The Book Sale
September 20, 2009

I took myself over to our annual Planned Parenthood book sale this morning. This annual fundraiser is the premier used book sale in Santa Barbara with more than a hundred thousand books.

The sale is more than thirty-five years old. For six of those I volunteered year-round, working with the donations in hot, sometimes dirty conditions. Donations came in all year, and they had to be sorted into categories, put into boxes, and the boxes placed in a storage unit. We kept watch for potentially valuable books, which would be safely set aside. But mainly we sorted, packed, and hauled. It was backbreaking work, and sometimes scary. Too often books that had obviously been stored in garages (and seen mice and other vermin) had to be thrown away and our hands disinfected.

Each year we would go hunting (and begging) for retail space, ideally on the main street through Santa Barbara in order to ensure foot traffic. But several years ago the decision was made to move it to the Earl Warren Showgrounds which, though not downtown, has the advantage of lots of easy parking for everyone, plenty of lighting at night, and tables set up and taken down by showgrounds staff rather than PP volunteers. The area where the sale is held is a huge room filled with enough tables and boxes to host the six-figure number of books. Each table is labeled with printed signs: Cooking, Specials, Fiction, Graphic Books, Art/Photography, World History, and so on. Extra books that don’t fit on top are in boxes underneath the tables.

The sale runs for ten days. It began last Thursday night with a preview sale for those willing to pay $25. Friday morning the free days began. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it until late morning on Sunday so I figured it had been pretty well picked over.

If it was I have no idea what I missed. Nor, I suspect, did any of the more than 300 other people I saw during my time there. All of us were hovering over the tables, bumping into one another, shoving bags and boxes alongside as we moved from table to table, hauling armloads of books back to holding boxes or bags in corners with our names. From my corner near the checkout, as I made trip after trip there to drop off books,  I found myself a little dismayed to hear the cashiers ringing up people who made reasonably-sized purchases: $36.78 or $13,29 or even $112.63. Even though most of the books I selected were in the $2, $3 and $4 ranges I could tell I was in trouble.

And so it proved, Nearly five hours after I entered and even after jettisoning one third of my initial selections I staggered out with four oversized and overweight boxes filled with an uncounted number of books that came to (before tax) $365. Histories, biographies, politics, cookbooks, adventures, coffee table books, science, memoir, humor, and literature. Some of them are books I have never heard of before but that sounded so good I couldn’t resist them. (Discoveries like this are why independent and used bookstores should never be allowed to die.) Among those are The Silent Traveler in Paris by Chiang Yee, a book whose unique cover—combining a picture of Paris with Chinese lettering—immediately captured my attention. Though undated, it appears to be from the early to mid-fifties and a wonderful travel piece:

I first heard the name Montparnasse over thirty years ago in Shanghai, where a number of Chinese art students, recently returned from Paris, had opened art schools of the Western type. Painting in the traditional Chinese style, these masters despised; and even our conventional clothes, loose-fitting and comfortable though they surely are, were alleged to be clumsy. Wide black or red bow-ties projected below their chins and obscured their none-too-clean collars. Their miscellaneous jackets and trousers were always copiously stained with oil paint. Their hair remained uncut and their beards unshaven.

This last small affectation means something different in Shanghai from what it does in Paris. To me it is one of the advantages of being Chinese that while the hair on my head grows long, thick and black, the hair on my lip and chin would not get into my soup if I did not shave for half a year. But to these disciples of art nouveau it was a source of grief and disquietude that they could not rival the splendid beards of their former art colleagues in Paris. But one cannot alter the physical characteristics of one’s race, and the Chinese are not hairy.

Murder in history also makes for good reading, and I scored in that area too with three books on Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra, and their children. Another book about Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley complete the real life murders, but I added to the pile with a mystery that promised “an unusual detective story”: The Gray Phantom by Herman Langdon. Is it any good? Who knows, but I am willing to find out.

