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Raw Material
Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2022 with the help of original edition published long back [1923]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 314. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete Raw material 1923 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, -
302 pages, Hardback
First published January 1, 1923
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About the author
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
199 books140 followersAlso wrote under the name Dorothy Canfield.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States. In addition to bringing the Montessori method of child-rearing to the U.S., she presided over the country's first adult education program and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951.
(from Wikipedia)
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States. In addition to bringing the Montessori method of child-rearing to the U.S., she presided over the country's first adult education program and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 22, 2022
July 20, 930pm ~~ Review asap.
July 21, 6-ish ~~ This is the final Fisher book in my little project to read her work. I am now reading a biography so I cannot call this challenge complete until that book is finished, but I have read as much as I am going to by Fisher herself.
I had mixed reactions to her work. Some I loved, some I didn't finish, some I skipped as not at all appealing to me. Raw Material was one I came to love but at first I was a bit bent out of shape by it.
The book is a collection of sketches written by Fisher about people she had known or known about; people who made an impact on her at some point in life. Some were family members, others were people she met at school in Europe, others were personages in Vermont history. Each chapter deals with one person, and all are well written, not mere notes from a sketchbook.
I do wish that there had been dates showing when each piece was first written, that information would have been both interesting and helpful. I say this because one piece, titled Scylla And Charydis was obviously the seed for Fisher's delightful 1917 novel Understood Betsy. Raw Material as a book was not published until 1923, so to my way of thinking that meant that these sketches were collected for the book but not actually written specifically for this book. But of course I may be wrong, maybe she wrote these stories from notes she had made earlier that had been transformed into Understood Betsy and other titles. Maybe she wrote these stories without thinking of her audience, she wrote them only for herself. So then why share?
There was another piece that felt incredibly familiar, Professor Paul Meyer, a story about an actual professor Fisher studied with in France. He has an article at Wiki and everything, so I know he was a real person. In the story Fisher shows us his character and what happened to him during a time when his opinions became very unpopular for the public. I had a sense of deja vu while reading this piece, especially during the climatic scenes. I had not read any other books by Fisher until this little project, but I have read a few of her short stories in collections. I was too lazy to try and track them down, but I know one story featured a professor who responded to a situation the way Fisher actually saw Meyer respond in real life.
I skimmed through a few of the chapters, but overall I very much enjoyed the book. You might be wondering by now why I said at the beginning of this review that I was a bit bent out of shape by it. Well, that comes from the first chapter, in which Fisher explains "this rather odd book" and what she intended by offering it. The whole topic is a little too complex and (still) confusing for me to go into too deeply here, but one main idea was that she much preferred the stories she wrote just for herself as compared with the stories she wrote for a certain audience. And why was that?
Because she understood exactly what she meant by the phrases she used, she could see the different characters in her mind exactly the way she intended them to be, and so on. Her father did a lot of public speaking and while in an audience would mentally riff on the topic as he himself would present it. (So he never really heard the other's point of view, did he?!) Anyway, Fisher says "Just as my father had been the ideal audience for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale all the experience which made it intelligible."
Up to that point I could kind of sympathize. A writer, poet, painter or musician must always feel that no one else could truly understand their art the way the creator did. They would want to say no no no that is not what I am saying in this piece, can't you SEE?! But then she goes on to other comments about how novel reading makes a person lazy and unappreciative of real life incidents, caring to look for excitement only in the pages of books, when there is plenty right in front of a person's nose if only we would take a look.
Here is what else she says:
"Other people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels.”
There is more in that paragraph, but I was pretty confused by this point. Fisher was a writer and yet she was complaining about how reading books takes you away from experiencing life for yourself, and claiming that writers have a desperate need to share their point of view? Is she insulting readers, writers or both? To tell the truth I still haven't quite sorted out this first chapter. All I know for sure is that I need some chocolate. NOW.
This is not really a peek inside a writer's notebook, the kind of thing where you write down bits of description about what you see going on around you or a phrase you hear that strikes your fancy and you don't want to forget. But it is a peek inside the way Dorothy Canfield Fisher felt about these particular people, and that gives us a clear picture of how she felt about Life. I like her, even if I did not always like her books. And one of these days I will come back to that first chapter and puzzle it all out until I am satisfied that I understand her.
I'd better buy more chocolate first, though.
