At Large and At Small (22 page)

Packard, A. S., Jr. How to Collect and Observe Insects. Reprint from The Maine Scientific Survey for
1862
. Augusta, Maine: Kennebec Journal, 1863.

O
N COLLECTING IN GENERAL

Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, eds.
The
Cultures of Collecting
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Muensterberger, Werner.
Collecting: An Unruly Passion
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Pearce, Susan M.
On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition
. London: Routledge, 1995.

Theroux, Alexander. “Odd Collections.”
The Yale Review
86:1 (January 1998).

O
N NATURAL HISTORY, ESPECIALLY
NINETEENTH-CENTURY

Allen, David Elliston.
The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Bates, Henry Walter.
The Naturalist on the River Amazons
. Intro. Alex Shoumatoff. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Kastner, Joseph.
A Species of Eternity
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Ritvo, Harriet.
The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Wallace, Alfred Russel.
Island Life: Or, the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras
. London: Macmillan, 1902.

———.
The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise, A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature
. London: Macmillan, 1886.

B
Y AND ABOUT CHARLES DARWIN

Darwin, Charles. “Recollections
of the Development of My Mind and Character.” In Frederick William Roe, ed.,
Victorian Prose
. New York: Ronald Press, 1947.

———.
Voyage of the
Beagle. London: Penguin, 1989.

Clark, Ronald W.
The Survival of Charles Darwin
. New York: Random House, 1984.

Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore.
Darwin
. London: Michael Joseph, 1991.

Huxley, Francis. “Charles Darwin: Life and Habit,” parts 1 and 2.
The American Scholar
28:4 (Autumn 1959) and 29:1 (Winter 1959/60).

Marks, Richard Lee.
Three Men of the
Beagle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

B
Y AND ABOUT
V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV

Appel, Alfred, Jr. Notes to
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated
. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Boyd, Brian.
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

———.
Vladimir Nabokov: The
Russian Years
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Boyd, Brian, and Kurt Johnson. “Nabokov, Scientist.”
Natural History
, July–August 1999.

Coates, Steve. “Nabokov’s Work, on Butterflies, Stands the Test of Time.”
New York Times
, May 27, 1997.

Field, Andrew.
Nabokov: His Life in Art
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

Johnson, Kurt, and Steve Coates.
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey
of a Literary Genius
. Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland, 1999.

Johnson, Kurt, G. Warren Whitaker, and Zsolt Bálint. “Nabokov as Lepidopterist: An Informed Appraisal.”
Nabokov Studies
3 (1996).

Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Aurelian.” In
Nabokov’s Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories
. New York: Avon, 1973.

———. “Christmas.” In
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

———.
Pale
Fire
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

———.
Speak, Memory
. New York: Pyramid, 1968.

Pick, Nancy. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Genitalia Cabinet.” In
The Rarest of the Rare
. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

M
ISCELLANEOUS SOURCES

Dickens, Charles.
Our Mutual Friend
. London: Penguin, 1985.

Fowles, John.
The Collector
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

Jones, James H.
Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private
Life
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

T
HE
U
NFUZZY
L
AMB

Winifred F. Courtney’s biography of the young Lamb was especially useful. For contemporary perspectives, see the Hazlitt essay and the brief memoir by Thomas Noon Talfourd at the end of Lamb’s
Literary Sketches and Letters
, both of which vividly capture the weekly soirées Charles and Mary Lamb held in their lodgings at No. 4 Inner Temple Lane.
Chapter 16 of Leigh Hunt’s autobiography also contains a graceful tribute to Lamb.

B
Y
C
HARLES
L
AMB

Lamb, Charles.
Charles Lamb & the Lloyds: Comprising Newly-Discovered Letters of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Lloyds, Etc.
, ed. E. V. Lucas. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899.

———.
The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Charles Lamb
, ed. R. H. Shepherd. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske,
and Company. Undated.

———.
The Essays of Elia
. London: Edward Moxon and Company, 1867.

———.
Everybody’s Lamb: Being a Selection from the Essays of Elia, the Letters and the Miscellaneous Prose of Charles Lamb
, ed. A. C. Ward. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1933.

———.
Literary Sketches and Letters: Being the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb
, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York: D. Appleton and Company,
1849.

———.
The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
. Vol. 1,
The Letters of Charles Lamb
, ed. Alfred Ainger. New York: International Publishing Company. Undated.

———.
The Life and Works of Charles Lamb.
Vol. 2,
Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays
, ed. Alfred Ainger. New York: International Publishing Company. Undated.

———.
The Works of Charles Lamb in Five Volumes
. New York: A. C. Armstrong and
Son, 1885.

O
N
C
HARLES
L
AMB

Barnett, George L.
Charles Lamb
. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.

Burton, Sarah.
A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb
. London: Penguin, 2004.

Courtney, Winifred F.
Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802.
New York: New York University Press, 1982.

Cruse, Amy. “A Supper at Charles Lamb’s.” In
Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles
, ed. William Targ. Cleveland: World
Publishing Company, 1955.

Frank, Robert.
Don’t Call Me Gentle Charles!
Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1976.

Hazlitt, William. “On the Conversation of Authors.” In
The Essays of William Hazlitt
, ed. Catherine MacDonald MacLean. New York: Coward-McCann, 1950.

Hunt, Leigh.
The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt
, ed. J. E. Morpurgo. London: Cresset, 1949.

