Here’s an oddity that I haven’t seen in awhile. A copy of this 1978 poetry book passed through my hands at the Amazon warehouse years ago. I couldn’t let it go without first photocopying the cover and taping it to the side of my computer monitor. The photocopy went with me as I moved into other roles at Amazon, always hanging over my desk or hanging outside my cubicle, sometimes raising eyebrows. I’m told that after I left in 2000, my friend Mari found my photocopy and hung it at her desk for a time.

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I just picked up the last issue of Comic Art Magazine and wanted to recommend it for the booklet that accompanies it, Forty Cartoon Books of Interest by Seth. Seth’s selection of noteworthy books from his collection includes a few relatively well known titles, but it’s largely made up of forgotten masterpieces and interesting failures: a collection of comics from a Hardware Store trade magazine, obscure early graphic novels, and unusually structured children’s books.

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A preview of a Northwest book that I’ll have at the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, October 14-15, 2006 at Seattle Center:

The Friendly Mountain
by E. B. Webster, Illustrations by Annette Chaddock Swan, Port Angeles: The Evening News, Inc., 1921. Second Edition.

An appreciation of Mount Angeles:

“It is a peculiar feature of mountain climbing that, as one ascends, the surrounding country appears to draw nearer. The city of Port Angeles gradually draws nearer until one can pick out the individual buildings, and can almost see the people walking along the streets. The government buildings in Victoria, eighteen miles away, are plainly seen. With a glass, one can make out the guns at Fort Worden, near Port Townshend, forty miles distant. The surf breaks along the beach at the mouth of the Elwha, or off the Dungeness spit, though something like ten and twenty miles distant, respectively. One can count every skiff in the salmon fishing fleet off Ediz Hook, seven miles distant. Every ship in the strait is plainly visible. The ranches from Port Crescent to Sequim are easily distinguishable. One is amazed to see how large a portion of the country always thought of as timbered is really under cultivation.”

And from the Miscellaneous shelf:

The Art of Bundling: Being an Inquiry into the Nature & Origins of that Curious but Universal Folk-Custom, with an Exposition of the Rise & Fall of Bundling in the Eastern Part of No America
by Dana Doten with Drawings by Lee Brown Coye, New York: Countrymen Press and Farrar & Rinehart, 1938

A study and defense of the 18th Century American practice of bundling, or sharing beds:

“Thomas Jefferson praised the virtures of country life, planned for an America unsullied by urbanism, free, happy, and rustic. The society which Jefferson hoped to perpetuate, dreamed of perfecting, was, among other things, a bundling society. We no longer bundle. Nor do we win Revolutions and produce Thomas Jeffersons.”

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I’m busy cataloging books and getting ready for the busy weekend, but have made time to preview another book from the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair:

Squeeze Play by Paul Benjamin [Paul Auster]
The early publishing history of Squeeze Play — Paul Auster’s attempt to make a quick buck with a commercial detective novel — could almost be the basis of its own detective novel. Its publisher printed the book but wasn’t able to distribute it, and when Auster found a paperback publisher to reissue it, he was contractually obligated to split the small advance with the original absentee publisher.

Auster is dismissive of the book’s merits. He writes that, “As an example of the genre, it seemed no worse than many others I had read.” But Squeeze Play is genuinely interesting — as a meta-source for his books’ recurring themes of identity and authorship, and as a satisfying detective story. Even with it’s hard-boiled overtones, it would fit comfortably into a collection of The New York Trilogy as Volume Zero.

This is a later edition, published in 1990 after he’d found some success, but before he outed himself as the book’s author in 1997. The author’s note reads, “Paul Benjamin is the pseudonym for a celebrated contemporary American writer.”

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Here are a couple of highlights from the selection that I’ll have on hand at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair next weekend, October 14-15, 2006. Both are comic strip collections by authors who are better known for their work in children’s books.

Crockett Johnson wrote and drew Barnaby between 1942 and 1946. Mr. O’Malley was young Barnaby’s Fairy Godfather, and while O’Malley paid Barnaby plenty of attention, it was often in pursuit of his own Quixotic agenda: ridding a condemned house of a gang of criminals (black marketeers skirting wartime rationing laws) so that O’Malley’s ghost friend, Gus, can haunt the house in peace, or getting himself elected to Congress without being seen by the public.

Johnson passed the strip on to other hands in 1946 and returned to draw the final episode in 1952. Barnaby was revived twice in the ’50s and ’60s. Johnson was, of course, the author of Harold and the Magic Crayon and many other books.

