Potentially hazardous

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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Twice a week we pack the items we've sold and take them to the post office, where they know us well by now, and know that most of our packages contain books. Still, they are required to ask the standard question about our shipping : "Are any of these liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?" After we made the joke about how "Haha! Books are always hazardous! Ideas are dangerous!" a few times, it got old, but the truth remains. They are.

In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. It was mainstream news, not "mere" book news, and got a lot of attention, with the local paper interviewing all in the book business to see if we were brave enough to defy any violent militants who hopped into town.

20 years later Rushdie is alive and so are all the booksellers and librarians 8~) who were brave enough to declare they would stock it anyway. It was truly scary, at least in major cities, at the time. Nobody knew what could happen. I kept this issue of the Barnes and Noble catalog, explaining their commitment to intellectual freedom, and I still admire their courage.

During Banned Books Week, here's to book peddlers everywhere who keep the light burning.

More book repair stuff

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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Since I was fixing these 2 books anyway, it occurred to me (after I'd gotten started, of course) to document and post another book repair entry, this time showing what I do when a book has completely split apart.

For anyone who happens by -- I talked about the basic materials in my first post on repairing books -- so I won't repeat that here, I'll just refer any interested readers to that post, but I will repeat one thing which is too important to skip:

NEVER repair a book unless you are willing to destroy its value. Repair pretty much does exactly that. If you want to sell it, collectors would rather have it in disrepair. Really. Repair only no-value books that need to be used and handled.

OK. You'll see 2 books here, but i'll show the repair steps for the more complicated one.
It's complicated mostly by my choice. I want to keep the original bookplate and to keep all of the original paper of that ripped endpage.

You may not want to. It would be simpler and would, in fact, look neater to discard the torn paper and make a big, neat, new pastedown. But I like the plate. I like the personal history in an old book. And I also tend to keep as much of a book's original material as possible ... just ... because!

The general idea is to secure the text block to the cover.

The first step requires a decision. There's paper backing against the bound page edges.

The bookbinding guide calls this the "hollow back." It is NOT hollow, it's thoroughly glued to the bound edges, but they call it that.

Is that backing secure? Or is it shredding, or peeling off?

If it needs fixing or replacing, this is the time to do either one, by gluing it down, or peeling it away and replacing it, the same way I have placed new paper on this one.

Two views, one from each angle:

But in this case, the old backing was very securely glued down already and needed no attention, so I just placed the new piece on top of it.

Now -- BEFORE gluing the book together, it's a very very good idea to close the book on the new piece.

This shows me exactly how the piece will conform to the cover. AND when I DO put glue on the pieces, they will already be shaped to each other and will fit together in their natural position, without pulling against each other.

All I need to do now is glue the new piece onto the cover.


IMPORTANT : NOTE that I have put NO GLUE ON THE SPINE. The cloth spine is not supposed to stick to the back of the pages. The text block, as it's called, just kind of hangs into the spine like a hammock, attached ONLY at the hinges.

Press it together. Since glue always oozes out around the edges, lay wax paper between the repair and its facing page, till the glue dries.

If I were discarding the old torn edges, I'd pretty much be finished, but I chose to trim the new piece to fit around the plate ... and to glue the torn paper back onto the pastedown. It looks kind of yucky, since it's been crumpled down into the spine, probably for decades, and darkened. But I wanted to put it back where it belonged!

And here are both books. In the other one you can see that this technique makes a pretty neat repair, especially if you sort-of color match new paper to the old paper.

This is another book I should sell. I'm not sure that a real booklover should even be in this business. I should sell collectible thimbles or something.

Marvels of Insect Life, by Edward Step. NY:Robert M. McBride, 1916.



Loads of amazing photos. as well as the spectacular color plates. This photo close-up of a honeybee's tongue is amazing. Maybe I'll sell it ... um ... later.

Sue me. I love Peyton Place

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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Our friend Leila often spends holidays with us and brings interesting videos when she comes. On Christmas day this year, after the Big Dinner with my folks, we came back and watched an episode of David Halberstam's documentary series, The 'Fifties.

Specifically, we watched the episode about Grace Metalious and her phenomenal bestseller, Peyton Place.

I'd never before felt any interest in Metalious or her book, but her personal story grabbed me. Her complete lack of emotional or educational background for writing, and her determination to do it anyway, drew me in. And then, she didn't just do what her soul longed to do, she did it successfully, at least in terms of sales and celebrity. And never had more than a moment's happiness from it.

