Medicine for Moody Times

Sometimes even mornings seem dark and brooding.

 

God forbid that I should say a word against a public library, but nothing will take the place or a rack of a shelf full of books by one’s own chair, close to a well-adjusted light, whether it be a lamp or a window. Everyone’s shelf will contain different books, and the books which give joy to youth may not delight age, but the pleasure of reading continues. I see to-day greater anxiety written on the faces of my millionaire friends than I do on the faces of the poor men who resort day after day to our public libraries, there to solace themselves with a book. In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death. 

 

-      A. Edward Newton, End Papers: Literary Recreations (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1933)

 

Newton was writing during the years of the Great Depression (“What was so great about it?” a young person might ask, and that would be a good question), when no doubt his “millionaire friends” had plenty of anxiety. But anxiety is not limited to millionaires, nor to periods of economic depression, so it is all the better insurance to those of us further down in the world’s financial hierarchy that public libraries still thrive in our United States and that personal, private collections of books can be had for very little -- though an occasional splurge, like the occasional cheesecake wedge for dessert, is not always to be resisted.

Newton, an American, was a serious high-end book collector, and his specialty was English literature – that is to say, he preferred books from “across the pond,” as he put it. For others he recommended Americana, specifically Walt Whitman; for himself, however, a book lacking any mention of Dr. Johnson rarely attracted him. Moreover, urban to the core, he had no interest in the world of nature. 

A noted exception to his Johnson/no nature rule was the fiction of Mary Webb, and he lauded her books so highly that I rushed to my bookshop shelves to find Precious Bane, smuggled it home that very night, and began reading Webb's masterpiece as soon as I closed the cover on End Papers.  

 

 

…It was a wonderful thing to see our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were, so that you would think not even an angel’s feet were good enough to walk there. … Every way you looked, there was nought but gold, saving towards Sarn, where the woods began, and the great stretch of grey water, gleaming and wincing in the sun. Neither woods nor water looked darksome in that fine spring weather, with the leaves coming new, and buds the color of corn in the birch-tops. Only in our oak wood there was always a look of the back-end of the year, their young leaves being so brown. So there was always a breath of October in our May. 

 

-      Mary Webb, Precious Bane (NY: Dutton, 1926)

 

 

Blooming cowslips (Michigan’s marsh marigolds) were known as paigle, or keys of heaven, to the natives of Mary Webb’s Shropshire meres. A much-neglected classic, I was ready to agree, after only two chapters of the novel. 

It is October now in Leelanau, always a quixotic month and this year alternating summer and autumn from one day to the next. By Sunday, had it settled down? Full, peak color and cold rain seemed to say yes, and while the colors gleamed in the rain, my mood was sad, or at least bittersweet. Although the Artist always used to say he loved the leafless trees in November and the time when the “bones of the earth” are laid bare, my memory calls back so many slow county cruises in October (following a getaway to the U.P. or Lake Huron in September) that seeing the beauty of the dying leaves by myself feels almost unbearable. 

Luckily, for whatever grip on sanity I possess, there is Sunny Juliet. Like October, Sunny has a variety of moods. Here is an introduction to a few of them, as demonstrated this past mid-October weekend.  

Looking goofy

Caught a mole!

Pretending it's time to get up.

Homework!

To my way of thinking, there is nothing like books and dogs to chase away the blues of politics and the approach of winter. 

Dark is coming earlier and earlier.

But can you see the tiny sliver of moon? Look closely!

Where the Past Never Dies

In a recent issue of the e-mail book world newsletter “Shelf Awareness,” the “Quotation of the Day” came from a bookseller opening a new shop on September 1, who said he thought of a bookstore as a “cultural anachronism.” He meant it (as one would have hoped) in the best possible way:

... A place where time itself seems to slow. People linger. Few are ever in much of a rush or put out by a line. We've all made a decision about what we value more than a discount.

  

Maybe this is what people really mean when they talk about their love of the smell of a bookstore. The anachronism of ink and pulp amidst the daily sterility of point and click.

If you are interested in more of what Brad had to say, follow this link.

My own experience (24+ years of running my own indie bookstore in northern Michigan) tells me that many people my age who deserted print books are coming back to them and, moreover, that much younger people, who grew up with electronics and take them for granted, are discovering physical books with wonder and awe. One lovely day near the end of summer three girls in their early teens were combing my shelves for the oldest books they could find that would fit their budgets. Their eager questions about copyright and printing dates or lack thereof led me to point out differences in paper quality, binding, and illustration. They could not have been more attentive. They purchased their treasures and came back in the afternoon for Round 2, eagerly shopping the past. A couple of weeks before that a young father had earnestly impressed on his child that “This book was published when Thomas Jefferson was alive!” Yes, he bought that book, too.

