Book Review: Words of Wisdom

Title: Words of Wisdom

("Beautifully lithographed and bound," an Amazon seller claims. Hoot. It's an old book and I don't know what the copy I physically own has "lived" through, but I know I found it in delicate condition, with its flimsy gilt binding starting to crumble.)

Author: Thomas C. Jones

Date: Ferguson

Publisher: 1966

ISBN: none

Length: 224 pages

Illustrations: drawings, some claimed by Kay Lovelace Smith, some anonymous

Quote: “Any selection of reading as widely varied as this becomes almost a literary lottery...the material had to qualify only on the basis of being enlightening, provocative, amusing, or tastefully expressed.”

This is a Commonplace Book, a collection of things that appealed to an individual reader, who then got permission to reprint them. Some of the selections qualify as “wisdom” in the sense of general advice, including George Washington’s “Maxims for Better Living,” Arthur Smith’s selection of some ancient Chinese proverbs and the author’s own selection of “Proverbs to Ponder,” and others in the first section (pages 1-68). Then there are thirty pages of American patriotism including Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and “the Monroe Doctrine,” 20 pages on sports, 10 pages of “Humor,” 42 pages “Mostly For Men,” 22 pages from “The Women’s World,” and 26 pages on “Business.”

Some men may be pleased, and others disappointed, that “Mostly for Men” contains no pornography. What Jones felt to be “man-to-man” writing was first published for a general audience and has some appeal for women; it includes “A Page from the Poor Richard’s Series,” “Wonders of the Yellowstone Area,” “The Characters of Damon Runyon,” a short piece by Albert Schweitzer on “Reverence for Life,” Thucydides’ “A Democracy Cannot Govern an Empire,” and selections from Emerson, Joyce Kilmer, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Montaigne, and William Penn.

“The Women’s World,” more irritatingly, consists mostly of selections from male writers. They’re not even about women; two poems about word selection, one that seems to be a father’s lament for a departed son, and a trite selection from Emerson about (originally male) friendship, may have appealed to Mrs. Jones or seemed to touch on women’s interests, but they’re not, in fact, part of any “women’s world.” Nobody could get away with that today, I hope—even though the individual selections could have been scattered through the book.

Apart from that bit of gratuitous sexism...other people’s Commonplace Books are usually not one’s own, but they usually make an interesting collection of short reading. This one is still likely to be appreciated in waiting rooms, bathrooms, on bedside tables, or anywhere where people open a book at random and read one or two pages at a time.

Even for a web site that tries to avoid gushing about “luminous prose” or proclaiming everything I’d like to sell to be The Great American Novel, someone is saying, this is a tepid review. I can’t help that. I am an older reader, no longer prone to the hormone surges that fuel young readers’ enthusiasms. Words of Wisdom is a nice collection, containing several now-obscure poems you might want to copy into your own Commonplace Book or “miscellanous quotes” file. I said George Washington, Albert Schweitzer, and William Penn didn’t I? What more could you ask? There’s a two-page selection of original poems that people used to be allowed to write on the fronts of envelopes by way of addresses: “Swiftly hasten, Postman’s organ, / Bear this onward to its fate, / In New York to George C. Morgan; / John Street, No. 78.” There’s a prayer from Dr. Tom Dooley and a speech by Knute Rockne and an abridgment of “Alibi Ike.” I did like this book, and so, if you enjoy reading short selections, will you.

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