About the project

I have really been enjoying Dr. Cathy Blake‘s Text Mining class this semester, in a large part because I’ve been given access to data that really excites me. The kind souls at the Reading Experience Database (or RED, hosted at the UK’s Open University) sent me a .csv snapshot of the database from August 2011, for use in my final project. I first came across the Reading Experience Database in Bonnie Mak‘s History of the Book course in 2010 as I pursued my interest in reading history. RED aims to collect all information about reading experiences in Britain from 1450-1945. (See an example record.) The data is crowd-sourced, and anyone can contribute a reading experience by filling out a detailed webform. A contribution must include the text of the evidence of a reading experience — that is, a reference to someone reading something in a manuscript or published work. The 26,000 records in the RED make a truly incredible resource.

My final class project is still taking shape, but my goal is to perform a sentiment analysis with the records to explore British readers’ attitudes toward literature throughout this period in history. What is particularly awesome about RED is that it includes details like the reader’s socio-economic group (e.g. “Gentry”) and the type of experience (e.g. “aloud, in company”), so I may be able to analyze sentiment within these different subsets of the data. Too cool!

Dr. Blake warned us that pre-processing the data may be the most time-consuming parts of our projects, and as I’ve been playing with the RED data over the weekend, I don’t doubt it. Crowd-sourcing information is one of the best things about the internet (ordinary citizens can discover galaxies!), and the many thousands of RED records are only possible because of this technology. For a student text miner, however, crowd-sourced data can be pretty messy, especially when there is no authority control. There’s a lot of redundant data, or data that is simply inaccurate:

I’d hoped that a good way to get my feet wet with this project would be to make a quick series of infographics that reflected attributes of the authors and readers in RED, partly for practice but mainly to understand any biases the RED may have, such as having mostly male readers/authors (though comparing this data to accurate historical data is probably outside my project scope). But it will take me some time to groom the data to something more manageable. So far, the most interesting and (reasonably) accurate data I’ve been able to extract has been a list of the most popular authors listed as read in the RED, as determined by how often a reading experience involves a book attributed to these authors. I shall present it as a clumsy HTML table (how long as it been since I used an HTML table?!).

The 50 most popular authors in the Reading Experience Database:

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A note about the data

I have been using Oracle SQLDeveloper to explore the raw data, and I edited an exported CSV in Excel to refine things for this list. I consolidated various name spellings for the top-cited authors. I collapsed the various “n/a” and “anon/Anon./anonymous” etc. attributions into [n/a], and all the “unknown/Unknown/not known” etc. data into unknown. Many of the [n/a] texts are, as you would expect, holy scriptures, but there are also many, many newspapers listed as well. Unknown may indicate author anonymity, reader uncertainty, or record contributor uncertainty. Note that I have not taken into account any duplicate records in the RED (where 2+ record contributors may have read the same memoir and noted the same historical reader’s experience). Note also that this data:

• reflects only the data in the RED, who would contribute to RED (one busy participant entered 8,000 records), and what contributors read
• reflects what historically was published and sold in Britain (i.e. by my count, there are 8 female authors in this set of 50 named authors)
• was not created with authority control

Data is never free of its context. Case in point: Ernest E. Unwin is not actually a widely-read author, but he kept the minutes of the “XII Book Club” and is often listed in the RED reading his own work. Case in point II: The entries that cite Samuel Johnson refer to both Dr. Samuel Johnson (of the Dictionary) and the Reverend Doctor Samuel Johnson. Ideally, I’d be able to assign an authorID to each individual author based on the publication title. Realistically, not gonna happen in the next month. I do still want to make some data visualizations though, so stay tuned.

