Abraham Lincoln and the books in the barrel of rubbish

The article about Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy  tells of how a seed was sown in my mind by a story I read 'by chance'. This story eventually influenced my choice of profession – and thus the entire course of my life.

With hindsight, I wonder if it really was just chance that someone came to stay for a short time with his box of books and science fiction magazines, one of which contained the influential story.

I recently learned that something similar happened to Abraham Lincoln.

In his case it was a barrel not a box, he (unwittingly) bought rather than borrowed the reading material, it was a set of books not a magazine, it was a treatise on English common law rather than a science fiction story, and he was the junior partner in a store at the time rather than a child. 

Just as what I read sparked my interest in computers and inspired me to become a computer programmer, Abraham Lincoln became fascinated by what he read of the law and went on to become a lawyer.

These are Lincoln's own words:

"One day a man who was migrating to the West drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon, and which contained nothing of special value. I did not want it, but to oblige him I bought it, and paid him, I think, half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the store and forgot all about it.

"Some time after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel, and emptying it on the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete set of 'Blackstone's Commentaries.' I began to read those famous works. I had plenty of time; for during the long summer days, when the farmers were busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them."

Although this anecdote was new to me, it is very well known and has been quoted in many places. The reason for repeating it here is that it provides a very good example of the unseen influences that appear to be at work in some people's lives.

The books that started it all were first published in 1765:

Two quotations about self-belief

This blog contains many posts in which two writers are featured; sometimes this because of what they had to say about topics of interest.

It is fascinating to see that very different people from different generations and even from different continents sometimes sing from the same song sheet!

The great writer Isaac Asimov, who has been featured in several articles, has also been paired with Noel Streatfeild and quoted in a post about Frances Hodgson Burnett.

May Sinclair has also appeared in many articles, Both she and Isaac Asimov had something to say about the importance of self-belief. Their wise words speak for themselves.

Isaac Asimov said this:

“And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.” 

May Sinclair's words on the subject:

"If you don't believe in yourself, you'll have some difficulty in making other people believe in you." 

These propositions are worth thinking about. 

Inner promptings, sudden impulses, and Dion Fortune

This blog contains examples of inner promptings and impulses that had very good results; it also contains details of inner promptings and impulses that led to what I think of as nightmare scenarios – or at least to some very unpleasant experiences.

One article for example describes how I felt a strong inclination to visit a small town in Kent and 'by chance' found a book there that I had been looking for everywhere; another tells the story of how my sudden impulse to take a long scenic bus ride into Kent resulted in an exhausting ordeal. 

Then there was the time when I felt an inner prompting to join a second public library, one that I used to go past on the way to and from school; it had all of the Rider Haggard books that I had been desperate to read!

I think of such impulses as good ideas and 'good ideas', depending on their positive or negative outcomes. 

I have been wondering where these ideas, promptings and urges of both kinds come from. Do they originate in my or someone else's subconscious mind? Are benevolent or malevolent entities on another dimension responsible? The article about inner demons sabotaging our lives is of interest here, as is the poet Kathleen Raine's mention of daimons and dark angels.

Dion Fortune's occult novels have inspired a string of articles; her book of short stories The Secrets of Dr. Taverner contains some material that is very relevant to this topic. A few extracts from this book speak for themselves.

Dr. Taverner says this in the story The Return of the Ritual:

“Supposing I told you that the impulse which made you break that window was not a blind instinct, but an attempt to carry out an order from your Fraternity, would you believe me?”

The following extracts come from The Death Hound story:

“All thoughts are not generated within the mind that thinks them,” said Taverner. “We are constantly giving each other unconscious suggestions,  and influencing minds without knowing it, and if a man who understands the power of thought deliberately trains his mind in its use, there are few things he cannot do.”

A few words about information overload

I have been wondering recently if books mean as much to the children of today as they did to me in my schooldays. There are many more options now when it comes to entertainment and education and many of these resources are conveniently available in the home, so perhaps the competition has devalued books and reading. 

This extract from the novelist Storm Jameson's collection of literary essays Parthian Words supports the proposition that you can sometimes have too much of a good thing and suggests that there is still a place for traditional-style reading:

“We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.”

This was written in 1970; it is even more relevant in the days of modern media, the Internet and AI.

