| One effect of the lockdown is that the University of Chicago Library is closed. This has resulted in a windfall for used bookstores, as I buy the books that I can't take out of the library. Sometimes when you buy an old book you find mementos of the previous owners that turn out to be as interesting as the books themselves. Some time ago I found the card of Kenneth A. R. Kennedy in a book I bought. He turns out to have been a paleo-anthropologist who taught at Cornell and spent some of his career digging up hominid remains in India. He died in 2014 at the age of 83, his library was bought by some bookseller, and so his well-thumbed copy of "Colloquial Sinhala" came into my hands. More recently I bought a book whose cover was stamped "Prof. Dr. Johannes Rahder, Hall of Graduate Studies, Yale University". Google found me his obituary, from which I learned that the professor was Dutch, born in Indonesia in 1898, when it was still the Dutch East Indies, and his father was governor of part of Sumatra. He got his doctorate in 1930 with a dissertation on Mahayana Buddhism, and taught at Utrecht until moving to Leiden in 1934 to be professor of Japanese there. He stayed at Leiden until 1946, surviving the war and the starvation winter of 1945-6 in Holland. In 1946 he got a job at the University of Hawaii, which must have been a blessed relief after what he had been through. And then the next year he moved to Yale, where he stayed the rest of his life. He retired in 1965 and died in 1988. Best of all is my copy of Christopher Reynolds' dissertation. Reynolds was studying at Oxford when World War II started. His military service took him to Italy and then to Ceylon after the war ended, and he became attached to the place, its people, and its language. When he came back home he finished his degree at Oxford, and then moved to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and studied Sinhala. He continued on and in 1959 finished his dissertation about a Sinhala text from the middle ages. I bought what is probably the only copy of it outside of the library of SOAS. It's his own copy, a carbon of the original, and every page has his tiny indecipherable notes. It was an austere time in Britain, and nothing was to be wasted. A notebook was probably an inconceivable extravagance - you just wrote on any piece of paper that had a little blank space. So the dissertation is stuffed with papers and envelopes that he used to make additional notes on. Among them are a ticket (admit 2) to a lecture he gave in 1968 and a receipt from Blackwell's issued at about the time (not to the minute, but who knows?) that I was being conceived in Bowling Green, Ohio. Reynolds and his wife lived in Westerham, Kent, and had four children. The obituaries make him sound like a wonderful guy. When he died in 2015 at the age of 92 his dissertation went to a bookseller in Rye, and so came to me. |
| Created on 14 May 2020, updated on 21 May 2020 by Samuel Ethan Fox |