Some scholars and commentators have remarked, in loving, neutral, or derogatory language, depending on their own perspectives and purposes, on books as “fetish objects.” (Here is a sampling of articles—x, y, z—and you can easily find more yourself.) I would remind those who look down on our love for physical books that we ourselves are physical creatures, not immaterial angels but living, breathing animals, borne of earth, mortal, gravity-bound, and conscious of our ultimate earthly destiny, death. Is it any wonder, facing our own time limits, that we are fascinated by objects that predated our births and can easily live far beyond us? The added attraction of these artifacts, of course, is that they contain thoughts – dreams – ideas – memories – which means that human minds can outlive human bodies and speak beyond the grave to later generations.

Part of my life-long fascination with Modern Library books is their hand-friendly size, and there is something quite endearing about books that size or smaller to many book-lovers, so you can easily see how this tiny volume, printed in Glasgow in 1836, charms me for its size and its binding. The ninth edition of The National Minstrel: A Collection of Popular Songs, containing only lyrics, no music, you might expect as I did to find numerous copies available, but I found the work only in libraries. (All the photos in today's post are of this little book.) Doubtless because it was so common and widely printed and purchased, the little book was not considered valuable in its time and so was not carefully preserved. As with those once-ubiquitous Dick-and-Jane readers, however, its survival intact is what today gives value to The National Minstrel. Its rarity – and its charm.

Book Review: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, 
and Jane Austen,

by Charlie Lovett

NY: Viking, 2014

Hardcover, $27.95

On sale October 20, 2014

Like a wary horse led toward a new and unfamiliar horse trailer – i.e., suspiciously, nervously -- that’s how I approach modern fiction claiming inspiration from Jane Austen’s work. My mind is not closed but is definitely guarded. At the same time, I’m also prepared to be won over. That’s it, though: I’ll be passing judgment on every page with a standard set 200 years ago by Jane Austen herself. How could it be otherwise?

Charlie Lovett did not win me over on the first page or even in the first chapter of First Impressions. I found fault with his adjectives and even his verbs.

Her first impression was that he was the picture of gloom—dressed in shabby clerical garb, a dark look on his crinkled face, doubtless a volume of dusty sermons clutched in his ancient hand.

But Jane Austen herself is the main character in that and every other chapter, so Lovett has given himself quite a challenge. Attempting to imitate Jane Austen! It is all too easy for words to fail: he who attempts and she who critiques had best tread carefully here. And so I read on.

After only four pages of his fictional Jane and her fictional and purely invented friend and mentor, our modern author shifts to the present day, introducing us to young Sophie Collingwood, and you’d think Sophie would seem easier to accept than first-chapter Jane, but maybe I’d allowed my skepticism to deepen over the previous four pages, because I did not immediately cotton to Sophie, either. Reading ostentatiously as she walked along, looking down on the strange young man for being American and casually dressed but then speaking to him of her father in a manner seemingly designed to invite the development of a relationship -- that is Sophie as we first meet her. “Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘He likes to shoot things.’” Is she trying to give Eric the brush-off or encourage revelations? Maybe she’s not sure herself, and maybe our first impression of Sophie will not be a lasting impression.

Back to Hampshire, 1796, in the third chapter, the Reverend Mr. Richard Mansfield gives the fictional Jane the first suggestion of many to follow as to the development of a story she has in progress.

“I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort – the type to throw parties or host picnics – your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.” 

 “I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

Now the horse is asked to walk up the ramp to the trailer, and this horse plants hooves squarely on solid earth and digs in! Stiff legs, ears laid back! Jane Austen needing literary guidance from an older man? One whose own writing is pedestrian in the extreme? What kind of liberties are being taken here with one of my favorite writers of all time?

The structure of First Impressions is two stories, however, one historical fiction and the other modern mystery. Eventually the two will intertwine. And fortunately my second impression of Sophie was more favorable than the first, the revised view beginning where Lovett starts cashing in the promise of “old books” in his subtitle. Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, I learn to my great delight, was a book collector. Soon Sophie finds a job in a secondhand bookshop! She gets to know a customer whose passion is early printing, and this intrigues her (though she’s never been interested in the printing aspect of books before), as her family is descended from an early English printer. She learns to question her own first impressions of everyone and everything.

