'As Duns Scotus Observed Long Since'

“No doubt you are going to take a holiday, long or short, this summer, and no doubt you will want to pack a few books in your gripsack to read on rainy afternoons or dull evenings.” 

Well, yes – and no. I hope to fly to Cleveland for my fifty-first high-school reunion in September, postponed from last year by the lockdown. I no longer travel often but I always pack books, though I’ve never sought “Summer Novels,” as H.L. Mencken titles his column in the June 10, 1910, issue of the Baltimore Evening Sun. I don’t find them much different from Winter Novels. Mencken is writing decades before the artificial genre of reading matter, Beach Books, was first marketed. My reading, to crib a term from physics, is a “steady state,” following no preordained path, subject only to whim and availability. Mencken advises the choice of novels over histories, and new over old – precisely the opposite of what I would suggest:

 

“The old ones you know all about: it is the new ones that puzzle. The advertisements are not to be believed, the fair young merchants at the book counters are not to be trusted. And you can never judge by the covers for the gaudiest and most seductive bindings are often upon the most stupid and melancholy books, as Duns Scotus observed long since and many a learned doctor after him.”

 

Mencken moves on to the haecceity of good and bad books, especially the bad ones: “If they are utterly and absolutely bad that badness appears upon the very first page and sometimes even on the cover. I have a superstition indeed that it is possible to detect a thoroughly bad novel at 20 paces.”

 

Most seasoned readers are similarly gifted. The same goes for any title, and not just fiction, printed with the announcement of an award, Pulitzer or otherwise, on the cover. Mencken helpfully supplies a list of books published in the preceding year. I recognize the names of four writers and have read the two Kipling titles: “[E]ven at 25,” Mencken writes, “Kipling had ingenuity and originality, a certain craftsmanship and a workable philosophy of life.” It’s a surprise to see Mencken having good things to say about Chesterton.