Planning the centennial
Next year the library will be 100 years old, as in the original building and collection opened to the public in 1909. We are in a newer building, though the old one still stands and is now owned by the local RC church. Precious little of the original collection remains, though there are some few books on the shelves still that have been around since the 1920s.
We are planning various events to highlight the centennial year, starting next month with a display of the ten best selling works of fiction from 1909, according to Publisher's Weekly. Needless to say, we had none of those on the shelves at this point, though several of them are still in print or perhaps back in print. We decided to order old copies in fair to good condition to capture the feel of what these books would have looked like on the library shelves in 1909.
Four of them have now arrived, and in spite of wear and some age spots, look amazingly interesting. That's a good thing, because today we agreed that we are going to have to read them all and make staff reviews available to the public, just as we occasionally do for current materials.
I think I'll volunteer for the McCutcheon and the Locke. Truxton King was the third of McCutcheon's Graustark series, set in the imaginary principality of Graustark somewhere in Central Europe. This series is similar to the more familiar Prisoner of Zenda which was published a couple of decades earlier, and Graustark was so popular that the word "Graustarkian" has been used to describe similar story lines of political intrigue and romance set in vague European nations, such as even the very well-known (to us today) The Mouse that Roared. As for Septimus, it was Locke's first visit to the best seller list, though he was already well known for humorous fiction.
I can leave Mary Roberts Rinehart knowing someone else will want to read her. She was the first American mystery writer to make the top ten with a whodunit, and it was this work. Fox's Lonesome Pine is still popular enough to be reprinted regularly, and is a romantic tale set in the Kentucky mountains, bound to find a reviewer among us. We may have to draw for some of the other, less familiar works, but this should still be an interesting project. If you're curious, nearly all of these are available online in Project Gutenberg.
So what else was happening in 1909? The first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line that year. Peary reached the North Pole (or at least thought he did, there's been some question since then as to the accuracy of his instruments.) Suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings and lamp posts in London in their attempt to gain the vote for women. Motion pictures were in their utter infancy, just beginning to gain notice from the public. Rube Goldberg was producing "Foolish Questions" as a regular feature of the New York Evening Mail. William Howard Taft was inaugurated President of the United States as the nation celebrated the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth by, among other things, putting honest Abe's portrait on the penny, replacing the beloved "Indian Head" coppers of previous decades.
That means, of course, that 2009 is the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, and we will also be having events to honor that occasion, especially since we are in Illinois, the state from which he launched his political career.
Oh, and likely to get lost in the fray is the fact that 1909 marks the real beginning of American Western writer Zane Grey's publishing career. His first book, Betty Zane, had been self-published after rejection by several publishers. After a hunting trip to the Grand Canyon, he returned home in 1909 and wrote The Last of the Plainsmen, but that work was also harshly rejected even though it was later published with some success. Only in 1910 did he finally succeed in creating a genuine best seller, with The Heritage of the Desert, quickly followed by his most famous novel Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912.
It looks to be an interesting, and a hectic, year.
We are planning various events to highlight the centennial year, starting next month with a display of the ten best selling works of fiction from 1909, according to Publisher's Weekly. Needless to say, we had none of those on the shelves at this point, though several of them are still in print or perhaps back in print. We decided to order old copies in fair to good condition to capture the feel of what these books would have looked like on the library shelves in 1909.
Four of them have now arrived, and in spite of wear and some age spots, look amazingly interesting. That's a good thing, because today we agreed that we are going to have to read them all and make staff reviews available to the public, just as we occasionally do for current materials.
- The Inner Shrine (anonymously published but written by Canadian author Basil King)
- Katrine by Elinor Macartney Lane
- The Silver Horde by Rex Beach
- The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart
- The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox
- Truxton King by George Barr McCutcheon
- 54-40 or Fight by Emerson Hough
- The Goose Girl by Harold Macgrath
- Peter by F. Hopkinson Smith
- Septimus by William J. Locke
I think I'll volunteer for the McCutcheon and the Locke. Truxton King was the third of McCutcheon's Graustark series, set in the imaginary principality of Graustark somewhere in Central Europe. This series is similar to the more familiar Prisoner of Zenda which was published a couple of decades earlier, and Graustark was so popular that the word "Graustarkian" has been used to describe similar story lines of political intrigue and romance set in vague European nations, such as even the very well-known (to us today) The Mouse that Roared. As for Septimus, it was Locke's first visit to the best seller list, though he was already well known for humorous fiction.
I can leave Mary Roberts Rinehart knowing someone else will want to read her. She was the first American mystery writer to make the top ten with a whodunit, and it was this work. Fox's Lonesome Pine is still popular enough to be reprinted regularly, and is a romantic tale set in the Kentucky mountains, bound to find a reviewer among us. We may have to draw for some of the other, less familiar works, but this should still be an interesting project. If you're curious, nearly all of these are available online in Project Gutenberg.
So what else was happening in 1909? The first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line that year. Peary reached the North Pole (or at least thought he did, there's been some question since then as to the accuracy of his instruments.) Suffragettes were chaining themselves to railings and lamp posts in London in their attempt to gain the vote for women. Motion pictures were in their utter infancy, just beginning to gain notice from the public. Rube Goldberg was producing "Foolish Questions" as a regular feature of the New York Evening Mail. William Howard Taft was inaugurated President of the United States as the nation celebrated the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth by, among other things, putting honest Abe's portrait on the penny, replacing the beloved "Indian Head" coppers of previous decades.
That means, of course, that 2009 is the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, and we will also be having events to honor that occasion, especially since we are in Illinois, the state from which he launched his political career.
Oh, and likely to get lost in the fray is the fact that 1909 marks the real beginning of American Western writer Zane Grey's publishing career. His first book, Betty Zane, had been self-published after rejection by several publishers. After a hunting trip to the Grand Canyon, he returned home in 1909 and wrote The Last of the Plainsmen, but that work was also harshly rejected even though it was later published with some success. Only in 1910 did he finally succeed in creating a genuine best seller, with The Heritage of the Desert, quickly followed by his most famous novel Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912.
It looks to be an interesting, and a hectic, year.