Terrence Cole's book collection to be sold for library benefit Friday and Saturday
The books collected over the years by Alaska writer and historian Terrence Cole are to be sold and donations will be accepted Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Noel Wien Library. All proceeds will benefit the library.
“Most bibliomaniacs,” my twin brother Terrence once wrote, “would agree with Jack London that it is impossible ever to have enough books on enough subjects.”
My brother agreed with London. He found it impossible to go anywhere without scouting used book stores. He was an explorer looking for forgotten volumes or oddball entries that caught his interest.
He was always most at home in a library, in a book store or at a baseball game, where he could be found with a book to consult between innings.
He knew his way around Acres of Books in Cincinnati, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, and the Strand in New York City, but he spent many an enjoyable afternoon or evening at lesser-known establishments across the country.
His sons tell of trips to Arizona for spring training games during which Terrence and one of his mentors in the history dodge, William R. Hunt, would visit a used book emporium, while the sons would wait for the duration. Terrence would emerge a few hours later with a box of books to mail to Fairbanks.
When he saw a book that interested him, he bought it. It might be about a bicycle trip across China, a Washington biography written in one-syllable words or even “Cole’s Fun Doctor,” a $6 item from 1886 that has as a subtitle, “THE FUNNIEST BOOK IN THE WORLD.”
These volumes and a couple of thousand more became part of the raw material he drew upon to write a shelf full of books and papers. He also found inspiration here and there for details that helped enliven the hundreds of lectures he delivered to thousands of students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He didn’t believe in giving the same lecture twice, thinking the way to stay fresh was to always find something new.
“I’ve enjoyed the challenge of teaching the largest lecture class in freshman U.S. history,” he wrote after his first year teaching. “I think the freshman courses are the most important we offer.”
He said the freshman history course might be the one and only chance to show students how exciting history could be.
He never changed his mind about teaching introductory courses and he never stopped looking for exciting material about the past. There were always interesting connections to be made in the process of getting students to connect the dots and learn how to think.
One of his goals in life was to persuade students who showed up in class thinking history was as dull as dust that they had been given bad information.
The personal library of his that grew in somewhat haphazard way over the decades became a part of his personality and soul. In his office, basement, garage and shed, he kept company with Lincoln, Mencken, Orwell, E.B. White, Bancroft, Cervantes, Boswell and hundreds of lesser lights. He also collected old newspapers, bumper stickers, maps and photographs.
On Thursday night, a group of volunteers gathered at the Noel Wien Library auditorium to set up a big part of his collection for a sale that takes place Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to help the library expansion project. All of the donations will go to the library.
Our family decided that Terrence, who died in 2020 of stomach cancer, would want to see his books and other items go to people that might find something valuable in them, keeping the reading light lit for a while longer.
In a 2006 essay about the effort to select the 67 best Alaska history books, he touched on what he thought about the mystery of a book in someone’s hands.
“The reader is a crucial ingredient for any book, the author’s unseen colleague who brings the work to life every time its cover is opened. Even the lowest hack writer or the dullest scholar can produce a book with some value if it meets a discriminating partner and interpreter willing to turn its pages,” he said.
”The world of literature is never a poorer place from publication of what the majority might consider a poor book, because under the right conditions seriously flawed books—like seriously flawed people—can be more interesting than their counterparts.”
“Thankfully librarians, collectors and other book lovers seldom follow the example of Napoleon Bonaparte, who allegedly had the habit of tossing books out the window of his carriage when he had finished reading them or if the volume had incurred his displeasure.”