A Mystery

I've been steadily reading my way through the big list of Unread Books that's taped up on my desk. I don't remember exactly when I made the list, but I've been making a renewed effort to finish reading every book that I own but haven't read. Yesterday I finished Huizinga's Decline of the Middle Ages, and this afternoon I finished a little booklet of lectures on Courtly Love that were read at SUNY Binghamton during some conference a number of years ago. Staying in New York State, I picked up the next book on my list this afternoon, a 200 page work called Res Cogitans published by Cornell University Press.

I opened up to the title page and saw that it had been stamped with a name and address:
T. Slater Raymond
319 West State St.
Albion, New York 14411
USA

I don't know who T. Slater Raymond is, but he took copious notes, and they are good ones. The book itself is "an essay in rational psychology." It's an analysis of speech and thought in the footsteps of the linguist J.L. Austin but re-framed in the context of Descartes. It's heady and abstruse writing--technical and (frankly) uninteresting. Whoever T. Slater Raymond was, he apparently had no trouble understanding it. And not only understanding, but agreeing, disagreeing and challenging it. I certainly wouldn't have picked this book up to read on my own--I'm only going forward with it because it somehow ended up in my library. (I probably saw the Latin title and assumed that it was something Medieval.)

But now I want to know who this T. Slater Raymond was. Was he a teacher? A student? When did he live in Albion? The copyright for the book is 1972, so he must have lived in Albion for at least some of the time that my parents did, and if he owned a rubber stamp with his address I assume that he was there on at least a semi-permanent basis. Now that I think of it, I don't have any better evidence to believe that T. Slater Raymond is a man than a woman. The T. could just as easily stand for Theresa or Tatiana.

I want to know...