A Book Is Not
A Pile of Papers

Who's throwing leather-bound books in the trash?

Last spring, as I was recycling cardboard, I looked up to see an employee at the dump ripping the front and back covers off of a thick leather-bound book. I yelled to him to stop, and I took it from his hands.

"Why are you ripping the covers off?" I asked. He said it was so he could recycle the book, nothing more, it seems, than a pile of papers. I told him I'd take the book home.

It turned out to be a Bible printed in Concord, N.H. in 1848. (They have the same edition—with intact covers—on display at the Vermont Historical Society museum in Montpelier.) My copy, though now separated from its covers, was full of interesting items, including rare old photographs (salt prints), a Tufts University (then College) commencement program from 1895, two eulogies, a commemorative poem, an essay on the sad state of our nation's roads (written in the most beautiful cursive hand I've ever seen), obituaries from an old newspaper.

There were a few names sprinkled here and there, enough for me to piece together, with help and encouragement from the Vermont Historical Society's Amy Cunningham, Marjorie Strong, and Paul Carnahan, that the Bible from the Randolph dump had belonged at one time to the T(h)wing and Gale families of Twingsville, a settlement on the Barre-Montpelier Road. How it found its way to the Randolph dump I don't know.

Yesterday, as I was about to throw my recycling into the bin, I saw on top of the pile two more coverless leather-bound books. I shouted out something like, "Not again! Who is throwing out old books?!"

This time it was a Bible published in Cooperstown in 1843 (inscribed proudly in pencil "William Washburn, Jr. Presented by his Mother"); the other An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, published by the George and Charles Merriam Company in Springfield, Mass., 1851 (identified—in a rotund hand, again in pencil—as "J.B. Washburn's Book, West Randolph, Vermont").

Neither book contained the family treasures of the previous find, but the Bible contains a small pamphlet, apparently printed by Seventh Day Adventists, about the "mistake" of making Sunday the sabbath when the Bible clearly states that the day of rest should be the seventh day. To emphasize the depravity of the error, the writer sketched a ghoulish hypothetical case in which an ill person asks his friend to bring him medicine from the seventh bottle on his shelf; the friend, through a bit of sophistical fraction work, brings instead the first bottle ("one-seventh of the bottles," he reasons); and the ill man dies, since bottle number one holds not a remedy but a poison.

Isn't it instructive and poignant, this evidence of an era when fervently self-righteous adherents of sects WITHIN Christianity were ascribing heretical, damnable errors to each other? How far into the future do we have to travel to find our interreligious antagonisms quaint, trivial, redolent of mothballs and rancid hair tonic?

Thank you, Someone, for your refuse. One man's meat is another man's poison; one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Walt Garner, Jr.

West Brookfield