Recent auction purchases

Two auction lots, still in cardboard flats.

I buy a lot of stuff at auctions. Well, to tell the truth, I try to do my best to buy wisely: I really don’t want to fill the house up with junk just because it’s cheap. But antique auctions and eBay are two of my favorite places to buy, and it strikes me that, in some ways, they couldn’t be more different.

When you go to a real, old fashioned antique auction, you never know what will be there to buy. Some antique auctions, of course, now produce detailed catalogues or on-line listings, in which case you know exactly what you’ll find, but I prefer the sort of auction where you can discover something you never expected to find or even to see. Where you end up buying something you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw it. On eBay, by contrast, you can usually only find what you are looking for: you put search terms into the eBay search engine, and only those things that match your search terms usually show up. 

Despite the differences, though, I had a remarkable experience this week in which I bought two things that are, in many ways remarkably similar, and both were things I found by not looking for them. The first I found on eBay by searching through all the auction listings that include the word “manuscript” in the title. 

Usually there’s close to a thousand such things, including stamps with manuscript cancellations, medieval manuscripts and fragments, and just about everything in between. But when I found the eBay listing for this manuscript of Lord Dunsany’s one-act play, The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, I couldn’t resist it.

The pages are all one-sided, and they were formerly glued together on the left hand side. Now they've mostly separated, and the glue has stained the pages. 

This is not, of course, an authorial manuscript, but rather a kind of work of art, a hand-lettered manuscript of the entire play, accompanied by a number of full-page gouache-and ink paintings or illustrations.

The play dates from the 1920s; I think this manuscript must date from the 1930s, based on its art deco style. The artist signs her name Louise Womack; my Google searches haven’t been able to identify her. I especially like the illustration, "The gods are asleep," but "The king's questioners" and "assistant priest" are also striking.

My second purchase was at an antique auction in Ohio I often go to with my folks. On the day of the preview, I saw these two stacks of paintings in cardboard “flats,” (as shown at the top of the post) and I thought I’d like to get them if they weren’t too pricey. It turned out I got them for five bucks a box, which I was pretty happy about. When I got them home, where I could take the time to get a closer look at them, I saw that they were a college student’s (possibly a graduate student’s) semester portfolio of sixty paintings of historical costumes, probably the final project for a class in costume design for dramatic productions. 

Late Medieval

Each painting is on onion-skin, now somewhat wrinkled, usually mounted to a card, and with a typed or hand-written notation about the published source from which the picture is derived. 

Medieval Peasant Woman

Some class notes taken by the student are dated January 1950, giving a clear indication of these paintings’ age. But I was especially interested to find as many pictures of medieval costumes as I did.

In fact, some of the medieval pictures were distinctly familiar to me: though I don't know what original source might lie behind the romanticized picture of the medieval peasant woman, I am pretty sure I recognize this Anglo-Saxon monarch, and however many intermediaries there are, the painting still resembles its Anglo-Saxon manuscript original to a surprising degree. Those colors, though!

Anglo-Saxon Monarch

Romantic

These costume paintings are not high-quality original art, but they are still impressive in their own way, especially when you see all sixty pieces together, and think that they were student work.

In the end, I like the one-of-a-kindness of these things, and the hand-work and care that always goes into a piece of art or a manuscript.

And, it seems to me, finding things like this is itself an important thing to do, or to allow oneself to do: it's a great experience to find something no one else knows about, to come to a feeling of appreciation for it, to share it--or try to--with others. 

Stewardship and Medieval Manuscripts

There has been a flurry of activity across my Facebook page recently about the modern trade in medieval manuscripts, and about the complex and troubling issue of the dissection of old books, in part due to this recent New Yorker blog post.

This a subject I have a deep and powerful interest in, as a scholar of the middle ages, as a collector of medieval manuscripts and fragments, and as an occasional dealer in medieval fragments. 

While I don’t think I can offer any concrete solution to the problems and difficulties of the trade in fragments, I hope in this post to at least outline some of the practical dimensions of the issues, problems, and questions, as I see them. And because my interest is inevitably in the real, I will try to illuminate my points, where I can, with specific and concrete examples.

The problem, in the plainest terms, is that some business-people have engaged in dismembering old books, because the monetary value of the resulting fragments exceeds the monetary value of the un-dismembered books. For these business-people, it is a business decision, and since we live in a capitalistic culture, the trade is likely to continue, so long as the value of the parts is greater than the value of the whole. 

Many academics, and others, believe a different calculation of value should apply, where the continuing integrity of the books or fragments should be valued more highly than their fragmentation. 

One simple solution to the problem of dismembered books, of course, would be to intervene in the market in such a way as to ensure that the current monetary-value-hierarchy is reversed: to purchase whole books or large fragments at prices that make cutting them apart or otherwise separating them unattractive to sellers. But speaking only for myself, I don’t have that kind of money.

