Nothing Like a Little Death

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where."

 -- Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare

Halloween is coming and I am not indifferent. No, I won't be dressing up. Yeah, wigs and masks are hot, but not now in a good way. At my age, even in costume, were I to actually attempt trick-or-treating, most people would assume either A) my car broke down on the way to a sad party or B) that I am in fact a somewhat laughable serial killer. I am also disappointed to say kids don't come to our door anymore for candy. This may just be another sign of an aging middleclass neighborhood where no one young enough to have kids is old enough to own a single family home. Also? It is my unhappy understanding that instead of being set loose into the cool and greedy dark, many American children now spend Halloween penned at well lit, properly supervised parties which sounds just awful, like church Christmas morning or new Easter clothes in which one may not eat chocolate. (Adults can be such assholes.) I still very much like the idea of Halloween though, even if I am no longer taking part. 

When I was little I loved monsters best. Reviled outsiders forced by circumstances not of their creation to periodically slaughter village gossips, mean drunks, and demanding little girls with daisies? I get that. Even at seven or eight I was pretty sure that sooner or later the angry peasants with pitchforks and torches would be heading my way. (Later I realized these would actually be townie jocks, redneck dopers, Elks, church ladies, gym teachers, and cops; what the Republicans now call "the base.") Well before I was grown I learned that the real monsters in life don't bite or wear capes or rise from the dead, they vote in midterm elections and ban books and always want to know who you happen to be fucking. Real monsters invade sovereign nations and bomb countries like Laos and Ukraine. Real monsters talk a lot about God and patriotism and make it easier for kids to get guns. Don't have to watch a lot of horror movies to learn that the most dangerous brute is usually the one leading the mob.

Real monsters are cruel. That's all. Easiest definition. The only thing really other-worldly about most real monsters is their uniform insistence when caught or cornered or called out that they are "the real victims." In the end bullies are always the injured parties, at least in their own stories. Luckily, real monsters die eventually, just like the rest of us. It is their tax-exemptions that can't be killed and their sources of funding that never seem to die. It is the persistence of selfishness* that survives every dawn, every fire, every sacrifice. 

So, no, I don't believe in ghosts anymore, or vampires, or werewolves, or zombies -- though January 6th shook me a little bit on that score. But I still love Halloween. I love lots of stuff that isn't real: chocolate Yoo-hoo, Mole from The Wind in the Willows, love songs. Watching scary movies I still like jump-scares, and John Carpenter scores, and practical effects. Doesn't mean I worry much at night about Michael Myers. Not to spoil anyone's fun, but so far as I am at all concerned, dead is dead. After-life? Well, that would be death, wouldn't it? I've seen death, more than once. Death is not scary. Pain is scary. Disease is scary. Despair is scary, and hatred. When we are dead we are done, all of us and everything. The next isn't up to us anymore. Yes, there is and ought to be more to the story of the body's decay -- "this sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod" in Claudio's shivery phrase -- but up again we do not get. Sorry. No faith in nor any hope of the resurrection. Just the one go 'round. I mention this not to discourage any of my many Pagan friends for example, who have very kindly offered me "readings" of various kinds including my "past lives," or the followers of newer religions like my Christian friends who still offer to pray for me. (Thanks for the good vibes, dear ones.) I've tried to make this point before, usually around Christmas, my other favorite decorating opportunity, but I think it's important to establish that one need not believe in ghosts, Holy or coarsely common, to enjoy a bit o' seasonal fun. 

I love a great ghost story. (RIP, Peter Straub.) Keeping in mind that none of these are mutually exclusive, there are more great ghost stories than there are romances in English literature, more great stories of horror and disquiet than of Christmas, kings, dragons, dinner parties, or anything other than perhaps clever detectives and beloved dogs. Great writers as different as Edith Wharton and Kelly Lynch, Joyce Carol Oates and Elizabeth Bowen have all done it. Henry James, and Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and Guy de Maupassant have all written great ghost stories. There are rafts of writers whose only surviving reputation comes from their ghost stories, some with wonderful names like Oliver Onions, and Clara Venn, and F. Tennyson Jesse (see the excellent British Library Tales of the Weird series.)

If I really want a fright, I read about the climate crisis, politics, and true crime, where again, there is often overlap these days. Almost any journalist providing new details of the workings of the last administration or the present Supreme Court can keep a body from a good night's rest. Read the true story of DDT, or the history of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Nightmares. You know what will keep you up reading all night? The history of the Bender family's disappearance from Labette County, Kansas in 1873 and what was found in their yard (Please see Susan Jonusas' new book.) Likewise the murder of women and children on a narrow highway in Mexico in 2019, and the LeBaron Mormon cult from which they came (see Sally Denton.) Try Beverly Lowry writing about the murder of a Mississippi matron in 1948, and the familiar failure of the American justice system to do it's job because race and sex. Horrifying.

That can all be a bit too real for what ought to be a fairly light-hearted occasion, I know. Years ago I did a fun display table at the bookstore where I still work. The premise was Scary Books for Grown Ups. The signage featured a drawing of dead honey bees. The books were all new nonfiction of the day, forecasting our onrushing doom. You can imagine. Turns out I could do that table every year since, sad to say. It's not like any of these subjects have really been addressed anywhere since, save in yet more new books. So yeah, still doomed and reading about it.

