SCOTT CITY AUTHOR A MAN OF MANY WORDS

SCOTT CITY -- For a man with an eighth-grade education, Edison Shrum has written a lot of books.

So many, if fact, that he doesn't know how many. Among them, a book about Southeast Missouri's supposed volcanic history, one suggesting there may be gold in our hills, a book about the hysteria that surrounded Iben Browning's New Madrid earthquake prediction in 1990, a book about Cape Girardeau County slaves and slaveowners, a tome about Scott City and his newest about the history of Commerce.

As many as 15 or 20 books altogether, he guesses, plus plenty of pamphlets. But whatever the number of books he has written is dwarfed by the number of books that stand like ancient sentinels along the walls of his house and fill an outbuilding. The total might be 10,000 books, many of them huge reference works.

"I don't want to wind up like Henry David Thoreau," he says.

How's that?

"Somebody asked how many books Thoreau had and he said he had a library of 900 books -- `All of them written by me.'"

As the typewriter, copying machine and microfilm reader in his bedroom suggest, Edison Shrum has a mind never at rest.

He was born 81 years ago in Swinton, Mo., now a ghost town 6 miles south of Advance. His high school education lasted only a few months. "I didn't think I was getting what I wanted fast enough," he explains.

He never married and worked as a timber inspector, a newspaper linotype operator, a syndicated freelance writer and a book appraiser during his career. Most of his books have been written since he turned 70.

Shrum published many of the books himself, while the Scott County Historical Society has brought out most of the historical ones. His book about the history of Scott City recently sold out its third printing.

His first book, published in 1950, was run off on an old mimeograph machine, all 25 copies. The subsequent books have become fancier and larger. Copies of most of them reside on a table in his living room, the better to show visitors.

Shrum might quote Plutarch and the Bible in the same sentence, and has made it his business to get to know Southeast Missouri, Southern Illinois and Western Kentucky inside out.

"You can't find a place I haven't stuck my nose in," he says.

His quest has led him to numerous discoveries: of a town called New York, Mo., which was located below Thebes before the Civil War; of the graves of early settlers, one never before mentioned in previous histories; of the pervasiveness of slaveowning in Cape Girardeau County.

He spends many months researching each book, interviewing people and researching government documents. But there's been little mystery to the writing process for him, from the first to the last one.

"I just sit down and write it up," he says.