A Course Is a Course, Unless of Course ...

Leo the cat goes home today and I begin filling the wooden boxes for the antiquarian book fair. Once again, I sold a book I had planned to take, but it’s okay, as it got me to thinking about an area of collecting you may never have considered – antiquarian and vintage self-help books and courses. Ever since I was a kid I have loved independent learning. In fact, I still believe the word autodidact was coined just for me. When I was still in high school I somehow managed to cajole my extremely – um, thrifty -- father into spending an obscene amount of money for the Famous Writer’s Course, which of course later proved to be rather bogus, but thrilled me nonetheless and still does. The heady excitement when the big box arrived from Westport, Connecticut filled with books and assignments still almost makes me believe I could be the next Harper Lee.  From that day forward courses of all kinds have called my name.

Over the years I have bought and sold many of these – it’s amazing how many types there are covering so many topics – The Roth Memory Course (LOVE that one and so do buyers), The Purinton Foundation Course in Personal Efficiency and How to Master the New Science of Personal Efficiency (just shipped that to Denmark last week), and The Course in Human Betterment. There are also radio courses, electronics courses, singing courses, art courses, courses on phrenology, and, my two other all-time favorites, The Home Study Course for Hawaiian Guitar published by the U.S. School of Music in 1938 and the rare Marshall Stillman Boxing Course. I’ve bought them all and sold them all, yet my love for them remains boundless.

So yesterday when I sold Annie Payson Call’s book The Heart of Good Health from 1907 (I’d previously sold her Nerves and Common Sense from 1910) it got me to wondering whether I’m the only one who swoons over vintage self-help. The field is huge – I consider early New Thought material to be part of it – and yet the stuff can be maddeningly elusive. Annie Payson Call, for example, was enormously popular in her day – she wrote regularly for Ladies Home Journal in addition to penning books on emotional and physical health, and yet today you say her name and most people stare back blankly. As for her writings, it would be easier to find a gold nugget in the backyard. I got both of her books at the same time and have never seen any since even though my “bookdar” is set so high for this stuff I swear it would go off if anything existed in a twenty mile radius even if were buried in a steel box underground. The last time I bought such a thing was last fall at an estate sale in Wooster where Orison Marsden’s The Secret of Achievement suddenly began flashing in neon red and nobody but me seemed to notice. Marsden started Success Magazine in 1897 and contributed regularly to Elizabeth Towne's magazine Nautilus – about which I will refrain from excessive gushing, as I think you already can guess I’m crazy about it.

Right now I have in stock a VERY cool course, but the thing is I’ve had it about three years, and haven’t listed it because I can’t find a comparable for it and am not sure what the market will bear. This one is Alois Swaboda’s course in Swabodism which is a blend of mind control and physical culture and is believed to have inspired Houdini. Swaboda signed mine, which includes the six lessons, a seventh called Confidential Instructions for the Application of Organic Stress to the Sexual System (yeah -- how about THAT in 1920’s?), plus How To Change From Worry to Happiness and How To Induce Others to Do For You What You Desire. I’d like to take the whole shebang to the fair, but can’t seem to settle on a fair (ha-ha) price. If any of you know anything about this my ears are wide open.

Admittedly, vintage self-help does sort of beg to be chuckled over, but it’s nonetheless a genuine collecting field even if you give it zero legitimacy. As for me, I am not a famous writer, I would be hard pressed to play even a few notes of Aloha Oe on the Hawaiian guitar, have a terrible memory for some things and a prodigious one for others, can’t divine character by the bumps on anyone’s head, can’t build a radio, can’t wire a lamp, worry incessantly, can’t carry a tune and can’t draw a stick figure. I do, however, have great boxing skills, which is good, since I have to haul sixteen boxes of books to Akron very soon.