Esperantist Professor Leaves University for Literary Life

George B. Viles
Nia dua prezidanto

The American Esperanto Association made a point in response to claims that they were wholly a Boston organization that their president, George B. Viles, was a professor at the Ohio State University. But in all truth, OSU couldn’t claim that their Professor of Germanic Language and Literature was a native son of the Buckeye State. Professor Viles was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.

It’s not clear if the founders of the American Esperanto Association knew they had elected a fellow Bay Stater as their head. Viles had graduated from Harvard in 1892, receiving an A.M. in 1896, and from there went on to receive his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1902. He then spent two years studying at Leipzig, before beginning at Ohio State University in 1904. He was at Leipzig at the same time that Wilhelm Ostwald was at the greatest point of his enthusiasm for Esperanto, and at a time when Ostwald was preparing for his trip to the United States, where he would lecture at Viles alma mater, Harvard.

Esperanto Vanishes from the North American Review

George Harvey
Probably not an Esperantist

Over at his blog, Robert Nielson has a post on the rise and fall of Esperanto in the North American Review between 1906 and 1909. The magazine was an early supporter of Esperanto in the United States, and then, just as the Esperanto Association of North America got underway, George Harvey, who owned the magazine, dropped his support.

Harvey wasn’t only promoting Esperanto in his magazine, as a sort of thank you to him, the North American Esperanto movement made him its very prominent head. As a thank you to the Esperanto movement, George Harvey turned his back on it. What gives?

I suspect that George Harvey’s views toward Esperanto mirrored those later expressed by JFK. “Ask not what you can do for Esperanto, ask what Esperanto can do for you.” Robert questions the very decision of the EANA to have George Harvey as its first president:

Future Nobel Laureate Nobly Lauds Esperanto

And this is the device that
I've labeled in Esperanto.

In 1904, the British chemist, Sir William Ramsay, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the noble gases (note spelling). To stray far from my area of expertise, the noble gases are those that do not (typically) react with other elements. More than sixty years would elapse between Ramsay’s 1898 discovery of xenon and the 1962 creation of a xenon compound. The first noble gas discovered by Ramsay, however, was argon in 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were still five years in the future.

In addition to being the chemist who discovered argon, neon, krypton, and xenon, Sir William Ramsay was an early British Esperantist, and a member of the British Esperanto Association, which is one thing that doesn’t get mentioned on Wikipedia, although his association with Esperanto and the Internacia Scienca Asocio Esperantista is mentioned on Esperanto Wikipedia. Ramsay wrote a piece on radium which appeared in the British Esperanto magazine, The Esperantist.

An Army of Esperantists

An army for peace

That’s at least the claim made by one J. O. McShane in a letter to the New York Sun. Mr. (I assume) McShane was seeking to rebut the views that were expressed by Professor Leo Wiener in the the editorial that appeared in the March 24, 1907 issue. It’s not clear who McShane was. The only J. O. McShane that I’ve found in public records for New York of the time would have been a nine-year-old when the letter was published, and it just doesn’t seem to be the work of a small child.

The only McShane mentioned in Amerika Esperantisto is a V. A. McShane, of Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The actual identity of this valiant defender of Esperanto will have to remain obscured to history for now. The thought occurs however, that whatever Professor Wiener’s objections to Esperanto were, would there be any particular reason to view a professor of Slavic languages as an expert whether Esperanto were a credible candidate for an auxiliary language. It would be nice to know what expertise McShane brought to this.

The Space Museum — Blogging Doctor Who

Trespassers will
be displayed. 

“The Space Museum” does a nice exploration of one of the possibilities of time travel. What happens if you get there, somewhat out of phase with yourself, so that you get there before you arrive? This is the initial mystery that confronts the Tardis crew, and they find that they actually can’t react with anything, nor can anyone see or hear them. (If that’s the case, and they leave no tracks, how can they even stand on ground, and not walk above or into things?) In any case, they find—to their horror—at the end of the first episode that they are on exhibit in the museum.

We were told, way back in “The Aztecs,” that history cannot be changed. If it’s already happened, it’s already happened, and it could be disastrous to try to change things. In “The Space Museum” the characters are faced with the problem that they’ve seen the future, and they desperately need to change it. I guess the rule becomes that history cannot be changed, unless it absolutely have to.