One book that grabbed my attention immediately was from an author I have read before and liked: Antonia Fraser. The Weaker Vessel, however, was unknown to me. It also has one of the longer subtitles I’ve ever seen, but each word is enticing: “Women in 17th-century England—heiresses and dairymaids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress.” Who could resist that, especially after reading in the Author's Note about a male colleague asking her: "Were there any women in seventeenth-century England?"

Women feature in a number of the books I  bought including Gertrude Bell, known as the “female Lawrence of Arabia,” bookwomen Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, nineteenth-century African explorer Mary Kingsley, eighteenth-century explorer/author/speculator Elizabeth Marsha, and two memoirs, one of a woman whose girlhood was spent in a harem, and another who grew up under Fidel Castro.

The most expensive book I bought (after putting back a dozen priced even higher) was actually a three-volume slipcased set I have been lusting after for a long time: The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. I am crazy about van Gogh. I have more than a dozen art books on his work. I have read a number of his letters that are part of one of the books, and been to several exhibitions that have come to southern California over the years. During one of them, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I had the privilege of seeing a work previously unknown to me titled “The Prison Courtyard,” which impressed me so much I stood in front of the work for nearly two hours as the changing crowd swirled around me.

The Complete Letters, though not a first edition (which has tipped-in plates rather than printed ones), is in perfect condition and in fact appears unread. And it is now mine!

There are many more books including two books about books that I added to my collection: The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking and Penguin Special: The Story of Allen Lane, the Founder of Penguin Books and the Man Who Changed Publishing Forever.

So as I sit here writing this I need only turn my head slightly to see the (new) piles on either side. Perhaps I spent more than I should, but what I got was an enormous bargain as well as a treasure trove. I made discoveries of books I hadn’t known existed. I will read authors I didn’t know about. And I helped an organization in which I believe to help other women. It’s hard to top that.

BiblioBuffet welcomes new contributor, Pete Croatto. In his column, “The Athletic Supporter,” Pete will focus heavily though not exclusively on sports books that tell interesting stories—biographies, memoirs, histories, fiction, essays, journalism, humor—as well as a few general subjects. We are happy to welcome Pete aboard and hope you enjoy getting to know him.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Several festivals that sound absolutely wonderful are coming up this week and next weekend. So if you live or will be anywhere near them, try and attend. 

During the week of September 21-26. 2009, Fairfax, Virginia, will host the annual Fall for the Book Festival. This book festival begin 1999 as a two-day event. It has since expanded and enlarged, and now offers a tremendous opportunity to spend five days submerged in literary events. Though there are ongoing exhibitions before and after this week, it is these five days that are the most packed. Beginning Monday at 9:00 a.m. and running into the night there will be authors in all genres speaking and reading (twenty novelists including E.L. Doctorow, thirty-four poets, sixty nonfiction authors, six children/YA authors and eleven “other”), poetry readings and slams, folklorists entertaining, workshops, book swaps, panel discussions, gallery receptions, film screenings, staged readings, and more.

Also during that same week, September 21-26, 2009, Abilene, Texas will host the West Texas Book & Music Festival, which features several Brown Bag programs, music events called Pickin’ in the Park, an opening night reception, a workshop for children on writing, the Boots and Books Luncheon, Storytime, the Gospel Hymnfest, the Texas Cookbook Gala, and seventy-five authors and musicians.

The Baltimore Book Festival is in its fourteenth year, running from noon to 8:00 pm on Friday, September 25 and Saturday, September 26, and also on Sunday, September 27 from noon to 7:00 pm. Among the xxx authors scheduled to attend are Buzz Aldrin and Gwen Ifill. Their various stages and venues include the Literary Salon, Children’s Bookstore Stage, Food for Thought Stage, CityLit Stage, Creative Café, Music Stage, Radical Bookfair Pavilion, Walters Art Museum, and Baltimore Theatre Alliance. Events range from a Poets Ink workshop to lunch with Baltimore’s best chefs as well as panels, author presentations, musical entertainment, poetry readings, author meet-and-greets and giveaways for YA Night, the Baltimore Playwrights Festival,  a Happy Hour, literary walking tours, Stories & Songs, the Reading Series, the Official Baltimore After Festival Book Party, and even more.