Possibly because of the endless TV series, which seemed to be on nearly every night when I was a kid and bored me then, I'd also never had any desire to read the novel. My assumption was that it was both trashy and tame, an artifact of its time that may have been an "adult book" in 1956, but had neither the wickedness nor the literary merit to make it interesting reading now.


I was wrong.

Not entirely. The book is amazing and often awful. It's a crazy-quilt of the lurid, the overly campy, and the insightful. Some of the vignettes in it delighted me, and the best of those are the smallest, not big plot points.

In an early one, two friends, twelve-year-old girls, spend an afternoon together. That's it. Allison is from an (outwardly, but with secrets) proper home. Selena is from an abusive home in a tarpaper shack on the wrong side of the tracks. Their friendship depends on their shared dream of a someday in which each can control her own destiny. But on this occasion, Allison wants to share with Selena a previously hidden aspect of her inner life. She wants them to take, not the usual walk downtown where they buy Silver Screen magazine and dream of pretty dresses in store windows, but one to the wooded glen where Allison goes to daydream about a bohemian literary future. Allison and Selena both feel like outsiders. The glen, outside of and above the town, is Allison's symbol of how outsider status can be superiority, a breaking away. Selena wants to achieve insider status, and can't relate at all to this place or its meaning for Allison.

The afternoon is a disaster. They wander back downtown. In a little chapter in which the pacing is crucial to the depiction of these two mending their friendship by reentering the part of their lives that they can meet in, Metalious nails it. Through ordinary window shopping and ice cream, they gradually find common ground again and part as friends, but as friends who have grown up a small notch by confronting their separateness.

This isn't the only passage in the novel that Metalious handles with intelligence and delicacy. Sometimes she takes you through a character's thought processes, as he or she wrestles with a big inner conflict. The town doctor, a good man, has to help the completely innocent Selena, who has been raped by her stepfather, and faces the ugliness of both of his choices. The nurse he enlists to help him has a little chapter of her own, the only few pages she gets in the book, but the whole interplay of her religious faith, her professionalism, her admiration for the doctor, her astute perception of his conflict, her knowledge that she's made a decision herself and can't pin it on anyone else -- all this makes her real.

This isn't a book review, in the sense of my trying to be Fair and Balanced. I'm neglecting the novel's flaws. It's intentional, because they are well-known, its reputation bad and its merits neglected.

So. I love Metalious's affection for her main character, Allison, yet her willingness to make gentle fun of Allison's earnestness, immaturity and melodrama.

I love the dialog between Allison and the repressed, pale, poetic boy she likes, on a picnic, where their conversation is about beliefs, plans, picnic garbage, sex information from a secretly-purchased mail-order book, all braided together with skilful naturalness.

The violent and awful passages can range from so-so to ghastly, but Metalious did know how to weave such passages over and then under again, with a quiet aftermath. Selena has worked hard to make their poor little shack into a home, and places a fresh log on the fire one winter night -- then gets attacked by, and kills, her stepfather. As she comes out of that trauma-induced altered state, she notices that "the fire made a crisp, crackling, friendly sound as the log she had placed across the andirons began to burn," and that this was all the time that had passed.

There aren't a whole lot of such nifty little passages. She was no Harper Lee, and the weird and grotesque in this little town don't come off with anything like the insight or compassion that a better novelist could have brought to it.

The deck was stacked against Grace Metalious from an early age and still she fought to become a real writer, and had the brains to do it. She set out to be sensational, and succeeded, but she also set out to write well, and did in places. She understood both description and dialog, and how to flesh out character and event using both. I read this thing and it nearly breaks my heart, the "if onlys" of her life and her achievement. With the support and direction that guide and train a writer, she could have been absolutely fantastic, and it shows in her awful-yet-wonderful, rather amazing novel.

So maybe I don't love Peyton Place so much as I love its author for her determination to be who she wanted to be against all odds, and for her even succeeding at it, not in fame but in the novel's Yes! moments.


OK, maybe I really do love Peyton Place.

A ramble

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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A friend gave me a copy of Eat, Pray, Love and I thought I'd give it a shot. Gilbert has a nice witty writing style, but I kept thinking, "This woman is infantile, self-centered and nuts!"