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What does this data tell us? Most of these authors are included in various iterations of the Western or British canon, with the exception of Unwin as well as the many unnamed journalists whose newspapers were mentioned. What’s interesting to me is the diversity these top authors’ output. The top 10 alone includes playwrights, poets, novelists, even a lexicographer. There’s also a lack of diversity, of course — only 8 of 50 are women. I will also confess that my English-major pride was a little hurt that there were some authors I hadn’t heard of before, like John Galsworthy and Harriet Martineau. There is always so much more to read! What else do you find interesting about this table?

sentEnd = re.compile('[.!?]')
sentList = sentEnd.split(abstract)

The regex looks for periods, exclamation points, and question marks as locations for splitting sentences into a list. But when you have things like “Dr. Smith” or “E. coli” or “1. this, 2. that” or “in the U.S. blah” in the text like these scientific abstracts did, that’s not really good enough. As it turns out, splitting text into sentences is a big headache! There’s no easy, one-size-fits-all-datasets solution. Any script you run will have to be customized to your text set. To start, though, we can use tools from the NLP (natural language processing) community.

One such tool is the NLTK, or Natural Language Toolkit, which contains a bunch of modules and data (like corpora) for use with Python. It’s free and pretty cool! The PunktSentenceTokenizer (see #6) was designed to split text into sentences “by using an unsupervised algorithm to build a model for abbreviation words, collocations, and words that start sentences.” It’s pre-trained for English and a dozen other Western languages. I tested it out with a sentence from a random book on Project Gutenberg (The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford, 1922, which appears to be all about Macy’s?), and also with some text I penned myself. Here’s how it went down in IDLE:

So, the Punkt tokenizer works great on fiction prose, not as hot in my blurb, which was admittedly a toughie. To summarize, it has trouble recognizing:

• uncommon or domain-specific abbreviation (M.L.I.S.)
• two name initials (A.B. Collins-Davis), although one name initial is recognized (Mr. T. Pain)
• “Mr. Pain.”, though I don’t know why here, as “Mr. T. Pain” was fine
• common latin abbreviations (e.g., i.e.)
• numbered lists (1. blah, 2. blah)

It’s also interesting to think about what to call a sentence. Is a quoted sentence within a longer sentence part of the long sentence? Or should you, like this tokenizer, split that into sentences as well? And leave a hanging quotation mark, as in the last printed line? What do you think? What IS a sentence? O_O 

Anyway, the PunktSentenceTokenizer works well as a basic sentence splitter for English text, but it’s certainly a lesson in knowing your data, e.g. what abbreviations and other quirks are common in your text set. Any other tools out there that might be helpful?

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Note: to work with this tokenizer, you’ll have to use Python 2.5-7.* (not Python 3.0) and download/install NLTK software (instructions here), then download NLTK.data (instructions here, under ‘Interactive installer’ — although I just stuck it in my directory, rather than using /share/, since only I use my laptop).

Osborn’s logbook was digitized by the library of Mystic Seaport. Happily for my eyeballs, they also transcribed it! (Link to digitized page — link to transcription page.) I’ve also copied the list of books below, with title corrections (he was a bad speller) and authors added. You can find 28 of them on an OpenLibrary list I created, and most are readable online.

