Just Reading
February 8, 2009

That’s what I’ve been doing. And it’s delightful. During those weeks when other things take necessary priority, I tend to feel off because I fall into bed to sleep rather than to read for a while, and I don’t get my ten minutes of reading time in the morning, or I  haven’t found time to sit and while away an hour or two in the evenings. When that happens I get cranky, and the longer it goes on the crankier I get. On this, day eight of my reading drought, I am notably cranky.

It seems to me that most passionate readers have the same feelings. Reading has become so much a part of life that losing it, even temporarily, leaves behind a sense of unsettledness. It must be how Linus van Pelt feels when his blanket is being washed.

As I write this on Saturday evening I am feeling soothed again. Reason: I have been reading today. This morning, I ripped through a delightful English mystery, The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin. I’d never heard of the writer or the series before I was sent this book, but I enjoyed it immensely. The plot required some suspension of belief, but I was willing. The eccentric characters were right out of 1938 British academic and literary circles. British colloquialisms and style so permeated the text that some Port and Stilton would not have been out of place.

Later in the afternoon I picked up the book I am currently reading: Conquering the Desert of Death. When Charles Blackmore set out to cross the Taklamakan desert in China, one of the harshest environments on earth, after more than two years of planning, he knew he understood what he was doing. He wasn’t the first to cross it—earlier explorers had traversed it but they used the perimeters, avoiding the harshest parts. However, he was the first to do so by going end to end through its unmapped center where no one had been before.

It’s a powerful narrative, at once captivating and horrifying. I am picking up an attitude of British colonialism toward the “natives” at times, but then I am reading this from the comfort of my living room rather than in the middle of 1,000-foot sand dunes, deadly high temperatures, an unremitting broiling sun, water perhaps days away, and the very real prospect of everyone on the team dying. And so maybe Blackmore needs to be cut some slack.

On that day we collapsed for a rest, our energy and enthusiasm quite spent. There was no protection from the sun which beat down remorselessly and dried out our skin. We were covered in fine sand — it was in our hair, all over our bodies, in our eyes, ears and mouths. Always there was the continual crunch of grit between our teeth. We lived in it. It was a natural extension of our existence. Rupert and I then took the lead. There were times that afternoon when I could have willingly caved in. I could not believe we would survive such punishing conditions. But we kept on, trudging eastwards, knowing that each step brought us nearer to our goal. After an hour only half the camels were in sight. We halted. One of the camels carrying two water containers backed into another and a container was punctured. Water gushed from the hole. We watched, reacted slowly and, with visible lethargy, struggled to our feet and attempted to repair the damage. Everything was a tremendous effort. No one wanted to give up their last ounce of energy in case they went over the top. It was almost tempting to lie their in the hot sand and pretend it had not happened: to have done so, shedding all responsibility, would have been wonderful, With Keith’s help,  eventually plugged the hole with strips of cloth wrapped around a piece of wood from a camel stick. It was rudimentary but it worked. We lay there afterwards, too exhausted to contemplate the remaining hours left before the happy release of the cool of the evening. But while daylight remained we had to continue. The pace had to be ruthlessly maintained if we were not to be beaten by the sand mountains. It would have been so easy to have halted early or taken breaks, but that would not get us out of our desert prison any quicker: ours was a race against the rapidly diminishing supply of clean drinking water that we carried. Once that was gone we would survive for no more than three days in that punishing temperature. Traveling at night was one way of reducing the risk but I had discounted it after careful thought. Keeping thirty camels and fifteen people together in the darkness would be very difficult: the risk of someone becoming disoriented and separated was too high. Besides, navigating through the dunes by day was hard enough — by night it would be even more awkward and slower. At least marching by day our bodies created a slight cooling breeze which was preferable to lying at rest under a pitiless sun that would sap our energy and dehydrate our bodies.