Too much choice, too much information, can be as bad as too little. In addition to overwhelming and stupefying people, it can destroy their ability to concentrate on one thing for more than a few minutes at a time. 

This book contains Storm Jameson's thoughts about novels and the future of novel reading:

Arthur Conan Doyle and the big brass bombardon

While the material in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's autobiographical work Memories and Adventures is not inspiring the extensive commentary that his essays in Through the Magic Door did, I have found a few interesting and/or amusing anecdotes that speak for themselves to highlight. This article contains the latest discovery.

As an older schoolboy, Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit school in Austria so that he could learn German. 

This extract from his Memories shows that he also mastered a very different skill during the year that he spent at the school:

“One unlooked for accomplishment I acquired, for the boy who played the big brass bass instrument in the fine school band had not returned, and, as a well-grown lad was needed, I was at once enlisted in the service. I played in public — good music, too, “ Lohengrin,” and “ Tannhauser,”— within a week or two of my first lesson, but they pressed me on for the occasion and the Bombardon, as it was called, only comes in on a measured rhythm with an occasional run, which sounds like a hippopotamus doing a step-dance. So big was the instrument that I remember the other bandsmen putting my sheets and blankets inside it and my surprise when I could not get out a note.”

When I first saw this, I was immediately reminded of the giant musical instruments in J. B. Priestley's Low Notes on a High Level, including “the Great-German-Double-Bombardon - six feet of shining brass with a horn a yard in diameter -”

This is what a bombardon looks like:

This picture of the boys in the band at the Stella Matutina Jesuit School at Feldkirch, Austria in 1876 - Conan Doyle is at the back with his bombardon - came from The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia site:

A few more words about books versus real life

Several reasons for extensive reading have been given on here. For example, what some people get from books seems much better to them than what they can get in real life!

I quoted some wise words on the subject from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in an article about books versus real life: 

“The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race.”

I recently came across something that reminded me of these words, but in connection with writing rather than reading. This is an extract from Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott:

“For a novelist, the real world falls away and the world of the novel takes on a vividness and fascination that can’t be matched by people or happenings in the pale, ordinary, slow-moving actual world. The characters of the imagination seem to have a mysterious claim on the writer’s time and attention.”

The real world does indeed disappear when we are immersed in a book, whether as reader or writer, and the novelist Elizabeth Goudge said something to the effect that she much preferred her own characters to people in real life. 

For some people, creations of the imagination are more real than the real world.

The mystery of Conan Doyle and the penny difference

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's little book of essays about books and reading Through the Magic Door (1907) is a treasure trove of material that has inspired a whole string of articles. 

After taking a last look at these essays, I started working my way through Conan Doyle's autobiographical work Memories and Adventures (1924) in the hope of finding similar material.

I soon found something interesting from the days when he was a third-year student; it reminded me of an amusing, article-inspiring anecdote in the earlier work. 

From Memories and Adventures:

“I used to be allowed twopence for my lunch, that being the price of a mutton pie, but near the pie shop was a second-hand book shop with a barrel full of old books and the legend “Your choice for 2d.” stuck above it. Often the price of my luncheon used to be spent on some sample out of this barrel, and I have within reach of my arm as I write these lines, copies of Gordon’s Tacitus, Temple’s works, Pope’s Homer, Addison’s Spectator and Swift’s works, which all came out of the twopenny box.”

In this previously-quoted extract from Through the Magic Door, Conan Doyle describes how he had to chose between spending his modest daily allowance on his lunch or on a book:

“...my student days, when times were not too affluent. Threepence was my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and glass of beer; but, as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the most fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a large tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books, with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket.”

So what happened here?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed that it was possible to communicate with the dead. If I could do that, I would ask him for an explanation!

As I have no way of contacting the great man, I will just have to guess why these two accounts differ in the detail.

Could Conan Doyle have misremembered details of his student days when creating the later work? Perhaps over the years threepence had changed in his mind to tuppence and the sandwich to a pie!

Perhaps he was remembering two different years and two different bookshops, with the threepenny version coming from his earlier years as a student. In connection with the later years, he mentioned that every shilling of his money was needed at home; perhaps he cut down and stopped buying beer.

Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him!