Harvard Professor Prefers Volapük to Esperanto

Leo Wiener.
Guess who he knew

When the New York Sun spoke with Professor Wiener of Harvard in 1907, the Volapük movement had collapsed about eighteen years before. Professor Wiener was truly flogging a dead horse, and the article acknowledges this, noting that “now Volapük is mute, and many of its former devotees are working and playing at Esperanto, the language of hope.” (Kudos to the Sun for remembering the umlaut in Volapük.)

From the perspective of the United States, in 1907, Esperanto was still pretty new, even though it was coming up on the twentieth anniversary of its publication. It had not reached the heights of interest that Volapük had achieved, then again, Volupük was published only seven years before Esperanto and Volapük’s fate already seemed to be sealed.

Still, in the Sun article of March 24, 1907, Professor Wiener made unfavorable comparison between Esperanto and Volapük. It seems likely that Wiener was a Volapükian, but there are indications that he was a disaffected Esperantist. Of course, one can be both, as the early twentieth century has plenty of examples of individuals who first favored Volapük, then Esperanto, then Ido (and then went on to invent their own languages).

Kial Mi Blogas…

500 blogaĵoj!

[A note to my readers who do not speak Esperanto.
This is my 500th post, and since many of my readers do speak Esperanto, I felt that a post in Esperanto was the appropriate way to mark the occasion. Ironically, what follows is mostly about why I blog in English.]

Mi blogas pri Espernato, sed malofte en Esperanto, kaj mi supozas ke kelkaj esperantistoj scivolemas kial mi ni blogas esperante ĉiutage. Mi havas kelkajn kialojn. Mi verkas angle pli rapide ol kiam mi verkas esperante. Kiam mi verkas angle, mi preskaŭ neniam bezonas vortaron. Mi preskaŭ ĉiam tajpas senerare. Aliaflanke, estus tre bona por mi ke mi verkas esperante pli ofte.

Sed, samtempe ke mi blogas, mi klopodas fini romanon. Tio estas ke mi verkas romanon, kaj la lingvo de la romano estas angla. Eble mi trovos kialon por inkluzivi kelkajn vortojn en Esperanto, sed la plejparto de la romano estos en angla. Mi volas trovi eldoniston, kaj mi volas ke oni povas aĉeti mian romanon en librovendejoj.

The Mysterious Madame Eks

Where was she from?

Was it a pseudonym? Or did she bear the Finnish name Eks? Or maybe the Hungarian name Ekso? On March 22, 1914, the Washington Herald, the Evening Star, and (in a somewhat abbreviated form) the Washington Post told of the most recent meeting of Internacia Klubo, one of the city’s (apparently many) Esperanto groups, and of its visitor “from abroad,” Sinjorino Ekso. I have found no travel records for a Mrs. Ekso arriving in the U.S. in 1914.

Our only source for this visit seems to be the Internacia Klubo itself, which sent the same text to each of the Washington newspapers, and seem to have omitted such information as her country of origin, and what other places she had visited in her travels in America. Was it playacting, with an Esperantist pretending to be a foreign visitor, affecting incomprehension should a question be posed in English, and talking only Esperanto? “Ekso” is suspiciously close to “ikso,” the name for the letter X in Esperanto. Was Sinjorino Ekso a Madame X?

Unitarian Minister Enquires about Esperanto

Did the minister speak Esperanto?

The Independent was a progressive magazine, much like the more famous Harper’s Weekly (which it eventually merged with). It was initially published in New York, but later moved to Boston. Early on, it seemed quite supportive of Esperanto, including publishing an article by Dr. Zamenhof in 1904 and an article about Esperanto in 1906. These were both cited in response to a letter in their issue of March 21, 1907, which was appended to a list of seventeen recommended books on or in Esperanto for those interested in the langauge.

Sadly, the Independent did not continue in its support of Esperanto. During the Ido schism, it came solidly down on the side of Ido and for the worst possible reason.[1] Even then, in 1912, they described their interest as “scant.” Still, their scant interest had been enough to publish a few pages on the subject.

