"Cheap and Commercial'

“He invented cheap and commercial editions of the classics.” 

Such an influential accomplishment, and I had never heard of the man. Indirectly, generations after his time, Henry G. Bohn (1796-1884) served as one of my tutors. His celebrator above is Theodore Dalrymple writing in the British Medical Journal in 2011. He continues:

 

“Emerson said of [Bohn] that he had done for books what railways had done for travel. But he also compiled a Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, with 8000 citations from 450 poets; surely a sign of the most diligent, if not necessarily judicious, reading.”

 

I love first editions, elegant bindings and typefaces, autographed copies -- but they aren’t necessary, I don’t fetishize them and I don’t go broke buying them. As a kid, my paperbacks outnumbered hardcovers three-or-four-to-one. I collected almost all of Edgar Burroughs’ books as published by Ace and Ballantine. I had all of Doc Savage in Bantam editions. I remain a reader not a collector, though you have to collect books before you can read them. A little later, I read most of Dostoevsky in Signet Classics from New American Library, along with Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman – and George Gamow, the Russian-born cosmologist and author of One Two Three . . . Infinity (1947). I still have that book, now so brown and brittle I keep it in a plastic pouch and away from sunlight. To read it would be to destroy it.

 

Bohn is best remembered for Bohn’s Libraries, started in 1846 – inexpensive volumes of  classics, history and science. On my shelves are Bohn’s editions of Goldsmith, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, and Humboldt’s Travels in America in three volumes.  Like characters in Dickens, we’re often unaware of the identity of our benefactors.

 

Dalrymple, a physician, is most interested in the quotations devoted to doctors in the Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, and observes that most of them are “overwhelmingly derogatory”:

 

“People turned to doctors then as people now turn to alternative healers when they or their relatives are pronounced incurable. No logic, evidence, or experience can altogether extinguish human hope. There is another explanation. Perhaps the lines quoted by Bohn were not altogether a representative sample of public opinion. After all, Bohn was putting together a dictionary of quotations, not writing a scientific paper. You cannot help but notice, however, that much of the poetry he quotes was very bad. In this, of course, it probably was a representative sample.”