1 Vol Goods Book of Nature. — John Mason Good
1 Vol Self Knowledg. — John Mason
1 Vol Morrels Voyages. — Benjamin Morrell
2 Vol Mad’m De Lacy.
2 Vol Quadroon. — J.H. Ingraham
2 Vol Pathfinder. — James Fenimore Cooper
1 Vol Pilot. — James Fenimore Cooper
1 Vol Reunza [Rienzi] or the Last of the Trybunes. — Edward Bulwer Lytton
1 Vol Numid of Pompei [Last Days of Pompeii?] — Edward Bulwer Lytton
1 Vol Book of Beauty. [possible The American Book of Beauty? seems too feminine for this list though, but who knows]
1 Vol Tracks on Disapation.
1 Vol Gray Hams Lecturs. [could be Sylvester Graham or James Graham]
1 Vol Husbands Duty to Wife [possibly A treatise of the rights, duties and liabilities of husband and wife by James Clancy]
1 Vol Ladyes Medical Guide. — Seth Pancoast
1 Mad’m Tusades History of the French Revolution.
The American Longer – 1 Vol
Benj’n Keen[?] – 1 Vol
Pelham – 2 Vol — Edward Bulwer Lytton
Rolans History – 3 Vol — Madame Roland
Napolians Anicdotes – 1 Vol — W.H. Ireland
Bulwers Novels – 12 Vols — Edward Bulwer Lytton
The Prince & Pedler – 2 Vol
Jack Adams – 1 Vol
May You like it – 1 Vol — Charles Benjamin Tayler
Kings Highway – 2 Vol — G.P.R. James
The Young mans Guide – 1 Vol — William A. Alcott
1 Vol Pamelia [Pamela?] — Samuel Richardson
2 Vol Meriam [Miriam] Coffin — Joseph C. Hart
1 Vol Ten Thousands [Thousand] a Year. — Richard Brinsley Peake
1 Vol Humphrey Clinker. [drama about 18th-c author Humphrey Clinker] — Thomas John Dibdin
2 Vol Bracebridge Hall. — Washington Irving
1 Vol Travels in Egypt & Arabia Felix. — Henry Rooke
2 Vol Elizabeth De Bruce. — C.I. Johnstone
2 Vol [The] Bravo. — James Fenimore Cooper
2 Vol Repealers.
2 Vol Steam Voyage Down The Danube. — Michael Joseph Quin
1 Vol Memoirs of Dr. Edward Young. [Edward Young the poet; memoirs?]
1 Vol Health Adviser.
1 Vol Female Wanderer. [the Wanderer, or female difficulties] — Fanny Burney
1 Vol Female Horse Thief.
1 Vol Holdens Narritive. — Horace Holden
1 Vol Rosamonds Narrative of the Roman Catholic Priests &c. [Rosamond Culbertson: Or, A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female Under] — Rosamond Culbertson
2 Vol Mercedes of Castile. — James Fenimore Cooper
22 Vol of Marryatts Works. [added Japhet in search of a father, and The Phantom Ship]— Frederick Marryatt

Osborn was a voracious reader! He had an especial appetite for novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, while also reading up on moral behavior and personal health. I haven’t looked much at the rest of his logbook, since it’s mostly boring weather reports, but he seems to have been an adventurous, artistic sort. (Look at this sketch, e.g.) He had to have traded or bought books during the voyage, as these 91 volumes would be a tight fit on board, and it seems like too many books to be able to afford outright on a whaler’s wages.

Most surprising book on this list? The Ladies’ Medical Guide, which describes the anatomy and physiology of women in the most unsexy way possible. There’s also a section in the back of different age-appropriate hairstyles for women. (Note that the edition I could find online was published in 1875, years after Osborn’s journey. But I like to imagine the edition he read wasn’t that different.)

If other book lists of 19th-c. sailors start making themselves apparent to me, this might evolve into a project beyond a few blog posts! Keep a weather eye out, fellow researchers?

See also part 1 (context) and part  2 (two book lists).

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Sources:

No web page should ever look less than its best on any display,
on any device, to the best of my ability.

Now, on to the tips.

Flexible-width layouts. Originally the Build theme was a fixed-width layout — that is, the CSS specified that the content should be 900px wide (content 600px, sidebar 300px). So on displays that were less than 900px wide, the original design required a horizontal scrollbar, anathema to me after 10 years of web interface design experience. We can fix this by making the layout flexible-width, which entails specifying widths using percentages instead of pixels. Pixel widths are recommended as a maximum-width so your page doesn’t stretch illegibly across a big screen (I’m looking at you, Wikipedia).

On my blog layout, I have three major divs, for the header, content, and sidebar. The content div (what all the blog posts appear inside) is 70% wide with a maximum width of 760px. The sidebar is 20% wide with a maximum width of 230px. (I left 10% unspecified to leave room for padding. This is a little sloppy if you’re the OCD-type designer. If things must fit together perfectly, you’d probably want to nest your padded divs into container divs so you can exercise every iota of control.) Here’s how my current layout looks on a display that’s just 750px wide:

Even in a small window, you can still see everything without having to scroll sideways!

Scale images. Most of my blog images are 760px wide, since that’s my optimal (and widest possible) width for the content div. But in a little browser window, even with the flexible-width div, the images would be so large they’d disrupt the layout. We’ll need to scale all images to shrink when they have to. Illustration of why:

We can do this with a little bit of side-wide CSS:

img {
max-width:100%;
height:auto;
}

Responsive design. It used to be that web designers’ rule of thumb was to code for a minimum screen size of 800 by 600px, but now all bets are off with all the range of devices we use. The screen can be any size; the window can be any size. The iPhone 3, for instance, is 480×320. Even with a flexible-width layout, my site would suck if the content with the sidebar were squeezed into 20% of 320px. That would be like maybe two words per line in my sidebar. In this case, I like to employ responsive design.

This is a buzzword right now, for good reason. It’s not just a set of code snippets — it’s a different approach altogether to CSS. Web developers sometimes get around odd-sized mobile screen problem by using a separate stylesheet for each kind of device. This is a hassle, though, as any site update means multiple layouts to fix, and any popular new device means optimizing the site for that instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design” article on A List Apart offers a solution: make the webpage scale and rearrange itself neatly when needed using one master stylesheet. This employs flexible-width layouts and scaled images. Example 1; example 2; example 3 is this web page itself (I’ve only done the bare minimum right now, but try making your browser window tiny).

To make sure mobile screens respond to your fancy new CSS, you will have to add this in your <head> section:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>

Otherwise, on smartphones that have very high resolution like the iPhone 4 (640px wide), the page will render very tiny and illegible.

vs.
Left: display not scaled. Right: display scaled.

N.b. Responsive design is probably best for smaller sites that display all their content regardless of device. Whereas with a museum’s website, for example, a separate mobile site with pared-down info is preferable, as most use cases are people looking up hours, the address, current exhibition, etc. on their phones.

Reset CSS. Different browsers display content differently. Internet Explorer is probably the most notorious for giving designers grief, though I’ve heard that IE10 is supposed to be standards-compliant. In any case, I use a CSS reset. Its purpose is to give your CSS a blank slate to work with, rather than have your CSS laid atop browser defaults like what the margins around H1 headers are, etc. I recommend using Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS.

I’ll also give a shoutout to BrowserStack, a web app that tests your site in a live environment across different browsers in different versions. (FWIW, my blog looks awful in IE6.) It’s a paid service, but I’m still on my 60 minutes of free use and I like it a lot. So far, they only have Windows OS; they are working on adding other OSs including mobile, which will be killer. For a similar service, NetRenderer has been my go-to for years to check IE, and it’s free.

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Other tips are welcome in the comments!

P.S. My top resources for user interface design stuff are A List Apart, StackOverflow, CSS Tricks, and Smashing Magazine. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t also check W3C standards for HTML and CSS, and I try to validate whenever possible (spoiler alert, this site is not valid). I use oXygen to write all my code and Transmit as my FTP client. See more at my post, “The Setup.”

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Update 1/26/12: For all of my tips and expertise, this blog displays strangely on Chromium (Ubuntu browser, open source project behind Chrome). Boo! Why?

• Regarding The Pain Of Others, by Susan Sontag
• Illness As Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem
• All The Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
• Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
• The Convalescent, by Jessica Anthony
• The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel (reread)
• Atlas Of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On And Never Will, by Judith Schalansky
• Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino
• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
• Great House, by Nicole Krauss
• The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown
• The Englishman Who Posted Himself And Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey
• A Short History Of Women, by Kate Walbert
• Hons And Rebels, by Jessica Mitford
• Love In A Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford (reread)
• Pyongyang, by Guy Delisle (reread)

Biggest literary disappointment? The Marriage Plot. It was like reading literary Twilight, and so obviously scraped from his college-age years, but without any semblance of the patina of wisdom that comes with time. I will freely admit that my main motivation for picking it up was to read about 1980s Brown. Anyway, if you want to read Eugenides, read Middlesex.

Our first book list comes from the barks Fortune and James Andrews, both of New Bedford. Two whaling voyages shared a logbook under shipmaster Henry W. Beetle, Master from June 1851–Dec. 1855. The ships whaled around the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and North and South Pacific. In the back of the logbook, which is owned and has been digitized by the Providence Public Library (PPL) Special Collections, Master Beetle wrote a list of books he wanted to add to his personal collection. So it’s not a complete catalog of his own books, just a wish list. Transcription follows.