Which leads me to a fictional sub-genre I just can't. Putting together the Halloween display table this year, I asked for input from a couple of younger coworkers, as I am not up on newer straight-up horror. My personal taste tends to literary types writing weird stories rather than genre writers of whatever merit. So for me it's Karen Russell short stories, or indie-rock musician and novelist John Darnielle writing about a house haunted by what sounds like a very real murderer. That's my shiver. I ended up with a couple of great lists of new titles from my fellow booksellers and ordered in what we didn't have. All good. (Best way to cover the gaps in a bookstore is always more booksellers with more lists.) The place I can't personally go isn't to do with squeamishness, or violence. Bring on the body-horror! Stack the victims like cordwood! But if you are heading into the post-apocalypse you are on your own. What would I do if the world was ending tomorrow? I'd die, that's what I'd do. So would you, darling. We neither of us have been missing a lot o' meals, have we? You ready to run? I'm not. Simple as that. Dead. And who wants to live in a dead world?! Fact is I'm never going to cook on an open fire again, or sharpen sticks, or go camping, let alone go camping until I die. My idea of surviving an atom blast or a plague that wipes out three fourths of humanity is don't. Who really wants to stay alive but basically on fire? Stay home for two years and wear a mask?  Turns out I was up for the challenge. But a world without bookstores and pho and television and the people I love? I'll be checking out. So however great the reviews for a novel set in Kansas after electricity isn't a thing ever anymore, or the last fresh vegetable is a memory, and I'm sorry, I think surviving in such a world is a stupid choice. I can't sympathize. I can't be made to care about people willing to go on with nothing but survivalists for company and only rats and seaweed on the menu. Maybe if I had kids (maybe) but I don't so no.

It is such a lazy metaphor now, life after the end of history, like preachers still carrying on about the fires of Hell like we're all still illiterate peasants staring at pictures in a cathedral, or reality tv contestants "thinking outside the box." (The last person with anything interesting to say about life in a void was Beckett.) Now the Post-Apocalyptic is often a given. I suppose it's the easiest way to not have one's characters texting each other, or catching an Uber out of danger, while still being recognizably us. That nearly the whole of human history can be told without resort to modern electronics seems to require too much work. Research you say? Why write Gothic --or a Gothic cathedral -- when you can just go all Goth and gloomy some time "in the near future"? Also? Poor people. If the only way you can imagine poverty as a possibility is to end the world, either your parents are still paying your rent and you still think eating instant ramen is a healthy option, or you decided to write a novel without ever reading good ones. Shame on you. (And shame on me for telling you people how to write. Go on. Write your ragged survivors reciting Shakespeare or whatever. None of my business what you like.)

The unknown is only frightening when the rest feels convincing. That would be one of my rules. I make a lot of rules. You may have your own, and mine may change and do, but this is one of mine for scary stories. Put it another way: you needn't name your monster, but you'd better name the street. Know what I mean? I hate any story set in an unnamed city. One thing the Book of Genesis gets right is you make a man and the first thing he'll do is name things. First thing we did as a species when we invented languages? Names. We all need a name. And probably not but a day later somebody named a dog, and then a village. I defy you to name an unnamed city. That's not fair, but neither is trying to generate atmosphere with just indefinite pronouns and nameless climes and unnumbered houses. Untethered adjectives don't carry much weight, no matter how many one adds to vague objects and places. Unless your protagonist is actually a small child or the last man on earth, somebody or something will eventually tell the sorry soul that this is or used to be Cleveland, or the Forest of Dean or the Gobi, and that creepy gas station attendant? Did you not see the name stitched on his filthy coveralls? That was Phil. Of course it was.

Every good witch needs a familiar. That may be an actual rule, I'm not sure. (I'll ask.) Every haunt needs a house, or a moor, or a grave. No point to Jack the Ripper without a chase. That's just my Halloween way of saying every scary story needs more than a monster. Even crazy needs a frame. True, mad narrators can be particularly scary -- see The Yellow Wallpaper and de Maupassant's The Diary of a Madman -- but in the first example we know the name of that woman's imperfect husband, it's in the first sentence and it's John, and in the latter story a lawyer finds the diary and he tells us who wrote it, if never his name. Context, yes? Detail. Specificity. Pyewacket. (Too obscure? See: Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, bell not bell-tower is the one I mean.) Deciding what not to name, or show, or tell, is maybe more important in a scary story than anywhere else other than poetry, but monsters need scenes and settings to menace properly; places and dates and other people with names.

