Mum and Magoo (My Christmas Reading 2025)

 

"Until death it is all life."

When I was younger I made a practice of kissing great men. I don't mean I ever had sex with anyone famous. Never did. Might have done if it had been on offer but it never was so, alas, nothing very saucy for the memoirs. Sorry. I wouldn't call the kisses innocent either as I was young and rather brassy, but nothing really came of them in that way and my motives were, I suppose we could say, pure. (Allen Ginsberg kissed me once and that was not at all innocent or expected and he had a chest cold at the time and it was not pleasant, but that's a story for another time.)

Walking back to my friend's apartment after the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation -- that was the full title, the alphabet was less inclusive in those days -- I saw an old man on the sidewalk ahead of me. He was in a small group of friends. I was with a different group. I was pretty sure I knew who the old man was and so I ran up to him and asked if he was, in fact, Harry Hay. He was. I asked if I could kiss him. He said yes and so I did. We hugged and he smiled and waved as I returned to my somewhat aghast young friends. Now for any who don't know, Harry Hay was a great gay activist, a founder of both one of the first gay rights organization in the United States, The Mattachine Society, and The Radical Faeries. He was an actor, a communist, a labor organizer, and is widely consider the father of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I'd read his biography, studied his work, and always remembered his explanation that the secret history of gay people was "a history of kisses." I kissed Harry Hay. He had kissed this one and that one and someone who had kissed Lord Alfred Douglas and so though Harry's kiss I had a direct connection to my hero Oscar Wilde. See how it works? Further, though most of our history has been hidden and intentionally destroyed, by this same chain of kisses we are connected in a direct line of affection back and back to Socrates, to "the apostle beloved of Jesus," to Achilles, Alexander, Gilgamesh. I think it is a beautiful idea. And so I kissed Harry Hay when he was eighty-one and I was twenty-nine and  I am proud to speak my lineage of kisses.

That idea has influence my whole life, that theory of connection that links me to Edward Carpenter, connects me to E. M. Forster, to Auden, to Truman Capote and on. Humans have evolved by and for connection, it is how we survived and why we've got our lovely, big, often neglected brains. "Just connect." 

It has also shaped how I see my reading life and provided a way to understand the connection of this book to these, this author to that, to me. I can't justify calling this anything so grand as a theory, it's more an entertainment, a game, but it does offer interesting and sometimes unexpected glimpses into my past. One book led to the next, and the next and if I could remember all the connections there would be a kind of autobiography in it, not so much of kisses now but concepts, ideas, art. I have writers in my library of whom I speak as "my household Gods," some going straight back to childhood like L. Frank Baum, and Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, and some who came later and by other ways like Dr. Samuel Johnson, and dear Charles Lamb, and Edmund White who we just lost this year. I sometimes try to track back through my books to find my first meeting with Dumas or Miss Maria Edgeworth or this year's Nobel winner for Literature, Lazlo Krasznahorkai. 

There is one book I know exactly when we met. 

I recently had a boy in the bookstore, college boy with whom I had a brief conversation in which I mentioned my favorite translation of Don Quixote (it's the current Penguin edition, translated by John Rutherford because I think it the funniest.) The boy was taken back a bit by that word, "favorite" and asked how many translations I could possibly have read. Five sounds very very impressive but I was quick to amend this by saying "whole or in part" which is all too true of the way I read now anyway. No apologies. Life is short. 

Anyone remember Mr. Magoo? If you don't, Quincy Magoo was a nearsighted, elderly gentleman who bumbled through a series of short subject and feature length animation and even appeared in a whole series of literary adaptations that ran and reran as primetime television specials  in my childhood. Most famously, he starred in a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that still plays somewhere every December. I loved those shows and one adaptation in particular was, I now realize, my very first encounter with Don Quixote.

And so, age probably nine or ten, I made my way to Grove City Public Library to find and read this book where, spoiler alert, Mr. Magoo dies at the end. In order to understand this part of the story, you need to know that I did not grow up in town but four miles down the road in an unincorporated village not covered at the time by any agreement with the town library. So, in order for me to check out books, we would either have had to pay a fee or I had to pretend that my home address was actually my grandmother's house in town. That's what I did. Always felt like shaky ethical ground at the time but then I was a nervous, already quite class-conscious child, as little queer country boys must inevitably be in the surprisingly stratified society of small American towns. 

I walked to the library after school, found the book in the adult stacks and sat and looked at the Gustave Dore illustrations until it was time for my mother to come pick me up on her way home from work. At the time she was cleaning dormitories at Slippery Rock College. It was filthy work for low wages done for ungrateful, often rude kids who thought nothing of leaving chicken bones under their beds and condoms on the floor. She needed the job though because we needed the money. Both my parents worked at the time at jobs they did not love so that their children might have more comfortable lives; plenty to eat, clean clothes, a bit of pride.

When I took the big book to the counter and gave the volunteer librarian my card she seemed not best pleased. She scrutinized the book, and my card, and me and then asked where I'd found it. It was not the first book I'd taken out from the adult section, but for the first time I was told I could not have this one, that it was not "appropriate" at my age. It was made very clear that I had done something wrong, that the book was adult not only because it came from those shelves but because, I was pretty sure, the librarian thought it was dirty and that I wanted it for that reason. I blushed to the roots of my hair, retrieved my library card and fled outside to the steps here I had to stay and wait for my mother to fetch me.