List of Bookes that I want if I can
afford to Buy them
Washington’s writings 11 volumes
Hart’s Female Prose writers of America
The Leaflets of Memory 1852 by Reynell Coates
Human Prudence
Commentaries on the Bible
Modern Philosophy Philosophy by Tupper
Histories Ancient & Modern
The Crock of Gold
Harry Muir by Mrs. Margaret Maitland
Sunny Side & Shady Side

From which I derived this list of published works:

• The Writings of George Washington
• Female Prose Writers of America, by John S. Hart, mid-1800s
• Leaflets of Memory, Reynell Coates
• Human Prudence, or the art by which a man may raise himself and his fortune to grandeur, by William De Britaine
• Commentaries on the Bible
• Proverbial Philosophy, by Martin Farquhar Tupper, 1837 [best guess for "Modern Philosophy by Tupper"]
• Histories Ancient & Modern
• The Crock of Gold, by Martin Farquhar Tupper, 1844
• Harry Muir: A Scottish Life, Margaret Maitland, 1853
• The Shady Side, or Life in a Country Parsonage, by a Pastor’s Wife (Martha Stone Hubbell), mid-1800s
• The Sunny Side, or the Country Minister’s Wife, by the Author of Little Kitty and Her Bible Verses (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps), 1853

I’ve made a list of books that are digitized at OpenLibrary. They’re all available to read online!

First of all, how adorable is the title of his list? He may as well have prefaced it with “Dear Diary!” More seriously now, what does this list of titles tell us about Master Beetle? He’s a thinking man, clearly, concerned with living a moral life. There’s a comedy novel about a war of the sexes on the list (The Crock of Gold), two novels with themes of Christian life in New England (The Shady Side and The Sunny Side), and a short story collection (Leaflets of Memory). What’s most interesting to me is that he has so many female writers in his collection… starting with Female Prose Writers of America, edited by John Seely Hart, an educator. The book is an anthology of short stories by dozens of American woman writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Hale. While the preface does explain that women “write from the heart” (because “their likes and dislikes, their feelings, opinions, feelings, tastes, and sympathies are so mixed up with those of their subject” — sigh), the women are presented as a legitimate up-and-coming literary force in the footsteps of Hannah Adams (1755–1831), the first American woman to make writing her profession.

Fun fact: the Fortune was later filled with stone and sunk as part of the Stone Fleet during the Civil War.

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The second list comes from the Hopewell, a ship out of Warren, Rhode Island. Under Master George Littlefield, the Hopewell sailed on a Gold Rush voyage from Rhode Island, around Cape Horn, to San Francisco from Jan. 29–Aug. 9, 1849. On this voyage, Master Littlefield fell ill, and there was talk of leaving him in Talcahuano, Chile, as written in another account of the same voyage by seaman John E. Eddy (according to an item description from the Library of Mystic Seaport). Littlefield ended the short logbook (digitized by the PPL) with a 120-passenger manifest, lat-long coordinates of major harbors, and a list of the books he read while on the journey. Transcription follows:

Books that I read on Board of Ship
2 years before the Mast on a Voyage round the
Horn by Dana of Boston
Fremont Travels to the Rockey Mountain and California
in 1841 and 2 . 3
Travels of the Rev. George Fisk of London to Egypt,
Read [sic] Sea, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land
A Voyage of and [sic] East Indiaman by Jack A____ [an Indiaman was a ship on an East Indies route]
The American Ship Master Guide, and Commercial Assistant
The Practical Navigation by Nathaniel Bowditch
Laws of the Sea, on the Rights of Seamen and [Passengers?]
The Carrier Assistant and Insurers Guide
The [?] and [?] Assistant The Landlord’s and Tenant’s Assistant [thanks, Jennifer!]
The American Coast Pilot by Blunt
What I Saw in California by Edward Bryant
Seaman Friend by Dana
Lardner’s Lectures on Astronomy

From which I derived this partial list of published works:

• Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1840
• The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843–’44, John C. Frémont [Littlefield probably read a report by Frémont]
• A Pastor’s Memorial of Egypt, the Red Sea, the Wildernesses of Sin and Paran, Mount Sinai, Jerusalem, and other principal localities of the Holy Land, George Fisk, 1845
• The American Ship-Master’s Guide and Commercial Assistant, Francis Gedney Clarke, 1838
• The American Practical Navigator, Nathaniel Bowditch, 1802
• Laws Of The Sea: The Rights Of Seamen, Coaster’s & Fisherman’s Guide, And Master’s And Mate’s Manual, Isaac Ridler Butts
• Shippers’ & carriers’ assistant & insurers’ guide: The legal liabilities of shippers & carriers, edition in 1868, unsure of precedents
• The Landlord and Tenant’s Assistant, Isaac Ridler Butts, 1847
• The American Coast Pilot, Edmund M. Blunt, first ed. 1817
• What I Saw in California, Edwin Bryant, 1849
• The Seaman’s Friend: A Treatise on Practical Seamanship, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1841
• A discourse on the advantages of natural philosophy and astronomy, Dionysius Lardner, lecture, 1828 (among other lectures and handbooks)

You can find most of these books at this list on OpenLibrary, available to read online.

What do these books tell us about Master Littlefield? He’s much less romantic than Master Beetle; he has the travel bug; he is keeping abreast of his field by reading reference books and lectures. He also sought some legal advice in books, something sensible to do when transporting a bunch of gold-crazy 49ers on a seven-month journey while ill. Bryant’s What I Saw in California is a long description of the author’s journeys in the brand-new state, ending with details on the gold mines like extent of the gold region and costs of provisions. Certainly a must-read in 1849.

When I was trying to decipher the list, I read the short account at the very end of the logbook to try to match letter shapes. It was an interesting read, much unlike earlier entries solely describing wind direction changes. He related his experiences in Honolulu vividly:

The climate is mild and warm, and the appearance of the place beautiful. And while the snow is blowing, and the sleigh bells jingling in the New England States, I am in the mist [sic] of perfect summer, enjoying all the [food] that can be imagined. … Lettuce, [?], cucumber, beans, green corn, watermelons, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, oranges, lemons, bananas, coconuts, milk, eggs, poultry, fish, etc. etc. etc. [p. 35]

Perhaps he saw himself following the tradition of Dana, Frémont, Fisk, and Bryant in describing his travel adventures. And isn’t that a major part of the attraction of a life at sea? Sailing between continents, going ashore in some of the world’s most exciting cities? Oddly, Littlefield’s logbook doesn’t seem to mention any desire to follow the 49ers toward the gold mines, even though he read Bryant’s account. Maybe he was too ill, or maybe he sensed the gold region couldn’t contain so many thousands of people, or maybe it was too far inland for his liking. In any case, Hawaii was probably a better place to stay than dusty, mined-out Coloma, CA.

Another interesting gobbet: On the very last page of the log, once back in San Francisco in 1850, he recounts staying on Washington St. and then being awakened by cries of “Fire, fire!” This was the fire of May 4, 1850, which destroyed the whole block he was staying on before it was stopped. The city deduced that it was arson and offered a $5,000 reward for the arsonist.

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What do you think of these mariners’ book lists? I know it’s not fair to judge someone by their book titles… but if we’re going to do it anyway, what would you think of these men? Of the female writers Beetle wanted for his collection? Of the adventure travelogues in Littlefield’s?

See another book list from 1841-45 at part three »

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Special thanks again to Jordan Goffin, Special Collections Librarian at the Providence Public Library (PPL), who sent me hi-res images of the logbooks and helped me with my research. The PPL has a large maritime collection. They’ve put online great hi-res color scans of some of their whaling logbooks, and black & white scans of all of them. The logbooks record life aboard a vessel, everything from wind changes to sailors’ quarrels and deaths to whales sighted and caught (often marked with a cool hand-carved stamp).

Sources:

• Beetle, Henry W. Logbook of James Andrews (#347). Available digitally here from the PPL Special Collections.
• Littlefield, George. Logbook of the Hopewell (#333). Available digitally here from the PPL Special Collections.

In the whaling days of Moby-Dick, splashy scenes like the above could be infrequent. Many long days could pass between whales, and indeed any long sea journey was marked by tedium. While ship-masters always had an unending list of chores for the sailors to complete aboard the ship, some of the men passed their free time reading. Voraciously! From the few 19th-century book lists I’ve seen, from both whaling and non-whaling ships, the sailors’ general tastes trended toward travel accounts, adventure novels, holy scriptures, and nautical reference books.