But let me consider an actual example here. The least I ever paid for a medieval manuscript leaf was $9.99 for two: two calendar leaves from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours, a penny less than five dollars apiece. I bought a third leaf from the same calendar for another $9.99. With shipping, all three came to my door for less than thirty dollars. 

I’ve paid more, I can admit, for some twentieth-century mass-market paperbacks (and perhaps I should point out the retail or cover price of the books I’ve written is a good bit higher as well). And some may feel that even a first edition of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters should not be worth more than a medieval manuscript page, but then some might say that the Bay Psalm Book (14.2 million) should not be worth as much as the Stonyhurst (Cuthbert) Gospels (roughly 14.3 million). Or that Action Comics No. 1 should not be worth over a million dollars, though it is certain that far fewer copies of Action Comics No. 1 survive than do medieval Books of Hours. Monetary value is a strange and tricky thing.

According to the legal definition, the $9.99 I paid for those two leaves was a fair market price: a price that a buyer and seller could, and did, agree upon. I purchased those leaves from a seller who frequently offers for sale individual leaves from manuscripts or early printed books; I do not know what has become of the rest of the calendar or the rest of the book, though the price I paid, as I hope all will agree, was not high enough to justify the breaking up of the book, and it may well have happened in this case long ago: at this point in time, who can say for sure? But I do know that for the price I paid, another buyer could have bought these three leaves, and then sold them on separately for a higher total price. But I bought them, and for as long as I own them, these three leaves will remain together. 

Say what you will about the person who pulled these three leaves apart (or the seller, who offered them in two lots, rather than one), but I will still feel that I have done these leaves a positive good by keeping them together while I can. And since I was the only bidder on these leaves, which were sold in an online auction, if I had not bought them, they might have been offered later for even less, and sold to someone with less desire to keep them together. I valued them too highly to let that happen.

And yet I hesitate to tell this story, because I know many people who say that participating in this market encourages the breaking up of old books.

           

1949 printed nautical tables

The Recycling of Books

It is often noted in discussions of these issues that the recycling of books for their material value is as old as books are: binding fragments survive that were first recycled over a thousand years ago. Examples from my own small collection include printed books from the sixteenth century to the twentieth that have been bound in manuscript fragments: I haven’t yet been able to afford an incunabula example. And let me say that clearly: the newest book I own that is bound in a manuscript leaf was printed in 1949, and its binding is not a conscious or ironic echoing of an earlier style of binding, but an honest example of the tradition itself. But bookbindings are not the only uses to which old manuscripts have been put.

           

Lampshade and Fragments

To the left, for example, is a lampshade made from manuscript leaves. The seller from whom I purchased this item said he found it in a dumpster behind a Beacon Hill mansion in Boston: of course, I have no idea whether this claim is true or not. But to me it looks like a hand-made item from the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

While William Morris, Elbert Hubbard, and the Arts and Crafts movement were busy printing books in a kind of neo-Gothic mode, actual medieval manuscripts were, in this artifact’s case, used to provide an appealingly soft Gothic glow as light shone through the leaves. 

Unfortunately, the heat from the gas or electric light providing that glow eventually caused the leaves to shrink, blacken, and fall apart. And it is still falling apart, though (for the moment at least), I am inclined to leave it just as it is: the story it tells is all the more poignant as it sits. And, of course, many of these fragmentary leaves would break further if I tried to take the thing apart.

2 bifolia and a single leaf; initials and one margin excised

These five Book of Hours leaves, too, were probably mutilated in the nineteenth century: the initial KL at the head of each calendar leaf was cut out, presumably, by someone who valued them as tiny works of art, and an initial and margin were excised from one text page.  

Again, one cannot be certain, but it seems likely these initials were cut out and pasted into a Victorian scrapbook, as was certainly done at the time.  I’ve handled enough Victorian scrapbooks to know that they were often made of the cheapest, most acidic paper available, and they are often extremely fragile as well as ephemeral. The initials from these leaves may survive somewhere, but it seems more likely to me that they have been destroyed or discarded, rather than lost: though once the colored letters were valued more highly than the leaves they were cut from, it is possible that these leaves—once dismissed as of less value than the cuttings taken from them—have ended up surviving longer.

Sewing guards: longest dimension about 10 inches

A final example, pictured above, probably dates from the fifteenth or sixteenth century and brings us back to bindings. These tiny fragments of manuscript were used as sewing guards: thin strips used, one to a gathering, in the binding of an old book. Now they are so very small as to have very little value—depending on how we value such things.

An interest in the materiality of texts has brought some new scholarly attention to such binding (and other) fragments, and they provide fascinating evidence across time of the changing values of books, texts, and the materials they are made from. 

It is crucially important, I think, to recognize that we also live at a moment where old books like medieval manuscripts are being actively recycled, and at least we can admit that the breaking of books today may do them less harm than to use them for lamp-panels, sewing guards, or scrapbook cuttings. I say that not to condone the breaking up of old books, but to help remember the practice in its historical context. 

