Étienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie (Voyage to Icaria). 5th Ed. 1848. Bureau du Populaire: Paris. Softcover 16-mo, 600 pp.
The Icarian movement, an amalgamation of ideas taken from Fourier, Saint-Simon, and other forms of early Socialism, was founded by the social theorist Étienne Cabet by means of this hefty utopian novel about the hypothetical society of Icaria, much of which is taken up with his appendix propounding the detailed programme by which a non-hypothetical version of it could be established. He was not slow in accumulating an Icarian community who came to the US in the year this edition was published to found a series of intentional communities in Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, and California, the last one lasting until 1886.
This copy has been valued and heavily used by at least two generations of radicals. At least one reader left marginalia – my guess is the original owner, based on the immediacy of interest suggested by its nature. This is done in pencil, and stretches throughout the book – all 600 pages were read in their entirety. Some markings suggest intuitive reactions to the texts – exclamation and question marks in the passages next to the related passages. A great many are single underlined words, and look to me like words unfamiliar to the reader, marked to look up after the reading session. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests that french was likely their second language, and raises the possibility that they were directly involved with one of the Icarian communes, which were bilingual; the hypothesis is complicated, however, by the fact that I bought it from a French bookseller. The alternative possibility is that the reader was a working-class socialist who was largely self-taught and encountering words outside their prior reading. Some markings on the wrapper have been subsequently faded or erased beyond legibility. An early- or mid-20th Century owner added a few bibliographic notations and repaired the by-then disintegrating binding with adhesive tape, which is now disintegrating in turn, after handwriting a new spine title, in a hand which makes me favour an early-century hypothesis.
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The great thing about marked up books is what we learn as well from the writings of previous owners. Luckily, books marked up are cheaper, because others see it as devaluing of instead of a benefit of owing the printed matter.
ReplyDeleteExactly – That fact is the only reason I'm able to afford most of this stuff; un-marked, unused copies of this book with no character or history cost hundreds of dollars. It's part of why I refer myself as an archivist rather than a collector; I was once told by a local bookseller that the fact that I specifically sought out books with marginalia in order to learn about communal reading practices made my archive useless, that I was not a "proper collector" and that I should actually THROW AWAY all of my books that had been "ruined" by their readers engaging with them (!). I've actually been known to add marginalia to a book specifically to make it useless to investment-collectors and mark it for real readers/archivists/researchers; in Marx's terms, to destroy the market-value and enhance the use-value.
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