Eventually she did, pulling up in yet another car inappropriate to a respectable married cleaning lady; some slightly sporty old wreck my father was probably fixing up in order to sell it in the yard. My mother drove many such cars. I can still see her bucket and brushes and gloves on the console between the bucket seats. Doubtlessly she was exhausted after a long shift and glad to be headed home. She noticed pretty quickly that I was uncharacteristically quiet. She asked what I got at the library and when I whispered, "nothing," she knew something was wrong. She asked me what and when I wouldn't say, she pulled over and parked and asked again. It was then, in tears that I explained about Mr. Magoo and Don Quixote and the Adult Section of the library. I will say bluntly that I don't know that either of my parents ever felt the need of a library. It was as I've said a small town and thus a small library and one can't spend every hour of childhood reading the same Lives of the Great Inventors or In Washington's Youth or any of the like dusty children's volumes otherwise intended for boys my age. Sooner or later, sooner in my case, one has to head out for fresh pasture.

Another thing about small towns? Everybody pretty much knows everybody.

I don't know what my mother made of my muddled telling of having been refused a book, but something in the way of it being done struck a nerve and so before I understood what was happening she had turned the car around and we were back in town and back at the library. I wanted to crawl through the floorboards and disappear. When my mother got out of the car and told me to come with her I was contemplating faking a heart attack or running away from home, anything to avoid the humiliation of going back inside and or being confronted about my status as an illegitimate user of the institution. I was sure we would be jailed for fraud at least. And yet I was a good, well brought up little puss and so in she went and after her I followed, eyes cast down to the creaking wooden floor. 

Everybody knows everybody, remember? So even though I don't know that my Mum had ever set foot in that library before, up to the counter we went and she greeted the librarian by name and the librarian returned the greeting.

And then my mother, my shy, tired, unkempt mother wearing a snap-front apron and a headscarf tied in a knot asked to see the book I was trying to check out. It was still on the desk. My mother looked at it and asked the librarian why I couldn't have it.  The librarian explained in low tones what the objection was. I couldn't quite hear over the blood roaring in my head, but I did hear the word "prostitution" at one point and the suggestion that I was too little to understand the book anyway. The librarian addressed my mother familiarly as "Stella," not "Mrs. Craft" as she might have done with a regular patron or fellow church-goer. I suspect that pissed Stella off too. Whatever was said, I remember my mother putting one chubby fist against the bone of her hip -- never a good sign -- and then, calling the librarian by her full married name, telling her roughly the following:

"You know who I am. You know where we live. You don't have to let my kid take out books at all if you don't want him to. He has for years now and he always treats the books respectfully and he's never late bringing them back, is he? No. And you know he can read already better than most and already reads beyond his grade and that, so I'm going to tell you what: like I say, you know who I am and you know he's my son and I'm telling you right now he can read any goddamned book he wants as far as I'm concerned and it is not your place to tell him he can't and if you tell me I'm wrong we will go and we'll have to just figure out how to get him what he wants somewhere else, but what he reads is not now and never will be up to you. Am I understood? Now, either give him the book or don't. I have to get home and start supper."

And I went home with my first Don Quixote.

What I was actually able to make of a thousand page novel originally published in Spanish in 1615, I couldn't tell you now. Probably not all that much. I can tell you that it was the first book I studied on my own as close as a Bible. I can tell you that I made sure that I stopped frequently to understand the English (it was probably either the Smollett or Ormsby translation.) I confess I do not think I finished it despite checking it back out twice. In fact I don't think I read it straight through until I read the Samuel Putnam translation -- still good! -- in my early thirties, or roughly the time I was still kissing great gays, just to come full circle.

And so our heroes can be, among other things, long dead, fictional, foolish, kissed, forgotten, but always and sometimes unexpectedly brave. That's the whole point of them. The great critic and essayist Simon Leys in a lovely essay titled Quixotism says this lovely thing:

"When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found he had inherited his master's faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease -- through the contagion of fidelity and love.

Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die."

Isn't that lovely? 

As Ive mentioned before, my mother died earlier this year. She was ninety three years old. If I owe my survival and my sense of hard-won self-worth to Harry Hay and all the old queers who came before and fought so that I might live aloud, if I can trace my love of serious literature to that first, forbidden book and count among my first teachers Miguel Cervantes, a busted, broken old veteran and 16th Century hack who in late middle age wrote one of the humane masterpieces of fiction, then I must close with a word of thanks to Stella Cookson Craft, my shy, brave, feisty, fierce little mother. She gave me life, her unconditional love, and my best example of what it means to stand up when needs be. In closing then, I stand as she taught me to, and thank you all for coming.

Daily Dose

From The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

SOMETIMES

"'Sometimes I'm amazed by what people call about,' she said, tapping her desk with a pencil. 'Once, a patron called to ask if it was okay for her to eat a can of beans that didn't have an expiration date. I mean, there is a website called Still Tasty that I use to check expiration dates on things, but I'm not going to take responsibility for a lady eating a can of beans!'
I said they all seemed to know a lot."

From Chapter 22

Library Shots

Branding Doodle

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #23

Some Shelf Shots

Some Library Shots

Daily Dose

From Sanditon, by Jane Austen

THE LIBRARY

"The library, of course, afforded everything: all the useless things in the world that could not be done without... "

From Chapter 6

Dropping by Versailles

He wasn't witty, or even particularly good at telling a story. He never knew when to stop, or not to, just going on until he'd told it all, so far as he could remember.  He did have an excellent memory.  He also made a practice of writing everything down as soon as he possibly could after something had happened, or hadn't.  His style, as I understand it at least, only in translation from the French, was good.  He's said to have coined the word "intellectual" as a noun.  He wasn't one himself, mind. His book doesn't lend itself to quotation, anyway not unless one has already read it, or at least in it far enough to recognize some of the more familiar names, far enough to know something of the author's subject, his preoccupations, his place and his enemies.  Once one does, it's impossible not to smile when he's on yet again about this or that mistress of the king, some little scandal or violation of etiquette, like how the king -- Le roi de France, Louis XIV -- at some grand military exercise, had to keep taking his hat off and then putting it back on, not to salute the troupes, but in order to pop the royal noggin in and out of the window of the lady's litter to explain things and answer charming little questions.  Just as often, what seems most to exercise the writer is even more trivial; usually something to do with who should walk into dinner before and after himself, etc.  He had no secrets, certainly none he seems to have kept out of his book, though he otherwise appears to have been the very soul of discretion, if he's to be entirely trusted on that head.  In fact, his may be not only the greatest collection of tittle-tattle ever composed, but also, curiously enough, one of the most blissfully unexamined souls ever encountered in memoirs --and such a long book, too.