The contemporary purpose to which individual leaves are being put most often is probably to serve as visible, and ownable, works of art. The case of medieval Latin manuscript leaves makes it most clear: such leaves are purchased for display, often enough, by those who may be unable to read their script or language, and the leaves are cherished for their age and their beauty. Again, I think it is important to acknowledge that these leaves are, in fact, often being cherished by their final (by which I mean current) owners: these leaves are a testament to how very highly even the simplest and most ubiquitous medieval textual artifacts are valued—and valued highly—inside and outside the academy. 

I say this not to celebrate the dispersal of books and leaves, but to acknowledge that the interest we rightly show towards the recycling of old books in the middle ages or the Renaissance or the nineteenth century is worth also directing towards our own times and places. To do so may remind us (as academics) not to indiscriminately demonize all the players in the market for manuscript leaves: if their buyers cherish the separate leaves for reasons different from how academics would cherish the whole books, a love and respect for medieval manuscripts lies on both sides of that divide.

I am powerfully and distressingly struck by the similarity of this dynamic to the difficult problem of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s use of ancient pots as “readymade” materials upon which or through which his own art can take place. His destruction or painting over of old pots has generated a wide range of responses, from numerous international gallery installations to accusations that it amounts to “cultural vandalism, pure and simple”.

Or perhaps we should consider instead the numerous artists who carve, reshape, and or otherwise alter (printed) books for their artistic ends.  For a spectrum of such book arts, please perform a simple Google search on “art made from old books” or glance at some of the following sites, which gather a variety of examples, such as here or here. Or indeed, see this Huffington Post slideshow and article.

We obviously live at a moment when (old) books are valued for many purposes. Perhaps a coherent or consistent response to such widely divergent acts and practices is impossible, but I must admit to having difficulty celebrating the destruction or mutilation of printed books for artistic ends and simultaneously condemning the breaking up of manuscripts for collectors’ ends. I am simply not certain that artists’ purposes must necessarily be valued more highly, or that the integrity of printed books does not deserve as much of our concern as the integrity of manuscripts. Emotions run high on all these issues, of course.

Critics of Ai Weiwei reasonably point to his destruction of older artifacts as a failure of appropriate stewardship of the survivals from the past. Ai Weiwei’s partisans, alternatively, would doubtless point out that the act of stewardship itself always also remakes old artifacts (even, often enough, via conservation) and it almost always alters their material contexts irrevocably, even while original contexts may be recorded to the best of the stewards’ ability. 

Again, the two positions are not far removed, except for an argument about what kind of stewardship is appropriate, what kind of intervention and transformation is allowable and why. But I’ve been in the game long enough to recognize that each side in such debates holds its own position to be the better one, the more morally or politically or academically or economically relevant one, the more valuable one.

Stewardship

At the end of the day, I, like many medievalists, am powerfully opposed to the destruction or dissociation of manuscripts (or other books) or the separation of fragments that belong together, and in my own practice (and business) I am committed not to engage in either. And I am, of course, always happy to come across others who share my opinions. 

But I am in the manuscript market, and I sometimes see that books are, indeed, being broken up, separated, sold apart. I very much worry that if I watch it happen and do nothing, or worse yet, turn away and do nothing, I contribute to the very practice that appalls me. When I was a teacher of medieval literature, I tried to encourage a love and reverence for the survivals of the medieval past: in that sense, I have always been implicated in the market for fragments. So for me, I have always tried to think as clearly and as carefully as I can about what I can do, given that my implication is, and has always been, unavoidable.

One concern I have, of course, lays not with the present, but with the future of scattered fragments and leaves, whether from books broken yesterday or five centuries ago. Had I not bought my three $9.99 calendar leaves, there is every chance they might have been split up from one another, as well as separated from their original context. Worse, they might have been purchased by someone who felt they were worth $9.99, and their future shaped or determined by a level of care and stewardship appropriate to ten-dollar items. 

Whether I am a fan of the market in manuscript leaves or not, one function of a collection is to allow a mass of items to gain a value by association that individual items might not have on their own. Because I have a collection, rather than a single leaf, I have more options for its future, whether I dispose of the collection myself or try to secure a home for it after my death. And because I am (at least a little) knowledgeable about the material and about the market, my range of action and options is even greater. Collecting can be a kind of stewardship that does good.

And let me be clear: as a collector, the last thing that one part of me wants is for there to be more collectors out there, their competition raising the prices on things I treasure. But my better side hopes for all fragments to be valued and subject to a stewardship that ensures their future.

Conclusions

So, in the end, I think there are good reasons for being in the manuscript market, even if others in that market act in ways that I personally am not happy about, and even if others have equally valid reasons for staying out of it. One thing I think I can do is to try to act ethically, as I see it, and to communicate my vision to others. It is in this spirit that I offer the following ideas.

• Though I expect to continue to buy and occasionally sell books, manuscripts, and fragments, I commit to maintaining them, as much as I can, in a state of integrity. This may involve conservation, to prevent or delay further damage, or it may simply take the form of benign neglect, through the principle of “do no harm.” But I will not break up books, manuscripts, or fragments that belong together. And I will say this clearly when I offer a manuscript book or fragment for sale.

