Dickens Lost & Found

Back to visit the old people in October, I was finally able to see for myself if the set of Dickens I sent was on the shelf of my hometown library.  In an earlier post I'd described buying and boxing up a full set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens to donate.  Earlier still, I'd described in a post my horror at finding naught but busted Book Club editions, and old strays on the Grove City Community Library shelf.  Not true any more.

A full set, twenty-one little hardcover volumes, with the original illustrations are now available on the open shelf, where they belong.  Done and done.

When I was in the library anyway for the free WiFi, I announced myself, and asked if I mightn't have a picture of someone from the staff, posing with the set.

Here's Librarian Heather Baker with her favorite of the novels, Little Dorritt.

Lovely.

No secret, my less than happy experience of public libraries in general, and of the one in my hometown in particular.  Growing up, I had to lie about my address to even use the library.  (We lived outside of town and I had to claim my town-grandma's place as my own to take out a book.)  More than once as a child I was forbidden certain books from the general collection because some busybody librarian didn't think the title "appropriate" to my infant intelligence.  (That ended when my little, unassuming mother told the party at the desk that thereafter, I "could read any damned thing" I wanted, as she was my mother and it was nobody else's business to raise me.  Thus I first read Don Quixote, whores and all.  Still proud of the old girl for that brave day.)  My experience in most public libraries since has done little to convince me that most are any better than they should be and that most are almost infinitely, tragically worse than might be imagined.

That said, I still believe in the mission of the institution, respect the sincerity and enthusiasm with which most public librarians go about their business, and believe absolutely in the necessity of public libraries for the health and stability of the Republic.

I have however come in just the past few years to despair of anyone finding on their own anything much that's worth reading in a public library, the one in my hometown not excepted.  Before my donation, there was no copy of David Copperfield, no Oliver Twist or Great Expectations!  I walked the stacks this last visit and found but one, old, badly translated and much abused novel by Dostoevsky, but three Austen, no Middlemarch, no Vanity Fair.  Forget for a moment the great 19th Century masters.  I saw no Bellow, no Joyce, one Updike, no Beckett, and so on and on, nothing and nothing.

The Grove City Community Library, as now situated is a handsome building; brightly lit, inviting and well arranged.  The limitations of the space would not allow for any but the most judicious selection even if the staff were granted carte blanche with their acquisitions budget and every awful, bad and or busted old book was thrown out.  Still, what is there is far from good, much of it, and much that might, and ought to be isn't.

Why this exercises me so is not just outrage on behalf of Dickens' ghost, in this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. While I understand the argument that libraries must change to meet the new requirements of a changing community and new technologies, I still believe with all my inky old heart that nearly no one ever wanted to read a book they never saw, that more readers find the books they need by finding them on a shelf than will ever find them in a dedicated "search."  Public libraries must be as much about happy accidents as they are about reference and recommendation, or they are just the poor man's Google, with ugly carpeting and poor lighting.

Now at least some other, younger, unknown myself may come across, as I did, The Christmas Books.  Someone who may never have read any further than that, may find Barnaby Rudge.  Great Expectations may lead to the journalism, or "Boz," anywhere, on.

I was more than a little miffed that I had to ask if the library had received the books I'd shipped.  I was not pleased to have had not so much as a "thank you" for a donation made in spite of rather than in memory of my own childhood experience of the place.  (Please note that despite my very best intentions, I could not make it quite to the end of this without mentioning the insult.  Pooh.)  Nevertheless, I am convinced that what I've done, I did well and someday, should I have occasion still to return, I may see someone, some boy or girl, some old party or some recent immigrant -- they have those nowadays, even in Grove City, PA -- with his or her nose in a book I sent.

Perhaps the Spirits will give me a glimpse, some Christmas.

"Lead on!"

Daily Dose

From Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, by Simon Callow

DICKENS' MOTHER

"She liked to say that she had been dancing all night the day before Charles was born; diligent research has shown the ball took place four days earlier, which only goes to show what a spoilsport diligent research can be."

From Chapter One, Paradise

Daily Dose

From The Pelican Chorus and Other NonsenseVerses, by Edward Lear

SPARROWGUESE

"Twikky wikky wikky we,

Wikky bikky twikky tee,

Spikky bikky bee!"

From Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow

Mr and Mrs Discobbolos by Edward Lear

Daily Dose

From The Pelican Chorus and Other Nonsense Verse, by Edward Lear

PELICANESE

"Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee,

We think no Birds so happy as we!"

From The Pelican Chorus (obviously)

The Daddy Long Legs and the Fly by Edward Lear

The Table and The Chair by Edward Lear

The Brothers Dorrit

Sending Boz Away

I bought mine, new, when I was working at Stacey's in San Francisco. In those far-off days, this was the sort of thing bookstores, the larger ones anyway, kept in stock. I remember mine was in a dusty white box when I bought it. Someone fetched it down for me from some dangerously narrow overstock-shelf, high off the sales floor. (I suppose there was some discreet little sign on the actual shelf in fiction, mentioning the Oxford Illustrated Dickens, complete in 21 volumes, "above.") I don't remember the price I paid. This would have been in the late Eighties, I should think, so I can't imagine the set cost me more than one hundred dollars, though it may have been at least that, at least had I paid full retail, without my employee discount. I don't remember if I asked for a ride home with the whole set, as I didn't drive back then, or if I took the books home, on the M Car, in bags, or one or two at a time, rather than fetching the whole thing home at once. Never was much for holding off, so I probably had to at least open the box and roll around in them as soon as I'd paid for them. Of that, I'm quite sure.

My dearest friend, R., collects the set in an earlier and more attractive iteration from the 1960s, I think. The dustjackets aren't that rather awful wine color, mixed with orange and green and so on. His are brighter and more variously colored. The boards on his books, as I remember them, are better too, less plain and homely. Still, my own set has served me very well, ugly as it is. True, the same squarish, squat format that makes these books so sturdy and portable also jostles the illustrations out of place; so that the scene in prose on page 138 may be illustrated three pages previous to that or ten pages after. There are other obvious imperfections in the reproduction of both pictures and type. Doesn't much matter. For the money, new or used, these are well made books. They will last.

To my knowledge, we never carried the set "new" in my time at the bookstore where I now work -- maybe, before my time, probably, in fact, but not since. I don't know that the set was even still available as late as 2003, when I moved to Seattle. I do know that by then some dealers were already asking silly prices for it used. The price seems to have settled, at least online, at around two hundred dollars in the passing decade or so, which seems high to me, but not unreasonably so. I've sold it for that. In fact, we've bought and sold the set, used, at the bookstore more than once, to customers other than me, I mean. I've bought it used, so to say, twice. When a coworker retired a few years ago, after some decades' service, the Dickens seemed just the thing. Man doesn't own a television, or a computer. Doesn't even keep a phone. A full compliment of Dickens constitutes, in its way, a home entertainment center, admittedly of a rather Victorian kind, but then the gentleman in question was a rather Victorian gent. The set was sitting right there at the Used Books desk -- too big to go upstairs into Fiction. Perfect. I marked the thing down to cost, basically, we all chipped in and bought it for the fellow's parting gift. He seemed pleased. After that, I remember selling the set to someone no older than I must have been when I bought mine. I remember giving the young fellow a banker's box with that set, so that he could get them home. Him, I didn't give a discount. and then most recently, sold this last set to come in to date -- the set in these pictures -- to myself, again, roughly at cost, back around October of last year. The idea was to buy the books, box them and send them off to replace the shockingly shabby collection of odd Dickens volumes on the shelf in my hometown public library.



When I was back there in September, I went into the library regularly, to check my email, etc. on the library's computers. Now and then, I would have to wait for a terminal to become available. Then I'd wander a little through the stacks, such as they were. It is a small town, my hometown, and far from well off, mostly. When I was a child, the library was housed in a very old building, with bare wooden floors that groaned under even the smallest step, and shelves, being of at least equal antiquity, were likewise swayed with years, if never really with any notable weight of books. The library now is new, brightly lit where the old was dim, clean when the old was dirty. Everything about the new library is essentially better. Everything, that is, but the books. The books are still bad; either bad in the sense of being not very good books, or in bad condition, or both. None in such bad shape, may I say, at least to my eyes, as the few sorry copies present of just a few books by Charles Dickens.

