Pigskin Library

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File:The Pigskin Library, drawing by John T. McCutcheon, Nzoia River, November 15th, 1909.jpg
Theodore Roosevelt showing the Pigskin Library to his visitors Delia Akeley, John T. McCutcheon, and Fred Stephenson (drawing by McCutcheon, 1909)

The Pigskin Library is the travel library of Nobel Peace Prize winner and 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. The collection of initially about 50 books bound in pigskin was a gift from his sister Corinne Roosevelt to take with him on the Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition from March 1909 to March 1910. Roosevelt did not want to do without books during the trip, but the usual bindings would not have withstood the tropical climate for long. The Pigskin Library was protected by an aluminum box in which the books were stored. It was small enough that it could be carried by a porter during the expedition.

The scope of the library and its importance to Roosevelt were the subject of several contemporary publications by himself and journalists. After the expedition, the Pigskin Library remained in the family. It was bequeathed to the Harvard Library by a granddaughter of Roosevelt in 1999.

History

Background

File:Roosevelt reading in front of his tent in hunting camp LCCN2010645482 (cropped).jpg
Theodore Roosevelt reading in front of his tent (Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition, 1909)

In the late fall of 1908, while Theodore Roosevelt's planning for the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition was underway, his younger sister Corinne Roosevelt asked him after a family dinner what he would like as a gift for the trip. Immediately, Roosevelt expressed his desire for a Pigskin Library, a selection of books bound in pigskin to protect them from the punishing travel conditions and African climate.[1] He wanted this more than anything else.[2] Even before leaving for the expedition, Corinne wrote to Roosevelt:

I want you both to think of me a little when you are reading in some little mosquito cage in far off Africa! I love you both dearly, & hope you will have the most wonderful trip imaginable..[3]

Roosevelt described the usefulness of the Pigskin Library as follows:

Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun-oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle looks.[4]

During the expedition, the usefulness of the new bindings became apparent. For example, Roosevelt once carelessly stuffed a puff adder, which had been caught by a rifleman and killed by himself with a knife, into his saddlebag, where the binding of the Nibelungenlied was stained by the serpent's blood.[5] Over time, the Roosevelts added more volumes to the original collection, which they had sent to them during the expedition or bought or received as gifts along the way. The exact number of books included at some point is not known. The Pigskin Library, bequeathed to the Harvard College Library in 1999, contains 55 volumes, with some works missing from Roosevelt's published lists.

Description

Production

The Pigskin Library was produced by W. H. Lowdermilk & Company, one of Washington's most prestigious booksellers. The volumes selected by Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt were broken open and the pages trimmed to just below the type area and the indispensable part of the gutter to save weight. The reduced book block was bound in a full volume of pigskin. The Pigskin Library was in an aluminum case covered with waterproof canvas. It was divided inside into eight compartments, four in width and two in height. The total weight was a little less than 60 American pounds (about 27 kilograms). This allowed it to be carried by a porter.[6]

On February 19, 1909, the Pigskin Library was delivered to Roosevelt. John T. Loomis, one of the owners of the bookstore, admitted in an accompanying letter that he had been very concerned about the production of the Pigskin Library as a departure from his usual routine. However, he also acknowledged that he had enjoyed working for Roosevelt and that he would be proud if the box and books survived the trip well. Roosevelt responded that the box seemed excellent to him, and that he was extremely pleased with it and the books. He would be surprised if it did not serve its purpose. Loomis had contributed greatly to the appeal of the trip. The bookstore Brentano's inaccurately stated on its website at the end of the 20th century that Roosevelt had purchased the Pigskin Library from Brentano's in New York.[7] This statement has also found its way into the professional literature.[8]

Scope

Roosevelt published a list of titles originally included in the Library as an appendix to his travelogue African Game Trails. Some of the titles listed there were not, strictly speaking, part of the Pigskin Library. Thus, Roosevelt distributed several volumes among different bags in order to be sure to always have something handy to read. He carried Ferdinand Gregorovius' History of Rome with him on his journey by ship.[6] On the list reproduced here, the volumes that are now lost are marked with a trailing cross (†). The order of the volumes corresponds to Roosevelt's list. It contains several times instead of identifiable titles only the author names and to the titles indications such as poems. In many cases, the editions of reliably identified works cannot be determined. In addition, the list contains no references to the summaries of several works in one volume and to multi-volume works.

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Additions during the expedition

The following volumes were added later by Roosevelt. They were books sent to him or purchased during the trip, and some were gifts received en route. Roosevelt received Les Louves de Machecoul by Alexandre Dumas in Port Said from Etienne Jusserand. The latter was the brother of his friend Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to Washington. In Nairobi in December 1909, before leaving for Lake Victoria, they purchased a set of supplements:

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Meaning for Roosevelt

The Pigskin Library was used intensively by Theodore and his son Kermit during the expedition. Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly commented on the great importance the library had for him in letters to family and friends, as well as in his travelogue African Game Trails. To his close friend Henry Cabot Lodge and his wife Anne ("Nannie"), he wrote on September 10, 1909, north of the Mount Kenya, that he was now too old to be a hunter in the wilderness for a year and leave his brain unused.[9] The Pigskin Library had been as much a help to him in this situation as the work on the African Game Trails, which he must have completed by the time the expedition reached Khartoum. The library was so important to Roosevelt during the expedition that he proudly presented it to his visitors Delia Akeley, John T. McCutcheon, and Fred Stephenson during a meeting in his tent in November 1909.[10]

Besides hunting, Roosevelt was extremely busy writing down his experiences for Scribner's Magazine. Nevertheless, it often happened that after an early return from the hunt, he first read for an hour or two in a volume from his library, and only then attended to his transcripts. As late as January 1910, a few weeks before the end of the expedition, Roosevelt wrote his sister Corinne that he was looking forward to seeing his wife Edith again, and that the Pigskin Library continued to be a source of comfort.