• Destruction and disintegration are thermodynamically inevitable. All survivals from the past are fragments of the whole that once existed, and their very survival is subject to constant transformation. To the degree that the passage through time itself leads to transformation, I will recognize that stewardship and transformation need to remain in dialogue, rather than necessarily being in opposition.

• Our cultural heritage belongs to us all, and we all should engage actively in its stewardship; we are all of us responsible for its future. I will commit to acknowledging that there may be others whose idea of stewardship or ownership of our common cultural heritage differs from my own.  These other people are my co-stewards (as I am their co-steward), and they may deserve my respect, if not my agreement.

• Whenever possible, I will practice a “value added” form of stewardship. I will strive to use my own knowledge and understanding of the past, and my belief in the value of maintaining the integrity of all old artifacts, to contribute to the maintenance of their integrity into the future. At times, this has taken the form of “rescue buying,” in which I have tried to gather together or keep together items that another seller has been willing to split up. My knowledge can be the tool with which I add sufficient value to such fragments that otherwise might be separated to try to ensure their future integrity.

On a final, personal note, I derive a real joy from my role in the ongoing stewardship of old books and manuscripts, whether that role takes the form of scholarship, ownership, or commerce. 

For me at least, I believe my ownership of manuscripts makes me more than ever committed to their stewardship, in both general and specific terms. Indeed, it would make me sad to think that such items of medieval material culture could only be owned by institutions and by the wealthy: the fact that regular folks can own these items gives all of us regular folks a stake in these matters that is more than merely intellectual and historical. For now at least, the trade in manuscripts and fragments has all the benefits and hazards of democratic capitalism. 

2 fragments of one leaf, purchased from different sellers

And so I have been greatly delighted, on two or three remarkable and unbelievable occasions, to bring fragments once widely separated back together again: these fragments I have shored against my—and our—ruins. 

It is good work to do. They will remain together while I have them in my care, and I believe it makes a difference for me to try to bring and to keep them together. More often, I've purchased multi-page fragments that another person might have separated, and I’ve kept them together. 

Even if my failures in this area should be as spectacular as my successes, I have only achieved the successes by being willing to try.

A year of reading

Twenty years ago, in January 1994, I started keeping a record of every book I read. Only complete books, not articles or essays, not books I started but never finished. Only complete books. Most years, I've read 60 or 70; this year I seem to have finished 91: about one book every four days. I guess that tells you what life is like for a book and antique dealer. A lot of waiting around for something to sell.

But in terms of the reading I did, it was a big year for series. I wrapped up the year reading both starting to reread Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and reading nine of Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane mysteries, leaving a few to try to track down in 2014.

Wimsey is an interesting detective figure, and not only because he is a collector of incunabula. He cheerfully leaves all the dull leg-work of detection to Inspector Parker, his friend at Scotland Yard (and eventually his brother-in-law). As a wealthy aristocrat, he plays the role of foolish dilettante almost to the point of being annoying to the reader, but he is nevertheless constantly troubled by the clash between the delight he feels in the solving of puzzles, and the  troublesome reality that solving his cases will probably send someone to the gallows.

For most of the year, I was finishing up the long series of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries, of which I read twenty-one between February and October.

For those who haven't heard of Miss Silver, she's an ageless former governess in the Edwardian mode, and she spends the 1940s and 50s working as a private enquiry agent, called in to sort things out in the aftermath of various English village and country house murders. She knits and she listens, and people tell her things they would never tell the police, and any slip of propriety is corrected with her signature cough.

The highlight of the year, though, was probably working through C J Cherryh's Foreigner series between August 17 and September 22. It's a science fiction series that I've followed since reading the first volume when it was new (it shows up in my book on February 2, 1994), and the most recent volume (Protector) is number fourteen in the series.

The series follows Bren Cameron, lone human from an island enclave serving as diplomat to the atevi government ruling upon the mainland of the atevi planet. There's virtually always shooting, human-alien interaction, and (perhaps most surprising of all) huge amounts of dialogue and description involving the protocols of atevi culture.

But the characters have become, over the years, very familiar indeed (to Cherryh as well, one suspects), and it's only the second time in twenty years I've made the effort to read all of the series in order to read the newest one. It was like a month spent with old friends, revisiting events well known and well remembered. The fifteenth volume, I think, will probably be out before too long.

Other smaller series and individual books were, of course, also read during the year. And I am almost half-way through the blank book where I've been recording my reading. Here's to the next twenty years!

The art of deception and the deception of art

In the last few days, I've encountered two recent works of art that I ravenously consumed, with the emphasis on "rave," and then had second thoughts about: the Oscar-winning Argo, and Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth. By sheer coincidence, both are about covert government operations in the 1970s, and the plot of both turns on the idea of art as political tool and sham. And in the end, both left me feeling like I was the ultimate "victim" of their deceit, in ways that were initially pleasurable but vaguely distasteful afterward.

