Letters From My Library

Starting a new series here today in honor of two milestones recently met, one being my fiftieth birthday, which, while not inevitable, is rather necessary for me to have achieved if I was going to be writing this sentence, and the other being the recent addition of the 2000^th book to my personal library.  Two thousand is much less than Thomas Jefferson was said to have had in Monticello (6,487 books donated to the Library of Congress), is certainly less than I have ever owned (there was the incident where lots of my favorite books were tossed out when I was off at college), and is less than what I’ve actually read since there are lots of trips to the library that aren’t factored in – but it’s still a hell of a lot of books.  So I’m going to try to pick out a representative sample and explain why I happen to like that particular one, whether and for what purpose I would recommend it and maybe just ramble on in whatever direction the words lead me.  In fact going on such rambles is what I see as one of the main functions of books.

First – no I haven’t read all of the books in the house – but I’ve read most of them, lots of them more than once – and I fully intend to get to each one.  If turning 50 is a milestone then its main purpose must be to allow you the experience and perspective to set a few goals and make a few resolutions.  One of mine is to get down to reading some of the books I’ve been holding in reserve (like Dom DeLillo’s “End Zone”).  But reading has never been a chore for me, so keeping that promise to myself shouldn’t be difficult.  In fact, 50 means that there is another milestone to be marked – 44 years of reading.  I really started picking up books from my entry into Miss Murphy’s first grade class when I was six years old.  I seriously doubt, from when I was halfway through that year, if there has ever been a time when I haven’t been reading at least one book.  Usually I’ll have a few going at once.  True – when I started I didn’t much care what I was reading (textbooks, joke books, baseball previews (one of which I still have – the 1974 pre-season review – Hank Aaron was going in to the year on 713 homeruns).  I’d just read anything for the sheer magic of seeing the words make sense.  Then I’d read it again.  And again.  And again.

That may be one of the things I miss the most about reading when I was a kid – I read all kinds of books more than once.  I’ll talk about some of them (like the Narnia series) in these essays, but there are others, like Tony Conigliaro’s autobiography “Seeing It Through”, that I’ve read about six times and can still quote from memory.  Re-reading books is tough to do now – I’ve got others waiting to be read in the on-deck circle, time is at a premium, and it is harder to justify picking up something you already read once.  But those books that I read multiple times (and some I’ve read so many times I’ve lost count) are like old friends revisited.  I think I might start to pick up the practice again.

In the meantime I’ll try, through these essays, to introduce a few of those friends around.  You might enjoy meeting up with some of them – you can never have enough friends.

First Up – William F. Gaines Sends a Present

I don’t know what the oldest book in my collection is – I have a few of my father’s old books and I’ve picked up some older books at used bookstores and the like.  I’ve got an old edition of Huckleberry Finn and a small edition of some of Chekhov’s plays – but I never have been a book collector in the sense of going after first editions or old leather bound volumes.  I get books to read them.  Towards that end I know exactly which of the books I have is the oldest in my collection in the sense of it being the oldest book I ever actually got for myself.  Not the oldest I book I ever bought mind you – I bartered for it – and therein lies a story. 

In first grade there were two primary mediums of exchange – neither of which was U.S currency.  One was desserts.  You could trade your dessert at lunch for many things – toys, other types of food, baseball cards – one chocolate pudding could get you quite a few cards.  The other item of barter was a “Whizzer” – and they were like gold.

A Whizzer was a top that seemed to be nuclear powered.  You would zip the vulcanized rubber tip along the floor and then the top would (probably aided by a gyroscope) spin on its end for about two and a half years (OK – hours).

(OK – minutes – but it seemed longer).

The entire time the Whizzer would – well – it would whizz, making a high pitched squealing sound.  Teachers must have loved the things because, at any given time, their desks would be loaded with an assortment of confiscated Whizzers, in all different colors.  Whizzers were the bomb.

You could trade a Whizzer for almost anything and I, in my first official book acquisition, traded an orange one that I had for not just one but three books.  One was so forgettable I have since forgotten it.  Another was one I would dearly love to find a copy of.  It was called “Bill Stern’s Favorite Baseball Stories” or something like that, and it was a collection of the stories that Stern, a radio personaility from the forties, would tell on air.  Woody Allen parodies the sorts of tales that would be told in Radio Days, wherein a pitcher comes back after three or four hunting accidents that gradually deprive him of his legs and arms.  Then there were the stories like the one about a catching prospect named "Bill" who had his heart broken when he didn't get signed to a pro contract  - "but don't feel too sorry for old Bill - because his full name was William Howard Taft and he went on to become President of the United States".  I still felt sorry for Bill - I'd have rather been a catcher.  I loved that book – I think it eventually disintegrated.  But it was still in second place out of the three – for the real treasure out of the trade was a book that remains in my possession, something called “Greasy Mad Stuff”.

I could tell you the history of Mad magazine, but others have already done a better job.  Check this out http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A2116540 or just accept this even shorter version – a guy called William Gaines had published a series of comic books in the fifties along the lines of “Tales from the Crypt”.  The comics were brilliantly written, scarily illustrated and actually could frighten the crap out of you.  So, naturally, someone, in this case Congress, had to shut it down on the supposition that it was “corrupting the nation’s youth”.  The “comic code” outlawed such brilliance in favor of hard hitting works like “Little LuLu” – but Gaines refused to give up – he modified a comic called “Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad” just enough to make it a full fledged magazine rather than a comic and, in doing so, avoided the code.  Thus set free he proceeded to load the magazine with exactly the sorts of outrageous drawings and parodies that never would have been allowed in a straightforward comic.  Naturally, again, kids flocked to the opportunity to be corrupted and I was one of them.  But I never liked comics that much – books, even paperbacks, were more solid.  Because of this prejudice I attempted, whenever possible, to take my Mad magazine in book form – this meant I missed out on the fold in picture that the true magazine included on the back cover – but it was worth it.

“Greasy Mad Stuff” is not the greatest Mad book I ever had – just the oldest one - but it was still good enough – and a lot of it still stands up.  It makes fun of the advertising industry (“Mad Men” indeed), includes some great Don Martin cartoons, a parody of “The Price is Right” (they are asking the purchase price for the Queen Mary), and has a great section on “Women in Whiskey Ads”.  These are all pretty standard for Mad, and, I suppose, are actually fairly tame – but when you are reading this stuff in the first grade it is a revelation –  and even if you didn’t understand half the references (who the hell is “Fabian”) it felt like you were being written to as a grown-up.  Well, maybe not a grown up, grown up – but at least like a teenager – someone who was being allowed in to a world beyond “See Spot run.  Run Spot, run”.  Mad pushed the envelope – but it pushed you too – and books should do that more often.