Crappy old books

On the Bank

Published on August 18, 2018 by Marica 

Civilization is a stream with banks, … . The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. –Will Durant

The other day I was thumbing through the crappy old book, Curriculum Books: The First Eighty Years (1980) by William Henry Schubert and I came across a reference to another crappy old book, Old Textbooks (1961) by J.A. Nietz. So I bought it. What a gem! It catalogs– based on the author’s private collection of over (at the time) 8000 texts published mainly in the United States until around the 1920s– just about everything you could want to know about old textbooks.

As is my habit, I did a spot of research to discover more about the book and its author. Holy cow! Nietz was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh (a student of Dewey at Chicago). When he retired in 1958, his donated textbooks founded the Nietz Old Textbook Collection at Pitt which now has over 16,000 volumes.

What a guy! He was the go-to scholar for all things concerning texts and curriculum in early American schools. His analysis of the texts’ content is meticulous, and affords a look at what we might call changing times in America. To whit:

From an analysis of 1370 readers published

before 1775,  6 percent of the content dealt with morals and conduct
1775 – 1825, 20%
1825 – 1875, 20%
1875 – 1915, 5%
1915 – 1926, 3.5%

Think about that. Some guy named John Nietz sitting on the bank of the Monongahela explaining the decadence of the Roaring Twenties.