Very clever people have studied why we ride roller-coasters. (I miss roller-coasters!) Scholarly papers have been written about horror movies, and ghost stories, and video game zombies. While I am not so smart or devoted as all that, I have thought about this. Can't grow up with a poster of Frankenstein at the foot of the bunkbed and not. It may not be a specially deep thought, but I do think that what does not kill us can be great fun, so long as it lets us feel like it might and we know that it won't. It's the campfire makes the ghost story, the lamp that keeps the monsters on the page. Gide said, "I do not love men. I love what devours them." Maybe that's the answer, and as with so many of life's answers it probably sounds even better in French. We are fascinated by our own mortality even as we deny or ignore it, mostly. Also, it's no easy thing to feel for humanity as a whole. More a philosophical position than an actual emotion. See someone in peril though, witness whole populations endangered by circumstances over which their control is questionable, and there is a familiar tug at the heart. (The absence of that tug is psychopathy, no?) Could be me, might be us, how terrifying. Fiction is the manageable version of this confrontation with danger and death, that is its chiefest charm. We may not know how it will end but we know that it will, a book. We trust that unlike life in the actual universe, in the space of a story, someone is telling. Need a narrator now and again. Might go so far as to say authors are our last gods. Stories  make sense of us. Still, stories end. Books are designed eventually to close. (We are in charge of this if little else.) We read to live and death is part of life so why not read to die a little? It's fortifying. Up again we get, if only from the armchair.

Halloween happens whether we like it or not. I know people who can't so much as read a murder, people who've never loved a monster. Blood, like candy corn is not to everyone's taste. My beloved husband hasn't any issue with mayhem, but very little patience with the supernatural. (Likes candy corn though.) The minute the monsters aren't mortal he's done. He was in his day though very much a rollercoaster kind of guy, back before we both learned what it feels like to fall from not even a middling height. It's okay. Still likes a thrill, if now more often at second hand. It's important to remember that not everyone need take the same ride. Might outgrow the rollercoaster just as one once did the teacups. Guess I never outgrew monsters. I have much admired friends whose abhorrence of violence extends to even slapstick. Who doesn't smile when Chaplin kicks a cop in the ass? Well, my friend for one. Imagine then trying to explain why vampires are still kinda cool. Likewise pointless to try and convince anyone to read Shirley Jackson's great American horror novels if said reader doesn't jump at a bump in the night and maybe like it a little now and then. All I would suggest is that there is still great good fun to be had from the haunted corners of literature and it isn't exclusively for little persons.

Can't begrudge kids much. Poor little bastards are told when to go to bed, what to eat, what to wear, just like inmates. They're constantly being told to stop doing fun things like jumping off of things and to get out of other things that obviously invite getting into, and to not break still other things just as obviously designed to make noise when dropped on a stone floor, etc. And the worst part of childhood as I remember it, being told to "go play outside" as if that requires no more planning than stepping through the door. (My advice is bring a book. Outside is overrated.) Halloween proper really is theirs. They ought to be allowed to run a little riot in the dark once a year, and eat sugar, and scare the bejeezus out of themselves. Let 'em have it, folks. 

Meanwhile I don't have to justify buying a bag of miniature Milky Way Bars just for me, or rereading Arthur Machen, or reading a grand new novel about Spanish witches by Brenda Lozano, or re-watching that very good Dracula miniseries with the Van Helsing nun. (I love Mark Gatiss because he is me but better at it.) I can see to my own treats. Of tricks I've rather had my fill long since. (They seldom wait for one to finish too, as I remember, do they? Selfish I call that.)

*See: market capitalism

Heart Shaped Box

Ah, red.  Everywhere red dust jackets, red book covers, red, red, red -- and a touch of pink.  Red but unread.  And, love!  Everywhere one looks for the next two weeks, there will love be.  You work in a bookstore, you know what I mean.  Even in Seattle where everything these days is blue and green (close as I'm going to get to Super Bowl fever, here or elsewhere,) every book with so much as a vague promise of romance in the title will be culled from the shelves and plunked on a display table.  (I was going to say, "heaped" but those days are sadly done.)  We are such calendrical creatures, are we not, booksellers?  Sure as hothouse-roses in February, the next display must be... St. Valentine's Day! Never quite the exercise in unimaginative retailing that, say, St. Patrick's Day has become -- James Joyce!  Irish Blessings!  Shamrocks!  Home Brewing! -- but it is bad, or sad enough.  I don't know that I'd fuss, if I could still sell a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese now and again, or if I was sure that The Rosie Project was going to fly off the table this month, but I don't frankly see that happening, at least not because it's February, when readers' fancies turn to romance, or better say, when romantics' fancy turns to reading.  Really?  Does it?

At the bookstore where I work, we do sell fancy chocolate at least, so that's something.

As someone who not only works in a bookstore but prefers a busman's holiday to actual travel, and as someone who accepts books as the perfect gift for any and all occasions, far be it from me to discount the lure of literature as love-token.   I just don't think that the single, annual sale of a copy of Neruda's love poems fully justifies such uninspired use of the space anymore.  (I know.  I know. A sale is a sale.)  Maybe I've just gotten too middle-aged and cynical for hearts and flowers.  Maybe.  And maybe I'm just too old in the business now, but I confess, I am so very weary of the annual retail display rotation.  Feeling just a little broken on that wheel today.

