Month: November 2012

In Defense of Real Books

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The fables of John Gay

I love books and always have.  I would have a hard time imagining a world without books.  I know that there are societies that still exist that don’t have books and they seem to get along just fine.  I am not an anthropologist and don’t know all of the social ramifications that come about once a society develops the capacity to write things down into book form and to pass that knowledge along to future generations.  Certainly oral story telling and passing down knowledge via oral means has served humanity well and still serves many cultures well , but books seem to be a powerful means of insuring that knowledge is preserved .   I sit looking at a volume of Gay’s Fables published in 1793.  The book is full of stories predate the publication of the book by hundreds of years. We owe a great debt to John Gay for his collecting these stories and preserving them in a format that over 200 years later I can still access.  I have sitting in another room floppy disks that I used with computers just a few short years ago.  I am certain you can still obtain external floppy disk drives, but the information on the disks might no longer be compatible with my Windows 7 operating system.  I don’t have to worry about Gay’s book of fables as long as my eyes can see and even then someone could read the book to me.  This is wonderful !  Another volume that jumps out at me is ” Enchanted Tales of the Atlantic”.  This book was published in 1898 and contains stories about such places as Atlantis and Antilla and Hy – Brasil.  In it you can read tales about Merlin and Sir Lancelot as well as the story of the voyage of St. Brandan.  I can sit for hours and occupy my time reading these stories.  The only operating system I need is the one that I have always had – an inquisitive mind.   I have a great admiration for those people who made books possible – from the ancients who started recording events by drawing on cave walls to the people who hand wrote manuscripts to the people who developed type and to those who developed moveable type.  We all have a debt to those people who handed down stories via oral traditions and to those who eventually wrote down those stories.

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All Tied Up In A Bow

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by Jas Faulkner

writer’s note: Abject apologies to Diane.  This is late and I am sorry. 

The email -the second this month asking me about  hockey books- came from Sam and Tab.  Someone brought in copies of “Saving Face: The Art and History of the Goalie Mask” and “Shooting Stars: Photographs of the Portnoy Collection at the Hockey Hall of Fame” and wanted to know if I thought they had a chance of selling them.  In “God, Flag, and Football” country that Mississippi can be, I told them to get them for their own enjoyment while they’re at work and hope someone from Southaven, current home of the River Kings, might take an interest and buy them.  Neither of the girls are particularly interested in hockey, but both love sports photography and these books have some shots that would be assessed as gorgeous by anyone who loves looking at beautifully composed pictures.

Even though the two books Sam asked about are thoroughly researched and well written, it brings to mind the fact that , as we get closer to the biggest gift buying and giving time of the year in North America, a whole section of books that are meant to be seen and not heard- er- read will make an appearance on sales tables at brick and mortar stores all over the continent.

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The Short and Shorter of It–Part 2

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Continuing my exploration of this thick volume full of lovely murders, Bill Pronzini, a superb writer, with a book on my Best 100 Mysteries list, wrote a lyrical love note to the railroad. Pronzini has edited short stories himself, and is the author of the two wonderful Gun In Cheek books about the worst in crime fiction–or best, depending on how you define it. He and his wife, Marcia Muller, are responsible for a huge catalog of  quality work. So I wasn’t surprised to find him within the pages, not once, but several times, alone, or with a writing partner. Sweet Fever  is narrated by an old man who describes he and his grandson’s love of watching the train come through the tunnel at Chigger Mountain.

“The moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Feride Johnson’s patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off towards the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the run-down shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the country sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.”

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The Short and Shorter Of It–Part 1

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I was never a lover of short stories. Until I finally read some. Now I find them appealing due to an ever decreasing attention span. I have read a variety of pieces, mostly crime fiction, and a couple of Carson McCullers, Wilkie Collins, and various themes and authors. Long ago I was in love with Dorothy Parker. I need to revisit her. I found myself returning to one thick volume, 100 Malicious Little Mysteries edited by the late Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph G. Olander. Published in 1981, I have a hardcopy in its 15th printing. Which says a lot about everyone’s attention spans. The stories are written by many different people, most of whom I wasn’t aware of. I’m not a subscriber to Ellery Queen Magazine, or other short story publications. I suppose if I had been, I would be familiar with most of the authors. Naturally, Asimov, Bill Pronzini, and the godfather of crime short stories, Edward D. Hoch are well known. But such names as Henry Slesar, Elsin Ann Graffan, Judith Garner, were strangers to me, and I would guess, they haven’t published full length novels. I should google to research them, but I’d rather move on and relish in the retelling of some of the most malicious tales.

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