Three Esperantist Lawyers in the Bay Area

Speak Esperanto and hang
with the fashionable crowd

On Sunday, March 20, 1910, the San Francisco Call devoted an entire page to San Francisco Esperantists, with a particular focus on three men: Frank C. Drew, R. B. Tappan, and the late W. B. Treadwell (who gets the posthumous indignity that they get his name wrong). The article doesn’t mention the other connection among the three men, in that they were all three of them lawyers (which I’ve thrown up there in the title), although Mr. Drew is identified as an attorney and Mr. Tappan as a judge. We get no real information for Mr. Treadwell, other than that he is deceased. A little sleuthing showed that he was the third lawyer in the group.

The article is too long for me to type, but it can be read online. It’s an interesting glimpse of the early Esperanto movement in the United States. The Call was mostly interested in the far-flung correspondence in which two of the men were engaged. While R. B. Tappan is described as “an enthusiastic Esperantist,” the focus of the article is on the correspondence of Messieurs Drew and Treadwell.

The Linguist Spoke Esperanto

Denzel Carr

And just about everything else it seems. Of course when the Daily Ardmoreite wrote about Denzel R. Carr, he wasn’t yet a linguist, just a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, and about twenty years old. However, as the Adrmoreite made clear, he was already showing some talent with languages, since (by their count) he spoke fifteen languages, although their estimate of 30,000 words cumulatively is probably well under the mark, since that would mean that for any one of those fifteen languages, he knew a paltry 2,000 words. It’s not much of a vocabulary. I suspect my rudimentary German consists of more than 2,000 words.

For that matter, the 30,000 word vocabulary for a single well-educated individual doesn’t seem to be that remarkable even for English. Many years ago, a friend and I did an not-very-statistical survey based on the number of words his paperback desk dictionary claimed to contain. I forget how many words we used, and there was probably some way of doing this to get a valid sample. We simply took turns at opening the book at random, and the person being tested would say things like “left page, second column, fifth word.” The person with the book would read the word and judge if the definition was close enough. (At one point, I told my friend I was giving him the point even before he defined it. “You already know this word. It’s jockstrap.”) In the end, we (one freshman, one sophomore) in the end we concluded that we knew about 20,000 words apiece.

Esperantists Speak to Students

Allan Davis
Esperanto's man in the
high school

At first glance, it seems like a continuation of the article which noted that high school students in Washington, D.C. asked their principals to bring in people to lecture about Esperanto. But instead of Edwin C. Reed, the speaker was Amy C. Leavitt, a less prominent Esperantist. But the date on the article is four years after the formation of the Washington High School Esperanto Club, as the talk occurred on March 17, 1915, and was reported on by the Washington Post on March 18, 1915.

Leavitt had been involved in the Esperanto movement at least since 1910, when she gave a dollar to help retire the debt of the unsuccessful 1910 Universala Kongreso. The Reeds had left leadership of the Esperanto movement in 1913, and had moved on to other (undoubtably more remunerative) endeavors. The headquarters of the EANA had moved, along with its publishing and sales arm, The American Esperantist Company, to West Newton, Massachusetts in mid–1913. The Reeds remained active in Esperanto, but somewhat less so. Edwin Reed’s resignation of the position of the secretary of the EANA, a position which he had held since the creation of the organization in 1908, was due to the decision to move the offices to the Boston area.

Esperanto's Second Generation in Washington

Not actually "in."

The Esperanto Office, the headquarters of the Esperanto Association of North America, has been found, more or less. The address doesn’t seem to exist in current Washington, D.C., but at least the quadrant of the city has come to light. On March 10, 1911, articles on the Washington High School Esperanto Club noted that the meetings were held at the Esperanto Office, 816 Fifteenth Street, which would be fine in a city that didn’t use its major street names four times. Happily, on March 17, 1911, in an article following up on the high school Esperantists, the Washington Herald notes the quadrant of the city where the meetings were being held. (In the case of potential addresses of the Esperanto Office, there were only three possible locations.)

The Esperanto Office was located at 816 Fifteenth Street NW, Washington, D.C. Google Maps seems a little inconsistent in assigning addresses in the area, but the address would seem to be a large, modern building, undoubtably built long after the Esperanto movement had left Washington, D.C.

110 Years of Esperanto in the United States

Thousands interested
in Esperanto!

Had the American Esperanto Association continued, today we would have a one-hundred-and-ten-year old Esperanto association in the United States. In truth, the AEA lasted far shorter, and was dissolved not long after its third anniversary. In 1908, the American Esperanto Association was disbanded and the North American Esperanto Association was founded as a successor.