Argo, as you no doubt know, is about the CIA's successful mission to get six American hostages out of Tehran after the embassy was seized in 1979. Improbably, the operative, played by Ben Affleck, pulls off this extraordinary rescue by posing as a Hollywood producer scouting locations for a desert-based science-fiction film.

CIA agent Mendez drills his "cast" of hostages on their new identities as Canadian film executives

The movie is tremendously suspenseful, and Affleck has a hang-dog, bearded earnestness that forces the viewer not only to root for his success, but to share his disappointment that no one could know about it afterward. Archival footage of the revolution alternates with vivid, contemporary restagings that make it viscerally clear just how terrifying it must have been to be in Tehran at the time.

But the movie ultimately emphasizes how terrifying it was to be an American in Tehran at the time.  The Iranians, with the exception of the Canadian ambassador's housekeeper, are portrayed utterly homogeneously, united in their seething, mob-like mentality.  (Read Marjane Satrapi's wonderful Persepolis for a sense of how terrifying the Revolution was for many Iranians, too.)

Though a couple of the hostages are fluent in Farsi, there's no translation of the angry shouts and accusations they face when, posing as a film crew, they go into the bazaar to meet with government officials. This omission underscores the film's portrayal of the Americans as innocent victims of screaming, incoherent maniacs.

The "happy" ending seems to suggest that it was our great good fortune that such savages weren't nearly worldly enough or smart enough to figure out that they'd been duped until it was too late. As the Swiss Air flight the freed hostages take out of Tehran leaves Iranian airspace, they pop champagne and whoop it up, while the other passengers--silent, anxious-looking "natives"--look on in bewilderment. Back at the airport, the security guards rapturously pass around the storyboards that the "director" bequeathed them as he entered the jetway. The moral of the story seems to be that even our bad, fake American art is slick and effective enough to fool these rubes, and thank God for that.

As the credits rolled, I felt duped: I thought Ben Affleck was a liberal? You wouldn't know it by this reactionary film, whose final scenes show his operative-with-a-heart-of-gold character embracing his wife while the American flag waves on the front porch behind them.

Sweet Tooth, too, is about covert ops, but in England in the early 1970s, when MI5 was shifting its concerns from the Cold War to IRA terrorism. The plot revolves around narrator Serena Frome, a recent maths graduate of Cambridge, who's tapped to join the service and eventually becomes part of the agency's "Sweet Tooth" program, which seeks out and funds conservative-learning writers. The catch is that the writers aren't to know that they're on the MI5 payroll: their stipend comes through a nonprofit foundation, and Serena's cover is that she's sort of a talent scout for a third organization that the Foundation uses to locate promising writers.

In classic spy-novel cliché, Serena falls in love with her "target," a young writer named Tom Haley whom she's assigned to bring into the program.  Her deception, then, is double: not only is she posing as someone she's not professionally, but personally as well. Haley has published a few anti-Communist articles and several short stories, but hasn't yet written a novel. Serena's job is to get him to write one, which he does, though it's a grim, post-apocalyptic affair that hardly touts the blessings of capitalism and democracy. But by the time he's done, she's too much in love with him to critique its politics.

That's about all that can be said of the plot without spoilers, but as you might expect from a spy novel, there are several unexpected plot twists along the way, things that turn out not to be at all what they seem: some things turn out to be more benign and even more banal than expected, others more sinister. The big twist at the end, though, has less to do with espionage than it does with art and narrative, and the mutual, willing deception that authors and their readers engage in and co-create.

While the ending is clever, and I appreciate McEwan's meditation on the artifice of fiction and reader's willing participation in it, I also found myself feeling more like the butt of the joke than someone who's in on it. Part of this is due to a vague misogyny that comes through in the end, coloring what's come before. But part of it stems from the sense, like the one I felt at the end of Argo, that I'd been conned into thinking I was consuming one kind of art only to have it morph into something decidedly less pleasurable and more pedantic.

In the last few pages of the novel, Healy contemplates the work of other, older writers who were pulled into secret government work during WWII. He asks, "Who says that poetry makes nothing happen? Mincemeat succeeded because invention, the imagination, drove intelligence. By miserable comparison, Sweet Tooth...reversed the process and failed because intelligence tried to interfere with invention."

Perhaps both of these works are really about nostalgia, a longing for that time when invention drove intelligence, when the government didn't manufacture its fictions in-house, but actually needed real artists--Hollywood makeup artists and literary writers--to pull off their deceptions.

But Argo and Sweet Tooth set out to deceive their audiences. And that's an artistic con that wish I hadn't fallen for twice in as many days.