He was Louis de Rouvery, duc de Saint-Simon, -- or "the Duke of Saint-Simon," as his translator, Bayle St. John has it here.  He was godson of the king, a soldier, a diplomat, a courtier and resident of Versailles, and author of Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency.  Here's the three volume set, from a series of "Memoirs and Secret Chronicles of the Courts of Europe," by the St. Dunstan Society, Akron, Ohio, "Illustrated with photogravures on Japan Vellum" and so on.  1901, M. Walter Dunne, Publisher.  (I've seen other stray volumes in this series drifting around used bookstores for year, always in the red cloth covers, with the lovely old photogravure illustrations, etc.  This would be the first time I've actually thought of buying something from the series myself.)

Helene Hanff, in a letter to "84 Charing Cross Road," describes spending cold winter evenings, curled in her armchair with only dear, silly ol' Saint-Simon for company, and as always with my favorite reader and guide, craving more, bless her.  I do not doubt she was reading the translation of Bayle St. John, though not in an edition from Akron, Ohio, considering she got all her books from London by then.

I discovered so many books and authors because Helene read them first, just as she discovered most of what she read because Arthur Quiller-Couch, or "Q", editor of The Oxford Book of English Prose, among other things, read them before her.  Saint-Simon is one of these, though I've never really tried to read the Memoirs straight through before, never having had anything like a complete, or even a proper selection come my way before.  Now here it is.


Bayle St. John, curiously enough, is a name I only really came to know in the past couple of years, after the bookstore where I work acquired an Espresso Book Machine and I discovered a whole new way to search out obscure titles and have new, paperback copies printed up for me on the spot.  I'd read Sarah Bakewell's delightful book, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.  I decided I needed to read another, more traditional biography of Montaigne thereafter and went looking for one, but never did find one.  Then I discovered Bayle St. John (1822 - 1859) on a search of the database of titles available for reprint on the EBM, and had his Montaigne, the Essayist, a Biography (1857) run up for me in two wonderful, thick, ugly little volumes.  It was everything it should have been for a biography of the period and I enjoyed every bit of it.

Now here's my old friend, Bayle St. John, again, this time the translator of Saint-Simon's Memoirs, that same Saint-Simon who kept Miss Hanff company one long winter in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, thanks presumably to the recommendation of her teacher via books, "Q."  See how this works?

I hadn't thought to buy this three volume number, either to sell in the store or to read myself and had actually put it back in the bag it came out of, once I'd looked it up online.  We don't keep such things on the shelf at the bookstore where I work, or rather we don't anymore, at least not for any length of time.  The chances that anyone other than me would ever buy it seemed a bit risky as an investment, even of so little money, if more than an inch or two of shelf-space.  I kept reconsidering.  Then there was the fact that I am still trying to shed books, not acquire them just now.  Had to consider that -- if I was thinking of buying the book for myself, which I wasn't until I did.

There are long winter nights coming my way soon enough, and generally in my experience what's good enough for H. H., is good enough for me.

I've been dipping into all three volumes for a week or more, ever since it landed on the desk.  I see the appeal now in a way I probably hadn't the last time I read Saint-Simon.  There's not the company of a friend and a philosopher, as there is in reading Montaigne, but there is the pleasure of a faithful correspondent from a lost time and place.  And Bayle St. John, the translator, seems to me every bit as reliably readable as Bayle St. John the biographer and essayist.  The world of  The Duke of Saint-Simon seems to be at least as interesting as that of Samuel Pepys, of whose diaries I've come to be more fond as I reach the age at which, I suspect, again, H. H. read them.

Long books to replace many briefer ones.  Maybe that's the idea.

Meanwhile I dip.  Some of Saint-Simon's stories, already seem to me to fall a bit flat, the joke perhaps requiring if not French, then something French in the way of sensibility, despite the yeoman efforts of the translator.  Likewise, more than once already I've found myself getting a bit impatient with absolutely ridiculous nature of life at Versailles.  (I've experienced a similar irritation reading about court life in Tales of Genji, where there was at least the chance of a bit of fencing.)  Still and all,  I can see the pleasure in visiting, if not for an extended stay.  After all, friends reccommened the place.

My Books by Austin Dobson

Daily Dose

From Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, a Biography, Volume Two, by Edgar Johnson

AMONG HIS IMAGINARY BOOKS

"... The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, of which the successive volumes were labeled: 'I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease.' Along side this bulky work was The Virtues of our Ancestors, a single volume so narrow the title had to be printed sideways."

From Part Eight: The Darkening Scene, 1851 - 1858, Chapter One: Fog Over England

Daily Dose

FromThe Poetical Works of George Crabbe, edited by A.J Carlyle and R. M. Carlyle

ON THE SHELF

"Here all the rage of controversy ends,
And rival zealots rest like bosom-friends"

From The Library

Daily Dose

From The Poetical Works of George Crabbe

TO THE CRITICS

"Foes to our race! if ever ye have known
A father's fears for offspring of your own;
If ever, smiling o'er a lucky line,
Ye thought the sudden sentiment divine,
Then paused and doubted, and then, tired of doubt,
With rage as sudden dash'd the stanza out;-
If, after fearing much and pausing long,
Ye ventured on the world your labour'd song,
And from the crusty critics of those days
Implored the feeble tribute of their praise;
Remember now the fears that moved you then,
And, spite of truth, let mercy guide your pen."