Not that it still can't be done remarkably well.  I work with -- and work for actually, now I come to think of it -- some brilliant young women whose talents, specially for selection and arrangement, can and do make even the most hackneyed displays sparkle with an unexpected wit and irreverence.   Entirely predictable, inoffensive and bland display ideas can, in the right hands, be oh, so subtly undermined and even a Valentine's Day table made interesting by simply introducing an unexpected mix of titles.  Old trick, usually requiring bright young eyes.

But why must it be done at all?  Where is the rule that says red in February?  It would seem that this would be one of those inescapable exercises in met expectations with which retail has always been rife. If there wasn't a display for Valentine's Day, then, and perhaps only then would someone not employed in the bookstore ask, why not?  (To say nothing of the rest of us  working at the Information Desk, who will find a way to like and or dislike pretty much everything that is or is not different about the place from year to year and day to day.  Witness this little exercise in hurrumph.)  Sure as waxy chocolates in a heart-shaped-box, there would be complaints.

But, what about sales?  How many red books would the bookstore hawk if the bookstore wouldn't hawk red books?  There's something like the question.

I know that as a regular customer in bookstores, new and used, that to which my eye is invariably drawn is almost never what I fully expected to see walking into a bookstore; namely the inevitable seasonal displays with signs reading, "Beach Reads for Summer" or "Turkey Day Cookbooks" and the like.  Can I be the only one who finds such things depressingly stale?  Again, I wouldn't bitch if I could remember the last time I saw somebody or some crowd of somebodies eagerly shopping such displays.

What I do see, and the thing that encourages me, is regular browsers at every display of Staff Recommendations in every bookstore into which I've ever gone.  Likewise, every witty window display or clever table-sign seems to elicit not only admiration, but now and again actual sales.  I've seen readers, young readers at that, transfixed by a display of new books in translation, seen couples and little clusters of friends laughing and discussing a display of "Bad Boyfriend Books" that included Anna Karenina and On the Road.  I still remember a marvelous table display that included cookbooks of the most decadent character, sex and drugs, with a sign on top that read simply "SIN."  I bought Maida Heatter's chocolate baking book off of that one myself.  Still use it, too.

My point being that if, as someone who loves books and bookstores and booksellers as much as I do, if I'm getting more than a little bored with the usual Valentines, so must other people be as well.  That's all.

Now not every display can be oh so clever clever.  There are perfectly viable uses of display space that simply have to happen in almost any general bookstore: new in paperback, the latest nonfiction, bestsellers and the like.  No argument there.  Hell, I'm actually interested each year to see what goes up on the annual Oscars table, just because there's always something I didn't even know had ever been a book.

I just wish we could think outside the heart-shaped-box more often.  In fact, I wish we would just ban the damned things.  Be honest, when was the last time anything good ever came out of one?

Back to the Blackboards

Poetry, light or long, narrative or nonsense, all of it at least until the moderns was always meant to be read aloud.  I make that claim based on nothing much but instinct and my own rather spotty reading of both poetry and something of the history thereof.  Tell me I'm wrong.  Just because I may well be. I'd be willing to argue the point.  Still, that's what I've come to believe and more importantly that's been my way back in to much of the literature from which my background, education and insecurities once seemed to exclude me.  For me, the medium required what turns out to be an older method.  (Think, Homer at the ol' campfire, Dryden at the coffee house, etc.)  Maybe what was actually required was just grey hair.  Anyway, now I read poetry, and poetry aloud with something of the hobbyist's enthusiasm, though hopefully without requiring of my friends all the grim forbearance of the fellow sitting next to, say, a collector of antique bus schedules at a dinner party.  (Everyone at work has been, I must say, very kind when I've cracked open yet another Oxford Anthology at the Information Desk and started to quietly vibrate.   Not long ago, seeing me hovering with an open volume at her elbow, a coworker not known for her love of poesy said, "Oh, go ahead, Brad.  You know you want to.")

Bookstores, in my long experience are very tolerant of eccentricities.  There's a lady where I now work, will tell you everything you need to know to survive a week alone in the Senora desert.  There's someone who's pickling plums.  Let's face it, bookstores are feed-lots for hobbyhorses.  Perfectly harmless, most of us.

Bookstores are also always in the way of finding new ways, or more recently employing old ways to share our enthusiasms with the otherwise unsuspecting public.  Here then yet another bit of recycled media: blackboards are trending.

Long established as something of a fixture in the new wave of coffee and bubble-tea now awash across college-towns and the more upscale or dowtownish of neighbourhoods, what are now called "wet erase boards", I've only just learned, would seem to be all the rage.  Many a saucy barista, having invented some elaborate new combo of espresso shots, soy-milk and anisette, now announces the concoction of the day on a blackboard in the window and or on a sandwich board out front.  Bookstores are now on-board, including the one where I now work.  I think the idea a splendid one.  We've progressed from one or two discreet little boards describing the week's new arrivals and upcoming events to a couple of great big numbers, nearly the size I remember from the front of my elementary school classrooms.

We're quite lucky to have an artist in residence, dear M., who not only "letters" beautifully -- to use a verb likewise from my childhood -- but who has something of a genius for reproducing the covers of forthcoming titles in a beautiful and immediately recognizable way.  Not only are his drawings clear and quite charming, he also does a pretty mean free-hand rectangle.  No mean feat, that.

