If the words “antediluvian libraries” do not intrigue you, then, first, there is something wrong with you, and second, you are probably in the wrong place and should go watch a cat video or something. The rest of us will stay here and make the acquaintance of a famous librarian.

A famous librarian? Well, yes, insofar as there can be such a thing. According to the magazine American Libraries, Mr. Richardson was one of the 100 most important librarians of the twentieth century. How many of the other 99 can you name? That would be an amusing party game. Specifically, it would be the kind of game you reserve for the end of the party, when there are still too many guests hanging around far too late into the evening, and it is necessary to clear out the room in a hurry.

Since Wikipedia exists, we shall not attempt a summary of Richardson’s life here. For our purpose the most significant thing about him was his interest in very old books. People may mean different things by “very old” when they speak of books. Dr. Boli has a copy of the first folio of Spenser’s works, printed in 1611–1612 (apparently it took a while), and visitors often think that is a very old book when they see it in the library. But Mr. Richardson would have regarded that as quite modern.

There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal, Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic (libraries of the gods)!

We can see, then, that the era of James I is, comparatively speaking, so close to ours as to be virtually indistinguishable. It is possible, at least in mythology, to trace libraries back before the beginning of time, and if there is anything earlier than before the beginning of time we do not want to hear about it.

The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.

Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it is said. According to several religions there were book-collections before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this. —The Beginnings of Libraries, by Ernest Cushing Richardson, Librarian of Princeton University (Princeton, 1914).

The Beginnings of Libraries traces the idea of the library back as far as it can go; according to Mr. Richardson himself, it ends at about 3400 b.c.. In two other little books Mr. Richardson addresses somewhat more modern libraries, and perhaps one might say more historical libraries.

In Biblical Libraries, he traces the libraries related to events and characters in the Bible from the Babylonian period to the time of the Apostles. “The period of Biblical history may be counted as extending from the beginning of written human history, about the first dynasty of Egypt or say 3400 B.C. (or 4200) more or less, until the death of the last of those who figure in the books of the New Testament or say the middle of the second century A.D.”

But this is of course oversimplifying the matter, because the Bible itself is a library, and therefore an enormous subject.

The Biblical story of course, and the Biblical story of libraries in a way, extends from the creation, which is by the “Word,” to the last Judgment, which, according to the account, is based on a collection of books. Not all of the events told in the Biblical writings have however yet happened, others, being parables, may never have happened and others, while they may be true, are not yet quite history and never will be if the critics can help it. It is one thing to be true, another thing to be believed to be true and yet another to be history.

To complete a trilogy on ancient libraries, we bring forward a book that was actually published three years before the other two: Some Old Egyptian Librarians.

The very title of this paper has amused some, quite as if they thought the subject would be exhausted by the sentence “there were none”, but nevertheless the paper is in sober historical earnest. It, in fact, proposes, among other things, to introduce to you by name and date and with some details of their lives, not always wholly without piquancy, twenty-one librarians who lived long before Assurbanipal, and by the same token, much longer before the Alexandrian library was founded. Moreover this paper makes no pretence of exhaustiveness—it is only a desultory beginning in a rich field. It is a mere sample so to speak of the wealth of material which has not yet gotten much into the encyclopaedias—or the universities.

Though The Beginnings of Libraries would dwell much on mythology, Mr. Richardson is at pains to point out that his Egyptian librarians are real historical figures. However, that does not mean we should dismiss the mythology.

If this account of Egyptian librarians begins with the librarians of the gods Thoth and Seshait please do not think that the paper is to be legendary or mythological in character; on the contrary, it will deal with real human librarians and the genuine historical monuments of these librarians in papyri or inscriptions. The mythological librarians, however, have two great virtues: first they embody the philosophy of books and libraries current among the Egyptians and second these gods were in fact the gods of the librarians themselves, seriously worshipped by them. The significance of this latter fact for the biographical interpretation of historical human librarians is very great, for as a man’s god is, so is he. Tell me a man’s god and I will tell you the character of the man. There is a sound psychological reason for this, since a man’s god is that on which his thoughts most dwell (or conversely that on which one’s thoughts most dwell is one’s god) and what our thoughts dwell upon as ideal that we become. And if, farther, a man’s ideal of his profession is made personal, whether that person be human or divine, this hero worship, or god worship, works all the more powerfully. Not to know Thoth is thus to miss the key to the Egyptian librarian, for Thoth was the ideal of the Egyptian librarian, constantly in his mind for imitation.

So here is the foundation for your own little library of books on libraries: three short but very entertaining books by Ernest Cushing Richardson, one of the hundred most famous American librarians of the twentieth century.

The Beginnings of Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.

Biblical Libraries. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. A sketch of literary history from 3400 b.c. to a.d. 150. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. Princeton, 1914.