In 1907, William Gray Nowell sent a letter to the New York Sun updating them in the progress of Esperanto in the United States. The Mexico Missouri Message probably received a similar letter, since the content is similar. The Message published their article on June 13, 1907, however, given that it reflects back to an event that three-month–0ld news, it’s more pertinent today, the anniversary of the founding of the American Esperanto Association.

Esperanto Comes to San Francisco

Esperanto was spoken here.

San Francisco started their campaign to host the 1915 Universala Kongreso in 1910, when they sent Sinclair Lewis to the 1910 Kongreso to make the case for the City by the Bay. Despite having a future Nobel laureate plead their case, the decision at Washington, D.C. was that it was too early to be planning the 1915 convention. They were eventually rebuffed, and Edinburgh, Scotland was chosen as the site of the 1915 Universala Kongreso.

Then World War I broke out, just on the eve of the 1914 Paris congress, which had to be cancelled. Edinburgh had the problem of being in enemy territory for some of the potential participants. There was the further problem for some that the war made any sort of travel impossible. With the Russian Empire at war with the German Empire, the Zamenhofs weren’t going to be going anywhere. The Esperantists decided that a congress in a neutral nation would be a better choice, and so the location was swapped to San Francisco. Although the initial thought probably was that it was better to have a small convention than no convention, there would not be another Universala Kongreso until 1920.

The Web Planet — Blogging Doctor Who

They could have used the
insecticide from "Planet of Giants"

Did the cast and crew who worked on this Doctor Who serial ever get together to reminisce about the time that someone slipped hallucinogens into the beverages? This is one freaky story that goes on for way too long. “The Web Planet” isn’t the worst Doctor Who story ever (I can think of those that are worse), but it certainly qualifies as the weirdest.

Where do we even begin? The weird bug costumes? The decision to shoot a variety of scenes through a big smudge (to indicate the thin atmosphere of the planet Vortis)? The bizarre stylized performances of the actors wearing the weird bug costumes?

Then there’s the matter of the Doctor’s ring. In this story, it has practically magic powers and he’s unwilling to part with it, but didn’t he trade it away for the outfit of a government official during “The Reign of Terror”?

Those Lying Esperantists

Dire predictions for Esperanto!

One of the recurrent features in the Ido schism were claims—from the Ido side—that the Esperanto movement was making false claims. In all fairness, yes, there were statements from Esperantists rebutting statements made by supporters of Ido, what was absent on the Esperantist side were out-and-out attacks against Ido. I have seen claims by Idists that these existed; I just haven’t found any yet (or they were mischaracterizing the responses and no such exist).

Given this, I don’t want to demonize current Ido speakers; I’m merely pointing out that their predecessors at the beginning of the Ido movement seem to have been a pugnacious crowd. The ire of two Ido proponents was directed at a March 10, 1909 letter to the editor in the Chicago Daily Tribune. The Tribune ran two letters in response on March 12, 1909, one from a pseudonymous writer who used the name “Progress” (undoubtably in homage to the Ido magazine Progreso), and the other by O. H. Mayer, of Chicago, who was quite active in the Ido movement, but has proved somewhat elusive on biographical details. There were about 13,000 people in Chicago with that last name in 1910, and the street where he lived is spread out over about twenty enumeration districts in the 1910 Census, which is about 400 pages.

Esperanto — More than a Million! Really?

Entschuldigen, wie viele?

It’s a difficult question to figure out just how many Esperanto speakers there are. The usual ways of figuring out estimates of speakers just don’t work. It’s not like there’s a discrete population of Esperanto natives; Esperanto speakers instead are spread out across the world, something the the Deutsche Correspondent already knew in 1907. Since it’s entirely possible for an Esperanto speaker to be fairly active without ending up on any sort of list or tabulation (many Esperanto speakers see little reason to join groups), any estimates are going to be somewhat vague. Current estimates put the number of Esperanto speakers between 100,000 and 2 million, part of which depends on what level of competence you’re looking for.

The Internet has been good to Esperantists, while at the same time probably not being all that good for Esperanto organizations. What’s the sense of learning a language if you’re never going to use it? (Although I’m sure there’s someone out there who decided that his or her only use of Esperanto would be for keeping a journal.) The Internet has provided many ways for Esperanto speakers to contact each other, a role where the organizations used to predominate. Of course, many organizations have the problem of figuring out their roles in the Age of Internet. It seems at times that Esperanto-USA and the UEA are happy to have the roles of planning conventions and selling books, losing sight of the larger ideal of promoting Esperanto.