From The Library

Daily Dose

From The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, by Henry Fielding

VISIT TO A NOUVEAU RICHE RESIDENCE

"We can hardly, at least, attribute it to the same taste with which he furnished his house, or at least his library, by sending an order to a bookseller in London, to pack him up 500 ponds, worth of his handsomest books."

From Saturday, July 13th

Clippings Saved, for now, from Burning

When we moved into our present house, I was finally able to have all my books out of boxes. It is a big house, certainly the biggest in which I had ever come to live, and I had a room, for the first time, large enough for a library. I had fine new pine shelves, purchased from a used bookstore going regrettably but conveniently out of business at just the right time, and having painted and put these up, I made a space worthy of the word. It was an exhilarating moment. To see not just my familiars finally shelved in order for the first time, but to find forgotten friends, to reunite scattered volumes, to rank my sets in line... it was an exhilarating week. My library, such as it was or will ever be, had at last found a home. There were, however, more books than I remembered packing. Some, frankly, were completely new to me. When had I purchased this? Where had I come across that? Why on earth had I felt the need of her and when exactly had I planned to read him? And just who the hell was this? So for all the pleasure of those days I spent unpacking and arranging my books, there was some considerable confusion, even consternation as well. I found myself sorting, in ever bigger piles, books I could not imagine my reasons for having bought, books I had no memory of ever owning, and books I had no intention of keeping. These kept stacking up and up in one corner of the room until I might address them later. When I finally did, most went back directly into the boxes from which they'd only just been taken, some for what seemed to be the first time, as if they'd been an unwanted gift from the faeries. Most of these have long since been sold off or thrown out.

The next problem pile to be addressed was less complicated, but more embarrassing. Even someone as forgetful -- and greedy --as I am could not help but be taken aback by the inordinate number of duplicate titles. Worse was realizing just how many of these had gone unread in any and all of the editions in which I'd bought them over the years. I always, or almost always, buy books with the intention, however fleeting, of reading my way right through-- at least I used to. These books went the way of the unwanted as well.

Finally, what was perhaps most shocking when I came to sort and organize my library, was a whole bonfire's worth of receipts, bookmarks, notes and ephemera, pulled from nearly all my books; read and unread, wanted and not. I never meant to clutter so many pages with so much trash. I certainly didn't intend to sell books crammed with snapshots and magazine-subscription-cards, torn sheets of newsprint and the like. And I knew enough, as a used books dealer, not to let all this inferior paper sit and brown the pages of my books. I should hope by now I know better than that.

What is usually called "ephemera" in the trade,comes to us just this way; forgotten between the pages of a book. Most of these bits and pieces are there as bookmarks, not the kind provided as promotion from the seller, but taken up from a desk or a nightstand as convenient to the moment, used to save one's place, and then forgotten when the book is put down or done with altogether. Reviewing my own books, it seems I was as guilty of doing this as the next person, even though, if anyone, I ought to know better. You see, most of the scraps we put in books to hold our place are printed on paper inferior to that from which the book was made; acids and inks and all manner of unpleasant chemicals that do no harm in our daily encounters with them, if left between the pages of a good book, may discolor and even destroy the book in which they have been abandoned. Likewise all the little Post-It notes, rubber-bands, paperclips and other detritus readers tend to forget having added to the text. As a bookseller, All this trash gets tossed, unless it is old enough, and interesting enough of itself to be sold as a curiosity. Old theater programs and tickets, stray illustrations detached from their books, even family photographs, can become "ephemera" to the dealer, once the stuff's been slipped into a Mylar bag and had a price-tag slapped on it. All well and good, but for the most part, what we leave in books is just so much stray paper. Cleaning up my books, I myself filled a large trash bag with the stuff, and other than a school-photo of a nephew here and there, and a single twenty dollar bill -- such luck! -- there was nothing in the stuff I shook loose from my books that was worth keeping.

There are things slipped into books intentionally by the owner, things meant to add to their value, at least for that first reader. These most often consist of newspaper clippings; a review of the book, or an original advertisement of the publication, but sometimes an obituary of the author. Nothing, as it turns out, that one could slip into a book is likelier to damage the pages than a newspaper; as the newspaper yellows and disintegrates, the pages of the book are infected and do likewise. As a bookseller of used books, I hate newspaper clippings.

And yet...

Above, please note not one, but two clippings discovered smack in the middle of my recently purchased copy of The Note Books of Samuel Butler. Both would seem to be from The London Times. The one on the left is indeed from some time after Butler's death, and while not an actual obituary, is clearly a valedictory published some time not long after the posthumous publication of Butler's greatest and most lasting book, his autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh. If I were to recommend nothing else written by Butler, I can heartily recommend this. No book other than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians probably did more to undermine the smug assumptions of perfect Victorian piety and virtue than Butler's novel, and like Strachey's, Butler's book can still be read with delight as one of the greatest examples of invective in English literature. It was heartening reading this notice, by the otherwise unidentified, "C. H. H.," to see that even in what was probably pretty close to the novel's own day, it and it's author were already much appreciated as exceptionally worthy of memorialization. The article is charming. I'm keeping it -- though not in the book.

The second clipping is a review, by no less a Grand Old Man of Letters than Helene Hanff's own "Q" -- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch -- of Butler's prose version of Homer's Odyssey, and of Butler's eccentric book theorizing the authorship of same, The Authoress of The Odyssey, in which Butler set out to prove that Homer was in fact, a woman. I haven't read either Butler's Homer, or his book on the lady who wrote it, but reading through Quiller-Couch's review, I think now that I might have to get me a reprint of the latter to go with a cheap used copy of the former and have a go.

