"The [bookshelf] is an enchanting thing / Is an enchanted thing..."

Today's finds:

Books so special they're making my hands shake:

1) A Sweet Songster from 1854. This is a book that Baptists (Old Regular Baptists in recent years, though I don't know what the denomination would have been called back then) used to line out hymns for singing. Not a lot of people could read, so one "elder" would "line out" the hymns for the rest of the congregation to sing along with....I'm writing this in the past tense--thinking about 1854--but there are several Old Regular Baptist congregations around Hindman (and elsewhere in Appalachia and places where outmigrants settled, such as Detroit), so this could very well be written in the present tense. This denomination of Baptists did not believe in using instruments in church, so the hymns in the Sweet Songster don't have any musical markings: no treble or bass clef, no shaped notes, no indication of how the song was to be sung. So, the Songster looks mostly like a book of poetry, hardback, palm-sized, small enough to fit in a shirt or hip pocket, pack-of-cigarettes sized.

2) A first edition of Nevertheless by Marianne Moore--I know this for sure because it says so: first printing. Its a small hardback chapbook with dust jacket. It contains six poems: "Nevertheless," "The Wood-Weasel," "Elephants," "A Carriage from Sweden," "The Mind is an Enchanting Thing," and "In Distrust of Merits."

3) What is probably a first edition of A Boy's Will by Robert Frost--from 1915.

These three books lined up, unceremoniously, on a shelf among Modern Library hardbacks, and mass market paperbacks from my own lifetime.