Some Early Influences

Last Fall, when I was wrapping up the comics course, a student asked me what the first comics I ever read were. I hemmed and hawed for a minute and said I'd have to give a three-part answer. First, I remembered reading the occasional Archie or Richie Rich comic book when my brothers and I were kids, though I have no idea where they came from; we never had superhero comics to read, that I recall. Second, I remembered loving Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (in the 1963 Dell paperback edition); I taught He Done Her Wrong in that class, so the students knew just what I meant. Third, I recalled how thoroughly my brothers and I had read the old Mad Magazine paperback reprints my dad had kept from when he'd bought them in the early 1960s: we read those books over and over, until they were probably entirely worn out.

For those of you who don't know He Done Her Wrong, it's a brilliant 1930 (almost) wordless comic (and comics) novel, telling the tale of a Great Northern woodsman, his flapper girlfriend, and the slimy, mustachioed villain who aims to break them up. The woodsman chases the villain and the girl to New York City, various adventures and misadventures are had by all, but ultimately the hero gets the girl, is discovered to be the heir of a lumber magnate, and the villain's most dastardly plan is stopped by the timely intervention of a friendly moose. It's brilliant and hilarious and it deserves to be better known.

But I assume everyone knows about Mad Magazine. The 50s Mads that we read were reprinted in The Bedside Mad, Mad in Orbit, and Son of Mad (and there must have been a fourth volume we had, I think). These old Mad stories have, in the meantime, become recognized as classic, influential comics, fueling virtually the entire Underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, and cited as a formative influence by major figures like Art Spiegelman, among others. 

When I look at them now, and remember the Wacky Packages stickers I used to collect in the early 70s, I am not at all surprised to remember that Spiegelman worked on those Wacky Packages: much of the silliness and the anti-commercial, anti-Madison Avenue aesthetic of the Wacky Packages comes straight from those old Mad Magazines

Over the years, I've picked up my own copies of these books, and I glanced through them recently and could hardly believe just how much of them had remained—somewhere—in the back of my brain. 

Any number of lines, I am sure would easily count as 'kernel stories' among me and my brothers: “Bumble—fumbled” and “Plastic Sam” and “Billows, not Pillows!” 

 This last phrase, from the Mad comics version of Longfellow's “The Wreck of the Hesperus” echoes in my memory as much as certain lines of the poem (“Last night the moon had a golden ring, And tonight no moon we see” says Peg-leg Popeye to the captain). 

 And I have to confess—I know this poem only from this version, and I really can't imagine it without the Mad panels, which make the tragic, sentimental story into a comic romp, complete with an amazing formal passage without drawings at all: comics without pictures, a perfect counterpoint to Gross's wordless novel. 

Thirty-five years ago, when I was reading these books for the first, and second, and umpteenth time, I had no idea what sort of impact they would have on me, even though I know that then I didn't get all the jokes. But having recently written extensively on the necessity of seeing as well as reading, I can't help thinking that it was the dense joke-packed illustrations of these old comics that trained me early to look closely at what I was reading.

It is often said that collectors are driven by the powerful force of nostalgia, and I usually don't think that's at all what's behind my kind of collecting. But I have an affection for these books, and even for “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” that can't be explained in any other way.

Hornbooks

I've admitted to being a collector here before; we have, stashed in various places around the house, all sorts of things roughly organized into loosely defined collections: books, glass and pottery, ephemera, folk art, and so on--even a few paintings.  It's always a great treat, then, to find an object that fits easily into more than one collection, as does the tiny (less than two-inch) late-medieval pewter badge shown here in the shape of a hornbook (complete with "abc"!), which fits both into a collection of books and into my collection of late medieval religious and secular badges. I got hooked on badges after seeing a number of them on display in the Cluny, the Parisian museum of the middle ages. The badges, both secular and religious, were the cheapest sort of personal adornments and/or tourist souvenirs from the late middle ages, and now they are an invaluable record of material culture from the lower levels of society, and they literally survive by the thousands.

Hornbooks, of course, were small wooden paddles, covered on one side with a see-through section of cow horn, behind which lay a printed or manuscript text of some sort, usually an alphabet and the most rudimentary elements of a primer. Hornbooks were often the first book in a child's literacy education. Real hornbooks, of course, like most early books intended for children, are virtually impossible to find these days, both because early collectors did not value them and because kids literally wore them out. If we can judge by an analogous example, the earliest American children's book, The New England Primer, apparently was first printed in 1689 or 1690.  It went through literally hundreds of editions in the next century and a half, and yet not a single eighteenth-century copy is available for sale on the ABEbooks site, and only a dozen or so copies from before 1830 can be found there. Charles F Heartman's bibliography of 1930 could not locate a single copy surviving from before 1727, though providing evidence for at least five earlier printings.

Excited as I recently was to find and buy the horn-book badge (which probably dates from around the fifteenth century), it was an especial treat since, many years ago, at an antique show in Greeley, I had bought a single-sheet hornbook page, although I've never been certain about just how old it is.  About the size of an index card, and printed on only one side, on good old-fashioned laid paper, with visible chain lines and everything, it has all the look of an original from the eighteenth century or earlier, but I've never been able to fully banish from my mind the possibility that it might be a nineteenth-century replica or souvenir of some sort. But the two-forms of the letters r and s, and the treatment of u and v as alternative forms of the same letter (to say nothing of the old-style "and" symbol after the lower case z) give it a very old black-letter look indeed. Early seventeenth century?  Could be, but I can't be at all sure.

