The Way of Life According to LaoTzu

It was 2024 PIGYS weekend in Cathlamet, Washington. I'm nosing through banker’s boxes outside the fire station filled with 1970's Betty Crocker cookbooks, golf tips, a few VHS fitness tapes...and out of nowhere this little pink-and-red hardcover blinked at me. The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, the John Day Company edition translated by Witter Bynner. I’d been reading a Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh discourse on the Tao just weeks prior, which made this the only spiritual title in a whole parking lot sale feel deliberate. You know, Tao doing Tao things.

The book is pretty cool. Bynner’s mid-century American take on the Tao Te Ching was pretty popular in it's early years, and was one of the translations written by a poet and not a scolar. Right away I took note of the fact that the inside copyright page reads “12th Impression,” while the dust jacket states “12th Printing.” Nice little mystery for book-people, and one that I automatically attributed to those good old days where books were printed with literal plates.

Speaking of plates, the coolest thing I found inside was a pasted bookplate that the owner had typed their information onto using a typewriter (see above, right):

Clifton Furlow 27 Pleasant Ridge San Jose, CA.

And even cooler was a hand written date at the top of the bookplate in ink, as well as two handwritten names underneath Clifton's information at the bottom - same handwriting, same ink:

Janet Crew and Maria Wallace

I love that this little book crossed decades, states, and counties to tap me on the shoulder. The bookplate turns it from any old copy into a copy with history. An address fixes it on a street and three names mark at least two bookshelves where this lived before mine.

(If these names ring a bell and you think the people you may know owned this book in the 1940's-1950's, I’d love to hear from you and map its path. Drop a note in the comments or email/DM me with memories, yearbook scans, church or club rosters, neighborhood directories..whatever you’ve got!)