Public discussion of the book selection

A list of the volumes included in the Pigskin Library first appeared in Scribner's Magazine in October 1909, as part of the publication of Roosevelt's travelogue African Game Trails.[11] In late April 1910, Roosevelt published the essay The Pigskin Library in the New York magazine The Outlook. In it, he comments on the selection of books and discusses a number of the authors and works chosen, including those passed over.[12] This essay contains a list of volumes in the Pigskin Library, expanded from the first version to include several volumes that had been added during the expedition. The essay with the expanded list appeared unchanged as Appendix F in the book version of African Game Trails.[13]

The books were selected by Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt. Therefore, the volumes of the library correspond partly to the taste of Roosevelt, and partly to that of Kermit. However, it is not possible to assign individual works to father or son. Roosevelt made a point of stating that the selection by no means included those books that were most important to either of them. They were simply the books they wanted to have with them on this trip for some reason.[6] The selection of books made by the Roosevelts quickly became the subject of public discussion, with Kermit's involvement no longer noticed. Theodore Roosevelt, in response to an inquiry, made rather general comments:

Now, all this means that I take with me on any trip, or on all trips put together, but a very small proportion of the books that I like; and that I like very many and very different kinds of books, and do not for a moment attempt anything so preposterous as a continual comparison between books which may appeal to totally different sets of emotions. For instance, one correspondent pointed out to me that Tennyson was "trivial" compared to Browning, and another complained that I had omitted Walt Whitman; another asked why I put Longfellow "on a level" with Tennyson. I believe I did take Walt Whitman on one hunt, and I like Browning, Tennyson, and Longfellow, all of them, without thinking it necessary to compare them.[14]

The Roosevelts compiled the Pigskin Library works in early 1909. Harvard University President Charles William Eliot published the Harvard Classics, or Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books, a 50-volume collection of works of world literature in 1909 and 1910. A supplementary volume included a series of lectures in addition to 11 reading plans. Eliot held that the careful reading of these 50 volumes according to one of the reading plans would provide the reader with a liberal education, entertainment, and the assistance of history's greatest thinkers. Eliot was already president of Harvard University when Roosevelt and his friend Henry Cabot Lodge studied there. The planned scope of Harvard Classics was communicated to Roosevelt in a letter from his wife, Edith Roosevelt, in the fall of 1909. In a letter to Cabot written a few days later, Roosevelt called the idea of Eliot's list being the canon "a little absurd" and allowed it to be only one of many possible selections of good books. He had little patience with people who seriously consider lists such as "the twenty-five best books" in the world.[15] Roosevelt also harshly criticized Eliot's selections his essay "The Pigskin Library".[12]

Current location

After the expedition, Roosevelt gave the Pigskin Library to his daughter Ethel Roosevelt Derby. After Roosevelt's death, in 1925, Ethel gave three volumes, the Nibelungenlied, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the first of two volumes of Molière's Oeuvres complètes as well as the aluminum box, on loan to the Museum of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City. Roosevelt's birthplace, demolished in 1916 and reconstructed in 1923, was furnished with furniture provided by Roosevelt's widow and sisters. Later, the library was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. Ethel Roosevelt died in 1977 and bequeathed the Pigskin Library to her daughter, Sarah Alden Derby Gannett. In 1999, Gannett bequeathed the Pigskin Library, with the 55 surviving volumes of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, to the Harvard College Library. In 2003, the library was given to the Houghton Library, which primarily holds rare books and manuscripts from the Harvard University Library.

In its present state, the Pigskin Library contains 55 volumes. These include 39 works by 22 authors from Roosevelt's first list, which included 37 authors and works without author attribution. In addition, there are four volumes from the expanded list published in The Outlook in 1910. The aluminum box is still extant. A replica of the box exists and is displayed at exhibitions in place of the original for conservation reasons.

Notes

  1. ↑ Robinson 1921, pp. 251–53.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Roosevelt 1910, p. 967.
  5. ↑ Roosevelt 1988, p. 224.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Roosevelt 1988, p. 29.
  7. ↑ "History & Show-Case," Brentano's (23 November 1999).
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ "Object of the Month. The Mount Kenya book club: Theodore Roosevelt discusses politics and literature while on safari in East Africa in 1909," Massachusetts Historical Society (November 2015).
  10. ↑ McCutcheon, John T. (1910). In Africa. Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 159–61.
  11. ↑ Roosevelt, Theodore (1909). "African Game Trails. I. A Railroad Through the Pleistocene," Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, pp. 385–406.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Roosevelt 1910.
  13. ↑ "Past Exhibitions. Roosevelt Reading: The Pigskin Library, 1909–1910," Houghton Library (12 February 2009).
  14. ↑ Roosevelt 1910, p. 969.
  15. ↑ "Teddy Roosevelt Gets Snarky About the Harvard Classics," New England Historical Society (30 January 2021).

References

External link

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