And that's one of the great pleasures and frustrations of collecting things so old: they tell us so much with their very presence and realness, but there's often so much that still demands research.

Book Writing

All summer long, I've had this bit of proverbial wisdom swirling around in my head: "It's better to break the spine of a man than of a book." Thanks to Google, I'm guessing that I heard Dan Simmons say it at some point when I went to one of his many readings in Colorado, as Google, surprisingly, does not turn it up as a proverb at all.

But anyway, as I've been toiling away at writing my own book this summer (progress report: two chapters of four written; one tough one and one easy one still to go, with a December deadline--uh oh), I've found myself quoting Simmons in my head as I've been writing in books as well as writing on them.

I was always raised not to write in books, and it's taken a long time to get to the point where I feel comfortable writing in books that I own: but the copy of the Norton anthology that I teach from now has writing in several colors of ink as well as pencil, and the notes I make are very useful indeed for finding my way through the dense pages of Norton prose, especially. So I thought I'd blog a little about books that are written in.

First, I want to note that the practice of writing in books is as old as books themselves, and medievalists often treasure the writing in old books as one of the clearest kinds of signs left by early readers. The image at the top of this post, from a 1559 printed book, shows how delightful early readers' comments can sometimes be: the small picture shows a manicule (a 'little hand') pointing out a key passage alongside a highly traditional "Nota bene" cipher: both forms of notation have their roots firmly in the middle ages. The second page from the same book (at the right) shows that this annotator is also interested in adding purley decorative touches his book: I especially like the little face inside the capital "O" half-way down the page (you'll probably need to click on the image to see it).

In recent years, I've marked up some of my own books almost to the same degree as this fellow: below is a page showing part of one of the Chronicle poems from my edition of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: these notes surely have significance only for me, and I despair of any future scholar being able to make heads or tails of my notes. So far, I can still follow them though, at least for the time being.
To my own surprise, this summer, I've even found myself on occasion writing in a library book (a line I once thought I would never, ever cross), and even more shockingly in a book owned by a friend. I try to keep marks in these kinds of books as minimal as possible: a tiny star in the margin, a single vertical line alongside a key passage. But I couldn't keep myself from writing "Hah!" in the margin of this passage from Derrida's Dissemination:

Finally, as a last example, I bought the following book when we were on vacation in Virginia last month: we stopped overnight in Charlottesville, and made out way to a couple of used bookstores. Another Colorado author, John Dunning, has a bookseller character say, at one point, "No one should ever write in a book except the author." But in this book, the author has written in it and the booksellers did as well, and I'm glad they did: I'd have no idea at all who the "Donald" of the inscription is, though I would have guessed that the "John" was indeed John C. Pope, author of The Rhythm of Beowulf.

I couldn't read the bookseller's note, though, but I asked at the desk when I bought the book. The old guy behind the desk pulled out a magnifying glass and took a look at the pencilled note. "E. D. Hirsch" he said. I'll never erase that bookseller's note: it's as important, in its own way, as Pope's notes to Hirsch.

Pope's Rhythm of Beowulf is a book I've wanted to have a copy of for a long time: it's a key book in my field that I might need to refer to once in a while. But Pope's note to Hirsch (and the bookseller's note that identifies it) makes this book interesting in a different kind of way: a record of the reading of one of the most controversial advocates of reading and education in our time. I don't have many illusions that the marks I put into my books (or others' books) will ever be equally significant: but neither do I feel like I need to feel guilty about them.

Write away, I say.

What do books do?

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who argued that young-adult literature has become a bastion of "depravity," "brutality," and "ugliness":

"Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it."

One of the books that she includes in her list of recent offenders is Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a book I have regularly included in the YA lit class I teach ever since its publication in 2008.  It is a brilliant, hilarious, tragic, and moving novel.* 

Yes, it has dark moments.  Yes, the narrator, Arnold Spirit, jokes openly about masturbation and "boners" (he's a 14-year-old boy, for chrissakes!).  But it is, at heart, a book about endurance, perseverance, and (ironically) the value of reading.  Standing in their school library one day, Arnold's friend Gordy points out that

"There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here....I know that because I counted them."
"Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said.
"Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish."
"What's your point?"
"The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."

Gordy's observation helps Arnold realize that the world we see and think we fully understand is, in fact, full of mystery.  Much like the mystery that surrounds a child with his or her nose in a book:  What's she thinking?  What's going on in her head?

I'm not interested in engaging in the debate about whether, and why, YA literature is so "dark" these days, and what adults should or shouldn't do about it.  What interests me in this latest kerfuffle is what has always interested me when books for kids and teens are challenged:  What is it that we think books do?  How do we imagine they work on kids' minds?  And why don't we make the same assumptions about adult readers?