Then I realized that during the time she's writing about, she is exactly the age I was when I was infantile, self-centered and nuts. 34. The early part of such a journey will, has to, seem that way. When you start with practically no inner life, you can easily strike out at your outer life, get selfish, hurt people. What's good about her story is not her initial lunacy, but her decision not to get stuck there. Progress is what matters, and progress takes a
l-o-o-o-ng blasted time.

This photo is from around March 1988. I'm 34 years old, about 3 months sober, and have that new-to-the-program stare: "How did I get here? What in the world do I do now?"


At the time I thought (oh so wrongly!) that nothing had changed. Relationships were an emotional puzzlement. My need to feel capable and confident was still unfulfilled but I no longer even believed that substances could meet that need.

In 1988 I am in emotional kindergarten and I want to be Graduated and have a new life right now.

I went to meetings and looked around me. One who really seemed to have her act together was "Meg."

I've been thinking about her lately. "Meg" and "Jim" were relative newlyweds in their late 30's. Each had 3 kids from failed former marriages. They got into the program, found each other, and formed a family. They had a baby, and I confess I watched the progression of her pregnancy with a mixture of envy and horror. Seven children! She joked about her lousy childhood and how The Sound of Music had been her unattainable fantasy of home and family, and now here she was, probably trying to act out the film. They had a lovely sunny house and the cutest von Trapp Family-style Christmas card you ever saw, and she still had emotional problems. But she went to meetings and talked about them and faced them. She acknowledged her need for real therapy, and found a shrink with strong medical credentials. That's what you do. Pretend everything's hunky-dory, quit your support network, and that's when you get into trouble. She seemed to be doing it right.

I went to lunch with her one day, and unloaded about my then-boyfriend. "He is cute, isn't he?" she said to me with a wry grin, and I found myself reading this statement as a smart assessment that I needed to put my brain in charge and judge whether it really could become what I was looking for.

This might have been her meaning, or it very well might have been early stirrings of my own mind coming back to life. Maybe both. Meg's life deteriorated later, but if I've learned anything, I've learned that that in no way means she lacked smarts and insight. We're a patchwork of sanity and craziness, all of us who are getting our marbles back.

If my own smarts and good judgment were indeed stirring to life, the stirrings were very early because I put a lot more years into trying to hammer bad fits -- friends, lovers, career -- into what I wanted them to be. There are still days when a nice toxic dose of regret will reactivate in my mind, like a mental malaria, but with decreasing frequency. Other days, I breathe deeply and tell myself that I took the time I needed to take in order to learn what I absolutely had to learn.

The photo is a moment in time. A few years later things were radically different. I was getting my marbles back. Meg began to have dissociative episodes, a schizophrenia-like hallucinatory illness, or some deeply buried memories of some serious childhood trauma. She disappeared from the group and rumors were vague as to diagnosis or prognosis. She and Jim split and she was at one point found wandering the streets hundreds of miles away. But no moment-in-time situation is the end of the story. My last news of her is at least 16 years old. It may sound batty to hope that she's found her way back to herself and to a happy life but I have, honest-to-God, seen it happen, and several times. I know people who have overcome wreckage the likes of which I've never had to crawl out of. It's a matter of willingness to take time, time, time to grow up, and not feel too lousy about starting so blasted late.

Meanwhile, back at the book, I keep thinking of an earlier book of poetry, by a poet I've written about before. Like Gilbert's book, it's about both travel and an inner journey, about food and beauty and inner longing and a joyous embrace of life, and it seems better centred and less immature. Gilbert is OK, she has something to say, but I think Miller did it a little better.

Consolation

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]


During my net surfing for a censorship entry awhile back, I ran across a NY Times article entitled, "A Good Book Should Make You Cry." It concerns the "problem novels" that teachers, often following book awards, think kids "should" appreciate.

The author rightly perceives that matching the reader to the book is important and difficult, and she touches on the attraction of bleak stories, but she doesn't really tackle the issue of why a story that puts its main character through serious emotional trauma can be well-loved, and how it differs from the ones kids avoid. The key is there, though, in her comment that the problem novels left her "unconsoled."

I tackled the issue when I got the whole set of Little House books for my 9th birthday. I'd already polished off 2 or 3 of them thanks to the school library, and had begged to own them.