I was asked if I would draw dear Ogden Nash for the other board, to announce our upcoming evening of the same.  Seemed to me a capital idea.  Dear M. agreed to letter it for me, as nobody wants to see my primitive scrawl a foot high.  Size wouldn't help my legibility much anyway.  Two things I hadn't considered: first, I very rarely have drawn anything on such a scale, and secondly I almost never draw in ink, let alone the weirdly fluid markers used with these wet-erase-boards.  I draw, I see you might almost say, in number two pencils.  I've been know to make finished drawings in ink, as required, but really I'm a doodler by nature and practice and that means stubby pencils and scratch-paper often as not.  I almost never use color, for which I have no eye, and anything like paint seems to require a kind of manual dexterity wholly other from whatever it is I have.  Oh dear.

Also, turns out the "wet-erase" thing means dampening a rag and then rubbing and smudging until finally clearing the whole damned thing and starting over.  This I did no less than three times.  (By the time I was done with it, my "eraser" looked like a clown's dinner-napkin at a fish-fry.)  I learned that hesitations with the marker still in contact with the board means making a puddle.  I learned that blue works better for glasses and the tie and purple looks better for the pomaded noggin of the poet.  I'd made a little preliminary pencil sketch -- natch -- but I realized on my third attempt to reproduce it on the blackboard that I had to rethink a bit.  I remembered my high school art teacher and mentor, Griff.  I remembered him telling me, when I was trying to do something, anything, with watercolors, first that I was "still thinking with a pencil" and then, shaking my grip on the paintbrush until it loosened a bit,

"You're fightin' the paint, man, stop fightin' the paint."

New medium, new ways in.  Anyway, I tried.  Once M. had lettered the thing, I didn't think it looked half bad.  Perhaps not my finest hour, but, hey, I tried something new, me who doesn't do that sort of thing.

And it's all for the good of poetry, man.  Check it out.

A Nice Curiosity: Samuel Rogers

I have a friend who works in the other side of the bookstore, a very talented woman, with a gift for arranging small things beautifully.  In fact, she is our display artist -- for want of a better job description.  She takes all the things that we old-hands in the book business used to call, in our arrogance, "sidelines": bookends and candles, soap and soap-dishes, bells and scarves and little stone statues and what-not and what-all, and she makes from this welter of items, displays of great complexity and retail attractiveness such as will make even the least likely browser stop and explore.  She is the mistress of the bookstore's curiosities; of all the things one might never have thought to want or buy until one's seen them artfully arranged; like with like and like without, in great constructions of multiples and singularity, in witty and whimsical and even magical relation one to another and one to the next.  No one has ever made, for example, a rather haphazard pile of recently reduced "merch" into such a fascinating concatenation of desirable stuff.

She is also, in her leisure, a photographer and finder of curiosities of all sorts.  She can take a bit of gum on a lamp-post, or rocks in a ditch, find a doll's head in a patch of moss or a fallen bird's nest just by the root of a tree, put a scrap of one thing next to another, and make the viewer see something new and beautiful and wonderful; a discovery made, a color reconsidered, detritus transformed -- if for just a moment and only by her art -- into treasure.

I've known a lot of people make displays.  I've never known anyone with quite her sorcery.  Treasure indeed, she is herself.

Tempted by her tables of things, I was set to musing on curios and the curio-cabinets I remember being in every grandmother's parlor when and where I grew up.  Remember those homely, glass-fronted bureaus?  Not the stately china-cupboards that displayed the unused mass of every lady's better bone and silver, but the smaller furniture, often as not a "corner-cupboard", or even just a narrow box of glass shelves.  The curios displayed, as I remember them anyway from my own grandmothers' houses, might be china figurines, and delicate dolls, cut-glass dishes and baby's shoes cast in brass, but just as likely tourist trash from otherwise forgotten trips; like a fringed, silk pillow from Rehoboth Beach, or a celluloid elephant that walked in a wobbly way on weird, rectangular feet if bumped gently enough from behind.

Literature tends to be taught, and rightly enough, from the china cupboard; all that weight of important books, the great masterpieces and collateral sets; Austen and Dickens stacked, with Richardson and Tolstoy, displayed like massy punch-bowls and soup-tureens.  I've always had a certain affection for the curios, myself.  One of the wonders of having access to an Espresso Book Machine has been the ability to browse among the lesser shelves of literature and dust off forgotten titles and the barely remembered authors now largely confined to footnotes, even in the big Nortons.

