The gallery will make sense momentarily.

You may recall that in wandering my way around last month’s Crappy Old Book of the Month, The Standard Dictionary of Facts (1914), I discovered an famous/unheard of/ author/editor of whom I had never heard, but who edited, in 1902, a book that I could find almost no mention of anywhere but which, in 1966, was republished as an American Classic.

The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide, J.N. Larned, ed., Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York, 1902. Republished in 1966 in the American Classics Series.

In Part III– The United States, Section 2: Comprehensive History, we find the entry for “Hawthorne, Julian. United States: From the Landing of Columbus to the Signing of the Peace Protocol with Spain Volume I. N.Y.: P.F. Collier. 1898. 3v. Subs. $5.” followed by a description of the books’ contents, and a bit of critical evaluation regarding the book’s worth.

I happen to have a first edition (only?) set of Hawthorne’s comprehensive history of the United States. I commented on the book in a post on Bunker Hill Day in 2013.

So my next question is, “Who the heck is Hawthorne?” I don’t usually find ‘patterings of summer showers’ in history books, and I know the only Hawthorne I know didn’t write it.

There’s some good stuff at that post– who doesn’t like Joseph Warren? Give it a quick look, funny stuff on Julian Hawthorne, too– including his desire to eliminate incarceration (guess why!).

Critical evaluation of Hawthorne’s history:

“The style is that of a series of essays, verbose, dramatic, often lacking chronological order, and presupposing no little familiarity with the general facts. Represents the extreme “popular historical writing which aims to be readable rather than scholarly. A maximum of military and a minimum of political and social history. Stock illustrations and entirely imaginary. Volumes divided into equal number of pages instead of by chapter. No references.”

Please to refer back up to the picture gallery. Top left, Front piece; Title page; Front matter; Contents; Illustrations; Whatever that page is called; and then picking right up in mid-sentence where volume II left off, “with outlawed fugitives from other tribes… .”

Crappy old books.