Bouncing off colleague David Mehegan's item below on the John Adams exhibit (which I'll see, off his recommendation), it occurs to me, not for the first time, that history isn't just what's been recorded in books, but also what hasn't been. For instance, as David shows, Adams was a notorious scribbler and avid writer, and his opinionated outpourings over 90 years, none of which he edited, have much to do with the modern view of him as ill-tempered, small-minded, stubborn, and blunt. In his own writing, he often even directs such criticisms at himself. Adams, however, also was probably the foremost shaper of America's revolutionary ideals and the principal architect of the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, has glided through two centuries both respected and beloved as the author of the Declaration (off Adams's notes) and the primary defender of pure democracy in the early republic. However, Jefferson also was underhanded, inconsistent, self-centered, and superficial. (And he was a slaveholder, which I mention here only because Adams raged against that institution his whole life -- and was hated for that too.) But Jefferson was extraordinarily image conscious, and carefully burned any of his papers that reflected badly upon him.

So when historians have researched their hundreds of books, they have written what they found: Adams was a fat, grumpy, flawed founder. (It's there in his own writing.) Jefferson was a patrician, thoughtful, democratic idealist, a figure second only to Washington (who also controlled his own image), and someone close to perfection. (It's there in his own writing.) Historians could only interpret what they found, not what was burned or never recorded by a careful man in the first place.

The result? Jefferson's image is on Mount Rushmore, the nickel, even the $2 bill. As for Adams, who actually believed, as colleague Ben Franklin wrote, that honesty is the best policy: Don't bother looking.

I've just seen the amazing exhibition of the 3,700-volume library of John Adams, entitled "John Adams Unbound," at the Boston Public Library, and I strongly recommend it to those interested in the mind of one of the four top thinkers of the American revolutionary period and the making of the new nation, along with Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison (not to slight Franklin). Aside from historic interest, the exhibition is a pleasure for lovers of books. Not only are many of the books, displayed open in glass cases, beautiful things as books, but most of them show Adams's own notes on what he is reading, penned in the margins.

Lean over a book that describes Blenheim Palace in England, and you see a note in brown ink, "Mr. Jefferson and I visited here in 1786." Under a drawing of an ancient Egyptian procession in honor of the goddess Isis is the grumpy comment, "Is this religion? Good God!" In his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's "History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution," he argues with the famous protofeminist on virtually every page, and you can almost hear him fulminating at her excuses for the excesses of the revolutionaries.

If you're visiting Boston, I would suggest you skip the pricey salons of Copley Place and Newbury Street and spend a half-hour with old John instead. It's free.

The legendary Chicago Manual of Style (formally, "A Manual of Style"), the bible of book editors for generations, has finally gone digital. You can still get your own copy (my 13th edition is right next to the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage on my bookshelf), but now the 15th edition is fully searchable and usable online.

Not that the University of Chicago Press is giving it away -- no, they're not making that newspaper mistake. A year's subscription will be $30 a year, with a $5 discount if you sign up before next Sept. 30. However, you can get a 30-day free trial. No, this is not an ad, just a sign of a milestone. The heavy, solid book that long was instrumental to the making of heavy, solid books may now go the way of most encyclopedias: that is, into the e-ther.

I'm on a poetry jag. John Updike tells the Poetry Foundation that poetry is the "exercise of language at the highest pitch.'' He says he would have written more of it if it paid as well as fiction.

His poem, "Ex-Basketball Player,'' gets more hits on the foundation's site than Shakespeare.

The best part about Galway Kinnell's new book of poems, "Strong Is Your Hold,'' is the CD that comes with it. He introduces and reads his poems, a trusted guide across the New England landscape and into the joys of being a parent, the lessons to be found in nature, the mysteries of marriage and friendship. At the center of the book is Kinnell's poem about 9/11, "When the Towers Fell,'' first published in The New Yorker.

This is the 11th book of poetry for Kinnell, winner of a Pulitzer and National Book Award, and his first in over a decade. There's something wonderfully intimate about hearing a poet read his own work. Reading along in the book while listening to Kinnell -- by turns melancholy ("Does the past ever get too heavy to lug around?'') and playful ("The bear peers about with the undressedness/ of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.'') -- stirs questions about the craft of writing and rewriting as Kinnell departs from what's written on the page.

And so the fate of any remaining GOP congressional control hangs by a slim thread: the thistight US Senate race between Republican George Allen and Democrat James Webb. If Webb is declared the winner in Virginia, the Democrats will control both congressional branches for the first time in more than a decade.

So what does this have to do with books? Well, Webb is a tough, larger-than-life original who has a resume -- Naval Academy grad, Marine officer, lawyer, assistant Defense secretary, secretary of the Navy, and screenwriter -- that reads like something out of pulp fiction. And, in fact, Webb has written half a dozen military novels ("The Emperor's General," "Fields of Fire," "Lost Soldiers," "A Sense of Honor," "A Country Such as This," "Something to Die For") and one nonfiction book ("Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America").