There is a lot in this book for bibliophiles. My part-time bookstore helper, Bruce, will love the beginning of this chapter (page 79):

Almost without thinking ... Sophie had walked to Cecil Court, a short pedestrian lane between Charing Cross Road and St. Martin’s Lane that was lined on both sides with bookshops. Cecil Court, with its rows of tall glass windows framed by green painted woodwork and filled with displays of every type of book imaginable, was the heart of London’s secondhand book trade. The world seemed to move more slowly here....

And Sophie’s Uncle Bertram, expounding to her on the beauty of rare books:

“If you mail a rare stamp it becomes worthless. If you drink a bottle of rare wine, you’re left with some recycling. But if you read a rare book it’s still there, it’s still valuable, and it’s achieved the full measure of its being. A book is to be read, whether it’s worth five pounds or five thousands pounds.”

Because that’s the kind of collector Bertram was, a reader rather than a trophy hunter. It’s impossible not to love him, so I was grateful to have so many encounters with him in flashbacks, despite his death early in the novel.

Death? Uncle Bertram? Did he fall, or was he pushed? Is Sophie’s imagination running away with her, as did young Catherine Morland’s in Austen’s Northanger Abbey?

Whatever will be discovered later on, Sophie’s impression that Uncle Bertram’s death is suspicious constitutes a mystery for her. The second mystery has to do with a couple of very specific 18^th-century books and the relationship between the fictional Jane Austen (remember, this is a novel Lovett has written) and her aged mentor. Sophie is determined to solve both.

Jane’s mentor, Richard Mansfield, is mirrored in Sophie’s life by her Uncle Bertram and later, in lesser fashion, by the bookseller, Gusty Boxhill. Sophie’s loving relationship with her sister Victoria mirrors that of Jane and Cassandra. Eric and Winston, Sophie’s “suitors,” seem to have no parallel in the fictional Jane Austen’s story. Are we to believe and trust either one of them, or do the older men hold all the truth and devotion cards?

For me, the modern chapters of this book worked better than those with Jane Austen, although I enjoyed brief two-century-old glimpses of the fictional printer. As for the mysteries, they felt contrived, and I could have done without them, whereas the world of old books, bookshops, bookselling, printing history, and primary source research had me spellbound. But this is, as always, a subjective response: I am a bookseller, and I live in a world of books. It’s also no small matter to me when a writer undertakes to re-invent one of my favorite authors.

The bottom line, though, is that First Impressions is an entertaining book and makes enjoyable reading. It will be irresistible to Austen fans and bibliophiles, and mystery readers and book club members will enjoy it, as well. The discussion possibilities are endless.

Leave a comment and become eligible for a give-away copy of this book! Sorry, U.S. mailing addresses only.

No Purer Love

You needn't be rich to collect books. These are from the Peter Pauper Press.

A recent post and comments on Books in Northport (don't miss the comments!) focused on the effect of rising real estate values on urban bookstores, a topic raised by Andrew Laties. Everyone knows, however—and I mean everyone in this country, not just everyone in the business--that rent is only one of many concerns facing bricks-and-mortar booksellers, as those of us with a physical street presence are called. The rapidly changing environment of publishing and bookselling, including online publishing, online buying and selling, e-books, e-readers, “clouds” and all the rest, has got everyone guessing and no one knowing for sure which way to jump.

I’m not alone in my love for printed books, and I’m far from alone in having expressed the reasons I remain loyalty to the old form but today I want to take another look at e-books, from a different and narrower perspective, because while advocates for and defenders of their respective preferences have advanced arguments in the e-book vs. print book debate dealing with issues of convenience, cost (both personal and environmental), and readability, Tim Parks has turned the debate in a new direction. His claim, the one I want to examine, is that that e-book offers a purer literary experience.

Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Leatherbound Jane Austen with ribbon bookmark

This is a serious point of view, and it cannot be dismissed out of hand. As for the obvious counter-argument in favor of what Parks calls “fetishistic gratification,” he anticipates and meets it head-on.

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

Indeed, says Parks, until e-books came along, every age--with each successive “word-delivery system,” if you will--offered different sorts of “fetishistic gratification” (the former phrase in quotation marks is not one Parks uses; the latter is), and only now can we free ourselves from these physical distractions to meet literature in pure form. As I say, this is a serious argument, deserving of serious consideration. If you have the time and inclination, follow the link and read his position in full. It’s worth the time.

