I have been editing a book of academic essays, which the compilers have organized as a tribute to the work of the scholar David S. Reynolds, whose field is the American Renaissance--that is, nineteenth-century American literature and culture. I had no idea that Reynolds was such an influence among academics, but he has certainly influenced me. I think I have read his book Walt Whitman's America three or four times; it offers such an amazing display of the way in which Whitman absorbed his busy world into his work. As biographies go, I would put it on the shelf right up there next to Jackson Bate's biography of Keats.

So yesterday, as I was reaching the end of my editing assignment, I realized that Reynolds had written the afterword of the manuscript--I was going to be editing the man himself. And I was not much surprised to learn that he is a beautiful writer who required very little from me. The essay was about Lincoln and religion--gleaned, I'm assuming, from the biography of Lincoln that is his current project. So while I can't buy that book yet (and I will), I can buy the one I've been meaning to read for a while: Reynolds's biography of the abolitionist John Brown. That will fit beautifully into my current transcendentalist meanderings, as both Thoreau and the Alcotts sympathized with Brown's radical actions.

There is nothing like falling down the reading rabbit-hole, is there? Let us lift a glass to the libraries and the bookcases and the old falling-apart volumes and the books we meant to read and finally did and the books we stumble over with joy and the curious jolt of rereading the same book twenty times and the heft of a fat hardback in the hand.