"Fields of Fire," Webb's best-known book, was good enough for author Tom Wolfe to call it "the finest of the Vietnam novels." Now, with public interest lasering in on his pivotal Senate race, the eclectic Webb has found his book sales rising, with "Fields of Fire" suddenly selling in the 200 range on Amazon.com.

All politics is local, and some book sales are political.

1. Mountains Beyond Mountains
By Tracy Kidder. Random House.
2. Istanbul
By Orhan Pamuk. Vintage.
3. 1491
By Charles C. Mann. Vintage.
4. Team of Rivals
By Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster.
5. Dreams From My Father
By Barack Obama. Three Rivers.
6. 2006/07 Boston Restaurants
Edited by Ruth Tobias. Zagat Survey.
7. The Devil in the White City
By Erik Larson. Vintage.
8. The City of Falling Angels
By John Berendt. Penguin.
9. Teacher Man
By Frank McCourt. Scribner.
10. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate
By Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. New Press.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai. Grove.
2. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
By Kim Edwards. Penguin.
3. On Beauty
By Zadie Smith. Penguin.
4. The Lighthouse
By P..D. James. Vintage.
5. Snow
By Orhan Pamuk. Vintage.
6. The Sea
By John Banville. Vintage.
7. My Name Is Red
By Orhan Pamuk.Vintage.
8. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
By Lisa See. Random House.
9. Slow Man
By J.M. Coetzee. Penguin.
10. The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss. W.W. Norton.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. The Audacity of Hope
By Barack Obama. Crown.
2. The God Delusion
By Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin.
3. Six Frigates
By Ian W. Toll. W.W. Norton.
4. State of Denial
By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster.
5. Easter Rising
By Michael Patrick MacDonald. Houghton Mifflin.
6. I Feel Bad About My Neck
By Nora Ephron. Knopf.
7. The Punishment of Virtue
By Sarah Chayes. Penguin.
8. Thunderstuck
By Erik Larson. Crown.
9. How Bush Rules
By Sidney Blumenthal. Princeton University.
10. You: On a Diet
By Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz. Free Press

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford. Knopf.
2. Lisey’s Story
By Stephen King. Scribner.
3. What is the What
By Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s.
4. Hundred-Dollar Baby
By Robert B. Parker. Putnam.
5. For One More Day
By Mitch Albom. Hyperion.
6. The Emperor’s Children
By Claire Messud. Knopf.
7. What Came Before He Shot Her
By Elizabeth George. HarperCollins.
8. Suite Francaise
By Irene Nemirovsky. Knopf.
9. One Good Turn
By Kate Atkinson. Little, Brown.
8. Thirteen Moons
By Charles Frazier. Random House.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

William S. McFeely of Cambridge and Wellfleet, professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia and Pulitzer prize-winning biographer of Ulysses S. Grant, has written "Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins" (W.W. Norton), a short biography of the Philadelphia realist painter.

Thomas Eakins at age 35

Eakins is about as far from Grant (or Frederick Douglass, the subject of another McFeely biography) as a man could be, but in either case, McFeely's reflective style and acute sense of character has a bracing effect on the reader. Without making an overall judgment on the book (officially published Nov. 20), which I've only dipped into, I was struck by this passage about a young friend of the Eakins family who took her own life:

"Then came Ella's death. A life was lost and a whirlpool of grieving engulfed the two families. Suicide is a lonely path. Those who embrace it refuse any companions. To silence the demons the world has let loose on them, the determined travelers go their inexorable way to their terrible sanctuary."

It's hard for America to keep up with what's capturing the imagination of people in other countries when it takes so long for books to be translated into English.

Case in point: The prize-winning Nazi-era novel, "Les Bienveillantes,'' (mentioned below by my colleague) is a best seller in France but it won't be available in English until 2008.

Pantheon has been a bit quicker to translate a German novel that knocked J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown off the top of the bestseller lists over there. "Measuring the World'' by Daniel Kehlmann -- favorably reviewed in the Times on Sunday -- focuses on two eccentric German scientists in the early 19th century. It was published in English this week and is the German Book Office's first selection for its book of the month program. Take that, Oprah.

By Judith Maas

SUNDAY, 11/12: Lois Ames' and others read from the poetry of Anne Sexton at 2 p.m., in Forsyth Chapel, Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave. ($5)....... Glenn LaFantasie reads from ‘‘Gettysburg Requiem,’’ at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord....... Howie Carr discusses ‘‘The Brothers Bulger,’’ at 2 p.m., at Borders, 255 Grossman Drive, Braintree.

