SIXTEEN DOLLARS

Every year, our local library has a used book sale. Some of the books are discards from the library, but most are donated to the sale by people who think they have no use for their books any longer. I admit to lacking an understanding of the latter source of books. I mean, come on, unless one went blind and had no heirs, how could a book possibly be of no use to its original owner? Yet, year after year, the Friends of Curtis Memorial Library set out dozens of tables and place thereon tons of books. This year, roughly 50,000 books were on offer.
Now some people, not to mention any names, like the name of a wife with red hair and four sons, think that it’s possible to have too many books, that more books than a certain number of books are superfluous and that there is not enough time to read them and no place to put them. Such people, when encountered, are best either ignored, or, if it is necessary to draw near, it is wise to approach with caution. Theirs is a madness which is highly unpredictable in nature.
However, in what I like to call middle middle age (the 50's: a great era for pop music, and, insofar as I have been able to ascertain, people as well) I have modified my approach to the library sale. In the past, I would hit the sale first thing Friday, standing in line perhaps and hour and a half before the doors were opened, and then go to those sections where I thought I might mine the most literary gold– at $2 a book. This usually cost a fair bit, but I deemed it worthwhile.
Saturday, when the books were half price (you can do the math, right, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?) I would head back to the same areas covered on Friday and gather those books I wanted from, say, the humor section, and then relocate them to the area reserved for books in Greek and Latin. Books from the general fiction and mystery sections would be relocated to the section with the engineering and math books. Then, on Sunday, I would stand in line again for more than an hour, rush in when the doors were flung open, and with the aid of my sons (there purely as sherpas) I would dash from one section to the other (usually with no one else in my way) and hand them piles of books that I had carefully secreted the day before. Then they put them in large boxes and stuck index cards labeled SAVED on top and then shove the boxes under the table. This process would take around ten minutes, and once the books were boxed, the children would be free to roam the sale, and gather such books as they wanted. Meanwhile, I would take the books from the boxes, carefully repack them in grocery bags, and place the bags on a sort of wheeled trolley. The boys would drift by and hand me such books as had stuck their fancies, and I would bag those as well. By the time I had all the books bagged, I would have pretty much filled the trolley, and we would head to the check out, where the dunnage was $2 a bag. One haul that I remember in particular netted a bit over 450 books at an average cost of seven cents per. Not too bad.
But now, in slothful middle middle age, I have, as I said, modified my approach. I manfully resist the siren song of the Friday sale, and I turn down the half price opportunities of Saturday and the chance for prerelocation. No, I merely get up in time to get to the Sunday sale about an hour before the starting gun, stand in line chatting with friends and booknuts, some I have known for thirty years, and then, when the doors are flung wide I simply race in, scour the appropriate tables at warp speed, and put the books I want in piles under the tables, still with the index cards that indicate they are taken. The scouring takes only an hour or an hour and a half at most– by that time, there is not much left, and then I clear a big space on the table, pack the books carefully into paper bags, and then when all is packed up, go hunt down a trolley and drag my haul to the check out.
This year, the take was a mere eight bags of books, a total cost of $16– less than the cost of a single new book at any of the finer book emporia that now dot this great land of ours.
Is it worth it? Well, let’s see. For the first time, and I dare say last time as well, I shall identify the books captured in the fray. Thank goodness this was not one of the larger hauls....
Feel free to skim, or skip to the end, where I expect to have a few more remarks.....
A few notes before we start. 1st means “first edition”; nbc means “not book club”; pb means “paperback”; hb means “hardcover”; mint means “in like new condition” and vg means roughly the same thing, though the price might have been clipped or there might be an inscription but that the book itself is in great shape. In addition exl does not mean “excellent”– it means “ex-library” in other words, a well used book discarded from the stacks of the library. I think that about covers it. So, here we go:

Side Effects, by Woody Allen, hb, vg. 1st?
Side Effects, by Woody Allen, hb, good. 1st
The Quintessential Cat, Robert Altman, pb, uncorrected proof, mint
Walter The Improbable Hound, Fred Ayer Jr., hb, mint save for inscription, 1st
The Lord Mayor of Death, Marian Babson, hb, exl, good
Dave Barry Is From Mars And Venus, pb, 1st pb, vg
Dave Barry Turns 40, 1st hb, vg
Dave Barry Slept Here, 1st, hb, mint
Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits, pb, 1st, mint
The Shepherd, The Angel, And Walter the Christmas Dog, Dave Barry, pb, good
Revenge of the Kali-Ra, K K Beck, hb, exl, vg, 1st
The World of Bemelmans, Ludwig Bemelmans, hb, 1st?, good
The Biltmore Estate, oversized pg, mint
The Burglar In The Closet, Lawrence Block, hb, book club, vg
Bangkok, John Blofeld, hb, oversized, vg, 1st
Forever, Erma, Erma Bombeck, hb, 1st, vg
Monsieur Pamplemousse Aloft, Michael Bond, pb, exl, good, 1st pb
The Garden Plot, J S Bothwick, hb, 1st, mint
The Cat Who Blew The Whistle, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, exl, 1st
The Cat Who Brought Down The House, Lilian Jackson Braun, pb, gd
The Cat Who Brought Down The House, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, 1st, exl, vg
The Cat Who Came To Breakfast, Lilian Jackson Braun, pb, exl, good
The Cat Who Came To Breakfast, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, 1st , mint
The Cat Who Dropped A Bombshell, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, large print, vg
The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare, Lilian Jackson Braun, pb, 1st pb, vg
The Cat Who Saw Stars, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, exl, 1st, vg
The Cat Who Smelled A Rat, Lilian Jackson Braun, hb, exl, good, 1st ?
Tales Too Ticklish To Tell, Berke Breathed, pb, 1st, good
Four Complete Mysteries, Simon Brett, hb, exl, good
The 2000 Year Old Man In The Year 2000, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, pb, 1st, vg
The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown, hb, mint, 1st?
The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown, hb, mint, 1st? (2nd copy)
Ultra Violet, Nancy Bush, hb, exl 1st, vg
Napalm & Silly Putty, George Carlin, hb, 1st, mint
Cassell’s French English Dictionary, 1st pb, good
The Life of the Party, Bennet Cerf, hb, vg, 1st
Paris, Rudolph Chelminski, hb, oversized, mint, 1st
Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet, hb, 6th printing, vg
Prizzi’s Family, Richard Condon, hb, vg, 1st?
Prizzi’s Glory, Richard Condon, hb, 1st US, mint
Childhood, Bill Cosby, hb, exl, 1st? vg
Childhood, Bill Cosby, hb, vg, 1st
A Six For The Toff, John Creasey, pb, vg, 2nd impression
Double For The Toff, John Creasey, pb, good
Feathers For The Toff, John Creasey, pb, second impression
Gideon’s Law, John Creasey, pb, vg
Gideon’s Raid, John Creasey, pb, good
Gideon’s Wrath, by John Creasey, pb, good,
Here Comes The Toff, John Creasey, pb, vg
Model For The Toff, John Creasey, pb, vg, 1st US pb
Salute the Toff, John Creasey, pb, good, 1st US
The Toff and the Golden Boy, John Creasey, pb, vg
The Toff and the Great Illusion, John Creasey, pb, exl, 1st pb? good
The Toff and the Kidnapped Child, John Creasy, pb, exl, ?
The Toff and the Runaway Bride, John Creasy, pb, exl?
The Toff and the Stolen Tresses, John Creasey, pb, vg
The Toff and the Toughs, John Creasey, pb, vg
The Toff In Town, John Creasey, pb, vg, exl, 1st UK(pb)
The Toff Goes To Market, John Creasey, pb, good
The Toff On Fire, John Creasey, pb, good
Next, by Michael Crichton, hb, 1st, exl
Cheap Shot, Jay Cronley, hb, exl, 1st, good
The Puzzled Heart, Amanda Cross, hb, book club ed, vg
The Divine Comedy Part One, Dante, pb, good
Paradise, by Patrick Dennis, hb, 1st, good
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, pb, mint
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle, pb, mint
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, pb, mint
Mr Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody, Finley Peter Dunne, pb, good
The Word Book II, Kaethe Ellis, hb, vg
Big City Eyes, Delia Ephron, hb, mint, 1st
