The Seuss Six

We need to talk about the Seuss Six, and we need to do it no matter what you think of the 6 titles that were taken out of print.

I come at it as a librarian and a liberal (though some might decide that’s a lie by the end of this).

Just FYI, I do not need correcting about the legal definition of censorship, which I’m well aware of, and I do not need Educating about how a copyright holder deciding to take its own book out of print is not a ban.  I agree. 

I’ll say it though: the Seuss Six have been functionally banned.

And this isn’t about whether their content is unacceptable or ok.  That’s a whole discussion by itself — especially the part where you’re told you have to oppose all 6, and if you defend one you’re defending all 6, so shut up.

Different discussion, and I won’t say I’d be happy to, but I’m willing to write about it separately, if I can meet my personal standard that I do NOT review a book I haven’t read.  

To meet that standard I might need to win the lottery.  I started to write about the content, but found that the books were unaffordable, and the disturbing nature of that turned into this topic.

The phenomenon of huge numbers of copies, by any major author with decades of huge print runs, going behind a high and expensive wall is at this point a way bigger question.

When the end of their printings was announced, I heard lots of;

“Oh poo-poo, there are zillions of, decades of, copies out there, so if you’re such a Horrible Person that you won’t take our word for it, go buy a bunch like the wyt supremacist you obviously are.” 

It usually does work that way: Go out of print, shift to the used market, no biggie.

Instead, national retailers shun them, online sites refuse to let sellers list them (eBay) or have altered the used-copies search function to show the title but appear that no copies are available (Amazon).  How many shoppers will give the secret handshake?  AKA, will click anyway what looks like a none-in-stock title and discover that 3rd party sellers are now visible?  If you hit it in the right 10 minutes you might get a bargain at under $100.

Did leftists tell everybody to make a grab/hoard run on them and drive up the prices?  Did they tell big retailers to remove the leftover copies?  No.

Is it against some law to print/sell/own them?  Nope.  So we get the oft-repeated:

 “Only governments can censor because only governments can levy Legal Consequences!”

So   the   bleep   what?

The legal definition of censorship is still government suppression, but that power exists only on paper.  It’s toothless, and as meaningless as banning buggy whips for Teslas.   

Official government banning worked only when government entities had a prayer of controlling printing and distribution.  They arrested booksellers, raided print shops and confiscated or smashed costly room-sized presses.  Until after the civil war they could threaten a printer/publisher with loss of government license that allows them to be in business at all.  Feds raided post offices and confiscated shipments of forbidden books.

That’s history, and federal law might not find it worthwhile after the courtroom battles they lost - see Tropic of Cancer - but in fact they haven’t the power at all anymore. 

Have any of the people clinging to this moribund definition of censorship even noticed that home equipment and internet access to sellers and platforms have ended that almost entirely?  There’s a complete publishing setup, from creating, to mass producing hard copy and digital media, to distributing digitally, right there in your laptop bag next to your “Politically Correct just means being a good person” travel mug. 

I think they have noticed.  I think they know full well that they oppose official censorship, but like this new unofficial version that empowers “progressives” to make books that bother them — again, some with merit, some without — come as close as possible to disappearing.

The one arm of government censorship still extant is the ban on child p0rn and trafficking. Governments exert major resources to track that down and prosecute.  Good.  Special place in hell for the perpetrators. 

But in a world where anyone can run a publishing business on their couch and access a massive, uncontrollable web, it’s a gargantuan effort that nets a few gallons of the floodtide of the nasty stuff.  They couldn’t enforce religion book bans or sexual-explicitness book bans like they did in the days of the Reformation or the dreary Lady Chatterley, if they wanted to. 

Even in the old days governmentally banned books couldn’t be stopped.  Illicit books always snuck in in small quantities, and circulated through small dealers in small venues, with collector prices.  This Seuss phenomenon may not be an identical customer-access problem, but you can’t tell me the similarities aren’t strong, whether it’s law or public pressure driving it.  Fear drives it either way.

The First Amendment provides constitutional boundaries for government-wielded censorship efforts.  The Court of Public Opinion has no such boundaries. It does levy penalties, protests and boycotts, and there are reasons why a national company says:

“No, we’re right-thinking!  We sent the books away!  Please don’t boycott our website. Please don’t egg our store.”

No matter how we feel about the content of the Seuss Six, or of any other thing we genuinely think is welcome to disappear, most of us don’t want to reactivate those days of official censorship for it.  

Censorship cuts both ways. 

We don’t want censorship, but we don’t want to admit that the Court of Public Opinion has become effectively the real agent of just that.  We really really want to call this restriction on book access “the Free Market” so we can call it a good thing but still congratulate ourselves for being anti-censorship.

Government censorship gets its day in court, gets examined by constitutional standards, and overreach gets told to cease and desist.

That public opinion “Court” can be right or wrong.  Its wrong opinions carry the same authority to levy those penalties as its right ones do.  There’s no hearing, there’s no appeal to any section of the constitution.  There’s no process of legally codifying what must be silenced and why. 

It’s about widening the definition of what ideas should be stopped, by simple threat of economic ruin and vandalism.  It can put enough fear into big retail to get a book pulled.  It can vilify and shame anyone who questions whether a book deserves the criticism it gets, or who just wants to see it for themselves.

Dubious though this Court’s “shut up” tactics are, it has the right to Freedom of Speech.  I have the right to oppose it. 

This is not the free market.

This is artificial reduction of customer access and of customer demand, through shaming and pressure.  

I urge my fellow liberals to think twice about this legalistic rationalizing in which populist pressure to squelch materials is not just a-ok but unquestionable, while we’re proud to oppose government censorship — itself a petrified artifact of a bygone time.

 A book driven into the margins of retail and hard to get for less than $100 a pop occupies the same position that the officially banned books of times past occupied; available in quiet deals in small venues, at a high price.  I do not give a tenth of a crap about the 50+ year-old definition of what “banning” is.

A better class of dirty books

It's a real bummer to love old books, but to also want your books uncensored. I'd much rather have old editions, but such ribald luminaries as Pepys and Chaucer were, not impossible, but difficult to acquire in unexpurgated editions, for a very long time. It's pretty much a given that classics for home and school, printed by major mainstream publishing houses, were edited for "taste" until well into the 1960's.

You may or may not think that this loosening up of standards was good. But cleaning up an important classic can misrepresent it. It can, in fact, make a literary icon out of a child abuser, which Samuel Pepys pretty much was, at least on one occasion. That, by the way, I learned not from my smattering of Pepys-reading, but from Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which is a terrific book on the importance and context of Pepys.

The top 2 books in the stack pictured above are typical major-publisher editions, sanitized for general public consumption; one of Pepys and one of Chaucer. Both were published by Macmillan. Sets like the Macmillan "Globe Editions" were offered by many other major publishers and buyers expected the text to be nicened up. To sell the full version to typical buyers was to invite returns, outraged letters, boycotts, and, if ordered by mail, prosecution under the Comstock laws forbidding the use of the postal service to send "obscene" literature.



This bowdlerized 1912 Modern Reader's Chaucer is worth owning for the many gorgeous illustrations alone. The editors say that they have departed from the true text:

...only to save their version from one or another of four possible stumbling blocks: rhyme and excessive rhythm, obscurity, extreme verbosity, and excessive coarseness. Their rare omission of words or short passages for the last reason has not been indicated; in the still fewer cases where a whole episode is incurably gross or voluptuous (yet Chaucer is never merely vicious), its omission is shown by asterisks.

This, I swear, is called, right there on its title page, 

The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 

If you can say nothing else good about modern morals, you have to admit that we needed to get honest about the definition of "complete."

The top book is a 1925 Pepys. LOTS of the material is included, 775 pages of double-columned small print. However, its editor has not only cleaned it up, but by the way, admonishes you for your interest in the smutty parts:

There is a certain pleasure in discovering a secret, and especially in searching, with the victim's aid, the further corners of his character. This pleasure is at bottom quite legitimate. But the same cannot be said of the Peeping Tom habit which seeks its sole entertainment in the dishabille of the diarist and his companions, and by so seeking has given his record an unenviable notoriety.

Since the full diary is multiple volumes, abridgments were the norm anyway, but while publishers were editing for length, they chose to leave out not only bad behavior but also tame and rather touching domestic information, like, the couple's yet-again failure to conceive a child, as sadly noted by Samuel when Elizabeth Pepys' menstrual period appeared.

But nice old books can sometimes be uncensored. An eBay seller offered both the Boccaccio and the Defoe, there in that stack, and made it pretty clear to potential buyers that they were unedited, by showing a couple of the illustrations.

Something tells me this isn't the
Hearth And Home Classics For Family Edification...

Learning the book business and book history is a lengthy process, but these purchases furthered my education. The Boccaccio set is an English edition "privately printed" for the Navarre Society. That got me interested in this group, but I can't find much of anything about The Navarre Society except book dealers showing what they published. And that may be the story behind them, right there. Unexpurgated literary works, probably sold by subscription to Society members. And possibly shipped in sets via other freight methods, to avoid the postal service laws.

Defoe's Roxana is a US edition, for something called the Bibliophilist Society. Also no information about them, at least under my fairly quick search, but it's a good bet that they were the same kind of organization. Publishers of works, largely literary and classical, that you couldn't get on the general market.

When I saw them on eBay I expected a buyer to grab them fast, but they stayed unpurchased long enough for me to think it over multiple times before I gave in and hit "commit to buy."

So if you're looking for tame editions, get the old editions put out by mainstream publishers. If you want the uncensored version, you'll probably want a modern edition, but if you like vintage books, you might not always need to choose between vintage and uncensored. Old and often beautiful editions from publishers who catered to the Don't snip my books! crowd are out there.

Mr. Ives Christmas

As spring starts (at least in South Carolina!) to show signs of coming, here I am writing about a Christmas novel for a slightly embrarassing reason.  I started it in the fall, got about 3/4ths of the way through, life intervened, then I rediscovered and finished it.  Then writing it about took some real and lengthy consideration.

Mr. Ives' Christmas is about grieving and faith.  The topic drew me first.   The writing held me.

I tend to find other reviews before I write my own, probably to keep from embarassing myself by making some off-the-wall declaration, but despite the fact that I have some weird things to say about the book, things nobody else has hinted about, I'm going to say them anyway:

In a way, it made me think Slaughterhouse-Five meets the Book of Job.

First, for the Slaughterhouse-Five likeness, nothing deep, just a structural likeness.  Just as Vonnegut's Billy is "unstuck in time" and we bounce around his life at different points, so Ives' life comes to us in short non-sequential chapters and often memories, driven by what's on his mind and heart at the moment. Some critics disliked the patchy recanting of Ives' life events, but it seemed to me to be simply the way we remember, and the way we make sense of the present, with whatever pieces of the past our minds connect to.

Some critics say Edward Ives is too Good, but really, he's a believable good man, not a perfect one.  If Hijuelos intended a parallel to Job, Ives would have to be essentially blameless and yet have a gut-wrenching loss visited on him.  And he would be perfectly entitled to question, be baffled by God and "whys." He'd have to feel tormented and damaged.

And he is, both.  But in saying Ives is too good, I think some reviewers miss the very plausible fact that some people turn outward with pain and grief, but some turn inward.  From his unknown birth parents, to the kind, but somewhat emotionally distant, nature of his adoptive father, to, possibly, Ives' innate nature, Ives is clearly drawn all through his life to be one who turns pain inward.

He tries to forgive the killer of his son, and yet tries to keep that at an intellectual level, writing to the kid in prison, sending him books and encouraging him to change the path he was on, but resisting any meeting.  And when the meeting finally happens, he is quite believably untouched by it.  Ives is trying to find redemption through his support of the young man, and it works.  The man does turn his life around, and so Ives has succeeded at making some good come out of the tragic shooting, but it's done with the mind, and isn't a real solution to his pain.

His inner torment over the senseless death of his son manifests in troubled dreams in which he tears at and bruises his own skin.  Healing comes from a dream of his son -- who appears at the age he would have been, 43, not the 17 he was when he died -- questioning him: "Why are you doing this to yourself?" and pouring water on his arms. Ives awakes to find all the damage healed.

The power of God, the existence of the soul and afterlife, are concepts well-supported by the plot, but Hijuelos is way too good a writer to answer the question of faith with a bumper sticker (God did it and that settles it!).  Rather, when faith itself helps to heal, any reader can insist on this being the power of mind.  Whatever.

It's not Ives' only mystical experience, or the only one felt by several other characters.  In fact, his earlier, pre-tragedy, vision of God's loving presence in the world remains undeniable even during the decades that Ives remains emotionally numb over his son's murder.

This novel is not comfortable.  Characters are complex.  Answers are ambiguous.

What makes a novel wonderful?  Different things, to different people, but to me, those ambiguities are what let a varied audience of readers intersect with the characters and with the story, some in very different ways and at different points than do others.  I'm kind of in awe of the power a novel can have to be a place where some people together who otherwise never would, and am more thankful for fiction that grows from someone's soul, than I can quite put into words.

The Profit-Driven Life

I know I'm not the only person who hasn't read The Purpose-Driven Life, though its sales have topped 30,000,000 copies. This is phenomenal for any book.
 
Those of us who've skipped it so far may simply be non-readers, or may be indifferent to Christian self-help, and some would rather be hung by their toes and fed Ex-Lax than read Christian self-help.

As for me and my house, it's fiction.  Or history.  Hell, I think I'd generally rather read High School Algebra 4U!  than any self-help book, and most Christian self-helpers I've tried said nothing deep, complex or...well....helpful.  To me.

But I'm a Book Person and feel both the need to know something about a book so huge-selling, and a personal curiosity as to what it might have to offer. So, armed with TWO delightful B&N gift cards received this Christmas, I thought, Hey, I could get an e-reader copy. And not pay any of my own money!

I've tried e-reading and still prefer real books, but e-reading can be great, especially in the dark of an insomniac night.  If I'm going to read self-help at all it will be then, deep in a sleepless night.

Come to find out that, though the book is years old, there's no lower-price this-has-been-around-awhile e-reader version for under 15 bucks.  Kindle's version is only slightly lower at almost $13, and I don't have a Kindle anyway, I have a Nook app.

I see many decade-old or older books that have come out in e-formats at mid-price range, $5-8 or so.  Not The Purpose-Driven Life.  Well, OK, it has too -- if I could read Spanish.  Spanish e-readers can have it for almost half of the English version's price, at 7.99.

If you're thinking this is either an anti-Spanish "We all pay more so fer-uh-ners can pay less!" rant, or a complaint about free market selling, you'd be wrong.

As a bookseller, I sell Bibles and Christian books for profit, and so I (grudgingly) have to allow publishers their right to do what I do.   Apparently, the publisher has priced the e-version at what they think they can get, and they seem to think they can get $8 from Spanish readers, but $15 from English readers.  They have a right to try.  I'd love to see sales plummet and see them shrug and say, OK, we screwed THAT up, and drop the price to something I have to call much more reasonable, considering that the e-version costs the publisher vastly less in materials, manufacture, storage or shipping.

The ball is in their court when they decide on a price.  Then it's in ours.

Any consumer can, and should say, "That's a rip-off" when they think it is one.  And I do.  It's OK, because this is a commodity for which I have options, like, it's not critical care medication, so I can live without it, and I actually can get it cheap if I change  formats and go to Goodwill for a hard copy instead.  The book shows up there fairly regularly, for 50 cents.

But I will point out those whose publishers offer reasonable prices on e-book versions, whether it's out of customer love or just what they think the market will bear:

Philip Yancey's Where Is God When it Hurts? is excellent and 5 bucks.

A Year with C. S. Lewis for 3.99 (as of this writing)

The Courage For Truth by Thomas Merton is geared particularly to writers, but there's a BUNCH of Merton available in e-format, priced from 7.99 to 9.99.

If these prices are good enough for Merton, Lewis and Yancey, it's hard to know why Warren is so much more costly, but hey, if people pay it, they're welcome to do that.

But wait! There's more Jane Whitefield!

Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield mystery/thrillers have a solid fan base and publishers will probably offer them gladly as long as Perry wants to write them, but they've never become the mega-sellers that some other thriller series have become.

Curious.  They are dark but so are Dennis Lehane's books among many others.  They are violent but so are Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" books.

The "problem" -- if it is a problem -- might be the character of Jane, who's complex and troubled, emotionally strong but still undergoing her own learning process.

That's what I love about the books, but when Jane meditates on the life she's chosen, her parents and the ways they influenced her, what she wants her life to be, maybe some readers get too impatient.

If anybody wants to try this series, I strongly recommend reading the second book.  Either read the first but keep on for one more, before you judge the series.  Or skip right to Book Two.  It was the game changer for Perry.

The first book, Vanishing Act, introduces Jane and it's one smashing good, tense read.  Jane lives alone in her childhood home in an old and quiet town in upstate New York.  But her underground life is one of helping innocent people who have run out of options.

She calls herself a Guide. She helps them disappear and start new lives under new identities.  She provides first quality identity documents and often-frustrating lessons for the victims in how to stay safe in their new lives, resettles each one, and sometimes has to escape or kill the bad guys who are after them.

The novels give a lot of detail about the process of disappearing.  Jane herself has to use multiple identities as she crosses the country to prepare her client's new home, teach him how vital it is to avoid old haunts, old contacts, and old habits.  She's a martial arts expert.  She also, in this first novel, has to win a battle to the death in the forest using strength and cunning.

I loved it.  Another friend didn't.  She said Jane was too unbelievable and perfect.

The author seemed to agree because he developed Jane's character in an unusual new direction in Book Two, Dance for the Dead.  The Jane of Book One was a Lone Ranger.  She had a rather unrealistic willingness to live a solitary life with few close relationships.

In Book Two, she's in love.  And Perry decided to let her have a personal life and a marriage.

It was risky idea if he wanted to keep a series going, since life as a surgeon's wife, mother, and Hospital Ladies Auxiliary member is highly incompatible with vanishing under assumed identities at unpredictable intervals, to remain away for weeks as she preps someone for a new life.  Not to mention having to sometimes kill or be killed, an eternal risk.

Perry developed the relationship between Jane and love-interest/husband Carey slowly through a couple more thrillers.  She had to tell Carey about her secret life.  She had to discuss with him the risks of what she did, and she had to come to a willingness to leave that dangerous life, if she wanted a family and community life. Carey had to understand that winding down her Guide business will take time and that it could intrude on their life together while that process occurs.

This still left Perry with a few missions he could take Jane through, even after her marriage.  He came up with a couple good ones, notably one in which Carey's elderly mentor is the one who needs to vanish, and Carey reluctantly requests Jane's help, and plays a role in the mission.

After Book Five, Perry wisely had Jane -- and himself -- take a break.   Extricating herself from the life of helping desperate people escape had to be a slow process, since they hear about and seek her out only through a grapevine that's impossible to shut down quickly, but there was plausibly a stretch during which she was untroubled by runners looking for her.

Runner returns to Jane and Carey several years after the previous book.  She has settled into a serenely ordinary life, but the underground network through which runners hear about her hasn't gone totally silent, and a young pregnant woman comes to her for help.

The mystery and the difficulty of helping this girl make for a white-knuckle read.  Perry has never been satisfied with preserving Jane in amber, though.  She's on her own life's journey, and we have to hear her thoughts about the personal dilemma she's in.

I noticed some reviewers criticizing the way Perry handled the aspect of the plot that involved Jane's personal life, and they have a point.  Here's Jane, in great health and married to a physician, for crying out loud, so why is she bemoaning her inability to get pregnant?  If fertility treatment with a high likelihood of success is available to anybody on earth, it oughta be available to this couple.

I understand that criticism, but I saw it differently.  Jane herself wonders if her constant honing of her body to stay in fighting shape isn't reducing her fertility as it does some female athletes.

And she wonders if she's kept herself in such athletic shape because she unconsciously couldn't give up being a guide.

Perry doesn't settle for easily answering that question because Jane has a deeper dilemma, and a pretty dark one.

She began acting as a guide when she was pretty young, still in college.  Now she realizes that it might have been a lifetime commitment, and that she made it without knowing that once she got into the Guide business, she might never be able to get out.

Is she unconsciously staying childless because she really doesn't want a family...or is it because of a cold knowledge that this door might be closed?

Here's this frightened and endangered girl, who has followed a word-of-mouth trail to Jane that's years old. Will the grapevine ever go silent?  Does what Jane wants even matter?  Did she close off the family-life option as a young and naive woman, without even knowing she was doing so?

A new Jane Whitefield  is on its way!  It came out 3 days ago and my copy is in the mail, but I wanted to post this entry about the previous titles, before I read it.  Pre-pub reviewers are already calling it somewhat disturbing.

It was clear in the last book that Perry has decided to escalate the conflict between Jane's two worlds.  It'll make readers uncomfortable.  It'll probably make me uncomfortable.  But for Jane Whitefield to serenely maintain her mental/emotional equilibrium while her outer worlds come into more conflict would make her that paragon that good writers really need to avoid, so I'll see where he takes it.

A Norwegian Christmas in 1811

Beyond Sing the Woods, and its sequel, The Wind From the Mountains, by Trygve Gulbranssen, were published in the US in the 1930's.  They tell the story of the Björndal family, whose manor dominates a remote mountain province.  

By the time of this excerpt, Chapter XIII from The Wind from the Mountains, we're into the 2nd book and about 50 years into the family's saga.  Adelaide Barre is still a relative newlywed, to "Young" Dag Björndal.   Here is a Björndal Christmas:

--

There was a grand Christmas at Björndal after this good year.   Major Barre and Aunt Eleanor came and there followed feasting and dancing and voluble speeches at the table and catches and boisterous songs.

Some of the guests found it hard to stomach sitting at the table with all the manor-people on Christmas Eve, and be solemn with Bible and church-candles in the middle of the table, and listen to Dag reading the Christmas text.  It was still worse when the old man broke up and went to bed quite early, giving it out as a decree that every one would be called in the small hours for the drive to the early Christmas service.  What sort of treatment was that for people of position?

They were not at all consoled by being awakened with a dram of spirits and a snack: they dreaded the drive in the night cold and growled angrily.  But the singing of the sleigh bells and the glow of the torches and the solemnity in church worked upon them as on others;  and what was naive and genuine in them responded through the fog of protest which they had believed to be their attitude to life.

Unlike many priests of the time, Pastor Ramer did not mount the pulpit in order to philosophize and excuse for God being possibly--and unfortunately--in existence. He was there to hold a service and he so believed in God that the whole church lived.

Marvelously the sleigh-bells rang out and marvelously the torches flared across the snowy spaces and between the tress of the forest ridge, when they drove home.  Mighty words, suited not only to good fortune and great days, but of value also in days of adversity and death, rang in their ears through the darkness with the song of the bells and flamed in the torchlights, all the way from church to Björndal's tun.

Because of the many guests, they had eaten in the new building hitherto, but when they came home from church, the Christmas table was spread in the inner room of the old house, as in all other years, with abundance of meat and fish and other foods, as was the custom from olden times.

The guests felt something of what Adelaide had once felt at this table: reverence for the living spirit of former times and ancient power, and the genuineness and security pervading everything, from the wall-timbers and the beams in the roof to the handsomely carved chairs and the table-silver.

At the beginning all, as one man, looked at Old Dag.  They knew not how to take him: and Adelaide had to purse her mouth not to smile.  All these worldly, confident people!  After yesterday and the beginning of today, Old Dag's power was over them, too, and they sat respectfully still.  Today he tarried a long while before touching his glass.  Perhaps his ears had caught a little grumbling the evening before, and again this morning--he had keen hearing--and it may be he wanted to let the solemn mood sink well in now.

At last he raised his glass and said the words it was his custom to say at this table.  He thanked them all for coming so far and for respecting the traditions of the gaard, and told them that what was on the table would perhaps put them in mind of the Lord's abundant gifts;  then he smiled gravely, drank skaal--and set his glass down empty.

The meal took its course.  Old Dag put not further restraint upon them, brandy and strong ale made them merry, and laughter and liveliness and mirth filled the room as they had filled it countless times before.

Adelaide had marked what Old Dag said of remembering the Lord's gifts in the abundance of the Christmas table.  All had its ancient purpose here.
 

It's ... it's like witnessing a murder

How to make a Christmas (or, I guess, any seasonal) wreath out of a recycled book.

And it's clever. It's potentially neat-looking. It's better than throwing old books into landfills. It's ....

AAAUGH!

Seriously, this lady has a clever and useful idea. Even I throw a book in the trash sometimes, and usually some of its pages are good for a project like this. Damaged, already-dismantled books, GREAT, do it!

But when I watch her use good, sound books, not just the one her dog chewed, but the Peter Devries--

(Haha, you didn't think I caught that nice copy of a respectable author, did you? You tried to hide the book's identity, but my pause button was too clever for you!)

.... and then, when she suggests using a book with sentimental value to your family....!!

It's not her, or the Nature Conservancy's, fault. The simple fact is that run-of-the-mill copies of older books, even good copies, even non-junk authors, are not valued in this society anymore. Neither she nor the Conservancy made it that way, and those books she bought at the library sale and ripped to pieces for this wreath would probably have ended up in the dumpster after a few months of customer disinterest.

This is a better fate for them. I know, I know, OK?

But watching her rip out the pages from a tight, snugly bound and nice vintage paperback was like watching Jack the Ripper dismantle his victims.