Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

For other modern accounts of natural theology, see J. H. Brooke's article

"Natural Theology and Plurality of Worlds Debate" in Annals of Science 1977, pp. 221-86, Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker (1987), and Robert Young's Darwin's Metaphor (1985). For an elegant piece of advocacy from the closest modern equivalent to a natural theologian, the astronomer Owen Gingerich, see his essay "Is There a Role for Natural Theology Today?" from Science and Theology (ed. Murray Roe et also., 1994), which is reprinted at

http://www.leaderu.com/real/ ri9501/natural.html. Further debate over the

anthropic principle can be found in Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers (1999) and John Barrow and Frank Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1998).

After this chapter, my debut in McSweeney's, was written, I stumbled across an article that appeared in the February 16, 1850, issue of Chamber's Edinburgh Journal. Ruefully titled "Specimen of Successful Authorship," it makes for heartbreaking reading.

Everyone has seen, or at least heard of, Dr. Dick's [works] .... Now what is the condition of this active and successful author? He is an old man--scarcely less than eighty years old: he entertains in his house a middle-aged wife and a family of orphan grandchildren. Being a retired schoolmaster, he enjoys a pension of l20 a year, besides about as much more from realized property. Now and then he writes a new book, or puts an old one through a new edition, and from that derives a few extra pounds. The sum of the whole is--POVERTY--POVERTY so great, that the postage of an American letter complimenting the author on his books often leaves him and his family with no resource for a dinner but the herbs in his garden.

Bear in mind that in Dick's era, it was the recipients of mail who were expected to pay the postage, and British authors rarely saw any money from the pirated editions of their work in the U.s. Dick did eventually receive an additional pension in his last few years, but still, imagine being aged and with scarcely three or four pounds income a month, and going hungry with your family while fan mail pours in with postage due. Looking up at his beloved stars may have been the old man's only solace.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From the day that I first voiced aloud an extraordinarily vague notion--"What if I wrote a book about things that didn't work out?"-my wife, Jennifer, has been there for me. She has been this book's first advocate, its first reader and editor, and it simply could not have been written without her.

I am also deeply indebted to Dave Eggers for this book's existence. After the first couple of chapters got dozens of rejections like "I've never heard of these people that you're writing about"--as if that weren't the point of the book--in desperation I sent a chapter to Dave with the note "Everybody hates this, maybe you will too." And to Dave's great credit, at a time when everyone else couldn't even be bothered to go past the cover letter of an unknown writer, he read and understood exactly what I was doing. This book is in many ways a child of his McSweeney's magazine, and he has helped it every step of the way.

Becky Kurson read my work in McSweeney's and lavished praise and attention on it, becoming an extraordinary agent on my behalf. Tim Bent of St. Martin's

Press took a chance on an oddball book and then gave it more attention than I could have hoped for from anyone. On the home front, both my son Morgan and I thank Marc Thomas for being such a great Uncle Zonker to my Doonesbury. And, lest I forget, thanks to my friends and my parents; over the years they all have humored a fellow who, rather than seeking out a steady job and paying rent on time, lived on ramen and bought old books instead.

Finally, my thanks to the very patient librarians at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the University of California, Dominican University, Golden Gate University, San Francisco State University, Johns Hopkins University, the San Francisco Public Library, the Concord Free Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Library of Medicine. Libraries exist to preserve the thoughts and deeds that no one else has time for anymore, to collect items that might not be used for another ten, fifty, one hundred years--if ever. It is this last uncertainty that makes libraries the most heroic of human creations.

THE END