There's nothing in my experience of public libraries in recent years, libraries from Seattle to Southern California, and from Wisconsin to Wyoming, to suggest that this disgraceful state of things was in any way unique to my hometown. In a beautiful new library building very near where we live, I found just one or two books by Austen on the shelf, and those were sorry things; nothing by Gaskell, nothing by Eliot but Middlemarch in multiple grubby copies, and so on. Our own local branch is a charming old building, handsomely restored, with nothing in it. When I inquired there a few days after it reopened after repairs, I found that the answer to everything missing was that other books, good books, even great books were available mostly via "interlibrary loan." If the browser, like me, was not entirely clear on that concept, this is not unlike being issued a "voucher" for an overbooked flight, or offered a coupon for one's canceled entrée.

We could order you a copy of Great Expectations from elsewhere, perhaps one without detached covers...

... OR, would madame rather have one of these lovely -- available -- titles by the ever-popular LaVyrle Spencer?

Anyway, feeling most uncharacteristically civic-minded last September, I approached the desk in my hometown public library and offered to replace their disgraceful hodgepodge with a set of actual, readable Dickens. (No, really, I was nice, I swear.) Dickens bicentennial birthday was February of this year. I wanted there to be a set of his complete works in that library where someone might find them, someone like my younger self, perhaps a first time reader, or someone like my present self but without the means of having a set of his or her own. A good idea, did everyone agree? The answer was, yes, please. Smiles, skeptical smiles, but smiles all 'round.

True to my word, I came back to Seattle, and sent the set of Boz. The books I sent were unread, pristine copies all. I put each dustjacket in a new mylar-cover I bought. I packed them carefully and included a letter reminding the librarian of our conversation.

Well, some months later, having had nothing in the way of acknowledgement of my gift, yes, I finally could stand it no longer and I called to see if the books had arrived. They had. Thanks. Oh. Well, were they on the shelf in time for Boz's birthday? No. Not yet. Oh.

And that, my darlings, was that. I'm ashamed to say how often I've been to the hometown library's rather primitive website, in search of any listing for the books I sent. If the books are on the shelf now, I can't tell. They may be in the library's inventory by now, they may not. They may never have made it out of the box into which I packed 'em. They may, those lovely books, have been put out on the stoop for the mice to nest in. From the little I know of unsolicited library donations, even or perhaps specially those already discussed with a smiling staff, that set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens may have been busted up, or put out for a yardsale.

Whatever their fate, it is long since out of my hands. I won't ask after them again. I can only hope those books, one way or another, have found new readers somewhere out there in the wide world.

"'Hope, you see, Wal'r,' said the Captain, sagely, 'Hope. It's that as animates you.'" Who am I to argue the wisdom of dear Captain Cuttle? Hope it was that animated me. Hope I still have, and librarians be damned.

Earliest Recollections of Charles Dickens

Daily Dose

From Reprinted Pieces, by Charles Dickens

THERE WAS ONCE

"There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought a number of things."

From A Child's Dream of a Star

Daily Dose

From Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

POCKETS

"Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heartache of begging him to accept my confidence. But, happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as she sat reading her book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a sovereign remedy for baby, I thought — Well — No, I wouldn’t."

From Chapter 33

Daily Dose

From Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

THE PUBLIC MAN

"He was a tough, burly, thick-headed gentleman, with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them, and, in short, every requisite for a very good member indeed."

From Chapter 16.

The New Year, a Selection from The Chimes

Stocks & Bonds, from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend

The Greatest Prodigality

A friend finally convinced me to join Goodreads. I'd heard about it. I'd seen updates and reviews from the site, posted on various social media. Librarians and other booksellers, and even a few customers at the bookstore had mentioned the thing to me. Like a lot of the bookish bits on the Internet, I couldn't quite see, just looking at the thing, what the point might be. The friend who convinced me to sign on basically told me to look for him there. I don't see enough of him -- can't see enough of him ever, as he's handsome as hell -- so this was just another way to stay in touch, I guess.

Once I'd made an account then, of course, there were twenty other people I knew. Again, there were librarians and booksellers, but also a few authors and devoted lay readers, so to say, as well. Yet another virtual community I'm in, though by now, it's pretty much just the same game different fields.