July 21, 6-ish ~~ This is the final Fisher book in my little project to read her work. I am now reading a biography so I cannot call this challenge complete until that book is finished, but I have read as much as I am going to by Fisher herself.
I had mixed reactions to her work. Some I loved, some I didn't finish, some I skipped as not at all appealing to me. Raw Material was one I came to love but at first I was a bit bent out of shape by it.
The book is a collection of sketches written by Fisher about people she had known or known about; people who made an impact on her at some point in life. Some were family members, others were people she met at school in Europe, others were personages in Vermont history. Each chapter deals with one person, and all are well written, not mere notes from a sketchbook.
I do wish that there had been dates showing when each piece was first written, that information would have been both interesting and helpful. I say this because one piece, titled Scylla And Charydis was obviously the seed for Fisher's delightful 1917 novel Understood Betsy. Raw Material as a book was not published until 1923, so to my way of thinking that meant that these sketches were collected for the book but not actually written specifically for this book. But of course I may be wrong, maybe she wrote these stories from notes she had made earlier that had been transformed into Understood Betsy and other titles. Maybe she wrote these stories without thinking of her audience, she wrote them only for herself. So then why share?
There was another piece that felt incredibly familiar, Professor Paul Meyer, a story about an actual professor Fisher studied with in France. He has an article at Wiki and everything, so I know he was a real person. In the story Fisher shows us his character and what happened to him during a time when his opinions became very unpopular for the public. I had a sense of deja vu while reading this piece, especially during the climatic scenes. I had not read any other books by Fisher until this little project, but I have read a few of her short stories in collections. I was too lazy to try and track them down, but I know one story featured a professor who responded to a situation the way Fisher actually saw Meyer respond in real life.
I skimmed through a few of the chapters, but overall I very much enjoyed the book. You might be wondering by now why I said at the beginning of this review that I was a bit bent out of shape by it. Well, that comes from the first chapter, in which Fisher explains "this rather odd book" and what she intended by offering it. The whole topic is a little too complex and (still) confusing for me to go into too deeply here, but one main idea was that she much preferred the stories she wrote just for herself as compared with the stories she wrote for a certain audience. And why was that?
Because she understood exactly what she meant by the phrases she used, she could see the different characters in her mind exactly the way she intended them to be, and so on. Her father did a lot of public speaking and while in an audience would mentally riff on the topic as he himself would present it. (So he never really heard the other's point of view, did he?!) Anyway, Fisher says "Just as my father had been the ideal audience for himself, so I was my own best reader, a reader who needed no long explanations, who caught the idea at once, who brought to the tale all the experience which made it intelligible."
Up to that point I could kind of sympathize. A writer, poet, painter or musician must always feel that no one else could truly understand their art the way the creator did. They would want to say no no no that is not what I am saying in this piece, can't you SEE?! But then she goes on to other comments about how novel reading makes a person lazy and unappreciative of real life incidents, caring to look for excitement only in the pages of books, when there is plenty right in front of a person's nose if only we would take a look.
Here is what else she says:
"Other people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels.”
There is more in that paragraph, but I was pretty confused by this point. Fisher was a writer and yet she was complaining about how reading books takes you away from experiencing life for yourself, and claiming that writers have a desperate need to share their point of view? Is she insulting readers, writers or both? To tell the truth I still haven't quite sorted out this first chapter. All I know for sure is that I need some chocolate. NOW.
This is not really a peek inside a writer's notebook, the kind of thing where you write down bits of description about what you see going on around you or a phrase you hear that strikes your fancy and you don't want to forget. But it is a peek inside the way Dorothy Canfield Fisher felt about these particular people, and that gives us a clear picture of how she felt about Life. I like her, even if I did not always like her books. And one of these days I will come back to that first chapter and puzzle it all out until I am satisfied that I understand her.
I'd better buy more chocolate first, though.
April 24, 2012
Published in 1923, this is an unassuming collection of sketches of individuals who touched the author's life in some way. I found it to be immensely readable. The quality of the chapters is uneven, but at their best, these portraits are quite moving. Most of the people depicted only intersected with Fisher's life in a tangential way; there are three fathers of school fellows here, and some forebears and one legendary local character who died long before she was born, so the book doesn't reveal as much about Fisher as one might expect. It left me eager to know more about her life, and to read more of her writing.
January 25, 2008
A collection of "short stories", except they are all 'found' stories...meaning that they are true portraits of people the author came across in life, or descriptions of episodes she experienced. Wonderful.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews