Where The Books Come From

Can anyone else look at certain books and not only remember where they were bought, but have a vivid memory of the store or sale itself? I have books I can look at and just be transported back into time:

All my Lord Peter Wimsey books came from the old Paperback Books store in downtown Providence, on Weybosset Street across from the Outlet Company department store. If I could go back in time, I could walk in that store today and still find my way around. The classics were up front, including those inexpensive paperbacks where the covers separated from the spine the first time you opened them (I still have my copy of Bob, Son of Battle that is like this). The mystery books were in the right-hand rear corner of the store, and the Wimsey books close to the dark linoleum floor. At the left-hand side of the store were shelves where the latest media-based books were kept. If a movie was coming out that had a novelization, or if a novel was being released as a movie and had a special movie cover, these books were all located on a bookcase on that side of the store. I remember buying my novelization of the movie Cromwell with Alec Guinness as King Charles (we saw it on a field trip) there.

All my Get Smart original novels (nine of them) each came from a different store; I used to be able to remember all of them, but my memory now fails me. The first book, Get Smart!, came from the Woolworths at Garden City Shopping Center. This was a "second home" for us sometimes; it carried everything from underwear to calendars (I'd buy a blank calendar from the stationery department every year, then illustrate each month with "scenes" from my stories), books to budgies (my budgie Frisky was a Woolworths budgie), ice trays, Christmas candy, and the best fresh-popped popcorn in town next to the fresh-popped at Ann & Hope (the Rhode Island version of Walmart). The second book in the series came from the Outlet Company downtown; the books were on the first floor at the back, next to the bakery/coffee shop. Mom would leave me there while shopping, relieving me from the boredom of tagging after her while she bought clothes (ugh) or shoes (double ugh). The paperbacks were on tall racks, with larger books on pallets in the center of the area.

Wyoming Summer, Mary O'Hara's memoir of life living on a Wyoming ranch, became the basis for her Ken McLaughlin novels starting with My Friend Flicka, I found at a used book sale that was being held at Garden City Shopping Center. The cover was rippled, probably from being wet, but the book was fine. I still remember the day, sunny, with a breeze, and my looking over the books piled on the outdoor tables and seeing the familiar author's name. I remember getting the third book, Green Grass of Wyoming, in a drugstore in Cumberland, Rhode Island, that we accidentally stopped at after heading to an outdoor summer concert at Diamond Hill. I had the first two books in the series (the other is Thunderhead) and didn't even know the third book existed until I saw it on the spinner rack. It was 75¢, a horrendous price for a paperback back then when the average price was 60¢, and Mom bought it for me for a good report card.

I must not forget Janette Sebring Lowery's Margaret, about a Texas hill girl sent to live in the big city with her uncle and aunt. It takes place in 1906, but the publisher had put a 70s-style girl on the cover. I was checking out the description when I realized that this was the book that had inspired the serial "Annette" on the classic Mickey Mouse Club. I found it on a spinner rack in Nayco, the "five-and-dime" that had replaced Woolworths on Rolfe Street in Cranston, Rhode Island. The changeover back then was nearly seamless; the store had the same wooden shelving and checkerboard linoleum floor and display windows as it had as a Woolworths. You could find barrettes and hair nets and inexpensive Christmas ornaments and flip-flops and packaged underpants here, and the place was a sweet, sweet trip into the past.

I have dozens of other books that not only bring me joy when I read them, but when I look at them and remember where they came from. It's always a happy journey.

Books Read Since May 15

• Autumn, Susan Branch
I adore Branch's wonderful whimsical watercolor handwritten books, but they can be pricy, which is why I scooped up this from the remainder table with glee. Poetry, recipes, minute illustrations, quotations, memories, all about the fall of the year, Thanksgiving, and Hallowe'en.

• Re-read: Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman
I picked up my original copy of this book from the metal racks at Nayco, the Woolworth's knockoff that occupies the old Woolworth's on Rolfe Street in Cranston, RI (or at least it still did as late as two years ago). I had heard of the book and the movie, but thought it was a dull narrative about a schoolteacher in the inner city until I saw the clever way the tale was told, with letters, school bulletins, memos, minutes, notebooks, and the frank student suggestion box entries from the teachers and students at the fictional but all-too-real "Calvin Coolidge High School." The memorable characters are by now family: idealistic new teacher Sylvia Barrett, the wise Bea Schacter, the flippant Paul Barringer, the kids including Alice Blake, Carole Blanca, Jose Rodriguez, and of course the "Adm. Ass." himself, J.J. McHabe and troublemaker Joe Ferone.

• Take Big Bites, Linda Ellerbee
A gourmet meal and the best dessert ever, all in one book. I have Ellerbee's previous two books and this is just as delightfully written. This time it's Ellerbee's adventures around the world and within herself, whether it's befriending people in Italy or Greece or England or taking on river rapids and hiking along the Thames. She lives with gusto and it spills out in a joyous celebration in this delightful set of tales (with some soul-searching along the way). Go on, take big bites.

• Murder in Little Italy, Victoria Thompson
The next (in paperback, anyway) in Thompson's series of mysteries about Sarah Brandt, widowed midwife in the poverty-stricken areas of Victorian New York City. This time she's mixed up in a murder that develops after a supposedly premature baby is born looking full-term to an Irish girl who married into a contentious Italian family, sparking off not only a police investigation but a gang war between the Irish and the Italians. Sarah's growing romance with Frank Malloy continues to move at a glacial pace as he grows no closer looking into the death of her husband, Dr. Tom Brandt, who she married despite the disapproval of her wealthy parents. Another good look at the sad, desperate lives of the poor in the 19th century along with a perplexing mystery.

• Treasury of Easter Celebrations
An Ideals gift-book size publication with lovely photos, poetry.

• The Flight of the Silver Turtle, John Fardell
Fardell's sequel to his cracking tale, 7 Professors of the Far North, isn't quite up to its predecessor, but it's great for nonstop action in the vein of those great old kids' series like Danny Dunn, with a touch of John Verney's Callendar family stories to boot, which takes off almost immediately. Each of the kids—Sam, Zara, Ben, Marcia, and Adam—get to use his or her own particular talent to again help the adults out of a jam, which involves the mystery of a hidden secret from World War II. The novel transportation feature the children use in the first book is just so memorable that the ones featured in the sequel pale slightly in comparison. Also, the villains of this novel seem more like conventional Doctor Who-type meglomaniacs as opposed to the sinister machinations in the original, which reminded me of the sinister menace in Pullman's The Golden Compass (Northern Lights). Best of all, the children are smart but not smartass, and the adults are not stooges for the kids.

• A Time to Remember, Ideals
Nostalgic poetry and essays, with the usual lovely Ideals photography.

• The Merry Christmas Book, Ideals
As always with their annual releases, contained are lovely winter photos, filler drawings, and nostalgic or thoughtful poetry or essays. These books are meant for curling up with a fleece throw on a sofa on a chilly day, to read and sip a hot beverage.

• The New Guideposts Christmas Treasury
A Guideposts collection of inspirational, thoughtful, and often amusing stories about families discovering the Christmas spirit. As far as I'm concerned, there can't be too many books that remind folks that Christmas isn't about getting big-box gifts and becoming a glutton. Even if you're not a churchgoer, these gentle stories, interspersed with poetry, recall close times with those you love.

• The Old Iron Road, David Haward Bain
In 1999, David Bain published Empire Express, a history of the building of the United States' first transcontinental railroad. He then took his wife and two children on a 7,000 mile automobile odyssey, following the route of the railroad (with several detours in Nevada) and the old Lincoln Highway, from Kansas City to San Francisco. This is the engaging detail-crammed story of that trip. Bain mixes history, trivia, Old West personalities, pioneer tales, landscapes, fellow history buffs, railroading—not to mention the story of the family trip—in marvelous detail. Along the way they visit museums, ghost towns, old railroad cuts, scenes of triumph and scenes of disaster: Promontory Point, Donner Lake, the track of the Humboldt (which Alistair Cooke so movingly described in one sequence of America) and more. Maybe a bit of my fondness for this narrative is due to the two cross-country trips I took with my parents in the 1970s (although we stuck to the interstate and didn't visit any of the fascinating places Bain talks about) as I recall those majestic or forbidding landscapes we traversed in our own car.

Books Read Since March 29

• A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray

I was caught up enough in this book about Victorian girls at a posh boarding school who become involved with magic to buy the sequel, although I do agree with the reviewers that all the characters are self-centered. However, most girls of that age are, and wealthy girls were brought up to be self-centered. I can't say the leading character is altogether likable, but she is absorbing to follow.

• Trouble in Spades, Heather Webber

I don't usually read second books in a series first, but I found this on the $1 spinner at Dollar General. It's about a woman who does landscaping who has recently been divorced, her prima-donna sister, and assorted other crazies. I found this cute but nothing special. I usually don't have problems with a multiple cast of characters, but all the players in this one made my head spin. Also it seems there were too many weird neighbors to go along with the weird relatives.

• Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin

I've seen this in paperback at the store, but this particular volume I found in hardback at the Smithsonian on discount. I was fascinated, not just due to the examination of how animals percieve the world differently, but also by the fact that the author is autistic, but has learned to cope with the chaotic (to her) world of the non-autistic. I have a friend with an autistic child, but his condition is more serious than the author's and it gave me an insight into his world.