A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, by Jules Feiffer, mint, hb, 1st
Southeast Asia, Fodor, pb, exl, (1999) good
Come To Grief, Dick Francis, pb, vg
Driving Force, Dick Francis, hb, mint, 1st
Straight, Dick Francis, hb, vg, 1st
Oh, The Things I Know, Al Franken, pb, 1st pb, vg
Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, by Al Franken, hb, mint, 1st
The Truth, Al Franken, hb, 1st, mint
Robert Frost’s Poems, pb, good
All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. Robert Fulghum, hb, vg
The Case of the Blonde Bonanza, Erle Stanley Gardner, hb, good
Role of Honor, John Gardner, vg, 1st?
Cat and Mouse, William Campbell Gault, hb, exl, vg, 1st
Cheaper By the Dozen, by Gilbreth etc, large print, hb, 1st? exl
Snooze, Alfred Gingold and John Buskin, pb, 1st , vg
Snooze, Alfred Gingold and John Buskin, pb, 1st, vg (2nd copy)
A Death For A Dilettante, E X Giroux, hb, exl, 1st, vg
The Boston Basin Bicycle Book, Goldfrank and Humez, pb, 1st, good
C is for Corpse, Sue Grafton, pb, vg
F is for Fugitive, by Sue Grafton, pb, vg
H is for Homicide, Sue Grafton, hb, large print, vg
J is for Judgment, Sue Grafton, exl, hb, vg, 1st
M is for Malice, Sue Grafton, pb, vg,
O is for Outlaw, Sue Grafton, hb, 1st, mint
P is for Peril, Sue Grafton, hb, 1st, mint
Rotten Apples, Edith Pinero Green, hb, 1st, exl
Perfect Fools, Edith Pinero Green, hb, exl, 1st, good
Sneaks, Edith Pinero Green, 1st, exl, good
How To Live With A Calculating Cat, Eric Gurney, pb, 1st pb?
Enigma,by Robert Harris, hb, 1st, mint
A Treasury of Great Mysteries, Howard Haycraft and John Beecroft, hb good
Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon, pb, vg
Pel and the Headless Corpse, Mark Hebden, hb, exl, 1st US, vg
Grooks, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Grooks 3, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Grooks 3, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Grooks 4, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Grooks 5, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Grooks 5, Piet Hein, pb, vg
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein. Pb, vg/g
The Enthusiast, Peter Hill, hb, exl, good, 1st US
The Fanatics, Peter Hill, hb, exl, good, 1st US
The Wood Beyond, Reginald Hill, hb, vg, 1st?
Blandings’ Way, Eric Hodgins, hb, book club, mint
The Illiad, Homer, pb, vg
The Odyssey, Homer, pb, good
John Keats 1795-1995, Houghton Library, pb vg, 1st
Barcelona, Robert Hughs, hb, 1st, mint
Exotic Aquarium Fishes, William Innes, hb, vg
Any Place I Hang My Hat, Susan Isaacs, hb, exl, 1st
The Black Tower, P D James, pb, exl, 1st pb, vg
Le Marriage by Diane Johnson, hb, 2st, mint
C B Greenfield: The Piano Bird, Lucille Kallen, hb, book club, exl, vg
The Devil Met A Lady, Stuart Kaminsky, hb, 1st, exl, vg
Hard Currency, Stuart Kaminsky, pb, 1st mass pb, vg
Lake Woebegone Days, Garrison Keillor, hb, mint, book club
Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor, pb, vg
Pontoon, Garrison Keillor, hb, 1st, mint
We Are Still Married, Garrison Keillor, hb, book club, vg
Monday The Rabbi Took Off, Harry Kemelman, hb, exl, vg, 1st ?
One Fine Day The Rabbi Bought A Cross. Harry Kemelman, pb, 1st pb, vg
One Fine Day The Rabbi Bought A Cross, Harry Kemmelman, hb, 1st, exl, good
Wednesday The Rabbi Got Wet, Harry Kemelman, hb, vg, 1st ?
One Fell Sloop, Susan Kenney, exl 1st, good
Iowa, Deborah Kent, hb, vg, 3rd printing
Please Don’t Eat The Daises, by Jean Kerr, vg, hb, 1st
Please Don’t Eat The Daises, by Jean Kerr, vg, hb, book club
Please Don’t Eat The Daisies, by Jean Kerr, exl, rebound, good
The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch, hb, good
On The Road With Charles Kuralt, Charles Kuralt, hb, 1st ?, vg
The Face On The Wall, Jane Langton, hb, book club? vg
Larousse’s Eng-French/French-Eng Dictionary, 56th printing, pb, good
Larousses’ Eng-French/French-Eng Dictionary, 83rd printing. pb, good
Right On The Money, Emma Lathen, hb, vg, 1st
Something In the Air, Emma Lathen, hb, vg, large print
Call For The Dead, John LeCarre, hb, vg, 1st (!)
Our Game, John LeCarre, hb, 1st trade, mint