Samuel Rogers (1763 - 1855) was a poet between two times.  As a boy, he twice went to knock on Dr. Johnson's front door.  The first time he was told the Doctor was not home.  The second time, he lost his nerve.  That would be perhaps the last times Samuel Rogers failed to meet a famous man.  The son of a successful banker, and despite his own youthful leanings to both poetry and the pulpit, Rogers would himself follow his father into the bank.  Though he abandoned all thought of preaching, young Samuel did publish his first book of poems at 23.  (He would publish his last original work fifty years later.)  When he inherited his father's fortune, the banker's son promptly retired from trade, built a fine house in London and became one of the literary lions of the age.  An invitation to breakfast was a sign of arrival for new writers. An invitation to his more intimate dinners was a more singular honor.  Rogers published a book with Byron, unlikely as it sounds, counted both Shelley and Edmund Burke as friends, and lived to read, meet and like Charles Dickens.   He used a considerable part of his personal fortune to relieve artists and writers down on their luck.  He paid to keep Richard Brinsley Sheridan from dying in utter want.  When his friend Wordsworth died, Rogers declined the post of poet laureate due to his great age, and happily endorsed his friend Tennyson's appointment in his stead.  His own early style owed more to Thomas Gray and Goldsmith than to his Romantic contemporaries, but his latter writing might be said to be representative of a high-minded Victorianism.  Neither quite fish nor fowl then for the anthologists, though he still figures in at least the history of English literature, if nowhere else.  I confess, I'd never read him until just now.

So... where'd he go?  In his day, as I've already suggested, Rogers' poetry was much admired by many poets now better known -- his' "Jacqueline" was published with Byron's "Lara" in 1814 --and a number of Rogers poems, like "Human Life" were once as popular as anything by Shelley or Keats.  Critics as late as the turn of the last Century could still be understood when using only his surname.  Even now, I would be hard pressed to think of another poet more often sourced in the biographies of his contemporaries.  Nonetheless, I suspect that the answer to where he went is as much in his biography as in his poetry.  Rogers did not have the mixed blessing of dying Romantically young, like "Byron and Shelley and Keats," in Dorothy Parker's memorable line.  Instead he lived and wrote to a ripe, and largely contented old age.  More importantly still, and unfortunately for his later reputation, the poetry of Samuel Rogers was nice.  (He was himself invariably kind, but not always nice.  Fanny Kemble said, "He certainly had the kindest heart and unkindest tongue of any one I ever knew."  He said of himself that having such a small voice, no one listened when he said pleasant things.)  Here I mean nice in both the Eighteenth Century sense of an elevated subject expressed in a well regulated line, and the Nineteen Century sense of poetry suitable to be read by virgins.

 Witness this, from the aforesaid "Human Life":

Now, seraph-winged, among the stars we soar;
Now distant ages, like a day, explore,
And judge the act, the actor now no more;
Or, in a thankless hour condemned to live,
From others claim what these refuse to give,
And dart, like Milton, an unerring eye
Through the dim curtains of Futurity.

That is as well-turned as the leg of of Georgian secretary, and as smoothly pleasant.  Hardly the sort of thing to inspire much in the way of new dissertation on his inoffensive metrical form or his equally unremarkable morals.

To the extent then that Rogers has survived it has been because of his conversation; the "table-talk" recorded in not one, but two separate and distinct volumes and comprised of the kind of casual remarks and reminiscences of his contemporaries and friends that make him such a bottomless well of anecdote and quotation for modern biographers of the Romantics and early Victorians alike.  (As I learned from one of the volumes I had reprinted on the bookstore's EBM, Wordsworth, for brief example, had a strained laugh.  No surprise there, egh?)

That's how I found the old boy myself.  Dickens scholars invariably make mention of the novelist's first success and celebrity being recognized in an invitation to breakfast with the old poet.  Rogers also figures in the memoirs and journals of the Irish poet, Thomas Moore -- likewise a great source now for writing mostly about other people.  So, like Henry James later when he was at the height of his dining out, one meets the man everywhere.

The grand thing about having access to these inexpensive but sturdy reprints is the opportunity afforded to poke around in some of the dustier corners of English literature; to shop, as it were, from the back shelves and among the smaller treasures.  Having found not one, but two versions of Rogers' "Table-Talk" and reminiscences, I can for roughly a sawbuck more, have the old boy's Poems - most of 'em, anyway, as well. 

The last great literary success of Samuel Rogers came from the volumes of expensively illustrated narrative verse he made of his trips with his maiden sister to Italy.  As it stands, I might have those as well whenever and if I ever feel the want of them.  For now though, I am content with the very good poems -- some of 'em -- and the heaping notebooks of his talk, large and small.  (I even had reprinted for me a short biography Rogers in a volume of Edwardian essays on various subjects.  At about 50 pages, that proved about right for my attention to the poet.)

And all these curiosities now home with me, snug in just the pocket of my bathrobe of a warm, new Summer's evening. 

An Improvisation

There was a time, fifteen years ago or more, when the aesthetic in bookstores, even independent bookstores all went kinda corporate.  (This will be a history lesson to the young peoples.)  The chains were still the biggest, and baddest players in the market back then, and the Internet Bezoshemoth had yet to swallow the earth.  Everyone was trying to compete with the slick professionalism of B&N and Borders -- remember Borders? -- and one way seemingly to do so was to update the look of everything.  "Branding" and "re-branding" were the buzz words.  What that translated into, at least for the big shops that could afford it, was a fairly substantial capital outlay on consultants, a few new computers with fancier software, and new signage when and wherever possible.