Washington Students Take Up Esperanto

Isabelle McCaffrey

I have vague memories of a French class assignment in which I was going to be linked up to a French pen pal. I don’t think it went past my first, probably clumsy, letter in which I introduced myself. Nor do I think there was much in it for the French student. I don’t think the expectation was that he would be writing back to me in substandard English. Perhaps the students who joined the Washington High School Esperanto club in 1911 had better luck than I did.

The students involved were aware that it was unlikely that Esperanto would be added to the curriculum of the D.C. schools. They might have been aware of the attempts of Mrs. Wilbur Crofts to get the schools to teach Esperanto. A few years later, Congressman Richard Bartholdt of Louisiana would attempt to get Congress to pass a resolution mandating Esperanto in the school system (one Washington paper suggested that he try getting it done in his home state first.)

After Esperanto and Ido…Esperanto?

Auguste Forel
Ant expert and temperance
advocate

The Butte Daily Bulletin got that one little detail wrong when they reported on March 9, 1920 that a solution had been found to the Ido schism. At this point, Ido had been introduced just over twelve years before, and there was probably no chance for reconciliation of the two movements.

The Daily Bulletin names one of the people involved in this, but it turns out that he wasn’t the main person. The article makes it clear that Auguste Forel is the “honorary president” of the new organization. He wasn’t running things, but they figured that his name would look really good on the letterhead. He was, however, one of those figures with something of a mixed legacy. On the one hand, he argued for world peace, female suffrage, disarmament, on the other hand, he argued for the sterilizing or euthanizing those with mental handicaps[1] or of certain races.[2] He was also a leader in the temperance movement and an important member of the International Good Templars. His reputation is clearly sufficiently redeemed (at least for the Swiss) that he appears on the Swiss 100-franc note.

Esperanto as Religion

Keep it simple?

William J. Phoebus was an early advocate of Ido, and in support of that language, he sent several letters to the New York Sun (as well as other newspapers). During early 1909, there appeared in the Sun sort of a correspondence between Phoebus and an an advocate for Esperanto, William Parker Bonbright. I will have to cover his side of the conversation at some point, but for now, realize that the two were holding a back-and-forth in the pages of the Sun. At this point, I don’t think I’ve uncovered the extent of their correspondence.

Briefly, Phoebus was a forty-nine-year-old man living in Brooklyn. He had been active in the Esperanto movement only a few months earlier, but when he switched over to Ido, he did so with a vengeance. With the zealotry of a convert, he proceeded to attack the Esperanto movement. In 1909, Phoebus is describing the Esperantists as holding a religion, a (erroneous) view that still crops up, as I’ve seen it recently.

Paris Police Learn Esperanto

We're ready.
Where are the Esperantists?

Large, unruly crowds of Esperantists, that’s what the Paris police were concerned about. Sure, they gave their reasons, but do we really take them seriously? In all seriousness, they very well may have been concealing their real reason. After all, there were concerns in 1914 about anarchists using Esperanto. Gavrilo Princip, the man whose actions set off World War I, was an anarchist, though probably not the Esperanto-speaking kind (despite that his name works beautifully in Esperanto).

And the Paris police had an ample reason to learn Esperanto. In 1914, the Esperanto movement was still in its franca periodo (French period), the era in which Paris was the center of the Esperanto movement (France still has a strong Esperanto movement). And the upcoming Universala Kongreso was scheduled to occur in Paris that year.

A Woman. A Journalist. An Esperantist

Matheson, about 1897

Florence Matheson’s moment of fame had nothing to do with Esperanto. I researching her life, the only statement that she had anything to do with the Esperanto movement comes from the March 6, 1918 Washington Times, even though she was both a journalist and engaged in many social organizations. Her membership in the “Esperanto Society” isn’t particularly surprising, as much as mystifying. But a little research identified it.

The Times article is one of those period things, in which the travels of more (or less) prominent people ended up in the newspaper. Judith Martin in one of her Miss Manners column cited the old adage that a woman’s name properly appears in the newspapers only three times: when she is born, when she is married, and when she dies. Martin forgot to add “and whenever she travels.” The Times gives a brief biography of of their subject.

