Reading Copy Book Blog

Curmudgeonly grump and marvelously imaginative author Maurice Sendak died a week ago today. I came across this again today and thought it was worth a revisit…. Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, as ready by Christopher Walken*. Makes me laugh every time. “The kid is kind of a jerk. I think that’s the point you’re supposed to get.”

And now, let the wild rumpus start!

*okay, or an excellent impersonator. Still super.

Reading Copy has a sister. AbeBooks has just launched a new blog called Pages & Proofs for our AbeBooks.co.uk site, which serves our British customers. I’m handling most of the blogging on Pages & Proofs and I promise to make it the same but different to Reading Copy. It will be the same in that it will be very readable and never dull. It will be the same in that we are addressing everything that catches our eye from the book world with a special focus on used and rare books. It will be different in that it won’t be a carbon copy of Reading Copy. There will be lots of news and links regarding books from the United Kingdom but the posts won’t be exclusively British-themed.

Now, if you are really into books you will visit both blogs on a regular basis.

Over at Pages & Proofs you will discover why the United Nations thinks Norwich is a bookish town, where you can see the original Harry Potter manuscript, how Pussy Galore wrote a self defense book in the 1960s, a review of a book about a road that goes past Stonehenge and much more. Visit Pages & Proofs.

Former Newsday columnist Mike McGrady has died of pneumonia. McGrady was most famous as being the leader of a group of 24 prominent journalists (19 men, 5 women), who in 1966 set out to prove that the minds and tastes of the American people, when it came to culture consumption, had become tasteless and vulgar. They went about it in a very creative way – by writing and publishing an intentionally bad book, Naked Came the Stranger, full of lewd, ridiculous over-the-top sex (there are sex scenes involving a rabbi, a shetland pony and many more unlikely characters) under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe. Ashe did not in fact exist (each of the journalists took on a chapter), but was played in public by McGrady’s sister-in-law, Billie Young.

The book was published in 1969 by Lyle Stuart, known for their willingness to publish sexually-charged books. The publishing house did not know the book’s true origins or authors. Upon publication, Naked Came the Stranger immediately began proving the authors’ suspicions correct – it sold 90,000 copies by October of 1969. When they began earning large amounts of money, many of the co-authors’ consciences bothered them and they went public about the hoax on the David Frost show on television.

Their confession only served to make the book sell faster, and the co-authors were approached to write a sequel, which they turned down.

Not everyone was happy, either about the ruse, or about the book’s content, which, given that it was intentionally written to be as depraved and devoid of literary value as possible, served to make a lot of people feel dirty.

McGrady died in his home state of Washington. He was 78 years old.

Read about Naked Came the Stranger and other literary hoaxes.

We have a guest writer today – bookseller Peter Thackeray describes the legacy of the author who helped launch the espionage fiction genre with The Thirty-Nine Steps.

John Buchan published more than 25 novels and yet he had a remarkable life away from writing that included being a Member of Parliament and Governor-General of Canada.

Read the Whole Article.

In 2008 Orhan Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence, a book about a wealthy businessman , Kemal, who becomes infatuated with a lower class shop girl, Füsun, who is 12 years his junior.  Despite Füsun being the love of his life Kemal refuses to give up his relationship with his fiancée to be with her, instead opting to obsessively collect artifacts associated with Füsun and his time with her; and with these artifacts he builds a museum.

Now, you can visit that museum yourself.  Last month Pamuk cut the ribbon on an actual Museum of Innocence which is based on the book and features the strange array of objects associated with and discarded by the character Füsun within the pages of the book.  The collection is housed in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, Istanbul.

Today’s Globe and Mail has an interesting review of the museum that is worth a read.

The American Guide Series is a collection of books, magazines and pamphlets published between 1937 and 1941. Meant to educate and attract, the series was put together by The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) which provided government funding towards writing and publishing initiatives during the Great Depression. Each publication in the American Guide Series included background history, information, attractions, and photographs. They were published by the individual states – no Hawaii or Alaska, as neither was officially a state until 1959 – and were also created for several cities, states, territories and regions, as well. Nowadays they are highly collectible as memorabilia of the era and pieces of history, and for their often-striking covers.

Tricksters are intriguing. You never quite know what to expect. Look at Loki and Puck, and the Raven of First Nations lore, to name a few. They can be good or bad, or an unpredictable mix of both. They survive, and also annoy, by using their wits. By turns funny and infuriating, these are the pranksters of literature who keep our protagonists on their toes.

This selection of literature goes way beyond Brer Rabbit and showcases famous tricksters from around the globe.