MONDAY: John Harris and Mark Halperin discuss ‘‘The Way to Win,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge....... Laura Zigman reads from ‘‘Piece of Work,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Wellesley Booksmith, 82 Central St., Wellesley....... Michael del Vecchio discusses ‘‘Knitting with Balls,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge....... John Allen discusses ‘‘Rabble Rouser for Peace,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Coop, 1400 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

TUESDAY: Kate Flora reads from ‘‘Stalking Death,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books....... Erik Larson discusses ‘‘Thunderstruck,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline ($2)....... Henry Louis Gates discusses ‘‘The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Coop....... Poets Marc Widershien, Sarah Getty, and Wendy Mnookin read at 7 p.m., at the Newton Free Library, 330 Homer St., Newton....... Poets Daniel Tobin, Diana Der-Hovanessian, and Fred Marchant read at 7 p.m., at the Cambridge Public Library, Central Square, 44 Pearl St., Cambridge....... Norman Gautreau discusses ‘‘Island of First Light,’’ at 7 p.m., at Flint Memorial Library, 147 Park St., North Reading....... D.T. Max discusses ‘‘The Family that Couldn’t Sleep,’’ at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University, Kenmore Square....... Tim Lemire discusses ‘‘I’m an English Major — Now What?’’ at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville....... Poets Dara Wier and Lisa Olstein read at 8 p.m., in Adams House, 26 Plympton St., Harvard Square, Cambridge.

WEDNESDAY: Martin Espada discusses ‘‘The Republic of Poetry,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline....... Dava Sobel discusses ‘‘The Planets,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Harvard Square....... Gloria Steinem discusses ‘‘Enslaved,’’ at 4 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University....... Stephen McCauley reads from ‘‘Alternatives to Sex,’’ at 4 p.m., in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium, Brandeis University, 415 South St., Waltham....... Charles Pierce discusses ‘‘Moving the Chains,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at The Attic / Union Street Bar, 107 R Union St., Newton.
...... Jan Whitaker discusses ‘‘Service and Style,’’ at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Downtown Crossing, 10-24 School St....... Perri Klass discusses ‘‘Quirky Kids,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at the Striar Jewish Community Center, 445 Central St., Stoughton; for ticket information, call 781-341-2016, ext. 279....... Poets J.D. Scrimgeour and Bill Coyle read at 7:30 p.m., at the Newburyport Art Association, 65 Water St., Newburyport.

THURSDAY: Richard Ford discusses ‘‘The Lay of the Land,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Coolidge Corner Theatre ($2)....... Douglas Bauer, Andre Dubus, Steve Almond, and Margot Livesey read from ‘‘Death by Pad Thai,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books....... Laura Kipnis discusses ‘‘The Female Thing,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store....... Richard Doubleday discusses ‘‘Jan Tschichold, Designer,’’ at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University.

FRIDAY: Rosamund Purcell and Sven Birkerts discuss ‘‘Bookworm,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books....... Laura Kipnis reads from ‘‘The Female Thing,’’ at 7 p.m., at Jabberwocky Bookshop, 50 Water St., Newburyport....... James D. Hornfischer discusses ‘‘Ship of Ghosts,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, One Worcester Road, Framingham.

SATURDAY: Kathleen Benner Duble reads from ‘‘Hearts of Iron,’’at 2 p.m., at Book Ends, 559 Main St., Winchester.

Announcements must arrive at globebookmaking@hotmail.com two weeks before publication date. Events are subject to change.

Charles William Eliot

To say so would have seemed ludicrous to either of them, but I believe there was an American commonality between Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), longtime president of Harvard and editor of the “Harvard Classics: The Five-Foot Shelf of Books,” and John Jeremiah Humphreys, my grandfather, who owned and loved those books. Eliot was a wealthy Brahmin, educated at Harvard and in Europe, a reformer in secondary and higher education. Grandad had a ninth-grade diploma from St. Mary’s Grammar School in the North End, and a law degree from Northeastern night school. But both of them believed that any person could love, acquire, and benefit from the life of the mind. Given access to books, Eliot said it required but “fifteen minutes a day.” Though Grandad fell short of his dreams, he was the proof that Eliot was right.

Grandmother and Grandad had moved to 76 West Cedar Street (the “West End” part of Beacon Hill) in 1929, and never moved again. She had always dreamed of owning a home, and, as my mother writes in her 1980 memoir, with her thrift and capacity for work, they might have done it. But Grandad was reluctant. He had various practical reasons. The real reason, my mother suspected, was that “he knew he would have to sacrifice on his reading if we owned a house.”

He retired from the Water Department in 1945, when he was 70. As a city employee, he had no Social Security, and his pension was only $125 a month (it stopped at his death). Grandad “enjoyed his leisure by at last having all the time in the world to read,” my mother writes. But he had developed diabetes when he was 54, and when he reached his late seventies, side-effects began to appear. First came neuropathies in his legs, then terrible attacks of anxiety and guilt over the imagined sins of his long-ago youth. He would pace back and forth and ask, “Why am I like this?”