Not surprisingly, there was immediate reaction. One bookstore owner, Bill Petrocelli, predictably (but is “predictably” always “wrongly”?) challenged the Parks view, reminding readers that the fact that e-books don’t burn (a point Parks had made) is not necessarily in their favor. He was quoted in the trade e-newsletter "Shelf Awareness" as follows:

The e-book burners of the future won't have to round up all of the copies and put on them on a big pyre. They could achieve the same thing with the push of a button.

I am more than sympathetic to Petrocelli’s concern. I certainly don’t want my books somewhere in a “cloud,” where they can be turned off by some remote master switch at any moment. He has much more to say, also, which you can read here. All of Petrocelli’s are serious concerns. He does not, however, provide a direct answer to the purity question posed by Tim Parks, so let’s go back to that and then afterward see whether the two concerns can be addressed together or whether they cancel each other out. 

First, I want to question the alleged “purity” of the e-book reading experience, and secondly I want to examine the general desirability of “pure” experience, divorced from sensual considerations.

The look of this shelf pleases my aesthetic sense, but there's more--.

Does reading a book on an electronic device, be it cell phone, tablet, or large computer screen, deliver an experience free of “fetishistic gratification”? After all, I can’t be trying to impress people by the dust jacket on my book if it isn’t a book I’m holding and they can’t see a title. There’s no way interior decorating can come into play, either: the books I read (were I to read on an e-reader, which I don’t) cannot be lined up on shelves to impress visitors to my home. So is Tim Parks correct in saying that we have left the distracting sensual element behind with with the "austerity" of e-readers?

Reports from the e-reading public seem to suggest otherwise. A more “’paperlike’ reading experience” is touted as a plus for some models. People with e-readers are eager to talk about the quality of the lighted screen, the background color, the “smoothness” of use. Two owners of the devices have insisted on showing me "books I've read," which they did by showing me a a lineup of titled book icons on their electronic screens. (I'm not making that up. Somehow they seemed to think the icons provided more evidence than if they had simply told me, in spoken words, what they'd been reading.) E-readers do not dispense with fonts, either; they simply make it possible (as Parks admits) for the reader to adjust and alter the font at will.  And what about all those distracting extras like hyperlinks and such? Don’t those rather leave the “pure” text behind? Isn’t it a bit like watching a movie on DVD with the director’s voice talking over the dialogue in every scene as he explains how the scene was shot and how he got the actors to give the performances as they did? Is that a purer film experience? The question I’m asking here, in line with the argument made by Parks, isn’t whether or not you should want or enjoy the extras (because they're a bit like footnotes, after all, and you don't have to bother with them) but if the e-reading experience is “purer,” as he claims. 

Isn’t it obvious that the sensuous has not been eliminated from the e-reading experience but only homogenized so that each book’s reading “feel” is like the one before and the one to follow? Haven't a series and variety of objects simply been replaced with one sleek, modern one? What would it mean to eliminate all material objects from the reading experience? If you could somehow “download” a “book” (text, if you will) directly into your brain, would that be a “pure experience”? Maybe it would be. Maybe that is the dream that many hope will be realized in the future of reading. I wonder how many old-fashioned booklovers feel the desire for such an experience.

I’d like to change the subject slightly, for reasons of analogy. For many people, “meeting” strangers on the Internet is a freeing experience, precisely because they can meet mind to mind and leave distracting bodies out of the equation. One could, I suppose, make the argument that a relationship thus formed provides—or at least has the potential to provide--pure interpersonal experience. Individuals can exchange opinions without even knowing one another’s gender, much less their respective ages or other physical qualities. If an exchange of views is conducted in such a manner, does it constitute a relationship? A pure relationship? The literary experience, says Parks, is purely mental and exists “in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.” Nothing else. Is the experience of love or friendship, in its purest form, nothing more than the meeting of two minds?

More than decor--time travel and encounters with those no longer among us.

Denigration of the material world is at least as old as Plato, who divided existence into two realms and saw earthly objects as degraded versions of pure heavenly forms. To my way of thinking, such disdain for our material world, the only one we know and the one that is, therefore, the ground of our every experience, is nothing short of reprehensible ingratitude. I love to see a smile on a friend’s face or to take a friend’s hand in sympathy.

Beautiful new paperback

Okay, Tim, I gave it a whirl. I considered your position. But I’m not buying it. I don’t believe the e-reader experience is purer than the experience of reading from printed books. It’s just different. And pure experience isn’t what I’m looking for, anyway. What I want is real experience. I don’t need or desire the illusion of having left the earth. In fact, the books I love most, whether fiction or nonfiction, bind me more tightly to this earth and to those I love by evoking earthly experience. And for that I love them, the books, both what they say and for how they look and feel. I don't love books because I sell them. I am a reader and a bookseller because I love books--as literature and as objects.