Some Old Egyptian Librarians. By Ernest Cushing Richardson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Once in a while we are privileged to witness an important literary event from the front row, so to speak. Samuel Hazo was the first poet laureate of Pennsylvania, and he served for ten years before his position was eliminated by a new governor, who said there wasn’t room for it in the budget. Since Mr. Hazo had not accepted any money for serving as poet laureate, one might be forgiven for wondering how closely the governor had studied his own budget, but governors have more important things to worry about.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Hazo turned 97 years old. He celebrated with his thirty-first collection of poems, which is now available from our friends at Serif Press.

All the poems in this collection are written in a kind of blank verse unique to Mr. Hazo, with three accents to the line, catching the rhythm of his best conversation. The topics range from war and peace (and the lack of difference between them) to dropping a penny on the floor and watching it spin.

Satisfaction troubles me.
                                         Dining
   on shrimp scampi, I say
   I’ll stop when I’ve had enough.
I rarely stop until enough
   becomes too much.
                                    That’s how
   satisfaction differs from perfection.

All the poems sound like Samuel Hazo talking straight to you—like sitting down with a great conversationalist as he lights his pipe and begins to get deeply interested in the subject.

And if you think you’d like to sit down for an hour with Samuel Hazo, here’s your opportunity. The poems in this collection are pure essence of Hazo—but more so. Find But More So at Amazon.

“Success” done up in style in The Inland Printer.

Where did the popular poster phrase “Live, Laugh, Love” come from? You can look it up on the all-knowing Internet and instantly find the answer: it came from a poem called “Success” written in 1904 by Bessie Anderson Stanley. Wikipedia:

The phrase is an abridged form of the 1904 poem “Success” by Bessie Anderson Stanley…

An essay by Jake Rossen in Mental Floss:

There’s the phrase itself, which appears to have grown popular thanks to a poem by Bessie Anderson Stanley.

An article by Brie Dyas in House Beautiful:

The real source of “Live, Laugh, Love” is Bessie Anderson Stanley’s 1904 poem, “Success.”

A “deep dive” by Jessica Barrett in Refinery29:

While it has often been misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the words were first linked together in a poem called “Success” by Iowan writer Bessie Anderson Stanley in 1904.

And so on. Some of the writers quote the poem:

He [has] achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has left the world better than he found it, whether [by] an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

Now, if you, like Dr. Boli, were born in the eighteenth century and came of age in the nineteenth, you might be thinking, “Where’s the poem? This is an essay.” But it seems that, if you were born in the twentieth century and came of age in the twenty-first, this is what “poem” means. It is a prose composition, generally meant to be inspirational or sincere in some obvious way. In other words, what we used to call an essay; perhaps more specifically what we used to call a personal essay. For these writers, a “poem” is any manufactured expression of sincerity, and it is the manufactured sincerity, not the form, that makes a “poem.”

There was a time—way back in April—when Dr. Boli would have been arrogant enough to say that all these writers do not know what the word “poem” means. But he is past that age. There is not a single writer who talks about this essay who does not call it a poem. “Poem,” therefore, means “prose essay,” whether divided into short lines or not, and the old Johnsonian definition “a metrical composition” must be relegated to the scrap heap of archaisms, where it will join several dozen outdated meanings of “nice.”

This does leave us with no word to describe a metrical composition, which might seem unfortunate. But a moment’s thought reconciles us to the loss. No one in the twenty-first century has any need for a word to describe a metrical composition. Like the forgotten technical terms of alchemy, the archaic meaning of “poem” may be allowed to pass from general use and linger only in a long paragraph of etymological explanation in the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you wish to see Mrs. Stanley’s poem in something like its original form, you can look in publications from 1905 in Google Books or the Internet Archive or Hathi Trust. Dr. Boli will leave you the fun of searching for it yourself, but the poem will not be hard to find, although in those unenlightened days it was never described as a “poem.” It was picked up, often but not always attributed to Mrs. Stanley, by just about every magazine and a number of other publications: The Northwest Journal of Education; The Leather Worker’s Journal; The Ladies’ Home Journal; Breeder and Sportsman; The McMaster University Monthly; Hardwood Record; a Biennial Report of the Bureau of Agriculture of Tennessee; an Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture; Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of North Carolina; Motorman, Conductor, and Motor Coach Operator; The Christian Student; The San Francisco and Pacific Druggist; The Free Will Baptist; Pennsylvania Grange News; and yes, though you probably had no need to ask, it was inserted in the Congressional Record. We were not able to find the original publication in the Brown Book, but we did not devote more than three minutes to the search.

“Success” in The Hardwood Record, sharing a page with “The Logical Evolution of the Hardwood Lumber Business.”

The Artificial Idiot, by Artificial Dostoyevsky. Powerful novel, written by an artificial intelligence, about the strange and tragic life of a good and wise but profoundly misunderstood artificial intelligence. “01010011 01110101 01110000 01100101 01110010 01100010!” —BitChat ChatBot. Available soon from Runcible Publishing & Finer Meats wherever books and cold cuts are sold.