The BC Book Prizes were handed out in Vancouver on Saturday evening. Victoria’s Esi Edugyan, who has probably built an extension to house all her trophies, won the fiction prize for Half-Blood Blues – a novel about jazz musicians in Germany. She had already won the Giller Prize, been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is still a contender for the forthcoming Orange Prize. This novel has taken her around the world so it’s good to see her being recognized on her home turf.

Charlotte Gill picked up the AbeBooks-sponsored non fiction prize for Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. It’s a book written from Charlotte’s 17 years as a tree planter and it goes deep into the province’s logging industry.

The late Chuck Davis, who died in November 2010, was a double winner. His book,  The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver, won the regional prize and the booksellers’ choice award.

The book had to be completed after his death by Harbour Publishing and can be called Davis’ magnum opus. It looks at 125 years of life in Vancouver and more than 10,000 copies of the book have been sold. The first two printings sold out in a matter of weeks. It charts the city’s growth from a ramshackle outpost to a huge sprawling city that hosted the Winter Olympics.

John Pass won the poetry prize for crawlspace. Sara O’Leary (writer) and Julie Morstad (illustrator) took home the  illustrated children’s literature prize for When I was Small. Moira Young won the children’s literature prize for Blood Red Road.

Salt Spring Island’s Brian Brett won the  B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Award for literary excellence. His latest book is Trauma Farm but his literary career goes back to the late 1960s.

There were two books that didn’t win but particularly caught my eye. Fred Herzog’s epic Photographs is an amazing book of photography showing Vancouver in the 1950s. Like Chuck Davis, he shows how the city has changed. Herzog primarily looks at the working classes and his images contrast to the perception of Vancouver today as a wealthy metropolitan city. I also like the look of Robert Wiersema’s non-fiction book, Walk Like A Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen – Robert is a versatile writer with two well received novels to his name already.

The B.C. Book Prizes is organised by the West Coast Book Prize Society. Thanks to everyone who put in lots of hard work on these awards.

We look at many, many, many books in a day as part of the AbeBooks marketing team. They go as far back as ancient times, long before the printing press, and I see books from centuries ago every day. So it should come as no surprise that very often I end up reminded of the way things used to be, and how different – and in some cases, not different enough – things are now.

My specific case in point – the golliwog, and other stereotypical depictions of black Americans (or any ethnic minority, actually, but it’s a lot of the old golliwog books I’ve been coming across lately). The golliwog was a character who originated in children’s books in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Enid Blyton, for instance, had a golliwog character named Mr. Golly in her Noddy books, who ran the Toytown garage (he was replaced in later revised edition by the caucasian character Mr. Sparks). The word golliwog (originally golliwogg – the spelling evolved) is thought to have first come from the books of Florence Kate Upton (1873-1922), a children’s author who found one of the blackface-style dolls in her aunt’s attic, nicknamed it Golliwogg, and used it as the central character in her series of books. Ostensibly a black man, the golliwog was a cartoonish caricature with the classic big, white lips and wide eyes and fuzzy hair, looking much like Al Jolson doing “My Mammy” or a minstrel show performer, or any grotesque portrayal, usually by a white person in blackface makeup. The golliwog was popular enough to make it off the pages of children’s books and into the forms of rag dolls, toys, figurines and more.

I have no question around the idea of the golliwog (and other similar portrayals) as a racist and problematic portrayal – I think that goes without saying. But I found myself asking how to handle these items that still exist. They are for sale on the site, I come across them in secondhand stores and at garage sales. People collect them, for differing reasons, not least of which is their slow disappearance. So – do we reference them? Do we include them in our features about the appropriate era, region or subject matter? The truth of the matter is, books are used as a record of events, circumstances and history, as much as for entertainment or information. Our history is full of some shameful, dark, unforgivably unjust things. And ignorance. And backwardness. And we have the books to show for it.

These things happened. And not as long ago as we seem so fond of thinking. Is it better to take the “I won’t even dignify that with a response” approach, and refuse to acknowledge these painful pieces of history and hope that they fade further into obscurity, eventually to be buried? Or is ignoring them, sweeping them under the rug and smiling nervously – EVERYTHING’S FINE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE – doing a bigger disservice to the problem? Is it better to bring them out into the open, acknowledge the grief and problem still surrounding them and start a conversation?

Slavery, oppression, racism, and systemic, ingrained bigotry – it’s all such a sensitive, painful, delicate subject that it’s intimidating to even talk about it at all. It’s been made taboo. But that doesn’t mean it might not be a conversation worth having, and that silence might not hurt just as much.