(Shameless digression: There they are on my emergency evacuation shelf. On top of the stack is a paperback Little House on the Prairie in French. Next to the Wilder books is the first, and therefore dearest to me, of my Victorian schoolbook collection, which I wanted because they were the kind of books Laura had. I bought that one, Lippincott's Sixth Reader, in an antique store when I was 11. Not that I was really, like, into this or anything.)

When I got to By the Shores of Silver Lake I got the shock of my reading life:

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes and Mary was blind. She was able to sit up now, wrapped in quilts in Ma's old hickory rocking chair. All that long time, week after week, when she could still see a little but less every day, she had never cried.

By the end of chapter 2, when Laura's beloved dog, Jack, died, I felt suckerpunched.

I never hesitated to skip ahead (still don't), so I pushed pages aside looking for the cure. Surely Mary would be cured by the end of the book.

She wasn't cured. I cheated outrageously and spot-checked the rest of the books as well, only to discover that Mary never regains her sight.

This is, i guess, a transition every kid has to make if s/he's an avid reader. I noticed that the above-article's author, writing in 2004, praised the cheerful Harry Potter books. They sure got darker later.

I was mulling all this over for my blog (I mull at length) when Mike Peterson -- for a treat, visit the classic stories on his Weekly Storybook site -- passed on to me a related article, "Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?" It was published in School Library Journal, which I was glad to see. SLJ is right where the librarians who review and who sit on the many ALA award committees will see it.

Library school, among many other things, set out to train us to join the reviewer pool. We were urged to get on board with the library journals once we were degreed and employed. It's entry-level professional publishing, and one can get into heavier publishing, organization and presentation work, editorial work, networking, and, for some, places on award committees. In a Booklist, Library Journal or SLJ review, somebody with the same training I have can say "Highly recommended" and generate serious sales of the title. Then libraries expose some readers to nifty books they would not ordinarily run into.

In a way it's good for prestigious awards to be given by practicing librarians. Or it used to be. Or it ought to be. We supposedly strike a good balance between literary knowledge and life in the real world with real readers.

The decisions that we look back on -- passing up Charlotte's Web is pretty cringe-worthy ‑‑ aren't as clear at the time we make them. It's good to publicize a cool but more obscure book. But how do you factor popular appeal and outside-the-box writing/subject matter, to craft an equation you can call "excellence"?? I can tell you one thing, though:

Kids can spot a book chosen to Improve them a mile away, and that goes not only for moral lessons, but for straight-out Learning Opportunities about history or other cultures. Those things are all great if the story is strong, but if the story is the packaging and a Lesson the contents, instead of vice versa, expect kids to Just Say No.

Charlotte's Web is great precisely because it entertains so marvelously, and yet does not shy away from depicting the full emotional power of death and loss. Neither do Frances Hodgson Burnett's books.

Neither did By the Shores of Silver Lake, which we're back to because it was my watershed book. Once I'd grudgingly accepted Mary's permanent situation, I was ready to sit down and read the book and let Wilder take me where she would. There would be new rules. A character could suffer harm or loss, but I trusted that the author would help her, and me, find our way back from it. This served me well because Roller Skates, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess would be in my hands shortly.

A child and a kids' book author have a relationship, and it's based on trust. Wilder did not let me down. OK, Laura's life has changed forever and she needs to become her sister's "eyes." Her new need to observe and describe is the beginning of Laura's training as a writer.

It's also the first stirring of her psychological independence, joyously symbolized by a hair-raising pony ride out in the prairie with her wild tomboy cousin, away from her nuclear family and its sorrows and responsibilities for one wonderful afternoon. The book is a terrific depiction of a girl's emotional growth, but that's where a good story has its real power: when it's a depiction, not a lesson.

And especially, when it's hopeful. A source of psychological tools for the reader.

That would make such a nice, neat closing sentence, but some of the grim-reality "problem novels" are a 3rd category, neither the cheerful story of fun and adventure, nor the classic tale of adversity overcome. The books that send librarians into ecstasies are often lesson-free, stories of stark and often horrible realism. Librarians, bless their good intentions, embraced this as kind of a rebellion against didacticism, and they promoted authors like Robert Cormier. Well-written grim reality speaks to an important readership that includes kids with life hardships who need their experience acknowledged and validated.

Cormier's The Chocolate War is one powerhouse of a book about a kid who tries to buck the system and gets crushed, but it's a mistake to decide that the uncompromising realism per se is what makes it excellent, and then start loading the shelves with lots of death-and-despair titles. What made The Chocolate War excellent was a factor that's one of the most difficult things to articulate and train into a reviewer. A story can depict failure, all attempts to fight for truth and justice can turn to ash, but the reader can see a spark of hope and the possibility of a different path.