In a lot of ways, this proved to be a very good thing.  What went probably was looking pretty shabby by then and what came in to replace it was a level of design, accessibility and utility that actually made bookstores work better as well as look better.  What was lost, besides a certain amount of clutter and dust, was a little of the individuality, and yes, eccentricity of some of the books-landscape.  Bookstores that hadn't updated their widow displays or reconfigured their cash registers since the Carter administration, found themselves looking all shiny new and Clintonian.

That kind of investment doesn't come cheap.  The last thing anybody wants after spending serious money on a face-lift is to see somebody dress it back up in the same ol' rags and do.  Pens tend to be kept, for awhile anyway, in the nice new mesh-metal-containers, scratch-paper in the matching mesh-metal-boxes.  Nobody puts Post-its on the new big computer-screens.  Unused book-stands briefly go back, stacked by size, under the appropriate tables.  Signage suddenly has a uniform font, style, sizes etc. and consistency -- for the briefest blink of the eye -- is everywhere to be seen.

Some people, some booksellers hate this sort of thing.  Not me.  I like the smell of a new car as much as the next fellow, and there is something about showing off the new wheels before they wobble that I totally get.  (And that's as near to an automotive metaphor as you're ever likely to get from me.)  There are negatives from the get-go, but why not enjoy the pure newness of things at least while they still look new?

But we all know why we can't keep nice things, don't we?  Time.  Yesterday's innovation tends inexorably to the entropy of disordered library tables and mismatched chairs, stained carpets, busted Poly(methyl methacrylate) -- science! -- and the inevitable return of framed family photos and potted jade-plants.  Sooner or later there will have to be some compromise with not just wear and tear, but the occupation of the space by actual, expressive humans.  However hard the powers-that-happen-to-be try to enforce  a rigid aesthetic conformity, people will break out.

(Two brief examples I will always treasure: 1) a photograph I wish I could now find online of a then East German lady hanging socks and drawers to dry on her Teutonic, Bauhaus balcony, and 2) a computer terminal at a local Barnes &  Noble I saw not long ago, the back encrusted with unicorn stickers.  Fight the Power!)

One thing that was lost in the movement to make everything clean and professional, immediacy.  Selling books isn't always the leisurely business of exchanging favorite titles with trusted customer, is it? Sometimes, ya gotta grab the people.  Thus the necessity of keeping current with news, reviews and the holiday schedule and being able to throw a time-sensitive display together on short notice.  When display materials and signage become the stuff of plotted campaigns and unified, long-term messages, it can be hard, for example, to mark the passage of a great writer, or remember that Fathers Day follows Mothers Day as night follows day.

So a coworker makes a handsome display, a witty selection of titles meant to communicate the changing nature of masculine interests and then we find we ain't got a sign.  We could request one of those lovely, professionally produced pieces from Promotions, but frankly, their plate is rather full just now and there are bigger fish to fry and so on, so...

I actually love making home-made signs.  I like home-made signs in bookstores.  Such signs and displays suggest a level of direct engagement of booksellers with our customers that reminds us all of the actual business we are in.  Just doesn't happen much anymore.  There are people for this sort of thing; paid professionals, with computers and standard fonts and all that.  Still, I've been asked.

What I like best about this kind of improvisation is putting as much into the message as possible in the time and space allotted, which ain't much.  Fathers Day makes me think of my own Dad, and of the TV dads of my generation.  Doesn't take me long to start humming the theme to My Three Sons in my head and so to the Internet for a reminder of the opening animation.

Now if the reader is too young to remember this old show, that's okay.  I haven't watched it in years.  What it was is less important in this context than making direct reference to the presumably happy if vague memories of people at least old enough to remember the reruns.  The next step is to do something different.

You can't see everything in the display in the photo below, but besides the usual beer and BBQ titles, there are books that address everything from running to The Enlightenment on these tables.  Seems Daddy has moved on, a little.  We live in faster times.  And so, my modification of the opening credits animation of a TV classic.  The son on the right is, clearly out of order.  The son on the left, in case you can't read it in the photo, says:

"Oh, Damn, Dude!  Seriously?"

Don't know if anyone ever actually said "damn to Fred MacMurray, certainly not that I remember.

The joke then plays out as best it can and the sign does until it's either replaced or no longer needed.  Made us all smile, anyway.  And it serves a greater purpose too, I think; reminding the customers and the staff that not everything in an Independent Bookstore needs to be quite so impersonally, blandly professional as what one would see in a chain store.

How's that branding working out for you, Borders?

Unique Bookstore Problem #49

NW TUT

Here's where I started. The young woman who sees to our bargain books, or rather the young woman who did before she took a promotion out of the books department, bless 'er, asked me for a sign. Not the first time either. Some years back now, during a busy season, I was asked to make more than one sign for the sales floor. I enjoy that sort of thing, always have. I made quite a few signs, that last go. People seemed to like them. Then I went back to doing what I more normally do and the people who more normally make our signs for the bookstore where I work went back to do just that, among many other things. As I say, I was glad of the opportunity to do a bit of signage and display work again. It had been years, I should think. Now here I was, about a month ago or so, doing a bit of sign-making again, if just for a couple of very temporary bargain book tables. Fine by me. Fun.

