Near Stockholm’s elegant main library, I wandered into a coffee shop.
The chain which has such shops all over town has a distinctive décor in that the walls, from tabletop level to the tall ceiling, have bookshelves filled with very old books. I assumed the corporate owners ordered some thousands of feet of books from sellers of otherwise unsaleable volumes. I have never seen anyone read the books in the several shops of this chain I have been in.
I had a book of my own with me and had finished it before I finished my coffee. I continued to sit, not feeling the need to move away from the comfortable chair, well away from the noisy part of the coffee shop. My eyes wandered to the tall bookshelf close by my left side and, as I love to wander in used bookstores, I looked more closely. Not many books were within reach, but two large volumes were: The Golden Bough and Gulliver’s Travels.
I had heard of The Golden Bough and quickly leafed through it and did an Internet search on its history. It seemed not my cup of tea. I replaced it and retrieved Gulliver, which I had first read as a child, and studied in the English 1 class at San Francisco Community College in 1958.
This Gulliver is very old and has been mishandled. There are dents in the cover, pages are turning yellow, and someone had put the leaves of plants between some pages, and these are now like ashes, sticking hard to the page and some having merged with the page, creating brown stains.
I asked the barista if I could borrow the book. This request was so odd that she was momentarily nonplussed but finding no rules governing such a request she assented with a curious smile.
As I began to closely examine it at home, I could find no publishing date, so I asked the Internet and found that this edition was recorded as received by the British Library in 1864 and 1865.
At home, I scanned 86 pages of illustrations and several more of text.
The illustrations helped to create the atmosphere of verisimilitude in this fantasy, along with the text. There were so many, large and small, that one could call this a graphic novel.
The “Explanatory Notes” referred to on the title page are invaluable to see what and who the author was satirizing and, in some instances, vilifying.
Since a youth, I have read many of the famous novels of the 18th and 19th Centuries. I enjoyed, anew, reading the more formal and descriptive language offered in Gulliver.
The fourth and final voyage:
After the four voyages are ended, the author/”narrator” delivers a screed against the imperialism of European nations which conquer, enslave and steal the treasures of nations in other spheres (the New World).
In the final pages, which are commentary by the publisher, I learned that they expurgated the “indelicacies” contained the original writing. I remember such indelicacies were not eliminated from the text in my English-1 class, one having to do with the awe that the Lilliputians viewed the exposed genitals of the giant Gulliver whose clothes were in tatters from his journey. No doubt, other expurgations had to do with the excretory processes of humans and animals, especially in the land of the Houyhnhnms, as I remember.
I end with an excerpt from the commentary on the final (fourth) story:
