“Book ‘em, Dano!” Confessions of an addict.
“Hi. My name is Joe. I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Joe”
And so begins another session of the 12-step substance-abuse support group I belong to. I know this sounds like I’m about to draw you all into some sort of titillating, confessional paean of sordid self-compromised confidentiality, but unlax! My addiction is somewhat more benign than the usual run-of-the-mill methamphetamine revelation stuff that fills magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, for I am addicted to…gasp (pauses to gather willpower and utter that almost-four-letter-word that dare not speak its name) BOOKS.
I know, I know! It’s a shameful admission of impermissibly deviant and unrestrained willfulness in our age of obsessive devotion to smartphones, email, social media and Kindle downloads and I hasten to apologise in advance for any heavy treading on aesthetic toes that may belong to offended parties who think books are (assuming they even know what books are…) as obsolescent and prehistoric as Tyranosaurus Rex or feathered Velociraptors.
The fact is, simply enough, that I am probably a recidivistic reprobate who insists on holding onto socially outmoded cultural norms out of mere spitefulness. Perhaps. But there’s also the possibility that I actually do have an unnatural relationship with paginated objects with spines, composition covers and tables of contents. That’s something I have long regarded as distinctly possible, given that reading is a very time-consuming (if extremely pleasurable) undertaking and the fact that the mere rapidity with which time passes mandates the certainty that I shall probably never, ever, even in my wildest fantasies, manage to wade through a mere 1/100th % of all the books I have carefully hoarded, over past years.
But let me pause amidst this scandalous and socially reprehensible revelation to take a deep breath. It’s foggy outside, this morning. Foggy to the degree that it’s difficult even to make out the large old camphor tree that stands out on the house’s front lawn like a replication of one of Tolkien's Ents (Fangorn, AKA Treebeard). It’s a perfect day for reading, in fact, but I’ve already engaged in an hour or so of this favorite activity and time now to move on with the day’s accustomed agenda. Given that the fog is so thick and the fact that I will shortly be riding my bicycle to our local neighborhood gym, it prompts me to pause briefly to consider how much more dangerous that ride will be, accordingly. Especially so, given that at least 10% of the drivers out there appear too ineffably stupid to recognise that there is a ‘lights’ or ’wipers’ switch staring them in the face on their respective dashboards.
Even in today’s somewhat more bicycle-friendly Sacramento urban setting, bicycle riders are still regarded by far too many motorists as an annoyance to disregard (or to even actively resent, sad to say) and what bicycle lanes that do exist are far too often considered an invidiously reactionary plot against drivers of God-fearing, upstanding motor vehicle owners. And that’s not to mention the comfort factor, a fact that the temp is probably considerably more than merely a bit ‘chilly’ out there, astride a bicycle. Ah well, as the Dude (in ‘The Big Lebowski’ movie) puts it, one abides.
Books, both the reading and collecting of same, may be regarded as having a dual nature in that they are simultaneously a heavenly blessing and a loathsome curse. Furthermore, they are like coat-hangers left along and unobserved in a closet, whereby they seem to magically multiply with as much enthusiasm as over-sexed rabbits hidden from sight in labyrinthine subterranean burrows.
But how exactly did this unnatural addiction get started, one might well ask…especially in an age in which printed matter has become obsolesced by electronic media? One of the obvious explanations is that I am now older than dirt. And old people, one must recall, were born well before today’s electronic media world even left the cognitive launching pad of today’s social media engineers. I was, naturally enough, raised on books, starting with my very first one, predictably a Little Golden Book titled ‘So Dear to My Heart’ (published in 1950).
It was acquired by my Da (for the ethnically confused, that's Anglicised Gaelic for 'Dad'), who rather unpredictably passed away that same year, and it dealt with the story of a prize race horse named Dan Patch and a little boy who raised a prize black lamb for exhibit at the local county fair. The original story was written by Sterling North, a well-known author of children’s books, and the version given me by Da was a Little Golden Book iteration illustrated with Walt Disney images. I’d venture to say that it was one of the most popular Little Golden Books and that many kids my age will fondly remember it.
The Little Golden Books series were extremely popular for young tykes back in the day, since they were intended to serve as an initial learning tool for children to hone their reading skills on.
Since this series of children’s books were so seminal in inspiring young readers of the late 40s and 50s to whet their appetite for literature, permit me to shamelessly reprint here a selection taken from Wikipedia that details the backstory on Little Golden Books.
“Little Golden Books was the brainchild of Georges Duplaix, who in 1940 was head of Artists and Writers Guild Inc., a division of Western Publishing tasked with developing new children's books. Meanwhile, a shared printing plant led Western and Simon & Schuster to develop a close relationship. In 1938, the first joint effort between Western and Simon & Schuster, A Children’s History, was published.
“Duplaix had the idea to produce a colorful, more durable and affordable children’s book than those being published at that time which sold for $2 to $3. With the help of Lucile Olge, also working at the Guild, Duplaix contacted Albert Leventhal, a vice president and sales manager at Simon & Schuster, and Leon Shimkin, also at Simon & Schuster, with his idea.
“The group decided to publish twelve titles for simultaneous release in what was to be called the Little Golden Books Series. Each book would have 42 pages, 28 printed in two-color, and 14 in four-color. The books would be staple-bound. The group originally discussed a 50-cent price for the books, but Western did not want to compete with other 50-cent books already on the market. The group calculated that if the print run for each title was 50,000 copies instead of 25,000, the books could affordably be sold for 25 cents each.
“Mary Reed, Ph.D., a professor at the Teachers College, Columbia University, served as initial editor of the series.
“The first 12 titles were printed in September 1942 and released to stores in October: 1. Three Little Kittens, by Marie Simchow Stern 2. Bedtime Stories, illus. Gustaf Tenggren 3. Mother Goose, by Phyllis Fraser, illus. Gertrude E. Espenscheid 4. Prayers for Children, by Rachel Taft Dixon 5. The Little Red Hen, illus. Rudolf Freund 6. Nursery Songs, by Leah Gale, illus. Corinne Malvern 7. The Alphabet from A to Z, by Leah Gale, illus. Vivienne Blake and Richard Peck 8. The Poky Little Puppy, by Janette Sebring Lowrey, illus. Gustaf Tenggren 9. The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, by Winfield Scott Hoskins 10. Baby's Book of Objects 11. The Animals of Farmer Jones, by Leah Gale, illus. Richard Scarry 12. This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes, by Phyllis Cerf Wagner, illus. Roberta Harris Pfafflin Petty
“Three editions totaling 1.5 million books sold out within five months of publication in 1942.
“Simon & Schuster editor Dorothy A. Bennett also worked with Duplaix on the Little Golden Books. Bennett became the editor of the franchise, producing books by such authors and illustrators as Margaret Wise Brown, Clement Hurd, Edith Thacher Hurd, and Garth Williams. Bennett authored several Golden Books, and introduced some of the first recorded books for children with Little Golden Records in 1948.
“A big boost to the series came with the involvement of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, an educator and founder of Bank Street Nursery School in New York's West Village, that later became the Bank Street College of Education. A strong proponent of realistic children books, Mitchell created the Bank Street Writer’s Laboratory, whose works became the new basis for the Little Golden Book series, with characters and situations that were often inspired by the very neighborhood where the Bank School was located.
“As historian Leonard S. Marcus writes, “Mitchell had been in discussions with Georges Duplaix and Lucille Ogle as early as 1943 about the possibility of a special series of Little Golden Books written by members of Bank Street Writer’s Laboratory. Wartime shortages had delayed the launch of the series until 1946. The first two titles appeared that year: Lucy Sprague Mitchell's The New House in the Forest, illustrated by Eloise Wilkins, and The Taxi That Hurried, coauthored by Irma Simonton Black and Jessie Stanton, with illustrations by Tibor Gergely.
“In 1958, Simon & Schuster sold its interest in Little Golden Books to Western Publishing. The price of Little Golden Books rose to 29¢ in 1962.
“Western introduced a line of Big Little Golden Books for slightly older children, age 5 and up. These included new stories such as The House That Had Enough and reprints such as The Monster at the End of This Book.
“In the 1980s, Golden Books introduced Golden Melody Books that included a long-lasting electronic chip that played music every time the book was opened. Titles included popular children's songs such as Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and songs from children's TV and movies including People in Your Neighborhood from Sesame Street and Heigh Ho from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
"In the year 2000, Encore Software produced a series of "Little Golden Books" titles for CD ROM, including The Poky Little Puppy, Mother Goose, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Velveteen Rabbit, Tootle, and The Saggy Baggy Elephant. These six individual titles were some of the first major software releases to be produced entirely in Macromedia Flash.
“In 2001, Random House acquired Little Golden Books for about $85 million. At that point, nearly 15 million copies of The Poky Little Puppy had been sold, including copies in various languages.
“In 2015, with the release of Little Golden Book adaptations of the first six installments of the Star Wars saga on August 25, the Little Golden Book adaptation of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith became the first ever Little Golden Book in history to be based on a film that was rated PG-13 by the MPAA. Months later, on April 12, 2016, a Little Golden Book adaptation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the next film in the saga, also rated PG-13, was released. This opened the door for further Little Golden Books that drew upon PG-13 rated licensed film properties, such as the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters, characters and storylines from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even Jurassic Park.”
I feel the foregoing is potentially interesting to anyone who is concerned with child development (and who among us who is either 1. A deep thinker or 2. An involved and concerned parent), but perhaps especially to us who cut our reading teeth on such children’s stories.
Even though I was only 4 when Da passed untimely on, I distinctly recall his (and Mum’s) reading this story (and others) aloud to me. Who could, at that tender age, forget such classic kid’s tales as ‘The Little Engine That Could’, ‘The Littlest Tugboat’, or that all-time favorite (according to Wiki) of ‘The Poky Little Puppy’?
Even today, when I see such modern releases of this classic series of gentle tales for children, I get a slight pang for those far-more innocent times. Of course, Little Golden Books continued to update its subject matter when epics like Star Wars came out, but as a kid brought up in Marina district of San Francisco and down near the docks & covered wharves of the Embarcadero, I probably owe my adult fascination with tugboats to those wonderful flights of childish fancy that were the Little Golden Book series. [I should probably fess-up that one of my life-long fantasies has always been to live on an old, retired tugboat converted into a houseboat (sigh!) and I will also readily admit that the mere sight of a sadly dilapidated and neglected old Tug (like the famous & redoubtable Mary Hume, up at Gold Beach, OR, which at this time is more recognizable as a sunken barnacle reef than a boat) brings a tear to my eyes.]
Naturally, as the son of a well-educated, progressive woman (possessed of a graduate degree in education), I was also exposed to a wide range of classics (read aloud to me) that included all the classic works such as the Brudern Grimm & Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. My parents even read aloud from noted French author Jean de La Fontaine’s works (a marvelous amalgam of fables from both East and West) published back in the 1700s.
Modern children’s lit authorities will quickly proclaim the benefits of children having stories read aloud to them and in fact even marginally bright kids will soak such things up a like a sponge. Sadly enough, so will they soak up violent stories from the ‘hood’ and revel in the violence suffered by substance-abused sibs & parents they are brought up among.
Without any hesitation whatsoever, I willingly attribute whatever modest literary abilities I possess to that early jump-start oral reading exposure received as a very small child. From that point I progressed (much to Mum’s abject and continued dismay) to comic books, which also helped my learning skills develop immeasurably. I hasten to qualify that by saying that I am referring to the remarkably bland adventures of Mickey Mouse, Darnold Duck and his three rascally nephews, Fooie, Pooey and Kabloowie (and NOT Mad Magazine's parodies of Michael Rodent and his own two delinquent nephews, Ferdie & Morty). These connections helped me associate verbal and visual conceptual skills more perfectly, undoubtedly.
Back then, although they certainly existed, so-called ‘Superhero’ comics were still on the outlying periphery of mainstream comics, unlike today, where nerds of all ages practically LIVE in an ongoing fantasy of Super-this-and Super-that (thanks to Hollywood, Stan Lee and modern marketing media…ugh!). We can probably also thank the excesses of today’s electronic entertainment media for this near out-of-control obsessiveness with fantasy characters with super powers (double ugh!) and skin-tight, erotically charged costumes. I am probably one of the few people who silently breathed a sigh of relief when Marvel Comics grand patriarch Stan Lee finally had the good sense to leave this life and take his chances with whatever lies beyond.
Another early inspiration (for me, at least) was Mad Magazine, the inspired (not ‘insipid’) brainchild of Harvey Kurzman and publisher William Gaines. I remained a Mad Magazine fan at least until I hit puberty and really enjoyed that ferschlugginer publication immensely until it underwent a sort of updating in concept and approach in the 60s that left me cold.
Eventually, these interests in literature yielded to a more substantial grounding in mainstream science fiction, which itself eventually melded & merged with a strong and abiding interest in the so-called ‘hard’ human life sciences and space physiology to provide me with a living. I hasten to add that although I was an early ‘sci-fi’ fan who, like the gang in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ television series, went to actual conventions, published ‘fanzines’ and otherwise lived & breathed science fiction and fantasy, I was never, ever a Star Trek fan (Trekkies!...shudder). We were early discoverers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterful works long before today’s nerds discovered them, since back in the 60s Tolkien was regarded more as a literary genius than the father of the sort of subsequent puerile J.K. Rowling ‘sorcery’ pap that is served up to today’s kids.
Given that by this time I was a confirmed worshipper of just about anything appearing in print, I began to acquire a personal library that over the years grew larger and larger. This was back when I was still a starving undergrad and not at all an easy accomplishment, given the postage-stamp size of the usual college student’s living accommodations. It wasn’t long before instead of living with stacks of books, I was living amidst those stacks of books. My friends had to exercise formidable powers of navigational expertise to wind their way around these iceberg sized piles of printed material, while visiting me.
And since most college students are ever on the move (to newer apartments, etc.), these books necessarily followed me like the locks and chains that eternally bound Ebeneezer Scrooge’s demised partner, Jacob Marley. This usually involved enlisting the help of my buddies, whenever the occasion occurred, and buying several cartons of beer for the small army of helpers. Usually all the books made it safely from the old abode to the new one, unless the rate of beer consumption exceeded a certain statistical level before the move was complete.
It’s a source of some amusement to me to recall that when I first departed for my contractual work in the Middle East (AKA: Southwest Asia, as the term exists in the military lexicon), I had to rely almost completely on the good graces of my 98 pound girlfriend, who with her sisters completed one of these massive bibliographic migrations entirely by herself! She, on the other hand, was FAR from being pleased with that arrangement, most assuredly.
But why exactly did I prefer to live surrounded by books? It’s a fair question, after all. My stock answer is that there are two general types of intelligent people in the world: those that carry around loads of data in their heads (thanks to excellent memories) and those who like me have difficulty remembering most of this material, other than where to look it up. I much preferred the latter system, given that as an undiagnosed sufferer from ADD (attention Deficit Disorder…ADD wasn’t back then even in the DSM-2/3, fer Pete’s sake!), I have had an attenuated attention span most of my life, as well as a lousy memory.
So, given that retention of data was somewhat problematic for me as an ADD afflicted person, my means of compensation was to carry a rather large library around with me, wherever I lived.
Naturally, after one has spent most of a lifetime being around books, one uncocnsciously tends to acquire a sort of deified regard for them as Holy Objects and that appears to be exactly my situation. Mistreatment of books, for me, was not unlike animal or child abuse! Book abusers were to be castigated, shunned, shamed and/or otherwise relegated to the 7th level of book hell, in my opinion.
To this day, the sight of a tattered old paperback book, cruelly tossed aside by some three-brain-cell miscreant and lying in the gutter of a street, is very much like coming across a cat that has been hit by a car that, while mortally injured, is still very much alive. [OK, we all have our little weirdnesses, so retract yer claws, already!]
My predicament was not in the slightest helped by some of my close friends, one of whom was a medical school dropout and a ferociously bright chap who seems to have been afflicted with the same book disease I had. He had a rambling apartment in an old high-rise building overlooking Lake Merritt (in Oakland, CA) in which every single room was jam-packed with books, magazines and anything printed and published. If a visit to my place was like a trip to the public library, a visit with him was not dissimilar to visiting the ancient, archaic Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt (265 BC), initiated by the Emperor Ptolomy II. The apartment itself had great vaulted ceilings and every nook, cranny and corner of it (including the bathroom) was completely crammed full of books.
Of course, he had a decided advantage in that he never moved from that place (this was over 40 years ago) and still lives there today, with his 4th wife (his having passed through four wives is probably no mystery!). I, on the other hand, moved every couple of years at the very least.
Now, those who know me well are aware of the fact that, as a Gemini birthsign, I am inhabited by two distinct personalities: one is that of a Zen aesthete and the other more nearly resembles a nerdy, leading-edge techy science wonk. Periodically, throughout my life, these two halves of my affect have emerged in moments of crisis to wage ferocious battle over which part of me gets to take charge of my soul. Sometimes the Zen monk wins and when he takes over, I experience seemingly inexplicable purges of my worldly possessions, not least among them my precious books (picture if you can, J.R.R Tolkien’s Gollum character In the LoTR, squatting on a pile of books while stroking a hardback’s dust jacket and muttering “Yesssss, my PRECIOUS! Yes!”).
Not far off the mark, my friends, I assure you.
But at other times, the science techy nerd aspect manages to carry the day and during his tenure as my guiding spirit, I manage to reacquire even more material things than I may have recently dispersed. It’s a hella bad way to live, since one flip-flops back & forth between these two radical polar extremes in a cyclical sine-wave manner that would probably look great graphed out on an oscilloscope.
Looking back over the past decades, this maddening personality trait has resulted in my losing not just vast numbers of books but some really extraordinary collections of specialized subjects. One was an Asian book collection that included volumes even the Smithsonian would probably like to include in its collection! Another was an aerospace collection of volumes that likely would have made the curator of NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center’s reference library jealous. But, thanks to the razor-sharp virtual katana of my Zen monk, all those books are now long since gone, gone, gone. When it was his turn to take over, the science techy nerd never did recover any of those rare volumes, much to both of our regrets!
Today, given that you can’t take books with you when you join the harp & wings squadron, way up thar, I should be taking concerted steps to pare down the existing massive library I presently have, but unfortunately one of my closest friends (who actually lives only a few blocks from me) is ALSO a life-long book hoarder. As a retired educator, he has a legitimate excuse for his supranormal affinity for books, unlike me who just suffers from an untreated (and also likely untreatable) pathological process of ill-defined parameters.
The point remains, however, that we both tend to reinforce each other’s bibliographic sickness with the result that the numbers of books keep increasing and the piles that exist keep getting taller & taller.
This is rather seriously complicated by the fact that my long-suffering wifie, whose patience with my book excesses has long-since been stretched to the utter limit, decided that by forbidding the addition of another bookcase in the house, this would act as a natural deterrence to the acquisition of further volumes. WRONG! All that that rather short-sighted ‘solution’ has resulted in is books being stacked up into piles, which makes them almost impossible to sort and index, let alone actually find when you want a specific one at hand.
This annoys me terribly, since with the books stacked in random order, one can never find what one wants when one needs to. That in turn drives me absolutely bonkers, so we’re seemingly stuck in an irreversible and completely frustrating process that is liable to end badly, some day.
Finally (and the nail that seals my virtual bibliophilic coffin), I have no self-control at all when I enter a bookstore and find myself unconsciously reaching for my wallet whenever I am surrounded by books for sale…anywhere. I’m so bad, slipping into a sort of semi-lucid trance at such moments, that whenever I walk through a book store’s front door my friends know they’ll eventually have to mount a search-and-rescue effort to extract me. Otherwise I’d probably just wander around in such a place aimlessly until I perish from lack of sustenance and disappear in the stacks. They’d likely find my wasted, dusty bones perched somewhere in a dark corner, book in hand and the undeniable aura of death all about me.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I admit, but I think I’ve made my point. Wifie knows well enough to 1. Never trust me in a bookstore, and 2. Have a rescue party on stand-by when I do manage to slip undetected through any bookstore’s doorway.
My rep is so bad (or so good, depending on whether you’re my wife or a bookstore owner) that most bookstores roll out the red carpet and break out the caviar and champagne whenever I’m in the neighborhood. In this, I’m being perfectly honest. No joke. I’ve probably personally had a major hand in helping prevent several small, privately owned bookstores from going bankrupt, over the past several decades!
Our local public library also contributes to my bibliophilic purgatorial status by having a regular monthly book sale, consisting of volumes on all sort of subjects being purged from their shelves. At $5 for a grocery bag full of books, this has all the attractiveness of a free ‘key’ of pot, or Willy Wonka’s ‘Golden Ticket’.
And so, like The Great Lebowski’s immortal Dude, I continue to abide, managing to persevere despite my singular and essentially pathological personal handicap. If I ever do kick the bucket, I’m toying with the idea of hiring someone to build a mausoleum out of my books to encrypt me right there in the midst of all those marvelous specimens of the world’s collected wisdom that I’ve managed to acquire.
Oh, and by the way, if I do pass on untimely (as above), there will NOT be a guest book to sign at my ‘celebration of life’ memorial service…
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Postscript:
My already semi-attenuated attention (LoL) was recently arrested (speaking of Dano and bookin’ ‘em) by several articles I came across recently, extolling the virtues of being a bibliophile (or ‘book hoarder’, your choice). A few of the more interesting URLs are given below.
One in particular argued that having too many as-yet unread books is not necessarily a bad thing, for the fact that you have stacks of books you haven’t even cracked open is actually a sign that you are a true devotee of wisdom and knowledge…specifically knowledge as it is transmitted & recorded in books. This is a virtual signal that you wish to be better and greater than you are, and that you maintain an open, ever-inquiring mind on all things in life. In my case that’s certainly true enough. I most emphatically do not read to self-affirm my existing biases and prejudices (as so many do, these days); rather, I read a broad range of things in hopes of expanding what may be still undeveloped and not fully articulated ideas, understandings and opinions on matters. Acquiring too many books may be interpreted as a symptom of an unquenchable thirst for greater awareness…but naturally enough, it can also be viewed as symptomatic of an abnormal literary pathology of sorts.
Just as someone recently remarked in an astute academic paper I read, surrounding one’s self with books is possibly an unexpressed desire to compensate for all those PhDs you never quite completed. After all, up until about 1940 or so the ‘self-made man’, who acquired his education from reading widely and extensively, was a uniquely American phenomenon, characteristic of many home-grown geniuses in our culture, who achieved great accomplishments despite a deficit formal education.
The bottom line is that while you may actually be ‘book-loopy’ (bookishly aberrant), there’s also an equal and quite likely possibility that you are interested in improving your station in life through self-acquired learning. I like to think that this is true as it applies to myself and, although I’m waaaay past the age where I can expect to be invited to upper-class cocktail parties and dinners (where wit, erudition and learning are mandatory personal assets), at least I won’t be the dullest member at my feeding trough in the Senior Citizens Home…
A few URLs worth checking out, here, may help affirm your own affliction:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/70400-the-wonderful-and-terrible-habit-of-buying-too-many-books.html
https://bookroo.com/blog/too-many-books
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-such-a-thing-as-having-too-many-books
http://the-toast.net/2014/07/23/on-book-hoarding/
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