felis_ultharus

Last night, in my "early Canadian print culture" class (the one with the ancient books), my professor pulled out a photocopy of an article he'd found in a Canadian literary review dated to 1935. So far as he knew, only one copy of said book exists, and it has not been reprinted since.

The article was the last surviving copy of Sitting Bull's version of the Battle of Little Bighorn, which has entered American mythology as Custer's Last Stand. This version is very different from the version preserved in official histories. Almost no one knows it exists.

I keep mocking the English Literature establishment, saying they don't really matter. But the people making the decisions about which books are preserved as classics, and which rot away on a shelf somewhere -- the people making that decision tends to be us.

And with preserved books comes preserved history. So much is being lost. Libraries throw books away all the time.

I also held in my hand yesterday two enormous books of poetry published in 1876. I didn't think there was that much poetry published in Canada that whole century, let alone in two books. There was actually lots of Canadian poetry of the time. Just no one was preserving it.

Of course, they were books of Orangemen poetry, so they were nothing more than anti-Catholic propaganda in iambic pentamenter. Which may be another reason no one was preserving them :/