I put down the book at this point and walked to my kitchen to draw myself a glass of fresh cool water. As I stood over the sink, drinking, these words replayed themselves in my mind. This is why I read—to feel things I will likely never personally know, to understand places and experiences I will probably never experience, to travel in time to eras long past, to meet people I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet. In the same way that Blackmore felt compelled to undertake his exploration of the great desert, I feel compelled to pick up the book and read. Reading is a priority, However and whenever it is accomplished, reading must be a priority in my life.

Book Festivals:
Next weekend two book festivals of different sorts will take place. In Chicago, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) will be holding its annual conference from February 11-14. As part of the conference, they have a Bookfair. On Saturday, the 14th, the Bookfair, at the Hilton Chicago, will be open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. There is no charge. Exhibitors include vendors of interest to writers, but also to readers including quite a few university presses (that publish books of general trade interest), literary journals, quality small and medium-size presses, and others. If you are near Chicago next weekend, try to make this. It looks great.

Antiquarian dealers will be gathering for their 42nd Annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco. If you have never attended one of these because the books priced in the thousands and hundreds of thousands are out of your range, let me assure you it is worth going just for the appreciation factor. More than 300 booksellers, book arts groups, libraries and associations will be exhibiting, and there are wonderful workshops for anyone interested in learning more about starting their own collections, having informal appraisals done on their books, viewing a special collections exhibit on California boosterism and tourism from the California State Library, and more. The event runs from Friday, February 13 through Sunday, February 15. Ticket prices are $15 for all three days or ten dollars for either Saturday or Sunday.

The Pub House:
Green Integer Press has one of the most intriguing mission statements I have ever seen from a publisher: Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least. My sense is that any publisher who can so engagingly articulate why they do what they do deserves a serious look.

The publisher focuses on works by leading artists, critics, and historians both contemporary and past ones. They put their books into an unusual format size—6" x 4.25"—making them easy to carry. Among their titles is Hope, a novel with two intertwining stories, one about a monk who is lured to an isolated island, the other about a contemporary man who at first imagines he is on an island and later finds he is. What seems at first two unrelated stories becomes one of possibility, hope and love. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous is a philosophical work by Irish philosopher George Berkeley that centers upon an imaginary discussion on the subject of materialism over three successive mornings. In Displeasures of the Table, Martha Ronk see food and writing about food as a sort of  “dialogue between society and between eating and reading, ‘a wrestling with dough or syntax, being at the table or under it.’”

Of Interest:
Bound to Be Read Books of Atlanta, Georgia hosts a unique book group, the Scandalous Book Club. They meet quarterly “to discuss the most controversial books in publishing history, contrasting their relevance at the time they were published with social values of today” and “determine whether these books still stand the test of time, or have become nothing more than campy trash from a bygone era.” The next meeting will take place on Sunday, February 15 to discuss Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

This Week . . .
Pulp paperbacks—those cheap thrills novels of the first half of the twentieth century have become valuable collector items in this first part of the twenty-first century. But not for their stories. Instead their often lurid always sensational covers have attracted a following as passionate as first edition collectors.

Pulps have an interesting history, and one of the best sites for them is  BookScans. Run by Bruce Black, the BookScans Project aims to become the largest library and resource center for all vintage American paperbacks online. It’s well on its way with more than 30,ooo vintage paperback cover artwork images, 4,000 magazine covers, and more than 1,000 covers of reference books, periodicals, and “fanzines.” He has also written several excellent articles on their history and evolution, a tiny portion of  which I quote below:

In 1939, a man named Robert DeGraff gambled on American literacy and won.

Whether or not there were different types of readers in the U.S., there were distinctly different markets. Books were sold to those who could afford the sizeable $2 to $3 price tag. Cheaper, paperbound books did exist, but most were very specialized: romances, mysteries, westerns and adolescent adventure novels made up the bulk of these titles. Many had serial characters. Almost none were considered significant literature. They were what would later be called “digest-sized” books, and the covers, though they supported color, were much thinner than those of the paperbacks that we think of today.

And then there were the pulps … cheap magazines that catered to various literary genres and offered serialized works (and sometimes complete novels) that sold for a quarter or less. DeGraff wanted to offer modern reprints of favorite books at pulp magazine prices.