Academic

An Antebellum Bookcase

By Alfred Brophy

One of my most favorite works of history, the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's Report, begins with a very elegant line: "Let us begin with a clock."  I absolutely love first lines, like  Marshall Sahlins' line in his much-discussed book, How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Instance, "Heinrich Zimmerman heard it directly from the Hawaiians: Cook was Lono."  And so perhaps I can borrow from the Brown Report and begin, "Consider a bookcase ... and its contents."

Why am I blogging about an antebellum bookcase, you ask?  For two reasons.  First, I'm interested in the architecture of bookcases; second, I'm interested in the contents that might have been found in the bookcase of an antebellum southern law professor.

And I have one bookcase I'm particularly interested in  In the Cobb house in Athens--the home where Thomas Cobb wrote An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery--there is a bookcase, which is, well, unlike any bookcase I've seen before.   The uprights have the seemingly ubiquitous arches of the 1850s (recall the arches on Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama, which I wrote about in the summer?)  I have a detail of thetop of the bookcase's left upright at the left.  (As I recall, the bookcase was owned by Howell Cobb, Thomas' brother; though the speculation at the house is that there was one just like it in Thomas' house.)

But what of the books that were on those shelves?  Close followers of the faculty lounge know that I'm most interested in what books people read and how books are used to propagate ideas.  Well, perhaps we can get some sense from Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery.  He tells us at one point in the book that he purchased some volumes when they weren't otherwise available in a library (and he also tells us that he visited libraries far and wide and drew on the kindness of academics far and wide as well).  And I'd imagine that a bunch of his books rested on shelves like these.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 21, 2009 (boomark / email).