Stewart E. Dunaway

This is a book that calls for a lot of compound adjectives. Oversized. Un-proofread. And... hyper-specialized.

Edmund Fanning was a key figure in the War of the Regulation, a North Carolina conflict in the decade before the American Revolution in which a group of (admittedly reactionary) landowners tried to escape the rule of the (admittedly corrupt) British administration of Governor William Tryon. They were centered in the area around Hillsborough, North Carolina, and their immediate target was Edmund Fanning, a Yale-educated friend and supporter of Tryon who seems to have been a self-righteous, snobbish, acquisitive boor who had his fingers deep in the local justice system and also used many means to add to his land holdings.

Tryon and Fanning won in the War of the Regulation -- the "Regulators" were so anarchistic that, when they gathered an army, they didn't appoint anyone to direct it, and Tryon had little trouble dispersing them and branding them traitors. But when the American Revolution came, Fanning (by then in New York) was a Tory and was driven out of the country. He went on to high British government jobs (both military and civil, gaining a generalship and serving as a local governor in Canada), and lived to the age of 79, but there is little sign that his collection of offices brought him happiness; his only son died before he did, and his daughters all ended up spinsters.

This is not really a biography of Fanning; his later life in particular is treated casually and the information about his early life is thin. The largest share is devoted to his few years in North Carolina. To be sure, as author Dunaway tells us, many details are now missing. But there is little attempt to understand Fanning. It's just a presentation of bare facts.

Or, in some cases, bare typos. It looks as if the book was hastily written by a very poor author who never re-read it thereafter. Grammatical fragments, inconsistencies, and just plain typos are everywhere. It was done with a word processor, so there aren't many mis-spellings, but every other sort of error abounds. These things are the job of a copy editor to fix, but clearly there wasn't one. Those problems, individually trivial, are collectively so common as to make reading a distinct chore.

And although the book looks substantial (not very thick, but it's printed on letter-size sheets, so there is plenty of paper here), more than half of it is reproductions of old hand-written documents, with almost no annotation or explanation -- just "Here's a document in archive X from someone to Fanning" or "here is a deed for such-and-such place written at such-and-such time." These are, I imagine, very important, but the scans are low-contrast and hard to read, and there isn't much information of why one should read this one or that one. Without those clues, I could not make myself summon the effort to strain my eyes to deal with the scans. And the large paper size makes even the ordinary text a chore to read; a book in that format really should be printed in two columns. Instead, it looks like it rolled off a typewriter, although one with proportional type.

In other words, if you aren't a specialist who needs to know more about Edmund Fanning, this book is likely to be immensely dull and also quite difficult.

On the other hand, if you are interested in Fanning, it gathers a lot of information that is elsewhere available only in scattered archives. You'll still find it dull and difficult, but dealing with the actual documents would be even worse. I wish Stewart Dunaway had made the effort to get this book right, or hired someone to do so (given how poorly it seems to have sold -- mine is, as of the time of this writing, the only copy on LibraryThing -- it likely would have paid for itself). But even in its present hideous state, almost as unreadable as the documents it reproduces, it is a genuine service to those who want to know about an important but obscure figure who played a significant role in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary America.… (meer)