Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

a. w. stratton

I've been meaning to write this entry for quite a while now, but had been procrastinating. Then a couple of entries on Desbladet and Gironale Nuovo, and a book I picked up on remainder reminded me. It all started a while back at one of my favorite used book stores. I have a standing joke with Michael, the proprietor: "Have any famous linguists died recently?" Over the years, he's bought the libraries of quite a few linguists, and I've had the luck, as one of his few walk-in customers, of looking through the books before they've been priced or entered into his catalog for sale. Anyway, one day he'd acquired the library of Carleton Hodge [1917-1998], professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Indiana, best known as an Africanist. It seems also that Professor Hodge collected a lot of pre-owned linguistics books outside his field, one of which I snapped up off the shelf that day: the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes par Ferdinand de Saussure. True, it was the second edition of 1887 and, though nicely bound, the book itself was a little worse for its wear.

Opening it, I saw its previous owner's signature ex libris: "Property of / Carleton T. Hodge / 1961", but it was the bookplate on the inside of the front cover and some other annotations that caught my eye and imagination. It was an ex-library copy that had been sold and replaced on the shelves of Johns Hopkins University library by what was described as the "Collitz 1879 copy". Well, it made sense that my book had been out-trumped by a copy of the first edition pre-owned by the equally more famous linguist, Hermann Collitz [1855-1935]. The bookplate informed me that this copy had belonged to the "Stratton Memorial Library / A Gift by his wife of the Library of / Alfred William Stratton, / 1866–1902. / Ph. D. Johns Hopkins University, 1895 / Principal of the Orient College and Registrar / of the Punjab University, at Lahore." Inside on the title page was the signature, partially obscured by restoration work, of "A. W. Stratton 1892", and the stamp of the previous owner, a M. Hériot.

A quick look around the the online catalog of the JHU library revealed two books, one his dissertation and the other his collected letters edited by his widow. I found a copy of the Letters from India, 1908, in the local university library and as soon as possible checked it out. It turned out that Mr Stratton had studied Sanskrit and Greek with Maurice Bloomfield at JHU and at the time of his death was in contact with Carl Darling Buck at Chicago about enlarging his research materials into a book of some sort. He had run a small college in what is today Pakistan, where he died early of a fever. His Letters has been republished by a Pakistani publisher. I later found a used presentation copy online.

Just a few extra bits of writing had lead me off on this wonderful adventure. This book had traveled from Paris to Baltimore to Lahore to Baltimore to Bloomington to El Cerrito and, no doubt, other places in between. There are only a few examples of Stratton's marginalia in the Système, one on p. 18, "See [Phillip] Bersu / die Gutteralen [und ihre Verbindung mit v im Lateinischen, Berlin, 1885] / p.151f." Another book, another day.