I’ll have copies of Ballantine’s first three Barnaby collections, which reprint roughly half of Johnson’s strips, and three issues of the nearly forgotten 1945-’46 Barnaby Quarterly magazine.

Daniel Pinkwater cites Terry and the Pirates, Li’l Abner, and Pogo as inspirations for Norb, the newspaper strip that he produced with illustrator Tony Auth in 1989-’90. Norb was a scientist and adventurer who battled cavemen, bad poets, and a now dated parody of Michael Jackson. The comic was an adventure strip with a continuing storyline. “This sort of thing is out of favor these days,” Pinkwater wrote, “but we figured it was due for a comeback.” It wasn’t. While the strip is said to have received fan mail from Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok, it received little attention from the public and was quickly dropped by most of the papers that were running it. Pinkwater and Auth ended the strip quietly after it had run for a year. A few months after the strip’s demise, a cheaply produced collection of Norb dailies was printed in a small run by Mu Press. I’ll have a copy of this unappreciated classic at the Antiquarian Book Fair.

About half of the books in the Using Books booth will be comic-related. Tomorrow I’ll preview some of the non-comic books.

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A cut-up experiment in The Stranger brings to my attention The Galosh, a recent collection of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories. I loved the Zoshchenko collection Nervous People and Other Satires when I read it a couple of years ago, though I found some of the humor puzzling. I was never sure which jokes came out off key because of (what seemed to be) a sometimes awkward seeming translation and which were just posed in some higher level of irony that someone who never experienced Soviet Russia could know.

There’s a more sober review of The Galosh here. This is one that I’ll want to read unless I’m hit by a bus tomorrow.*

Found while digging for reviews of The Galosh: Elephant Walk, The Overlook Press weblog

* My attempt at a Zoshchenko ending

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This postcard with directions to a book club meeting was found in a Modern Library edition of the book being discussed, Light in August by William Faulkner. The postmark doesn’t have a date, but four-cent postcards were used between 1963-1967.

The word “Roux ‘Fanciful’” is written on the card in pencil. I thought perhaps someone had jotted down the author and title of the next book the group was going to read at the meeting. I imagined a book called Fanciful by Jean-Claude Roux or something along those lines. But it turns out that Roux Fanciful is a brand of hair color. (The other pencilled in words — “#52 White Minx” — could have given me a clue.) As with many contemporary book club meetings, the discussion strayed off topic.

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Briefly, some highlights from my 2005 reading: Baudolino by Umberto Eco, A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene, Things That Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier, On Board Noah’s Ark by Ludwig Bemelmans.

As for business, it’s been a difficult and sometimes rewarding year. The hardest lessons continue to be about what doesn’t sell. My current project is weeding some of those lessons out of inventory to make room for new books.

I haven’t handled multiple copies of many titles. Of the few that I have, the bestsellers were The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. I came into a pile of assorted editions of The Conscience of a Conservative as its profile was being lifted by two recent books that referenced it in their titles — David Brock’s Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative and Zell Miller’s A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat. Goldwater’s book was also noticed by BookFinder, which ranked it as the second most searched for out of print book in the Society and Culture category. The Four Agreements, a self help book based on Native American philosophy, sells steadily at a modest price.

By volume, my bestselling categories were Fiction, Biography, History, and Religion. Based on percentages (the number of books sold weighted against the number of books stocked in that category), Fiction was one of the worst performing categories, and the bestsellers were Audiobooks, Folklore & Mythology, and Self Help.

I’m looking forward to 2006 (and am hoping to get more reading in than I did this year). It’s going to be a big year for me and for Using Books.

Have a happy New Year.

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Here’s the Scotsman’s list of the 20 Scottish books everyone should read, heavy on mystery novels.

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After The New York Times’ recent profile of a happy owner of the $8,000 Complete Penguin Classics Library and the release, on Amazon, of five more economical sets of Penguin Classics (The American Collection Volumes One & Two, The Complete Greeks and Romans, The English [& Scottish] Collection: 19th-Century British Fictions, and The Children’s Library), I though it would be a good time to revisit the matter of the forgotten Classics — that is Penguin Classics that have fallen out of print and aren’t included in the 700 pound shrink-wrapped pallet of print that makes up the Complete Library.

So I’ve searched my shelves for another sampling of forgotten Classics. Parts of some of these books may be represented in titles that did make it into the Complete Library and the others are likely in print from other publishers. Whether they’re classics or not, they’re no longer Penguin Classics.