Then, deep depression. “He stopped reading, even stopped going to church,” my mother writes. “He would just sit in the wing chair in the window of the living room, smoking his pipe. He became increasingly withdrawn.” I was a young child, but I remember a silent old man, carefully eating his dinner.

In the spring of 1955, he caught a severe cold, which progressed to pneumonia. With cares and family of her own, my mother did not at first realize how sick he was, but when his doctor put him into Massachusetts General Hospital, she hurried in to see him. “I was shocked at how frail he had become,” she writes. “I impulsively took him in my arms. I could not believe this was my father. I felt as if I were holding a child.” He died a few weeks short of his 80th birthday.

John Jeremiah Humphreys in old age.

Though they had such different lives, no one could have revered Charles William Eliot any more than John Humphreys was admired by those who knew him. At the end of my mother’s memoir are these words: “Dad’s life, though he might have thought it unsuccessful, was, on the contrary, the life of a totally successful human being.” Besides his indirect influence and her writings, all that we have of him are a few photographs and papers, his rosary, and the “Five-Foot Shelf.”

Next week: epilogue.

(Previous installments appeared Sept. 19, 26, Oct. 4, 16, 23, and 30.)

The French, to put it mildly, tend to disdain foreign influences on their culture, whether in food, fashion, movies, or literature. So it'll be interesting to gauge the reaction after American expatriot Jonathan Littell won France's leading literary prize. Littell, who once lived in France, now resides in Spain, and is the son of spy novelist Robert Littell, won the Goncourt Prize Monday for his Nazi-era novel "Les Bienveillantes." Earlier, he won the Académie Française prize for the same work.

French critics, straining to be magnanimous, may yet wax philosophical on a foreigner winning the award, except that there's an unsettling trend developing here. Nancy Huston, a Canadian who lives in France, recently won the Femina prize for her new book. What would Proust and Hugo say about North Americans snapping up their nation's top literary awards? And where, oh where are today's rising French novelists?

National Novel-Writing Month has been under way since Nov. 1. The idea is to get people to write a novel, minimum length 50,000 words, in one month. Since the nonprofit project was founded in Oakland, Calif., in 1999, 145,161 writers have participated, and a few -- apparently very few -- have seen their work published. Last year, 59,000 people participated, and the organization expects 75,000 participants this month.

The idea seems to be to encourage people who always wanted to write just to jump in and see what they can do in 30 days. There's no fee. The only prize is an "official winner" certificate. Last year, $14,000 was used to help build children's libraries in Cambodia and Laos, raised with sales of such stuff as mugs and t-shirts, project director Chris Baty's wonderfully titled book, "No Plot? No Problem!", as well as donations. Half of all income to the project this year will again be put toward kids' libraries, this time in Vietnam.

The website says, "Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create." Hmm. I suppose it's a good thing if you have unreasonable standards for a first draft, and your objective is just to get something, anything, written and to put it before readers.

On the other hand, I've always wanted to sing the part of Rodolfo in La Boheme. But I don't think I'll participate in National Opera-Singing Month. Except in the shower.

The Texas Book Festival, held each autumn in Austin, is a predictably magnanimous affair, drawing scores of authors and thousands of participants to its three-day celebration of the printed word. This year's fair, dubbed by a local rag "the finest pound-for-pound" festival in its history, drew such notables as Gore Vidal, Richard Ford, and Amy Sedaris. (Barack Obama's Saturday morning appearance won, hands-down, in the category of events-impossible-to-get-into.) There were parties and panels and pundits galore, and because the festival took place over the weekend preceding Halloween, there were also costumed revelers wandering all over Austin's famously weird city streets.

But surely the most Texas of all the gatherings took place at the black-tie literary gala on Friday night, when patrons paid $350 a head to gather at the Austin Marriott. When Gore Vidal addressed the crowd and dared to bring up George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, he was mightily received - by applause from the rich Texas liberals and jeers from the rich Texas conservatives. Only in the Lone Star state would two such disparate crowds compete to be at the same star-studded event.

Full disclosure: This writer, a native Texan long accustomed to such territorial disputes, escaped the black-tie dinner by claiming a previous commitment - an outside swim under an October moon.

The king of rock 'n' roll's home literally pops up in the new book "Graceland.'' You can look inside his refrigerator, check out his wardrobe, and change the channels on his TV. Priscilla Presley gave her blessing to the pop-up book, contributing an introduction.

It's unclear if Elvis Presley's estate will benefit from sales of the book. Kurt Cobain recently topped Presley as the top-earning dead celebrity, according to Forbes.com. But the fact that next year is the 30th anniversary of Presley's death may give him some lift.