The Road To Omaha, Robert Ludlum, pb, good
The Complete Yes, Minister, Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, pb, 1st US, vg
One More Sunday, John D MacDonald, hb, book club, vg
The Balloon Man, Charlotte MacLeod, hb, 1st, mint
The Gladstone Bag, Charlotte MacLeod, hb, 1st, mint save for inscription
The Resurrection Man, Charlotte MacLeod, hb, 1st, near mint
Hurricane Peak, Margaret Mahy, by, exl, 1st, vg
Gideon’s Lot, J J Marric, hb, exl, 1st , good
Encore Provence, Peter Mayle, hb, 1st, mint
The Big Bad City, Ed McBain, hb, vg
Fiddlers, Ed McBain, hb, exl, 1st?
Heat, Ed McBain, hb, vg, 1st?
Heat, Ed McBain, exl, worn
Lullaby, Ed McBain, hb, exl, 1st, good
The McBain Brief, pb, exl, vg
Puss In Boots, Ed McBain, hb, 1st, mint
Rumplestiltskin, Ed McBain, hb, book club, vg
Fletch Reflected, Gregory McDonald, hb, exl, 1st?, vg
Flynn, Gregory McDonald, pb, exl, 1st, good
Coming Into The Country, John McPhee, hb, vg, 5th printing
Italian In A Nutshell, Nicholas Milella, hb, good
Paradise Lost, John Milton, pb, vg, 7th pb ed
The Student’s Milton, hb, vg
Rumpole and the Angel of Death, John Mortimer, hb, exl, 1st US, vg
Felix in the Underworld, John Mortimer, hb, vg, 1st US
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Farley Mowat, pb, vg, 3rd pd ed
Peppers, Amal Naj, hb, mint, 2nd printing
Canada’s Incredible Coasts, National Geographic, hb, 1st ? , mint
The Country Garden, Josephine Nuese, hb, exl, 1st?
All The Trouble In The World, P J O’Rourke, hb, exl, vg, 1st
All The Trouble In The World, P J O’Rourke, hb. mint, 1st
Parliament of Whores, P J O’Rourke, hb, good, 8th printing
The Detective and Mr Dickens, William J Palmer, hb, vg, 1st? book club?
Dead Lock, Sara Paretsky, hb, book club? vg
Chance, Robert B Parker, by, exl, 1st, near mint
Early Autumn, Robert B Parker, pb, 3rd, good
Baby, It’s Cold Outside, S. J. Perelman, hb, vg
The Last Camel Died At Noon, Elizabeth Peters, hb, 1st, exl
Dover Goes To Pott, Joyce Porter, hb, 1st, exl, good
Roger Fishbite by Emily Prager, hb, mint, 1st
Omerta, Mario Puzzo, hb, 1st, mint
Buster’s World, Bjarne Reuter, j-hb, vg,
The Cooking School Murders, Virginia Rich, pb, good, 1st pb
Lord Peter, Dorothy Sayers, pb, 1st pg ed, good, exl
Lord Peter Views The Body, Dorothy Sayers, pb, good
Think Thinner, Snoopy, Charles Schulz, pb, good,
As You Like It, Sharkespeare, pb, vg
Hamlet, Shakespeare, pb, good
Henry IV Part One, Shakespeare, pb, vg
King Lear, Shakespeare, pb, good
King Lear, Shakespeare, pb, vg
Macbeth, Shakespeare, pb, good
Measure For Measure, Shakespeare, pb, good
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare, pb, good
Othello, Shakespeare, pb, good
The Tempest, Shakespeare, pb, good
Maigret and The Killer, by George Simenon. exl, hb, 1st US
What’s Up Doc, Carole Smith, pb, 1st pb
Life In A Putty Knife Factory, H Allen Smith, hb, vg,
Write Me A Poem, Baby, H Allen Smith, hb, 4th printing, vg
The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American, Jeff Smith, hb, vg, 1st?
Meet Andy Capp, Reginald Smythe, pb, first, good
The Dan Quayle Quiz Book, Jeremy Solomon and Ken Brady, pb, 1st, mint
Oedipus and Antigone, Sophocles, pg, vg
One Foot In Heaven, Hartzell Spence, hb, vg,
Willard Lives! By Robert L Steed, mint, hb, 1st ?
Florida, Lynn M Stone, hb, good, 6th ed
Client Privilege, William Tapply, hb, exl, 1st, good
Alarms and Diversions, James Thurber, hv, vg, 1st
Fables For Our Times, James Thurber, hb, 1st, vg
Men, Women and Dogs, James Thurber, hb, 1st, vg
My Life And Hard Times, James Thurber, pb, vg
Thurber Country, James Thurber, hb, mint
Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin, pb, vg
Ask For May, Settle For June, G B Trudeau, pb, 1st, vg
We’re Not Out Of The Woods Yet, G B Trudeau, pb, 1st, vg
The Wreck of the Rusty Nail, G B Trudeau, 1st, pb, vg
The Passion of Artemisia, Susan Vreeland, hb, mint, 1st?
More Bushisms, Jacob Weisberg, pb, 1st, mint
The Last Italian Joke Book, by Larry Wilde, pb, vg, 3rd ed
Housewarming, Charlie Wing, pb, good, 1st
Notre-Dame De Paris, Richard and Clara Winston, hb, vg, 1st?