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Slate critic Bryan Curtis wants to reclaim Ray Bradbury from literary respectability:

To these eyes, many of Bradbury’s most garishly “literary” achievements are his least impressive. When the McCarthyite gloom of Fahrenheit 451 fades, it’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick. Bradbury nudging characters into his ingenious hells; Bradbury the fabulist of the Space Age (morals in 10 pages or less!); Bradbury the dinosaur nut who confessed an urge to “run and live” among giant reptiles.

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So you’ve made your way through your 1,000+ volume set of the Complete Penguin Classics Library and you’re wondering what to read next. What about all of those Penguin Classics that aren’t part of the complete set — those that are are out-of-print? Anthologies are re-sequenced when an author’s oeuvre is reconsidered, publishing plans are revised, editor’s move on, and sometimes — in retrospect — that classic may not have withstood the test of time after all. A cursory glance through my inventory brings up a handful of forgotten Penguin Classics:

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The folks at The Millions have mined this Guardian article on world writers who are under-appreciated in the UK (and the rest of the English-speaking world) for another interesting reading list.

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I’m charmed by this book’s title and its author’s cited credentials. If I had been ten years old in 1940, I would have had a well-thumbed copy of this. I would have wanted to draw cartoons successfully.

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Jossey-Bass, 2003

Oxford University Press, 2004

Here’s the source photo at Getty Images.

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I’ll use one of those canned memes to get this weblog going. Requested by Phil:

• You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
  Pass.
• Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
  Probably, though apparently it wasn’t a pervasive enough crush that I can recall it. Is Sarah Vowell a fictional character?
• The last book you bought is:
  The last book that I bought for myself was Contemporaries of Marco Polo (edited by Manuel Komroff), which I haven’t really had a chance to look at yet.
• The last book you read:
  The last book I read was The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw. A couple of years ago, I had the idea that I could develop a better grasp of politics and history by reading biographies of all the U.S. Presidents. I read a Washington biography and then had a look at the recent bestselling Adams biography, but something about it put me off. I got the sense that the author was trying to frame Adams as a kin to contemporary conservatives, though that’s definitely an uninformed interpretation. That took me off track, and I only recently got around to finding another Adams biography to continue the Presidential biography program. This book was more of a character sketch than it was a history of Adams’ life. It was relatively balanced, though Adams came off as sort of a narcissist who made a point of being apolitical to such a degree that it really had a negative affect on his life and career. At this rate, if I continue to read these in the order that the presidents served, I’ll have only just passed Lincoln when I’m 60. If anyone can recommend an interesting Jefferson biography, let me know.
• What are you currently reading?
  I’ve been carrying Old Glory by Jonathan Raban with me, I’ve been reading it off-and-on for quite awhile. It’s Raban’s account of a 1979 trip he made down the Mississippi River. If graphic novels count, I’m partway through Epileptic by David B., and will probably start from the beginning again soon.
• Five books you would take to a deserted island:
  • The Travels of Marco Polo. Assuming I’m going to pass an extended stretch of years marooned on the island, I’d take any version but the annotated Yule/Cordier version. I’d want the luxury of being able to mull over the language and the descriptions without the scholarly research and interpretation explaining things for me. (Besides, the annotated version takes up two volumes, and that would leave me with only three more books.)
  • Something by Italo Calvino, probably Mr. Palomar or Difficult Loves.
  • A graphic novel or comic strip collection — I’ll say any of the Barnaby collections by Crockett Johnson
  • Graham Greene’s Complete Short Stories
  • some short story collection that I haven’t read before
• Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
  I’ll tag my brother Justin, John to encourage him to post something, and Kat because she hasn’t posted in awhile (her RSS feed moved and I lost track of her site for awhile).

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Before shipping this book — the screenplay of Orson Welles’ film, The Trial — to a customer tomorrow, I wanted to make a note here on the labored story of the book’s text.

Orson Welles adapted Franz Kafka’s novel into a script and shot the film. Then, according to a note at the beginning of this book, a French publisher translated the non-dialogue portions of the script, combined that with a transcript of the dubbed dialogue from the film’s French release, and published the result. The American publisher apparently didn’t have access to the shooting script. To produce their book they untranslated the French script, transcribed the original film dialogue, and then combined the two. So the end result is a book that’s partly a translation of a translation of an adaptation of a translation of an unfinished novel, and partly a transcription of a performance of the same adaptation of the translation of the unfinished novel.

So. Hello. Welcome to the first entry on the Using Books Weblog.

The Trial is a really good movie by the way — one of Welles’ best.

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