More than eight authors, many of them national names, will be converging on the National Mall in Washington DC on Saturday, September 26 for the National Book Festival. It takes place from 10:00 am to 5:30 pm. Several pavilions—Authors (Children, Teens & Children, Fiction, Mysteries & Thrillers, History & Biography, and Poetry & Prose), Book Sales, and Pavilion of the States, Let’s Read American Pavilions—will be busy all day so come on out and indulge your literary appetite under the sunshine.

The 19th annual Novello Festival of Reading will feature author Christopher Buckley and its favorite local and regional writers during a variety of events scheduled between September 26 and October 31 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Though for budgetary reasons they have had to cut back there will be a Carolina Writers Night, WordPlay Saturdays, two events by youth authors and even an event for genealogy fans.

The Pub House:
Press 53 is a small independent publisher in North Carolina that specializes in high quality short story collections, creative nonfiction/memoir “that absolutely knocks us out,” narrative poetry that shares a story or tells an experience, and re-issues of out of print classics. Among their books are two that stand out for me. The first because when I first stumbled across this press I found Searching for Virginia Dare intriguing. (Virigina Dare, you may remember, was the first white child born on American soil and she, along with members of what is now termed the Lost Colony, disappeared shortly thereafter.) I was right; it was an intriguing read, but not just for the information on the mystery. The author weaves three things—her memoir, history, and some fiction—into one of the better books I have read this year. Definitely recommended. The second book I am going to recommend is Cliff Garstang’s In an Uncharted Country. This collection of short stories that center around the people of Rugglesville, Virginia, as “they struggle to find places and identifies in their families and the community.” Like the other, I also ordered this book, and it is due to arrive any day. While I haven’t yet read the book I know Cliff through a book discussion forum to which we both belong. So I anticipate a good read here too. If these two books are an indication of the press’s quality, you can expect to find excellence here. I encourage you to look.

Of Interest:
Google Books is in the process of digitalizing books, and it has been the focus of discussion, dismay, criticism, derision and laughter at what were perceived to be inane errors on the part of Google. At the end of last month, Geoff Nunberg had a blast gleefully pointing out a number of those errors that included the year 1899, the novel Madame Bovary, and classifications that would make the insertion of a square peg into a round hole positively easy.

To take GB’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’ [sic] La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, Fodor’s guide to Nova Scotia, and the Portuguese edition of the book version of Yellow Submarine,  to name just a few. . . .

And while there may be particular reasons why the 1899 date comes up so much, these misdatings are spread out all over the place. A book on Peter Drucker is dated 1905, a book of Virginia Woolf’s letters is dated 1900, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James’s 1897 What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

Then there are the classification errors. William Dwight Whitney’s 1891 Century Dictionary is classified as “Family & Relationships,” along with Mencken’s The American Language. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary both classified as “Antiques and Collectibles.” An edition of Moby Dick is classed under “Computers”: a biography of Mae West classified as “Religion”; The Cat Lover’s Book of Fascinating Facts falls under “Technology & Engineering.” A 1975 reprint of a classic topology text is “Didactic Poetry”; the medievalist journal Speculum is classified “Health & Fitness.”

First, we know we have problems. Oh lordy we have problems. Geoff refers to us having hundreds of thousands of errors. I wish it were so. We have millions. . . .

Second, spare a thought for what we are trying to do. An individual library has the tough goal of correctly cataloging all the books in its collection, which might be as many as 20 million for a library like Harvard. We are trying to correctly amalgamate information about all the books in the world. (Which numbered precisely 168,178,719 when we counted them last Friday.) We have a cacophony of metadata sources — over a hundred — and they often conflict.