The Secret Life of Books by Tom Mole

Author:Tom Mole [Mole, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783964604
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
Published: 2019-09-19T07:00:00+00:00

Once we get to school, books become essential to our learning. But schools have often invested money in books, and then invested them with prestige, in a way that far exceeds their pedagogical use. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, schools in Britain and America – as well as many Sunday schools – gave books as prizes for conduct and academic performance. In a well-known episode from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Mark Twain tells the story of how Tom finagles his way to getting a coveted Sunday-school prize: a Bible earned by memorising verses of scripture.5 Tom, who is already a notorious scapegrace, hasn’t actually memorised the verses. He has traded trinkets for the tickets awarded to other children for their feats of memorisation, and so accumulated enough tickets to exchange for the prize. For, although Tom has no aptitude for applying himself to rote learning, he longs for the glory of being presented with the book. It ends badly, of course, when Tom reveals his lack of knowledge in front of the class and the visiting dignitaries there to present the Bible. But the scene reminds us that books are objects that can be endowed with prestige and that, in turn, can bestow prestige on their possessors.

That power was mobilised on a grand scale in schools and Sunday schools well into the twentieth century. Publishers produced books specially marketed to schools for use as prizes. They often included presentation pages in the front, with spaces to write the recipient’s name and the occasion on which they had been awarded. These books prompted their purchasers and recipients to act in certain ways. They were valued not only for the educational or entertainment value of their contents but also as signs of achievement. At the centre of a ritual conferring prestige on selected individuals, the books were markers of distinction.

Once a year at my school, pupils, teachers and parents used to gather in the school hall for Speech Day. As I remember it, this was an occasion on which speeches were more or less incidental but books were essential. A few weeks before the event, pupils who had excelled at different subjects were given book tokens and told to buy a book and hand it in to the school office. There, the secretaries pasted in a bookplate saying to whom it was being awarded and why. On Speech Day itself, the books stood piled high on tables at the back of the stage, and pupils came up one by one to be given their book by whichever minor local dignitary had been invited to distribute them. Similar scenes, no doubt, played out in many other schools and had done for many years. The whole occasion was a ritual of amassing, marking and ceremonially redistributing books. The minor local dignitary gave a speech afterwards, but as schoolchildren we thought that the bit with the books was the main event.

Eager students spent their book tokens on improving works of literature calculated to impress the teachers.

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