My "skill-set" is however very much out of date. I've not kept up. I still draw with a pencil. I still cut paper with scissors and poster-board with a razor. I still use glue. I don't know how to use graphic-programs on the computer, (is that redundant by now?) I don't have anything against using such things, I've just never had the opportunity or seen the necessity, considering what I actually do most days to earn my living, which is buy and sell books, rather than promote them, etc. I have the greatest respect for the people who do produce those more professional promotional materials: signs, sale banners, window dressing and the like. I am, I confess, even a bit envious of not only their "skill-set" but their training and the polish of nearly everything they produce. Which isn't to say, however, that I don't like the look of a handmade sign in a bookstore, because I do, I still very much do.

There is something to be said, particularly in an independent bookstore setting, for a touch, here and there, of the improvised, the hand-lettered, a bit of construction paper, a whiff of glue-stick, the less-than-perfect, the made-for-the-moment. Besides the aesthetics of the thing, there is just the obvious opposite of everything manufactured, pat and corporately uniform; all the values that made all those much lamented Borders bookstores so pretty and so indistinguishable, one from another. (It never quite seemed like anyone had ever made anything in a Borders, not a decision about where to put the remainders, or even the coffee. ) That may be a good thing in a national chain. The customer certainly always knew pretty much what to expect, walking into Borders Books and Music, in New Mexico or New Hampshire. But does the loyal customer of an Independent bookstore want or expect that absence of surprise?

Anyway, not my job to worry about such things. Better heads than mine. But, now and then, I may get asked to whip something up, of the moment. Glad of the challenge, and the chance.

This time what was needed was something for the display of Egyptology remainders the buyers had specially ordered and or collected in anticipation of the farewell tour of King Tut coming to town. (Seems that boy king has said more goodbyes down the decades than Cher, doesn't it?) Pretty big deal, that show, and not here long. Lovely big books on the subject at lovely low prices. How about a quick sign? Done.

I wasn't much interested in ol' Tut himself as a subject. in the first place, his gilded mug was all over the bookcovers, in living, vivid color. Nothing I could draw could compete with all that lush photography and dense black backgrounds. That would seem to be a rule with Tut books: rich, shiny gold and a background black as India ink. I thought I might try something like, but unlike. What came to mind was the poster of a movie I'd seen, "The Devil's Double," about another Pharaoh's brat, the murderous Uday Hussein. The movie poster was a spectacular thing, all in gold, the actor, Dominic Cooper, gilded on a gilded throne with golden guns. You get the idea. I looked up the poster online. Tut could work in that pose, I thought, so I sketched it out briefly, as seen above. Why not?

So off to the basement for some supplies: black foamboard for the background, gold poster-board, a new can of spray-glue, as my old one had dried up, and then making the sketch the right size on the back of the gold cardboard.

Next comes my favorite part frankly, using the Exacto. I admit it, I love the things. I find the process of curving that razor-edge 'round corners and cutting out a silhouette just as exciting as the first time someone let me play with sharp things. I don't know, but somehow it still feels a little... dangerous. Whatever. The result, particularly on a larger scale as here, in poster, can be dramatic. And in gold, yet!

For a bit of detail, I found a gift paper we sell at the bookstore, a black and gold stripe, that worked rather well for my Tut's headgear. What I hoped would be the thing to make this little arts and crafts effort a bit wittier than it may so far sound, was to make my Tut specific not just to the 21st Century, but to his latest stop in the tour, Seattle. I gave him a Starbucks cup to replace one of Uday's guns, and an Ipod to replace the other.

NW TUT.

Get it? Okay, so it's not Madison Ave. I thought it was just clever enough to make someone else smile too. (It did.)

Here's our boy finished. Not bad. I need to confess one thing more though, and explain his "bling" TUT. When I drew and cut out his Ipod, I thought I might be awfully clever and make the cord from the device to his earbuds by using one of those white-out tape dispensers, you know, the ones shaped to fit the hand, where the white comes out on a spool. That, my friends was a bad idea, as can be seen here. Not only was the line too thick, but my dispenser was running almost on empty, a fact I had not noticed before I'd started. In for a penny, in for a pound. Somewhere near the point where my ugly, thick white lines had to converge, the spool twisted to it's end and made.. . well, an ugly mess. What to do? I tried scraping the gnarled bits off, but that scratched the gold off as well. Crisis! All that effort, and then spoil it at the end. Well, I improvised. Gave our boy a bit of the ol' heavy gold, just to cover the mess, but without mucking up the theme of the thing. Worked okay, I think, just.

I ended up wishing the "bling" TUT was actually a little more visible, but still, happy enough accident. And a poster for the bargain books in an afternoon, between buying used books, answering phones and the rest.

I'm not making any claims for this as either art or graphic. It was fun to do and I think added a bit of something to an otherwise rather predictable display of very nice, topical, shiny bargain books. All it was meant to do, really.

I know there will be people who don't see much in this kind of thing, who think it rather lowers the tone. I don't disagree. I just think fun is a value, as is improvisation, surprise and, yes, ephemerality. I say embrace the temporary, now and again, and the homemade.

Though only, of course, when asked.