Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman

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Summary: Sowing the Seeds of Civilization
Review: Perfect Sowing arrives as a companion to A Few Reasonable Words. Like its predecessor, it consists of previously uncollected essays, reviews, and introductions that offer glimpses into the writing life and publishing life of Henry Regnery (1912-1996). It was Regnery's goal to publish serious books, particularly those that went against the temper of the times.

Contemporary literature students hear nothing about Wyndham Lewis or Roy Campbell, who we meet in these pages through Regnery's relationships with them, along with Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Whittaker Chambers, Romano Guardini, and Karl Jaspers. My sense is that Regnery derived a great deal of pleasure from publishing, whether it meant traveling to Germany to meet a professor, to Spain to secure a translation, or at his desk in Chicago, poring through manuscripts. Whenever I read about his life, I cannot help sharing the excitement of the enterprise.

If there is a thread in all the pieces here, it is Regnery's sense of himself as a kind of intellectual archaeologist, saving what ought to be saved, dismissing what ought to be dismissed. Hence there is continuity between the early chapters, about growing up in Hinsdale, Illinois, in the early 1900s, and the later chapters, about the decline and vulgarization of publishing. All of these essays are tinged with the elegiac tone of a man who felt uncomfortable in the modern world. Much of what he valued he felt was being discarded. Yet this sense of loss, real or imagined, gave impetus to his life's work, and we are all better for it.

Although these essays are meant to highlight Regnery the writer, it is Regnery the publisher my thoughts return to, perhaps because, for him, publishing was a vocation in which he invested much of his life's meaning and purpose. In his quest to publish serious books, he had to fight the financial pressure of catering to public taste. He regretted that he was unable to make more of a profit. But those of us who have read from his catalog would agree that we have profited a great deal from his efforts. I have to agree with the publisher that there is much in Regnery's work that is worth preserving, otherwise I would not have read and reviewed the book. I have read the others - Creative Chicago, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, and The Cliff Dwellers - and I encourage readers to seek them out as parts of an extraordinary story.