Jacob's Papers

Meet Jake: human, husband, curator of relics, bearer of burdens, troublemaker, fool, father of two. As his daughter tells it, "I wished my father would change the world and fix every broken thing. But oh no, no, not him.

"More than anything, he loved paper. Paper, paper, paper. Mountains of paper. He couldn't get enough of it. He wrote on it--he wrote and wrote and wrote. He traveled some--he wrote about that. He walked a lot--he wrote about that. He worked in bookstores and wrote about that. He worked in museums and wrote about that.

"I speak of my father, Jacob Friedman Wright, most of whose life was lived in a time when computers were still a novelty, and there was not yet the Internet. He was a collector. His house was filled with stuff, flea market finds, thrift shop junk. He would pick things up off the street. Seriously. He collected 'artifacts, ' as he called them. And books. Books about the arts and crafts movement, mainly, along with every sort of miscellaneous book about life on earth, philosophy, planets, and physics. If the book was published in the year 1912 or the author had been born or had died in the year 1912, so much the better.

"In Camperdene, Massachusetts, as it happened, they had been looking for a new curator for their Museum of the Year 1912. After the Museum Association's Board of Directors had appointed my father curator, the Chairman, Wallace Barrow, had moved in close to him, had placed a long arm around his shoulder, and had whispered ominously, 'Don't get this wrong, Jacob Wright. You're the dog. Don't let the tail wag you.'

"You could say this book is the story of how the tail wagged him."

Tom Foran Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of the nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, teacher, journalist, and abolitionist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn; The House of Great Spirit, a collection of short stories; and Freewheeling, a fiction series in four parts based on an actual long bike ride taken by the author and a friend: (I) Riding in Italy, (II) Derailed in North Africa, (III) Rambling in Spain, and (IV) Writing on Crete. Clark was born in Burbank and raised in Torrance, California. He received a bachelor's degree from Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and a master's degree from Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts. He has worked variously in publishing, public relations, advertising, marketing, museums, and libraries as a desk clerk, archivist, graphic artist, editor, quality controller, manager, and director. Beyond the peripatetic busyness of moonlighting as an antiquarian book scout for the Bungalow Shop online, nowadays he likes to sit on a simple wooden chair strategically located under the skies and stars over Southern California midway between Laguna Beach and Joshua Tree National Park, quietly contemplating infinity and his own and others' little journeys.