In case you don't know, and might care, the site is yet another virtual hang-out for the bookish. Email updates will tell you what new titles friends are reading, or want to, or what books they may have reviewed -- there's a 5 star system as well as formats for writing notes and or full-length reviews, if so inclined-- and the more friends on the site, the more updates one may see. The site also functions as a kind of reader's diary, or even library catalogue system with which one may make inventories, lists, and all manner of other wonderfully time-wasting things. There are book clubs to be joined, places to promote activities... lord knows what all I haven't even looked at yet.

Most dangerously, there are all manner of quizzes and such like trivia to be play about with, including a perpetual quiz made up of literary questions devised by members of the free site. Within minutes of creating a profile, I was pissing away hours answering questions quaint and clever, obvious and obscure, and skipping the endless Harry Potter rubbish ("In book four, was Hermione's first pubic hair red or russet?" Blah, blah, bloody blah.) Important to remember that many Goodreads members are young readers, but let's just say, about the quizzes, in general, you may trust me when I tell you, the answer to every other question is either Boo Radley, when Little Women's Jo cut her hair, Mr. Darcy's first name, or quidditch.

Read a few more books, people.

The perpetual quiz has also taught me that while I am strangely confident answering most Shakespeare questions, I am wrong roughly as often as I am right. Shocking. Really? Sebastian? And that's from Twelfth Night, not... the other one? Lord.

What Goodreads really is then, is yet another marvelous excuse to do something online only slightly more productive generally than playing solitaire.

Have I mentioned yet that my friend quite sweetly pointed out to me, just days after he'd finally induced me to join, that I'd already committed a social embarrassment by just plowing through hundreds of titles and marking them as "read"? Seems this is seen as a kind of empty brag, and rather like "shouting" in CAPS, or "trolling" in stranger's comments fields. As I tried to explain, I did it to support any books I might actually review on-site, to show I wasn't just a flibbertigibbet who hadn't read but that one book, and so that I might contribute to lists, etc. Oh well. Besides, I like looking through the title recommendations made, I suppose, automatically by some algorithm or another, suggesting that if I liked the poems of Horace, I might also enjoy The Fundamentals of Ballroom Dancing. Actually, however it's done, the recommendations are a fascinating, and constantly renewing pool, a bottomless aquifer of like to like, in biography, and historical fiction, and poetry and on and on. If anything, reviewing the recommended titles is an even more entertaining waste of time than the quizzes or voting on the lists.

I already applied and was accepted by the powers that be, by the bye, as a"librarian" for the site. I decided to sign up for this so as to be able to update and or otherwise modify or improve the entries for individual titles or editions and or authors. I've already scanned in a dozen covers for books I own that didn't show a cover on the site. I've corrected the listed page count of an edition of Walter Scott that happened to be the one in my hand at that time, an edition that ran to 511 pages rather than the bare 259 originally listed for it. Correcting such small errors, and posting those cover illustrations and the like has felt well neigh useful, far more so anyway than anything else I've been doing at Goodreads.

I certainly didn't need another thing to look at besides porn, of an evening, but here we are.

I do think this latest exploration in social media offers me yet another chance to peep into a wider readership than what I might see otherwise, and I've seen some encouraging chatter -- some quite vigorous defences of print, for example, from quite young readers. Most encouraging, that. What has troubled me a bit, as I've already suggested, has been the astonishingly juvenile character of much of what's being devotedly read and reread by grown people, and an enormous reluctance among the young to read complicated prose, let alone poetry, but to be fair, I've seen nearly as much Austen about as anything, and I've already joined a reader's club for the Victorians, and two groups reading Dickens. (Started one too, to encourage people to read the great Boz aloud for his bicentennial this coming February.)

Nothing pointless about that, really.

Daily Dose

From The Chimes, by Charles Dickens

NOTHING

"'There's nothing,' said Toby, 'more regular in its coming round than dinner time, and nothing less regular in its coming round than dinner."

from 1st quarter

Daily Dose

From Dombey & Son, by Charles Dickens

DIFFICULT

"The Captain found it difficult to unload his old ideas upon a subject, and to take a perfectly new cargo on board, with that rapidity which the circumstances required, or without jumbling and confounding the two."

From Chapter 14

Daily Dose

From The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

A VARIETY

"A variety of expletive adjectives let loose upon society without any substantive to accompany them."

From Chapter 42

An Old Man's Memory, from Oliver Twist