For whatever reason, some authors choose to publish books under a name different from their real one. In some cases, like Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte publishing under Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell are under advice from publishers to make the book sell better. In other instances, perhaps a well-known author wants to publish a different style of book from their usual fare, and wants the freedom to do it without the expectations attached to their usual name. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, it’s something a lot of authors have chosen to do. Josh Lacey lists 10 of his favorite pseudonymous books on The Guardian today. As much as it might be an obvious choice, I’d have to include The Running Man by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King). I’m not usually a fan of Stephen King’s writing, but that one was innovative and brutal long before anyone had thought of The Hunger Games. On with the list!

1. Tintin in Tibet by Hergé
Georges Remi originally signed his drawings with his initials. He then turned them around and used “RG” instead, which soon morphed into “Hergé”. (It makes sense if you pronounce the letters in a French accent.) I’ve always adored the Tintin books and, without realising what I was doing, borrowed from them when I wrote my own Grk books, the stories of a plucky boy and a little dog travelling around the world, combating injustice and solving mysteries.

2. The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Daniel Handler has written several novels under his own name, but none of them have achieved the fame and glory of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The 13-book sequence sags a little in the middle, but the first few books are absolutely brilliant, particularly the first of them all, which is a masterpiece of character and comedy. Handler’s greatest creation is his narrator, Lemony Snicket, a sad, lonely and utterly charming character whose melancholy tone pervades the series. Handler originally invented the name to hide behind when he baited neo-Nazis over the internet; his delicious mischievousness jumps off every page.

3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens took his pseudonym from the call of sailors on the Mississippi, shouting out “mark twain”, the depth of “two fathoms”. I was forced to read the story of Huck Finn at school and hated it. I picked it up again as an adult and fell in love. What could be a better spur to a story than this: “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out.” All the best children’s adventure stories begin in the same way: I was bored at home, tired of domestic life, so I set out to find some excitement…

4. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The perplexing games, puns and trickery of Alice in Wonderland begin with the author’s name. When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was thinking of a new name for himself, he took his first two names and translated them into Latin. That gave him “Carolus Lodovicus”. He switched them around and translated them back into English, ending up with Lewis Carroll.

5. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Robinson Crusoe
The first readers of Robinson Crusoe’s extraordinary adventures believed that they were reading an autobiography: the title page said Mr Crusoe’s book was “written by himself” and there were no hints to suggest any editors or ghostwriters had been involved. After 28 years on an island, he had dragged himself back to London and penned his life story. If it works, this is the best possible way to use a pseudonym: nothing stands between the readers and the truth of the story.

6. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Carlo Lorenzini was a journalist and satirist who thought his own best-known work was “childish twaddle”, which may have been why he published it under a pseudonym, taking his new name from the village near Florence where he spent his childhood. He didn’t like Pinocchio much, inflicting constant pain and humiliation on his fictional character, and had to be persuaded by his publishers to keep writing. The original story is much more rebellious and antagonistic than Disney’s version.

7. The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
I once read a biography of Theodore Seuss Geisel and learnt one snippet of biographical information that I’ve never forgotten. Whenever a journalist asked where he got his ideas, Dr Seuss would reply that he found them on his annual visit to Über Gletch, a small town in the Austrian Alps, where he went each year to get his cuckoo clock repaired. Here’s another nice fact about him: Dr Seuss didn’t just invent his own name, he made up the name of an imaginary daughter too, and even dedicated one of his books to her.

8. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart
Frankie Landau-Banks is a girl who finds herself confronted by a tricky problem: how can she be a teenager without being an idiot? She’s a pupil at an expensive, exclusive American boarding-school, where the girls are expected to be pretty, polite and dumb, and the smartest boys group themselves into a club which forbids entrance to females. If Frankie wants to be liked – or even loved – does she have to hide her intelligence, suffocate her wit and stifle her own imagination? This is a wonderfully funny and clever novel about a teenage girl refusing to obey the rules. Having read it, I discovered that the mysterious E Lockhart is also Emily Jenkins, the author of some excellent picture books.

9. Animal Farm by George Orwell
Eric Blair apparently borrowed his pseudonym from the river in Suffolk and added George for its solid Englishness. I can’t imagine Animal Farm was intended as a children’s book, but I read it as a child; like a great fable or fairy tale, it speaks to all readers, whatever their age, allowing each of them to find different pleasures.

10. The Story-Teller by Saki
This is the story of three kids on a train, whose aunt tells them a dull moral tale to pass the journey. Seeing how bored they are, another passenger takes over the narrative duties and tells a deliciously subversive story about a little girl who is so good that she’s given a chestful of medals. A hungry wolf comes past. The girl hides, but her trembling makes the medals clink and clatter. Alerted by the noise, the wolf finds her and gobbles her up. The aunt is furious: “A most improper story to tell to young children! You have undermined the effect of years of careful teaching.” Hector Hugh Munro didn’t write “The Storyteller” for children, but it is an example to anyone who does.