Books I'm Reading and/or Admiring
There's something odd about the bloodlust 18th century Nantucket Quakers had when it came to their profession. In In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick says they went about the killing of whales with such fervor that a shipowner from the era claimed it must be due to supressed anger (since the Quakers were forbidden to express it by outward actions), though that seems unduly psychological.
I happened across my old copy of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and its patina of personal nostalgia, it being the last of my early books. Somehow it managed to survive ten or more moves between apartments and then houses - each subsequent one made more onerous by additional books. Cooper's classic looks worse for the wear; the cover is missing a large section of upper left corner and the spine is as wrinkled as a Ukrainian octogenerian. The back cover has something of a puncture wound. But I love that I have my original book just as I mourn the loss, presumably in one of those ten moves, of Albert Payson Terhune's Lad: A Dog. I've given up looking but should I find and buy the same edition on the internet it wouldn't be the same.
I wonder how old the Mohicans book is. It's a Dolphin Book, published under Doubleday, but has no published date - simply "Printed in the United States of America". In a way, the unknowing only adds to the mystery.
Looking at the list of other Dolphin titles at the back of the book induced involuntary salivation: Sea Fights and Shipwrecks by Hanson Baldwin and Samuel Johnson's two-volume Lives of the Poets.
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