So I'm keeping that clipping too.

I'll keep both in a nice, clean folder, in my filing cabinet, well away from the book, so as to avoid the clippings doing anymore mischief to the book.

So, yes, even I can appreciate something wonderful and old found slipped between the pages of an old book. This doesn't mean that I wasn't right to take them out, anymore than I was wrong to throw away all that junk I'd stuffed into books myself. Just means I've developed a more selective judgement when it comes to my personal pack-ratting, is all.

And a filing cabinet, for any like me who might want this kind of thing to hand hereafter, is an important feature in any private library. (One's heirs can burn the stuff just as easily... after.)

A Merry Heart

When I was all of fourteen, as I remember it, I experience my first earthquake. It wasn't an actual earthquake, as were the ones through which I lived in California later, but my first taught me something of the shock and confusion I was always to feel thereafter when the world jerked as if by a sudden tug, displacing objects at rest the moment before, knocking some over and, more magically, leaving others still upright but slightly off center. I was asleep that first time, at home, in my room and in my own narrow bed. At the foot of my bed stood my first bookcase: a cabinet of great antiquity, given over from years as a storage place for home-canned-goods to the newer purpose of housing my books. It was a humble piece of furniture, old and well made, but it was never intended to carry such weight as I'd put in and on it. It stood about three feet high and half again as wide and was no deeper than my hand. Into it's shelves I'd crammed perhaps a hundred books or more, and on top of it stood not one, but two cardboard cases rescued for me from... a dump? Appropriately enough if so, as, though I didn't know it at the time, these were the temporary display cases for mass market paperbacks, sent out with sometimes elaborate, three-dimensional decoration and a stand, to be assembled and attached, and called in the business, "dumps." To me, they seemed perfectly utilitarian, accommodating as they did perhaps as many as five paperbacks to a square, three squares to a "shelf," four shelves to a dump, the whole then a solid box of books. Being cardboard, these could be secured to the wall of my room with just tacks. They made something like a proper bookcase, tacked up this way. But having even then more books than I had places to store them, the old jelly-jar-cabinet was burdened not just with these solid-seeming boxes, but piled right up to the low ceiling of my room with more books, stacked, and crammed, and piled so tight as to require considerable effort to pull one from the whole, even if nearly the whole was carefully disassembled to get at a particular book. (You see now, where this story is going, don't you?) The night of my first earthquake, the household all asleep, there was a sudden rumble and a tumbling as off bricks from the walls of Jericho and I was awake in the dark and buried. We lived then, as my parents still do, just off the Interstate Highway, our house passed at all hours by coal trucks, and my father said, more than once that night, he "thought a truck hit us." My parents slept in the room next to mine and the thin common wall we shared was the wall on my side hidden behind books, or was until the old cabinet gave out, the dumps came away and nearly the whole of my library fell into my bed and onto me. When my poor father forced the door, turned on the light and found me, I wasn't to be found, until a good number of books had been pulled off me. My poor mother, thinking I was hurt, rushed to examine me for concussion, for broken bones, but other than a black eye, I was unhurt. My terrified look was not the result of pain, but of the thought that my father, in his angry concern, might have tossed a book too hard in clearing my bed, that some paperback, already injured in the collapse, might be pinned and cocked, broken under the weight of its fellows, like an innocent fan at a soccer riot. It took some very stern words and a cold compress held forcefully to my eye to keep me from spending the rest of that night searching for damaged books. It took some days to reorganize and assess the damage. Surprisingly few books were actually lost, paperbacks being, like small children, surprisingly tough little items. The cabinet and the dumps were a total loss though. Thereafter, I made do with second-hand metal shelves and the pine desk and bookcase my grandmother's last beau, being something of a carpenter, had made for me from scrap pine. (I have it still, filled now with some, though not all of my Library of America books.)

My husband jokes, should we ever have a house-fire, that he knows to save the first editions of Beerbohm before he thinks of saving himself, or me. And I did set our house alight, a few years ago, putting a cigarette out in a box of fireplace ashes in the garage, losing in the process quite a few of my CDs stored there. I like to think, when I put that fire out with a bucket filled in the laundry-room sink, that my first concern was our lives, then our home, then the cars, but I would be lying if I did not admit that the thought of my library, just down the hall, didn't flash through the smoke and the heat.

My dear friend R. had an apartment fire years ago, not long before I met him, and whenever some grim happenstance has befallen either of us since, he has slyly kept perspective for us both by saying, again and again, "I don't know that I've ever told you, but I lost everything in a fire." (My role is to feign ignorance each and every time the subject arises.) Poor R. did in fact lose nearly all his worldly goods that night, fleeing the flames just in time to survive, and, I believe, in just his shorts. Later he was able to fish a few photographs and trinkets from the ashes, but among the things he lost in that fire were all his books. When he and I became good friends, he was determined to remain detached from material possessions, refusing, at first, to replace the books he'd lost. Over the length of our friendship though, I have worn down his resolve and his apartment, once again is all but impassible in places for books -- though nowadays his fascination with fish means that the many aquariums he keeps not only make the place prettier, but seem at least to provide something of a potential fire protection system, if not for himself and his precious fish, then for the old building as a whole or at least the tenant directly below.

In my experience of actual earthquakes, my old oak cases, acquired one by grudging one for me by my husband, weirdly never fell, in even the worst quake I experienced, in 1989. Some standing as high as eight feet, and weighted even then with hardcover books, often as not shelved two deep, these never fell but merely skipped, as if rocked out to the middle of the floor by poltergeists, shedding and shattering picture-frames and mementos, but very few books.

