#J07 J. Donald Adams, NY Times book reviewer

A man of aphorisms

Jones cites his birthday as September 24th, 1891 which is the same as the New York Times obituary.

• Farewell to the North Woods Guide Author and editor, J. DONALD ADAMS upon his graduation from Harvard spent two years as a teacher of English at the University of Washington before embarking on the career which was to make him widely known and universally loved. Since 1924 he has been associated with the New York Times Book Review, first as assistant editor, then as editor, and for the past fourteen years as the writer of the weekly column, “Speaking of Books” In this essay he calls to our attention the gradual disappearance of the guides in the fishing and hunting areas of Maine, a state which he has come to regard as his second home.
  • J. DONALD ADAMS
  • JULY 1957 ISSUE, Atlantic Magazine.

 Marc Edmund Jones,does not local mean time (LMT) the birth times in his 1000, but uses the clock time. I prefer Zain’s method of LMTing the time as I agree it gives better results. This gives Adams the ascendant of 28 Scorpio 21 instead of 29 +; it is a minor difference. Jones though would round up the 29+ to 30 Scorpio because that is the FreeMason method—the same that Alan Leo used. As I am not a FreeMason, I list Adams, and just about everyone else as 28 Scorpio without the minutes so if are several with that degree they would group together. Scorpio 28+ is also the ascendant for President James Garfield. It is a symbol of “collecting” and being tethered to a place because of their collections.

I could not find any information that James Donald Adams was related to Evangeline Adams or Jane & Charles Addams (all three, despite their various spellings of the surname are descendants of the US presidents John and John Quincy). In spite of the similarity in name, he was just an “Adams.”

           Looking at the chart

Adams has a huge stellium in Virgo which made him good for the minutiae of book reviewing. It spreads from the ninth house of publishing to his tenth house of dreams and aspirations. He wrote a few books himself, so reading and learning about books probably was a good segue to his real aspiration of writing. I found some of his oeuvre on Archive.org,– here’s a link to one of the more popular volumes, A New Treasure Chest, which he writes in the foreword are selections previously published in his c New York Times column, The Treasure Chest. That noted, you can find many of my own luminaries represented within; because talking on the telephone cost per minute, unless it was local to your exchange, and there was not any T.V.

Lilith, in the tenth tells us he settled for the second choice of reviewer because he could not afford to be a full-time writer.. The group of Gemini planets supports this in the sixth house, showing he worked hard juggling his two, though allied, fields. 

He is a bucket with a Jupiter handle, in its rulership, in the third house of small communications, again fitting book reviews and his collection of short stories I found. Surprisingly, with the great preponderance of Virgo in the ninth he did not take to teaching, and it would seem that Jupiter in the third overrode that grouping and made him more inclined to reading and more solitary work. Another argument against teaching is his Mercury in Virgo in the tenth, as it shows how much he loved words, wordplay, and reading. But perhaps the greatest argument against teaching was location: he did not like being on the West Coast in Wasington State. In the Al-Qabisi (Alchabitius) house system, his first and seventh houses are intercepted, he was lonely and couldn’t meet anyone but it didn’t happen until that event—moving to Washington— occurred.  In the end, why didn’t teaching work? He was homesick.