The rare ship had its own large library, up to the 326 volumes in the U.S. steam sloop Narragansett‘s ship-wide lending library for instance. (See the Narragansett‘s 1860 printed catalog at the Internet Archive via Boston Public Library, and see p.33 of The View from the Masthead by Hester Blum for more info). Some ships were the recipients of books donated by citizens wishing to encourage erudition among tradesmen, in the spirit of Ben Franklin. More often, though, sailors had only their personal book collection, if any. Aboard the ship, seamen could trade books with each other, but when many days pass between whales, a few dozen books looks quite scant. For bookish mariners, then, a gam was heaven-sent. I’ll let Melville step in here:

In an 1852 account, Henry DeForrest, an erudite officer aboard the William Rotch of Fairhaven, MA, describes how “the reading part of the crew” has exchanged books with other sailors. This scan (used with permission, highlighting by me) comes from the Providence Public Library Special Collections. Transcription follows.

Elsewhere in the log, DeForrest mentions that the captain is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in the middle of their voyage. The PPL surmises in the item’s description that it too was obtained during a gam.

There may have been a whole economy of book trading at sea, but precious little survives to tell us more about it. Most of our knowledge of maritime reading habits in the 1800s comes from ship logbooks and sailors’ personal accounts, and only a few wrote down their catalog. If you’re like me, seeing someone’s personal library is like seeing a part of their mind. Texts are a common and communicative thread between generations, even centuries. So in Part Two tomorrow, I’ll present actual reading lists from a whaler and a Gold Rush ship.

See part two and part three for book lists »

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Special thanks to Jordan Goffin, Special Collections Librarian at the Providence Public Library (PPL), who provided me with valuable research leads via prompt email reply. Thanks also to Richard (Rick) Ring, former Special Collections Librarian at the PPL, who first mentioned the interesting reading histories of whalers to me in 2009. Check out the fantastic Nicholson Whaling Collection at the PPL, the only library I know of that has a harpoon and scrimshaw collection in its catalog.

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Sources:

• Blum, Hester. The View from the Masthead. UNC Press Books: 2008. Link to “Cargoes of books” section (Google books preview).
• DeForrest, Henry. “Log of the William Rotch, 1852-1853.” Nicholson Whaling Collection, Wh W7183 1852j, Providence Public Library Special Collections. Link to description and digitized version.
• Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Boston: St. Bantolph Society, 1892. Link to OpenLibrary page.
• Mumford, Heather. Whaling Log of The William Rotch. Blog. 2009-10. Link: http://finologylog.blogspot.com/ — see many transcriptions of DeForrest’s log.
• “U.S. Steam Sloop Narragansett’s circulating library.” Virginia: 1860. Link to OpenLibrary page.

I rigged up a book scanner using stacks of books and a long ruler. This allowed me to turn the pages (drawn only one one side of the paper) and keep the book in the same place throughout the process. Scanning and batch editing in Photoshop only took about 30 minutes.

I had to move my light source so the bookstack on the right wouldn’t cast such a dark shadow.

Worked a charm!

These little seahorses lined up in formation for me — totally weird

Four more after jump.

Jellies. Lion’s mane, I believe?

Cassiopea (upside-down) jellies, commonly found in marshes and swamps

Unknown but adorable species of jellyfish

Fish in the famous Shedd Aquarium aquarium

These were made on my iPhone with the Gif Shop app during an October visit to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, IL.

For your indoor gardening pleasure, I have hastily sketched up a pictorial terrarium tutorial for you.

As for the kinds of plants, choose little ones that don’t need much water and won’t grow large. There are essentially two options: fern-y type plants ($2/ea here) and succulents ($4/ea). There was a specific section for good terrarium plants in the Prairie Gardens store I frequent here in Champaign, but Googling around is very helpful. See: about.com advice, gardeners.com tutorial with pictures, and this lovely book: The New Terrarium. People get super into this and set up tiny scenes in their containers, and in fact Prairie Gardens sold items like Lilliputian bicycles or miniature shovels or the smallest of gnomes. But that crosses the cutesy line for me.

Here’s what else I made. My roommates can attest to the high degree of ‘tizzy’ I got into when I came home from the plant store.