I was managing the branch store on Sacramento Street in San Francisco, for Stacey's, when that same quake hit in the afternoon, and there likewise, while we lost a window and power, very little stock so much as fell off the shelves. I remember books displayed on wire book stands on the tables jigging but staying upright almost every one. (The main store was not so lucky and the structural damage there revealed greater problems, necessitating the renovation that led to the store's expansion into the whole of that building, and, in a way, to the store's eventually recent demise, being too big to scale down when the economics of selling books offered the owners too few other choices.)

Now my shelves at home are all bolted to my walls, so unless our house comes down, the shelves are likely to stay put. But as the photo I include here shows, my shelves are not enough for the books I own. When the house is cleaned, the strays are congregated in a heap such as that shown. It is a sorry and undignified fate for so many good books, particularly as the pile on the floor usually represents my most recent reading, particularly for the purposes of writing this blog. But barring natural disaster, or a sudden urge to organize and divest -- an urge not unknown to me, but rare -- these good books will have to be content to be as they are. The room is warm and dry, at least, and the stacks not nearly so likely to collapse as they might look. And at least from the standpoint of our personal safety, I've learned not to build such unstable structures at the foot of the bed. The only black-eye I'm likely to get as a result of book collecting hereafter would be from my exasperated spouse. Luckily for me, he has a merry heart.

My Favorite Polish

"It is good to rub and polish one's brain against that of others." - from The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind." - ibid

Where now are Michel de Montaigne's books? Where is his library? I've watched two videos online, touring his chateau and in neither was there so much as a Bible on his desk. His study is still a beautiful room; round and bright, the beams lined with favorite quotes. Much has be preserved or restored. The bed in his bedroom may be his bed for all I know. There is the sense, looking through the windows that we might see just what he saw. But where are his books?!

I imagine that those books that survived him he was anxious to preserve. Books in his day were more precious for being rare, and I can not imagine he would have left them in any other than a safe place, though I likewise can not imagine him parting with any of them before he died. I like to think his books still exist, that his Cicero sits somewhere, if under glass, still to be read, or at the very least seen. I could no more read his Latin and Greek than I can read his own French, I haven't his languages anymore than I have his library, his leisure or his wisdom. But still, I like to think that his library not only survived him but survives, if not intact then at least in individual volumes, acknowledged as having been once his and whole.

I expect no such conservation of my own collection. My books may go, en masse, after me, to anyone who will haul them out. When I am dead, my library as such dies with me. A. may want to keep this room as it is now, for awhile, but it will be more a burden, should he survive me, than a sanctuary to him. I would not want him here alone, in the room to which I so often retreat, even from him. Better he remembers me, if it comes to that, in our bed, the big bed we bought together and where we've slept together night upon night, the bed we've moulded to our own forms, his side and mine and the space in the middle where we've shared so much of our life together; taken our meals, watched our shows, told our secrets, exchanged dreams, affection, wind. (Montaigne would not approve of that last prudish euphemism, by the way.) Yes, better my lover remember me, or I him, in our bed than in our books, not every book in this house being mine, whatever the numerical imbalance. So when I die*, any friend may take from among my books any he or she may want. I tell you now, in the hope somebody will. Ask A., if he's here, and he will understand. Any he doesn't want, any left unclaimed, he can sell, I'll leave him little else.

But I've strayed from Montaigne's library here, and into my own, and apologize, to you, the reader, though not to Montaigne's shade as I feel sure he'd understand. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, aristocrat, diplomat, traveller, advisor to Kings, Mayor of Bordeaux, born February 28, 1533, died September 13, 1592, owned a library of some 1,500 books, into which, at 38 he withdrew from public life. There, in his tower, he wrote his Essays, if not inventing then perfecting a form that answered better to his subject, himself, than any he might otherwise have mastered. In his Essays, one may meet him as one might meet a friend and know him better than most of us will ever know ourselves. In his Essays are his books as well, that other self, external to his mind but made to furnish it as handsomely as his books must once have filled his tower.

Quoting from my books is, or began at least, as something of an affectation, a way, like smoking cigarettes in a holder, of assuming a sophistication I desperately hoped one day to have. I don't know but what the habit, to some small extent, fulfilled the hope. I am smarter for remembering, when I do, what I have read. "I quote others only in order the better to express myself." said Montaigne. I should like to think I do the same, or at least intend as much. But reading the Essays, I am gobsmacked by the breadth and resonance of the author's quotation, by the subtlety of use, by his delight, sometimes unbridled in all he read, in anecdote and history, in poetry, philosophy, in nature, in himself.

If, as Montaigne wrote, the most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness, then Montaigne is the wisest of writers. I turn to his Essays, from among all my books, not only for example, or for the pleasure of his erudition, but for his company. If he is occasionally long-winded, or he tells more stories than required to make his point, if he assumes too much of his reader's education, and more of his reader's good sense, if he can not resist a joke, or a quote, or keep his thumb from pulling down yet another book, how does that make him anything but the best possible friend on a cold night like this, here, in my own little library, the shadow of his?

And so, yet again, he answers my question for me. Montaigne's library survives, if not intact, then at its best, in Montaigne Essays, just as he does. Where are his books? Here.


*But not before. I would rather buy a friend a book than loan one.

Keeping My Lists

Back before the dawn of recorded time, when I still used an eraser, a typewriter, and more of my wits, I made a little list. (I am someone who makes lists, one either is or is not, and while I continue to make lists, I do not do so with the same resolution and enthusiasm I once brought, come to think of it, to many activities I practiced devotedly in my twenties and thirties.) My little list of books I wanted, for that's the list I mean to describe here, grew. As my two-finger-typing grew more skillful, and the technology available to me more sophisticated, my little list grew and grew, until it filled a three-ring binder. Now alphabetized and categorized, sorted into books I needed and books I had but might forget owning, my list of "Haves and Have Nots" became a more impressive and useful thing, updated and checked, referenced and annotated, an all but constant companion whenever the fever was on me, a car was available, a trip was planned or even anticipated. Even my beloved A. came to appreciate the value of that binder, reminding me when we went to the movies, or out with friends, or anywhere at all we didn't go daily, "Did you bring your list?"