Johnson, Edith Christina. “Lamb and
Coleridge.”
The American Scholar
6:2 (Spring 1937).

Prance, Claude A.
Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760–1847.
London: Mansell, 1983.

I
CE
C
REAM

I could not have written the section on the history of ice cream without Elizabeth David’s exemplary book.

A note for the pedantic: Several sources—including myself, in an earlier version of this essay—have erroneously cited
1700, not 1744, as the year of the first recorded ice-cream consumption in America. Thomas Bladen, one of Maryland’s colonial governors, served it to a group of Virginia commissioners on their way to a meeting with the Iroquois nation. Bladen was born in 1698 and is unlikely to have been a dinner host at age two.

Burke, A. D.
Practical Ice Cream Making
. Milwaukee: Olsen, 1947. David, Elizabeth.
Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices
. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.

Dickson, Paul.
The Great American Ice Cream Book
. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

“Flying Fortresses Double as Ice-Cream Freezers.”
New York Times
, March 13, 1943.

Geeslin, Campbell, ed.
The Nobel Prize Annual 1991
. New York: International Management Group, 1992.

Gilbert, Susan. “Headaches Come in Icy Flavors.”
New York Times
, May 14, 1997.

Grimes, William. “In the Ice Cream Follies, Anything Goes.”
New York Times
, August 5, 1998.

Herszenhorn, David M. “A Town’s Last Word to the Ice Cream Man: Quiet!”
New York Times
, March 4, 1998.

Keeney, Philip G. “Ice Cream Manufacture.”
Course 102, Correspondence Courses in Agriculture, Family Living and Community Development
. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania
State University.

McGee, Harold.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984.

Nieves, Evelyn. “Savoring Legal Success, an Ice Cream Vendor Calls the Tune.”
New York Times
, May 7, 1998.

Skow, John. “They All Scream for It.”
Time
, August 10, 1981.

N
IGHT
O
WL

Among the literary sources, my favorite is the Dickens essay. For atmosphere and
eclecticism, the indispensable night author is A. Alvarez, who writes about everything from hypnagogic hallucinations to an all-night “ride-along” in a New York City patrol car. Although his book does not concentrate primarily on literary topics, he writes so beautifully that I believe
Night
itself is likely to be remembered as a work of literature.

L
ITERARY
S
OURCES

Alvarez, A.
Night
. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1995.

Carroll, Lewis. “Pillow Problems.” In
Night Walks: A Bedside Companion
, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1982.

Dickens, Charles. “Night Walks.” In
The Uncommercial Traveller
. New York: Macmillan, 1896.

Dreifus, Claudia. “A Conversation with John McPhee.”
New York Times
, November 17, 1998.

Fadiman, Clifton. “It’s a Puzzlement.” In
Worth a Jot
(unpublished
manuscript).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Sleeping and Waking.” In
The Literary Insomniac
, ed. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Jackson, Holbrook. “Specimen Days.” In
Bookman’s Pleasure
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947.

Lamb, Charles. “Popular Fallacies: That We Should Lie Down with the Lamb.” In
The Essays of Elia
. London: Edward Moxon and Company, 1867.

Proulx,
E. Annie. “Waking Up.” In
The Literary Insomniac
, ed. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Spender, Stephen. Interview. In
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series
, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1984.

Thomson, James. “The City of Dreadful Night.” In
Poetry of the Victorian Period
, ed. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and George Benjamin Woods. Glenview,
Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1965.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In
Whitman
, ed. Robert Creeley. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973.

Young, Edward.
Night Thoughts, or, the Complaint and the Consolation
. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1975.

M
ISCELLANEOUS SOURCES

Blakeslee, Sandra. “Biologists Close In on the ‘Tick-Tock’ Genes.”
New York Times
, December 15, 1998.

Goode, Erica. “New Hope for
the Losers in the Battle to Stay Awake.”
New York Times
, November 3, 1998.

Lamberg, Lynne.
Bodyrhythms: Chronobiology and Peak Performance
. New York: William Morrow, 1994.

Melbin, Murray.
Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark
. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Miller, Louise.
Careers for Night Owls & Other Insomniacs
. Chicago: VGM Career Horizons, 1995.

Moore-Ede, Martin C., Frank M.
Sulzman, and Charles A. Fuller.
The Clocks That Time Us: Physiology of the Circadian Timing System
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

P
ROCRUSTES AND
THE
C
ULTURE
W
ARS

This essay is loosely adapted from talks given to the Phi Beta Kappa chapters of Yale College, Harvard College, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Gettysburg College. Part of it focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson
because the year I delivered the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration happened to be the 160th anniversary of Emerson’s 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration, “The American Scholar.”

O
N THE
C
ULTURE
W
ARS AND THE LITERARY CANON

Anson, J. Cameron. Letter.
Harper’s Magazine
, April 1996.

Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In
Between Past and Future
. New York:
Penguin, 1993.

Arnold, Matthew. “Wordsworth.” In
Criticism
:
The Major Texts
, ed. Walter Jackson Bate. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952.

Denby, David.
Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Kaplan, Justin. “Selling ‘Huck Finn’ Down the River.”
New York Times Book Review
, March
10, 1996.

Ronholt, Sharon Uemura. Letter.
New York Times Book Review
, January 19, 1997.

Smiley, Jane. “Say It Ain’t So, Huck.”
Harper’s Magazine
, January 1996.