surfaced while I was gazing into the sprawling immensity of Anthony Trollope’s beard. Of all the views of Trollopian facial hair shown in an online gallery of images, this prodigious display most fittingly suggests the depth and range of the event that begins Friday morning at ten in the Community Room. Seen here in full flower compared to the more crafted and contained incarnations, the author’s beard spreads hugely east and west, a veritable landscape, offering in its sheer breadth not only an evocation of the scope of the sale but a definitive image of its owner’s productivity, at rough count 40-plus novels, 15 story collections, and 15 works of non-fiction.

Henry James, for one, thought Trollope’s great good thing needed trimming. Yes, he was “strong, genial, and abundant,” but he “published too much,” his “fecundity was prodigious”; his “fertility was gross, importunate.” James found Trollope’s focused devotion to his labors both admirable and appalling. Having once crossed the Atlantic in his company, the Master marveled at the “plain persistence that it was in the power of the eminent novelist to give on that occasion. The season was unpropitious, the vessel overcrowded, the voyage detestable; but Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning for a purpose which, on the part of a distinguished writer who was also an invulnerable sailor, could only be communion with the muse. He drove his pen as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in Montague Square; and as his voyages were many, it was his practice before sailing to come down to the ship and confer with the carpenter, who was instructed to rig up a rough writing table in his small sea-chamber.”

Can you see Henry James conferring with the ship’s carpenter about a sturdy writing table? For that matter, can you imagine any wordsmith of any era driven enough to do it? What better patron saint for a festival of written works than a writer who braved time and tide and had his cabin desk made to order?

Trollope’s Big Year

More to the point, the year 2015 marks Anthony Trollope’s bicentenary. In 2012, the celebratory fanfares hailing Charles Dickens’s 200th began in late 2011. Yet here we are almost ten months into 2015 and the fanfares for Trollope’s big year have been few and far between. Just this week there was Charles McGrath’s New York Times Book Review piece (“Trollope Uncut”), with its image of the author, the stub of a cigar poking out from the depths of a slightly less luxuriant beard than the one shown here. But the subject was not the celebration of 200 years so much as the restoration of the 65,000 words that Trollope, wielding the clippers himself, had trimmed from the last of the Palliser novels, The Duke’s Children (1880).

Books as Family

Among the countless books I saw during the two decades I was in charge of donations for the Friends of the Princeton Public Library Book Sale, from the shabbiest, dustiest, and most unprepossessing to works of great value, there were certain volumes that had clearly been lived with, loved, absorbed, pondered over, and taken comfort in, books that still retained the atmosphere of the home they once had been a part of; you could tell simply by turning the pages which ones had such a history.

As soon as Trollope loomed as this week’s probable subject, I went to our living room book case, stood on tip toe, and took down from the topmost shelf a handful of small books that have been members of the family since my father’s graduate school days. By “small,” I mean I was able to span seven volumes with one hand when bringing them down for a look. These Oxford World Classics editions of Trollope’s novels have “always been there,” as it were. They were presences on the living room and study shelves I grew up with long before I had any more than a vague awareness of their content. When my father sold virtually his entire library to a book dealer before moving to Florida, only the Trollopes survived, along with Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and a few inscribed volumes from his days as director of the Indiana University Writers Conference.

How is it that the humble Oxford Trollopes, half of them with faded spines, made the cut rather than equally small-scale, older and more valuable sets of Dickens and Scott? One answer was the folded piece of paper, browned and flaking at the edges, inserted in Volume One of Phineas Finn. Here, it turned out, were my father’s notes for a paper on Trollope. When you consider how self-consciously, precisely distinctive his handwriting is, the very image of his identity, it was like finding a faded photograph of my thirty-something father, or a handwritten caption to the small framed snapshot of him from the same period (our Siamese cat on his lap) that I’ve always kept close by on my desk.

In that neatly styled hand that never varied, from student papers to the bank book he kept the month of his death, my father had sketched in ink an outline of the novel divided into Characters, Plot, Setting, Type (“author’s style”), with subheads such as “identification with people you know,” “universality,” “proportion,” “reflections of the time, comedy of manners, author’s bias, and peculiarities (facetious names, rambling, easy going, quiet humor, touch of malice, aversions).”

In pencil near the bottom of the page are the words “Misc. Love scenes. Weeping.” To see that barely legible “miscellaneous” afterthought, knowing the emotional history of my parents’ marriage, I had to smile and shake my head. Open an old book and look what happens.

Book Love

Of course you’re unlikely to find the shorthand caption to a marriage every time you open a volume left behind in the remains of a family library or on the table of a library book sale; or for that matter, in one of these deceptively “little” seven-in-one-hand Trollopes, which in fact average 560 pages on fine India paper with the type still bright and clear. Patient browsers sooner or later may find some interesting comments written (with pencil, you hope) in the margins of some volume on the sale tables in the Community Room, particularly in a place as writer-scholar-and reader-friendly as Princeton.

Other than that scrap of paper, the only marginal comment my discreet father permitted himself — “Trollope’s charm p. 85 (“gentilesse”) — is written on the map of Barsetshire illustrating the endpapers of Doctor Thorne. In the passage marked on page 85 Mary Thorne has just received a passionate declaration of love from Frank Gresham and is asking herself “What makes a gentleman? What is the inner reality, the spiritualized quintessence of that privilege in the world which men call rank, which forces the thousands and hundreds of thousands to bow down before the few elect? What gives, or can give it, or should give it?”

So where’s the “charm” and “gentilesse” in bowing down before the few elect? Did my father consider himself a gentleman? Or was he simply charmed by the idea of a “spiritualized quintessence of that privilege”? Perhaps there’s a clue in the way he embossed his last name in gothic letters on the lower right endpaper in each of the Trollopes. The special hand-press he had made to order must have used up a fair amount of his modest graduate student grant. It does look impressive, you might even say “classy.” Having inherited the hand-press, I’ve stamped most of my own books in the same place, from the Hardy Boys to the Brothers James.

On Where You Read

An appealing advisory about the most propitious time and place for “book love” and the joy of reading can be found in W. Teignmouth Shore’s introduction to my father’s copy of The Three Clerks: “There is the proper mood and the just environment for the reading as well as for the writing of works of fiction, and there can be no better place for the enjoying of a novel by Anthony Trollope than under a tree in Kensington Gardens of a summer day. Under a tree in the avenue that reaches down from the Round Pond to the Long Water … we see in the distance the dun, red-brick walls of Kensington Palace, where one night princess Victoria was awakened to hear that she was Queen …. Here, to the mind’s eye how easy it is to conjure up ghosts of men in baggy trousers and long flowing whiskers.”

At this writing, I can’t tell you how many works by the man with the long flowing whiskers will turn up among the 10,000 books on the tables of the Community Room this weekend. Some Trollopes will be there, you can count on it, even if I have to contribute my copy of The Three Clerks, whose introduction contains a paragraph from Trollope about his devotion to his characters and his task that Henry James must have read:

“I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.”