I've only just discovered my list again; abandoned on a shelf in the garage, forgotten and unused for ages, stored under soda cans, dusty. My habits have changed, my collecting taken a different turn, and my reading too. Blowing the dust off the binder and turning the pages -- each page representing so many happy hours, not only of reading and buying and organizing, but also just of list-making and updating and... wanting. From "Amado, Jorge" to "Yourcenar, Marguerite" I see so many names I haven't read in years, so many books I owned and sold, so many I never found in an edition I could afford, so many that I have now, still unread. There are series here, runs of books I collected with demonic obsession: "The Classics of British Historical Literature," from Chicago University Press, the old Dent Everyman's Library, the "English Men of Letters," supervising editor, John Morley. There are authors in my lists who I once had only piecemeal and now own entire: Scott and Balzac, Fielding and R. L. S., Dickens and De Maupassant and Swift. There are enthusiasms represented here that have waned, Nadine Gordimer and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and others that broke like a fever after being too long sustained at a go, like Beverly Nichols and the Powys boys. Nothing in these lists embarrasses me. There's nothing regretted, nothing lost or really still longed for.

I will always want more Edward Gorey than I will ever own. I will never own all the Denton Welch I might want. There are Beerbohms I might still possess, had I money. (Will I ever be in a position to actually own an actual piece of his art?) Will I see again and be able to buy a copy of Peter Taylor's The Widows of Thornton? Nancy Mitford's Wigs on the Green? William Gerhardie's plays? Would I read another Janet Frame? Look for another Stephen Dixon? Pay for a clean copy of an unread Angela Thirkell -- always overpriced in hardcover?

There are authors now in this house, their titles stacked as high as my knee, I never added to this list of mine. There are writers I have loved, listed here, I haven't read in years, whose books I sold years ago, whose names came back to me now with great pleasure even as I pass them over without so much as a sigh.

One's tastes change, one's reading evolves. (If those statements have not the ring of truth to you, brothers and sisters, you're either dead or stuck.) What's changed most for me is the need to complete my library. I do not see that any longer as a goal. I've parted with books I never thought I would. I have bought books I never intended to keep. I read books now I purchased twenty years ago and never opened. This list reminds me that there will never be enough books, enough hours, enough. If I don't need it now, that doesn't mean my memory has improved. The usefulness of my list is not ended, so much as my interest in it has gone. My eye searches out other books, or knows those in these lists too well. I've come to see my library more for what it is than what it might be. I am not satisfied -- never that -- but I am now more content. I am keeping my lists, but I do not need them nearly so much. I have only to look around me in this room at all I've acquired, all I've read and have yet to read, and I am touched at the optimism, and by the spelling, of the reader I was, but glad of all the reading I have yet to do.

A New King (temporarily) In the Cave

Tonight I had to move five books from my desk just to see the computer screen. This is typical, both of my present state of mind, and of my habitual untidiness. I might want Heinrich Heine later, or Dryden, or Woodforde, or the O'Reilly computer book I bought with great resolve but can not understand. Honestly though, everything here on my desk is here on my desk because I had cause to want it, today or a week ago, whenever it was that I did, and, as I so seldom can be bothered to put anything back where it ought to go once I've done with it for the night, the moment, or, in the instance of the O'Reilly book, in
all likelihood, forever, here it will stay until displaced by some other book, or until the cleaners come because we're having guests. We seldom have guests. As I'm home with the mumps, we are unlikely to have any visitors soon, save from the Health Department. (They seem to have taken a disquieting interest in me and my mumps, by the way, sending a car to pick up my blood sample from my doctor today. I do feel ever so special, in a creepy way. Perhaps I should tidy up, in case the men in hazmat suits are just around the corner? Will photos of my library, and this entry be used on the news to show just how precipitous was the zero-patient's decline into incoherence, immediately post-diagnosis? I will practise John Hurt's cornered scream from The Elephant Man, just in case I'm afforded a close-up before being spirited away to the CDC: "I am a human being! An indifferent housekeeper, and somewhat slovenly in my appearance since becoming ill, I admit, but I am Not an animal!") Whatever my intentions, owning these books means I have the use of them -- when I can remember where they are -- anytime I choose. Mine is not so much a library then, lacking as it does a proper purpose or any but the most rudimentary organization, so much as it is a private hoard. I sit in the pirate's cave, atop the miser's pile, my uncounted treasure spilling all about me.

I suppose my subject here, to the extent I can be said to have one, is my library/hoard, the relation of book to book and books to me, and the ways and means by which my books have come into my life, into this room, and onto my desk. Working in a bookstore, I have access to entirely too many books, and I only too obviously have entirely too little self restraint. I have only to look around me for proof. True, all but two of the books on my desk just now came from Magus, or some other used bookshop. The computer book I'll never use I bought at full price, minus my employee discount, but atop the lot sits a remainder; a book sold off by its publisher to be got rid of, and sold in the bookstore at a dizzying discount when compared to its original price. The greatest danger in the bookstore to me is, as I've mentioned here before, the Bargain Books tables the length and breadth of the bookstore's lobby. History, biography, science... all those lovely hardcover books, marred only by a black Sharpie dot, or even, when I'm specially lucky, unmarked, and all priced to tempt the poorest book-obsessive. My manager, M., is also the remainder books buyer, and he is a devil. He knows just what will tempt impecunious but acquisitive magpies like me. Damn and bless him. History most often snags me.

