Guide to Seashells was Poe’s Best-Selling Book During His Lifetime

Edgar A. Poe landed in Philadelphia in 1838. He had been raised among the elite of Richmond, Virginia, but in Philadelphia he was an impoverished outsider seeking recognition and stability as a professional writer. Strikingly, Poe’s first publication in Philadelphia—and the one that sold the most in his lifetime—was a scientific textbook.

When Poe arrived with his teenage wife (and first cousin) Virginia Clemm and her mother Maria, they were “literally suffering for want of food,” living on “bread and molasses for weeks together.” Poe’s friend James Pedder, well situated at a sugar manufacturer’s, purifying the raw goods delivered from Caribbean slave islands, came to their aid; his daughters, Bessie and Anna, visited with gifts for “Sissy” and “Muddy.” Pedder was also editor of The Farmers’ Cabinet, publicizing techniques for improving soils and raising crops—the kind of practical, commercially oriented publication in which much of the era’s natural science was reported and discussed. Pedder had studied the beet industry in France and was scheming to introduce beet sugar to the States.

Enter Poe, newly arrived and eager for work. Thanks to his work on his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and reviews he had written, Poe had a proven record on scientific topics. Fluent in French, he could work through the relevant volumes by Cuvier, Lamarck, Blainville, and naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, all available for consultation in the Library Company on Locust Street—an august space overlooked by a giant bust of Athena.

Published in 1839, The Conchologist’s First Book by Edgar A. Poe was slim, portable, and inexpensive, with several plates of engraved shells. The preface and introduction were lifted from Wyatt’s book and from Thomas Brown’s Elements of Conchology, which openly acknowledged their own debts to French precursors. Though later wags accused Poe of plagiarism for this book, all “new” systems of natural history depended on earlier systems, which were in turn the product of an enormous collective and largely anonymous labor by observers, collectors, and taxonomists around the world. In his preface, Poe thanked Isaac Lea for his “valuable public labors” and for “private assistance” in preparing the book.

Poe introduced important improvements. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out the book’s “progressive, even innovative, arrangement of material.” Brown’s book had followed the order of description of Lamarck, presenting the shells descending from those taken as most advanced or perfect to the lower, more “primitive” types, but Poe adopted a more widely practiced convention, ascending from “lower” shells upward.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conchologist's_First_Book

Article source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/edgar-allan-poe-seashell-book