Two new hardcover novels with dust jackets--beautiful in every way!

Books for Looks?

This was our Saturday afternoon homecoming. Can you blame us for staying home on Sunday with books, magazines and old newspapers?

A friend who braved the weather yesterday to visit Dog Ears Books brought me a section of the New York Times from earlier this month. For those of you who missed the article my friend knew would interest me, “Selling a Book by Its Cover,” you can find it online here.


The idea is that a well-stocked library is part of the design of a house. It’s part of interior decoration:

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé....

Not all clients rule out the possibility of reading their home décor--some, for instance, want only books in English for that very reason—but others are happy to have stacks of books all wrapped in white (or black) as “design elements” in a room where nothing is left to chance, presumably in a house where every tschoschke and its position on a table has been carefully planned. (I guess some people really live like this.) My friend was appalled and thought I would be, too. Well, I can’t see much value in books as nothing more than stacks of white or black, but shelves of real, readable books? Maybe someone will read them—if not the people who paid for the house, then their guests or their grandchildren.


But are we, as one trend-spotter in the article claimed, turning codices (the old word codex is now new again, distinguishing a printed, bound book from an e-book) into fetishes? Fetish! That’s pretty loaded language. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing and making an argument, I looked around my own house and came up with more questions. Why do we photograph natural objects and put those photographs on our walls? Why do we (some of us) have stones and shells and animal bones on our bookshelves, along with the books. Is that small mammal skull a fetish? Those deer jawbones? (Where did my deer jawbones get to, anyway?) Is there something all of these objects on shelves have in common?


[Caveat, disclaimer, disclosure, whatever: There has never been an interior decorator involved in our house. I probably don’t need to say so. Surely our books and bookshelves speak for themselves. Just remember that that’s beside the point, okay? Don’t get distracted! What do books, shells, stones and skulls have in common?]

Here’s what I think. We are physical inhabitants of a physical world and also spiritually connected both to one another and to other aspects of the world, and so we bring into our individual home spaces some of the objects from the larger world that make that larger world our home, too. This stone connects me to a beach covered now by snow and ice. A walk on another beach hundreds of miles away turned up this shell. Finding jawbones of a deer down by the creek years ago, I felt my connection to an individual animal I might never have seen but who was, for a while, a neighbor, and the little raccoon (possum?) also was another being like us, once warm and alive, needing food and shelter. Like these animals, we will one day lose our warmth and life, but even then, like the stone and the shell and bones, we will leave some traces behind.


Every book on the shelf contains human life. Traces, lives, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, events. Readers and non-readers alike sense that books connect us to other human beings in our own and in earlier times, every book a product of other inhabitants of our home, this earth. Wanting them around us, it seems to me, is recognition of their value. Whether or not it constitutes fetishism, I leave for others to decide.

I am fairly well convinced, though, that I need to make crisp new dust jackets for the 25-volume set of the complete works of Mark Twain in my bookshop, its covers worn and faded by the years. A lot of people do judge books by their covers--at least, the cover gives them their first impression--and to many the look of the books on their shelves is important, so Mark Twain needs a facelift. Unless someone comes in to buy the set before I get around to the beautification project. And I have all those stones and shells and bones to handle and rearrange before I start making dust jackets. First things first.

Guest Blog: Bruce Goes to Toronto for Henty Meeting

Here’s another contribution from Bruce Balas of Omena, Dog Ears Books volunteer for a solid decade:

Recently Judy and I flew to Toronto for a gathering of the G. A. Henty Society. George Alfred Henty, the object of the gathering, was a writer of historical novels in England from 1860 until 1902. His historical adventure stories, written mainly for young people and full of action, made him the most popular writer of his time. And since his books are historically accurate, they are still very popular today, especially with the home school families. In addition, in Victorian England where they were originally published, his books were beautifully bound and as a result are very collectible.

There is a “society,” headquartered in England, with a branch in North America, consisting of the people who collect his books. Our North American branch meets at least once each year to trade books around, share information we’ve learned about Mr. Henty and, of course, just socialize.

In addition to the conference itself, Judy and I got to spend several days exploring Toronto. The city has a lovely park along the north shore of Lake Ontario, a dynamic downtown and a wide variety of cafes, bookshops, and museums, with a very European feel. This area is small enough to be easily walked from the University in the north all the way down to the lakeshore. We enjoyed it very much and recommend a visit.