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King, by Ian Mortimer, a handsome British book, on a subject largely unknown to me otherwise than in Shakespeare, is the latest prize from those damned Bargain tables to find its way into the cave and onto my desk. Read only to page 75 to date, it sits now waiting to be picked up again from the stack and carried off to my sick-bed. I know just why it caught me, I've been reading Marchette Chute's biography of Chaucer, saved from a Clearance Sale, and this other is quite serious history on the same period. And I bought the Mortimer book because it is a handsome brute of a book, read well at lunch one day, and seemed, somehow, necessary in that moment of temptation. As in so many moments of temptation, I yielded. Now, here it is.

In an earlier post, I praised Margaret Lane for serving her biographical subjects without dismissing her predecessors. Mr. Mortimer's introduction, now I look at it again, might be the model of exactly what Lane didn't do, as he dispatches his rivals in it, one by one, as his Henry dispatched his; enemies and otherwise, they all go to the block. I do not say Mortimer is unjustified in this, or that Henry IV was for that matter, as I have never read the books or authors disposed of in this way, or needed to assert so strong a claim to either expertise or the throne of England. I trust that King and biographer were both well within their rights. And Mortimer is, after all, not writing of gentle times or of a gentle subject, as Lane and Gaskell were. Mortimer is telling the story of one bloody great king, from the look of him by page 75, and a certain bloody-mindedness would seem to serve his subject admirably. Perhaps that explains why I've nearly finished the Chute book, and read but so far in the Mortimer. One tells the story of a man, contemporary to the King, but otherwise unlike him to the extent of having given to our Language it's first masterpiece, while repeatedly, habitually and amusingly remaining deprecatory of his own considerable intellect, his person and his talents. Geoffrey Chaucer is a delightful companion, as met in Chute's biography. Henry IV, as met at least in Mortimer's biography, is a right bastard, however impeccable his lineage. Which would be likelier to be a welcome companion to me as I suffer with the mumps? Which would be the better friend to my future reading? Which book has the ring of real treasure to it? Which is likelier to find a permanent place in my cave?

It is no reflection on the value of Mortimer's research, or on the felicities of his style, to say that, like so much of the history and biography that tempt me to take them up from off the Bargain table, I ought to have put his book right back after my lunch. Instead, it may be read again -- after all, it is right here -- but ultimately, like so many books I've bought on impulse, it will probably end up in a box, waiting for a trip to Bellingham, to be sold for something likelier to be wanted again hereafter. That is, if it doesn't end up at the bottom of some stack, undisturbed for years. And so it goes.

To My First Follower

Oh dear. It seems I have a "follower." Whose usage is this?! It seems to me an awful noun, that word, to have it tethered to so slight a thing as this. My hope is that only a friend is meant. That is my assumption. I could guess at the identity behind the coded name, but I will not. Rather, I'll simply say, "welcome" and "thanks."

Seeing that anonymous "icon" pop up on my screen reminds me of my purpose, or at least of my better purpose, in taking this gab up again after I left off elsewhere. There I wrote as a way to participate, to support and promote a business I love and a place, a very special place, that has given me good reason to be grateful. But here? As I just said, my motives were clouded somewhat when I started this two days ago. Emotion made me impetuous and habit made me write. But now? Tonight I think I am writing for that reader, that singular friend, kind enough to subscribe, if that's the word, or at least to be seen to do so. As I have written just today, I have need of my friends.

But where then am I asking you to go with me? And why? How 'bout this: if you are there, and not just a gesture -- much appreciated if just that -- if someone is actually reading as I write, and excusing me what passes for my style, as I can not manage another without the restraint of retail or some other, proper object, then I will try not to talk so much about and to myself. I will rather write of books, but my books now, my friends, the companions of my mind, my teachers, my superiors.

They are all around me as I write. To my left sits Isaac Beshevis Singer. At his father's court I can introduce you to wise men and women long since vanished from the world like so much smoke. In his stories you will find the tragedy of the last Century, the mysticism of of an ancient People, often as not framed in New York apartment windows, and an English made richer in translation than any language of which I have command. And because these are my shelves, and narrow, next to him, for reasons only of space, P. G. Woodhouse is piled; Psmith and Jeeves and Blandings all higgledy-piggledy, some books facing out and some facing in to keep the stacks from bowing. And just to the other side of Singer rest the works of Muriel Spark, all sharp as nettles and just as stinging.

You see? My library, such as it is, is no better organized, no more thought out, than this thing I do now, in writing this. But, in it's small way, my library is rich with unlikely possibilities, strange bedfellows, and much that may be unknown to you. Do you know Julian Green? He sits between Henry and Graham. You may know them already -- Graham is the Greene with the final "e" -- but you may not know Julian Green. He was an American and the first man not a Frenchman elected to the Académie française.

And Nicholas Mosley? You might know him, but what of dear old Francis King? Or Robert Liddell? Kawabata is famous still, I should hope, as is Naguib Mahfouz, but have you ever heard of little Daisy Fellowes? Or Coleman Dowell?

There are so many friends I never get to introduce at work. Their books are out of print, or if in print, available only to those who might use them for research, a legitimate use, I admit, but hardly a fond one. Poor old Arthur Hugh Clough, or Coventry Patmore, when were they last turned to with an open heart or the hope of simple pleasure?

That I am no scholar, is here, for once, not an embarrassment but a pleasure. I have no theory to support, no reason to make claims or assert anything beyond my own gladness in addressing someone, some new or familiar friend, on behalf of just my own reading, my own books!

Again I say, welcome! I hope this will prove to be a conversation worth having. Whenever I can I will shut up and let my friends speak for themselves. I hope you will like them, as I do. They are so much better at this than I have any hope of being.

And so the last word tonight to William Cowper, from his poem, Friendship:

"If every polished gem we find,
Illuminating heart and mind,
Provoke to imitation,
No wonder friendship does the
same,
That jewel of the purest flame,
Or rather constellation."