Russian Censors Study Esperanto

Esperanto: A force for
free speech!

It’s not like they were seeking to bring the world together in unity and peace. They were more afraid of what the Esperantists might be writing. This was one of the worries that Marcus Zamenhof, Ludivick’s father, had about his son’s creation. New language: not going to go over well with the Czarist officials. It’s entirely possible that Marcus Zamenhof’s motivation for destroying the predecessor to Esperanto, lingwe uniwersala, was not so much “don’t waste your life on this crazy dream,” but “don’t jeopardize my job,” since the elder Zamenhof had become a censor.

Marcus Zamenhof was still alive when Esperanto came to the attention of the Russian censors. He couldn’t have been happy about it. The censor’s office probably wasn’t happy when the censor assigned to study the language “died within a couple of weeks of learning the language.” Least happy would be the poor man who died, though I don’t think we can implicate Esperanto in the matter.

The United States has a long-standing tradition of freedom of the press, and so there hasn’t been a need for censors. The Sedition Act of 1798 was a notable blot on this tradition, and ironic given the role of seditious newspapers in spurring the Revolution. Its successor, the Sedition Act of 1918 was upheld by the Supreme Court, but subsequent decisions would seem to make clear a constitutional right to criticize the government.

Esperanto in Sweden

Can't print them fast enough!

For the readers of the Wilmar Tribune on March 4, 1908, the strength of the Esperanto movement in Sweden might have been news, or perhaps not. Minnesota has a concentration of American whose ancestors came from Sweden or other Scandinavian countries. The Wilmar Tribune had a column of Scandinavian News, with the subhead of “Principal Events Gathered in the Old Scandinavian Countries.” Those readers possibly knew just how strong the Esperanto movement was in early twentieth-century Sweden.

And it was strong. When Esperantists in Upsala, Sweden started an Esperanto club in 1891, not only were they founding the second Esperanto group, they were founding the first that wasn’t built on the bones of a Volapük society. The 1904 Jarlibro Esperantista has slightly more than seven pages of new Esperantists from Sweden, from Aborrträsk to Yxno (Upsala itself is responsible for about fifty names).

An Esperantist at the White House

Roosevelt giving a speech.
Probably not in Esperanto.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have been the President. However, the newspapers of March 3, 1908 make it clear that, however briefly, and to what little effect, there was an Esperanto speaker in the White House on March 2, 1908.[1] In my earlier post, I noted some doubt, given the news reports, as to whether the meeting took place or not, but the later articles make it clear that the meeting did take place.

This much is also clear: Roosevelt did not promote Esperanto at any time. When Edmond Privat showed up, Roosevelt’s universally ignored presidential order that federal agencies use simplified spelling had resulted in just ridicule for the President. Even a bull moose was unlikely to tangle with that again. Plus, was in the last year of his presidency. He had probably already decided that he wasn’t going to run again, so why take on the advocacy of a cause like Esperanto?

Many newspapers covered Edmond Privat’s brief meeting with Roosevelt, and some of them even got the Esperantist’s name right. The New York Times, (“Edmond Privato”), the New York Sun, and the Stark County Democrat (“Edmond Privot”) were not among these. Privat was trying to encourage the study of Esperanto in public schools, an issue that just kept coming up.

Photos, Fear, and OS X

Cool new icon!

It’s a no-brainer that iPhoto needed to be rewritten from the ground up, no matter what they called the end product. Over the last couple years, I’ve found my iPhoto library increasingly slow, wonky, and crash-prone (to the extent that I actually made a new version of my library). So, I’ve been looking forward to the arrival of Photos for OSX, which Apple graciously allowed for test driving today.

First: a niggling complaint. They seem to have named this with the idea of making Google searches difficult. Photos, because a more generic name wasn’t actually possible. While searching for “iPhoto” gives you some pretty specific results, “Photos” is just a disaster as a search term. I understand that Apple is dropping the whole i-thing (expect a future iMac to just be a Mac), but have you every tried searching for information about “Pages” or even worse, “Numbers”?

I’ve got about 74,000 photos in my iPhoto library. Just a few snaps, really. I also keep coming back to a project to scan, date, and geotag the photos I took on film (remember film?). My iPhoto database is a tidy 215 GB. Really, nothing. Why should this be a problem?