That’s the end of the list. Two hundred twenty nine books, and that’s not counting the two I tossed, one because it was too torn up, the other because it was too weird and not what I thought it was. So, doing the math, that comes to, wait for it... yes, you guessed it, seven cents a copy. I suppose this isn’t too much of a surprise, after all, it’s how one packs the books in bags that determines the unit cost. I suppose if I ran into that million volume set about civilization that broke so many book shelves in the 1970s and tried to pack that in, it could mess up the average. But without purposely trying to get more or fewer paperbacks or hardcovers or oversized books, it came to seven cents a copy. If you waded through the list, you will have noticed a fair number of mint first editions that are worth considerably more than the sixteen big ones I had to lay down to take these home.
But, of course, they’re not all going home. Most will live at the Summer Palace, and weigh down the shelves there (okay, once I build them). But a fair number are to give away. That book on Paris is for a friend who secretly lives in France. The Yes Minister book goes to a former colleague in China, who was addicted to the television program, and who speaks with a clipped British accent when he speaks English. Several are for the oldest boy and his status quo. The book on Florida is for a pal who is living there on a temporary basis (until she regains her sanity) and moves back to New England. The book about Boston bike rides is for a girl in a Boston burb who keeps crashing into trees. I’m hoping this book will get her on to safer bike paths. Some I got for the better half to read. And most of the rest will be utilized when the Summer Reading Urge surfaces in one of the denizens lurking and whiling at the Summer Palace, here on the pacific western shores of the lake they call Sheepscot Pond.

TRE UOMINI

The title of the most important book in my life is nothing if not straightforward: Three Men In A Boat. The words, both taken together or rendered divided are clear, the meaning is nothing short of unmistakable.
And yet, either through confusion, an improper quotient of attention to detail, or as a result of out and out perversity, it would appear as though Italian publishers of this book, now exactly 120 years old and in print since the day it was first published, simply do not understand the utterly simple premise of the book. Three Men. In A Boat. How hard can it be?
But here we have Tre uomini in barca, an Oscar Mondadori edition, with a cover featuring a couple of people setting a fishing net from the stern of a stubby row boat. Neither is the boat remotely anything like a Thames River Skiff, nor are the people three men, and they are setting a net, something that does not take place anywhere between the two covers of the book, unless the translation is significantly changed from that of the original English text.

Perhaps, I thought, this confusion is limited to just this one Italian publisher. And so I sought out, in the quiet and narrow backwaters of Florence, another book seller, and once found, in English with abundant gestures, made clear my wishes: a copy of Three Men In A Boat. Ah yes, the fellow at the desk said, I have exactly what you want (though he said it in Italian I understood him perfectly). He went over and pulled from the shelf a copy of Tre uomini in barca (per tracer del cane), clearly a copy of Three Men In A Boat (to say nothing of the dog)– the book’s actual full title. But immediately underneath it said as well, “Una Gita Tragicomica”– a tragicomic journey. Tragicomic? If ever there was bound a book without the slightest bit of the tragic, it would have to be Three Men In A Boat. Had the publishers, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli actually read the pages of the book? Certainly this additional and heretofore unencountered descriptive subhead suggested that they had not. And as if to confirm this, the illustration on the cover of the book, by Auguste Renoir, features two, not three, men and a boat, but the boat so nicely rendered is of a scull that would seat but one person, or two with a coxwain, but never three, and which would do for a bit of exercise, but featured nothing in common with the skiff Jerome described, having no room for the third man, nor the dog, nor their provisions nor room to sleep.
As if to confirm the Italy-wide custom of not following the plot of the story, a third edition, procured from a very vociferous if entirely unintelligible book seller of advanced age and smelling of wine and book mold, who clearly loved his small book shop located in a virtually untraveled alley of Florence, had on its cover, surprisingly, an illustration taken from one of the earliest (English) editions of the book. But this illustration, which within the book accompanies a small and wholly irrelevant side tangent to the main story– the hazards of having young lovers tow a boat with a line– would be guaranteed to mislead any would-be reader unfamiliar with the actual story. La Biblioteca Ideale Tascabile thus managed to continue the Italian tradition of obfuscation of the story that we have seen in every other edition published in this country so removed in time, distance and perspective from the place of the book’s origin.
Why the Italians so perversely affix obfuscating or misleading drawings on the cover of this classic book, I do not pretend to understand. Other publishers in other countries do not suffer from this compulsion. The Chinese, the Bulgarians, the French and the Russians are not afflicted with this ailment. Nor are the Americans, English, Canadian or Australian publishers of the book. German and Swedish editions have cover illustrations that tie directly to the main theme. Why not the Italians, what is it about them that they either do not comprehend, or, comprehending steadfastly and perversely refuse to choose an illustration for the cover of the book that makes sense? I confess that while I observe this custom that I do not understand it. Further investigation in the years to come may reveal the answer to this riddle of the Italian publishing brotherhood, but for the moment, we shall have to be content merely to recognize its existence and to recognize that the world today is still a mysterious and incompletely understood marvel of creation.

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak
furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on
the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible
leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and
fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat
upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully,
gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister
intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened
and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic,
leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous
lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

A BOOK WORTH BURNING

Well, okay, maybe not-- book burning is a Very Bad Thing. But so is Playing In Traffic. To call the book vile is to slander everything else you already think of as vile. The author picks an easy target to vilify-- a tempting bit of Goth girlhood-- and uses her to show the evil that women do. It's like those old movies they showed in Health Class 30 years ago, where the drunk pregnant girl with an STD bends over to pick up her cigarettes while driving and crashes her car. Boogah, boogah. I wouldn't call the author a simpleton-- she can write well enough, but the book is written at the black and white level, and children reading it will either be alarmed, scared, or laugh it off as the rubbish it is. I wouldn't give it to any of my four children, and good parents and teachers everywhere should follow my lead. I sincerely hope the author finds a new line of work, where she can do less damage to the body politic. Something like opening a toxic waste disposal site.

TROIS HOMMES

Three Men In A Boat is my favorite book of all time. I suppose this makes Jerome K Jerome my favorite author, but if not for this book, I don't suppose I would be a collector of his works, which I am.
Three Men In A Boat was published more than one hundred years ago and has never been out of print. It has been published in at least twenty six languages and countless editions, many of them not altogether properly authorized. At this point, it's a moot point, as the book has been out of any copyright for quite a while. There are many fine editions currently in print including reprints of the first edition by Arrowsmith.
I decided that I should start to include foreign editions in my collection and began with an edition published by Hachette in 1947, with illustrations by Jean Routier.
I have come across many editions of Three Men In A Boat, but this version of Trois Hommes Dans Un Bateau has what may be the worst illustrations I have ever seen. The three men of the title, rendered by Routier, look like three youths, and three French youths at that.
Have later versions been offered in France with better illustrations? Or no illustrations at all, which would be a marked improvement over those by Routier? We shall see.

Gruff

Three Billy Goats Gruff.
What's up with that? Was it written by Yoda?
Why isn't it called Three Gruff Billy Goats?

Libris Ho!

It was fifteen years ago that I built the portion of our house that was to house our bedroom and my study. Of course, immediately after completion of the construction, we left the United States for a year and a half. And by immediately, I mean the next day.
We came back, and despite spending a portion of the next thirteen and a half years in res, the study grew every more unstudylike and ever more warehouselike. My old (really old, around 130 years old) roll top desk became hidden by piles and boxes, then those became hidden by yet more stuff. The book shelves remained unbuilt, the wood stove uninstalled, the mice took over and a state of semi-forgotten quiet became the room's own.
And so it might have remained, save for The Wife. Last year, she decided that it Was Time for me to move in to my study and start to use it for its intended purpose. She pressed offspring into unwilling service, moving boxes and boxes of books and other detritus into the basement, building material into the barn, And debris into the rubbish bins. She swept and cleaned. After a time, she said, "There. Now you can use it."
It still needed a bit of work, to say the least, but it was true that there was a space in the middle-- a fairly big space, and room to move things around. I put together a table that we had bought a year or so earlier, and moved it in. Then I relocated the roll top desk, and bought a carpet. I replaced the dead light bulbs (odd, what the passage of a decade and a half will do to light bulbs...) and started thinking again of how I wanted to build the book shelves that I'll need to absorb the few thousand books cluttering up the rest of the house. It's not that I have a lot of books, but the house doesn't have much in the way of book shelves, so it seems like a lot. A friend has promised to help with the design and construction, which won't be trivial, but at the end of the day, I'll be able to take the books out of the piles and heaps and boxes where they now reside and put them, spine out, on yards and yards of nice new shelves.
Meanwhile, amidst the clutter that remains, I've been working, not on the study, but in the study, doing the sort of work one would do there, appropriately. I've been writing and editing. It's great! It's not done yet, but the beginning of the end is in sight! Whoo, hoo!

Hybrid Books

The design for my garden is my own, but the basis comes from two gardening books, both fairly good, both differently philosophied. The first, Square Foot Gardening is your basic traditional more-from-less, intensive gardening book, easy to read, and with clear and plentiful graphics. A ten-year-old could not only follow along, but could do the things described in this book.
Then there is the second book, a bit less traditional, but springing from sound technique, a nice short book, nearly bereft of diagrams, but full of sprightly good humor, by a couple of guys who have written together (with success) before. It's by Tom Christopher and Marty Asher. Very cute, The 20-Minute Vegetable Gardener : Gourmet Gardening for the Rest of Us is a funny book, but so loaded with information that one has to go back and reread it to remember how to do what to get where, at least according to these guys.
It would be nice if one could say, "I want a book with a dash of this, and a dollop of that, a spoon of this, well mixed but fluffy" and poof! There's your book, just what you want. But we haven't reached that point yet, so we have to read our own groups of books, and then stir them together in our own minds and create them ourselves. Sometimes the result is something tangible, such as a garden. Other times it might be something fuzzier, maybe a Philosophy Of Life. But this process of mixing, collating, sifting is our own, not the task of some outside agency, and the books we read serve only as the most raw of ingredients...