I have long thought, and discussed with students in my YA lit classes, that book challenges are motivated not so much by the specific, offensive content of any given text, but by the privacy of the act of reading.  Concerned parent sees child deeply engaged in a book, oblivious to the external world (oblivious, in fact, to the parent), and becomes suspicious.  What's in that book that's so interesting?  And why can't I monitor that experience?

If parents sincerely object to "dark themes" in their teens' lives, they ought to be raising this kind of public stink about hyper-violent video games, and movies, and...well, the daily drama in most high-school hallways.

Of course, I know that books are more likely to be questioned than other forms of media because most challenges arise when controversial texts are assigned as required reading in public schools.  (Although why some parents would be OK with their kid picking up such a book on their own and reading it, rather than reading it with the guidance of an expert reader, also known as a "teacher," I've never understood.)

But I remain convinced that the real problem is that the parent sees the child experiencing something that the parent cannot monitor or co-experience, as they could a video game or a movie.  The process of reading, and the images and ideas reading generates, is entirely internal and invisible, and I think some parents find that completely unnerving.

The other thing that baffles me in these cases is the weird construction of what the act of reading, and books themselves, can do to a kid.

As a voracious, lifelong reader, I understand that reading can be one of the most powerful and life-changing ways of experiencing the world possible.  

Parents who object to "dark" books also see the act of reading, and texts themselves, as powerful--but they construct that power negatively, casting the act of reading and books themselves as dangerous and potentially corrupting.  Gurdon writes,

It is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. 

There seems to be a logical line here that gets crossed:  is Gurdon suggesting that if a teen girl reads enough novels about eating disorders she will, most likely, develop one?  And what are these "pathologies" she fears might be normalized if kids read about them:  homosexuality? Poverty?  Heaven forfend.

But what intrigues me most about the above quote is how it underscores the fear of books and reading that seems to be at the heart of book challenges:  what is it that these parents fear their children will absorb through the silent, private act of reading? 

One of the things Gurdon herself fears is that kids might acquire (gasp!) bad taste by reading such things:  "Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it," she says, and claims that it is "a dereliction of duty [for parents] not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options."

Let me tell you a story:  One summer when I was in middle school, my parents and I went on a long  road trip to the east coast.  We spent a night at Chautauqua in New York, and before we left the next morning, we browsed around a bookshop and they offered to buy me a book for the the trip.  I chose a book of poems by Rod McKuen.  (Hey, it was the late 1970s.)

My mom, herself an English professor, objected on the basis of taste:  "He's a terrible poet."  My dad, undoubtedly not wanting to start a long day in a small car with a quarrel, but wanting instead to just get on the damn road, intervened, saying, "Let her choose.  If that's what she wants to read, let her read it."  Smugly, I carried Mr. McKuen's book to the cashier.

Of course, my mom was right:  the poems were terrible, even though I didn't recognize that at the time.

And guess what happened as a result of my parents' dereliction of duty?  Dear Reader, I grew up to be an English professor.

Clearly, that book ruined me.  If only she'd snatched that book from my hands and given me a "more desireable option."  Which I probably would have studiously refused to read.  Gurdon clearly has forgotten how unwelcome such lessons in taste are to the average person between the ages of, oh, seven and death.

I also find it odd that there seems to be an arbitrary, unspecified point in one's development when books cease to be "dangerous" or "bad for you."

When is it, exactly, that young people can be trusted to read what they choose to read without potentially being harmed by it?  I remember being utterly freaked out by the scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure when the title character arrives home to find that his eldest child has hanged himself and his siblings in a closet "because we were too menny."  I was haunted by World War I for weeks after reading All Quiet on the Western Front.  And there's an explicit image of a donkey repeatedly described in John Irving's The Cider House Rules that no amount of brain bleach will ever eradicate.

All of these I read when I was in college or grad school.  I've read other books in the two decades since that have disturbed me, as well as many that have moved me to tears, made me laugh out loud, pissed me off, or bored me stiff.  Don't good books continue to affect us deeply regardless of our age?  Isn't that why we read in the first place?  Why do we imagine that children and teens, in particular, need to have those potential effects vetted and filtered before they even experience them?

There's also a tremendous hypocrisy in the fact that so many cultural critics these days lament the fact that kids don't read at all, and say that we need to do whatever we can to get kids up to speed as readers, and then turn around to slap certain books out of kids' hands while saying "But not THAT."

Adults who challenge books are more often trying to protect themselves and their ideas about what childhood and adolescence should be than they are trying to protect real children and adolescents.   

So, with apologies to Sherman Alexie, I'll end with an affirmation that I wish such adults would repeat to themselves when they see a kid engrossed in a book:  A child, even the smallest one, is filled with thoughts you can't know.  Instead of balking at such a thought, let's embrace and encourage the complex, private mystery that is reading.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

*Alexie wrote an eloquent and passionate response to Gurdon's article, and he has said elsewhere, in an autobiographical essay titled "Superman and Me," that books saved his life.