At some point a reader becomes aware enough to see that the very existence of the book in her hand means that the corruption has been exposed. People who value truth, justice and mercy may not triumph in the book, but they grow up and write the books. This is a new type of consolation, at a remove from the story itself, but it's there.

Cormier got it in that novel. Barely. He even got it in After The First Death, a grueling terrorism novel for teens in which he lets you fully engage with and root for various young characters and then lets the terrorist kill them anyway. I haven't read all his books. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway -- a hopeless, pointless and hideous children's cancer clinic story -- was my farewell to Cormier. I'm pretty good at achieving the detachment that lets me see the merit in a book I don't like, but I had trouble finding a purpose for this book. Just my opinion, but: "Not recommended."

The excellence of the best examples can fool less insightful reviewers, and award-givers, into thinking everything ugly must be good. Both these articles provide what I think is an important wake-up call.

You think you got problems

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]

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There's a whole genre of kids' fiction -- mostly aimed at pre-teens and teens -- called "problem novels." It's a relatively recent genre, novels in which kids face realistic modern problems: death, crime, drugs. This was kind of revolutionary and was rightly applauded, engaging some readers who insist on acknowledgment that Dick/Jane/Sally suburbs and families just are not everyone's experience.

Publishing and awards have gone overboard with these books, though, and that's a whole post by itself, but before I offer that one I'm going to serve dessert first and tell you about the ultimate Problem Novel.

I got a "newsletter" (read: ad) from abebooks a couple days ago, which mentioned a list voted by British readers as the 10 funniest books of all time. No way does this one belong with that largely modern classic group, but it popped into my head immediately. The Grounding of Group 6 is one of my guilty pleasures, ridiculous but funny as all get-out and seems (judging by its amazon reviews) to have a little cult following, enough to have gotten it reprinted at least once. That's notable since, with some exceptions, hot teen novels have short shelf-lives.

In The Grounding of Group 6, a new school year opens at hip, elite Coldbrook boarding school. Orientation consists of a wilderness hike for all the new students, who are divided into small groups and sent out, each with a faculty advisor, for bonding, trust-forming, resource-testing, yadda yadda.

Only... this school offers parents a special service. If you have problem teens, you can arrange to have them assigned to Group Six. This is the group that ... does not come back. Ever. Part of the quite black humor here derives from the implication that unwanted-child disposal -- no, I mean real disposal -- is one of the raisons d'être of boarding schools:

Arn had said that there'd been lots of Coldbrook-sorts-of-schools, for years and years and years. "Whatever happened to so-and-so?" How many times had someone said that to a friend? And gotten back the answer "Oh she or he went away to school and I lost track of her or him." Oh, yeah.

To present these kids, with the various ways in which they've teed off or disappointed their utterly coldhearted parents, to make it a biting comedy and still touch on the heartbreak at least some of them would feel, is hard. Thompson is remarkably successful at balancing the reality and the campiness. The evil adults pretty much are caricatures, and that works, since it reduces the painful-reality problem a reader might have, and lets the humor be nice and dark, while the more believable kids of Group 6 made me genuinely care. It skewers preppie culture nicely, and has some sharp things to say about education, fads, and conformity.

It's got flaws. To make the plot work, these kids have to get over this emotional trauma way too quickly, though black comedy allows some license. The romantic pairups among them work out too neatly. And the pairing-up of the 22-year-old leader with one of the girls, an impossibly wise and mature 16-year-old, is probably why it's gone out of print, though they resist unprotected sex. And the circumstances under which they manage that make it not terribly plausible. The resolution is idealistic, though I can be over-tolerant of happy endings because, blast it, I like them. The absence of cell phones and computers (it was published in 1983) is conspicuous, but, heck, just set it in 1983 instead of in "the present."

Basically, the story tells how the group -- including their leader, who was hired to off them -- faces the truth and turns the tables on the school, taking it over. They form a real Family Of Choice, and make a plan. The scene in which they go through the items in the evil headmaster's office was what sent me into a fit of laughter. He's a Mary Worth fan and that's all I'm sayin'.

Thompson wrote other books that were maybe less flawed, but just didn't have the bite that this one has.