• I started reading the Civil War mystery A Grave at Glorietta (another $1 spinner acquisition, since I'm not much of a Civil War buff), but I ended up forgetting it at the bank on Saturday morning and it wasn't worth going back for.

• The Rocking Chair Reader: Coming Home

This is a feel-good anthology of Chicken Soup for the Soul-like stories about people's memories of growing up and returning to the small towns where they either grew up or spent a lot of time (with grandparents or other relatives). If you have similar memories, or just want to see what it was like, these are sweet stories, but I didn't like them well enough to keep the book.

• Re-reads: Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, both about fan fiction, although Jenkins and Bacon-Smith both discuss "songtapes" and Jenkins addresses filksongs. These are two 1992 classic texts about fandom and fan fiction. I also have Jenkins and Tulloch's study of Star Trek and Doctor Who fans, which I have not re-read lately. I would like to get some of Jenkins' (and others) books about fandom in the age of the Internet.

How Can So Many Memories Fit Into One Little Book? #1

Does anyone else have books that are more than just books, because they have become part of the time and place that you first read them?

Back during college I happened to catch the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Murder Must Advertise (this was before the British mysteries were spun off to Mystery). I remember Alistair Cooke's delightful commentary on the British society portrayed by Sayers, but most of all I remember Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter. Many people complain he was too old for the role and I suppose he was, but he fit the bill perfectly.

In any case, this caused me to go out and buy all the Wimsey books, and several weeks ago I dug out my copy of The Nine Tailors again and plumped happily into the affairs of little Fenchurch St. Paul and making agreeable reacquaintance of Lord Peter, the inestimable Mervyn Bunter (Wimsey's faithful gentleman's gentleman), the garrilous Reverend Venables, precocious Hilary Thorpe, the Thodays and all the working-class folks of the village—and of the eight-bell ring in the large village church: the bells John, Jericho, Jubilee, Saboath, Batty Thomas, Gaude, Dimity, and Tailor Paul. (That's all from memory!) Tailor Paul is the tenor bell, which is rung nine strokes whenever a man dies, which gives the novel its name.

I can't sniff the book print in this one without falling deep, deep into a time machine and coming out in the midst of the little Paperback Books (that's what it was called, and that's what you made the check out to) store that used to be on Weybosset Street in Providence in the 1960s and 1970s. It was across the street from Providence's signature department store, the Outlet Company.

Compared to the designer stores we have today, the paperback bookstore wasn't much on decoration. The show windows in front were always filled with books whose covers were fading from the sun. When you entered, you faced an L-shaped floor plan and the linoleum on the floor was cracked and broken. The cashier sat in a booth that was reached by a short flight of stairs, so she could overlook the store for shoplifters. Racks of books were even set up against this booth. The bookshelves were plain wood, nothing much—but they were crammed with books, books, books... The shelves reached up to about six feet, and then the remainder of the wall and then entire ceiling was covered with posters: rock bands, television favorites, even those black-light psychedelic things so favored in the late 60s. No coffee shop, no games, no overbright lighting—just filled bookshelves and the heady scent of bookprint.

The paperback bookstore had the best media book section anywhere. If a television series had a novelization based on it, or if a book was being made into a movie, it showed up on their shelves long before it hit the screen or theatre. I still have my copy of Cromwell that I bought after we had seen the Richard Harris movie as a school field trip.

The cashier there, a heavyset young woman, was also fannish. One day I was surprised to see what looked like some typeset 8 1/2 by 11 pages stapled together with a colored cardstock cover with drawings of some Star Trek characters on it. I looked at it, but it was priced more than I had. I wish I'd picked it up; it was the infamous "Night of the Twin Moons" Sarek/Amanda fanzine, the very first time I'd ever seen one. I didn't realize what it was until I read the book Star Trek Lives!

The mystery books were off in the back right corner—I can remember the whole floor plan as if it were yesterday—and the Lord Peter Wimsey books were on the right wall, a shelf or two from the bottom. They were $1.25 in those days, a vast sum, and I ended up buying two at the time from my college textbook money without telling my mother. (I bought the trade paperback, Lord Peter, with all the Wimsey short stories including the elusive "Talboys," which takes place after Peter and Harriet have three sons, and my mother had a fit when she found out I paid...ulp!...$3.95 for it!) Most of the books were published by Avon, but for some reason The Nine Tailors was owned by another publisher, Harcourt, so all my copies don't match. I swallowed them all like sweets and then read them a second time, and some, like Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors, over and over again.

When I open up The Nine Tailors, I open the door to the paperback bookstore again, hear the bell, sniff the ink scent that is more compelling than any perfume...

"There Are Bricks Flying By"

It was one of those rainy summers through July, then August raised sweltering temps, exhausting for people without air conditioning in three-story homes. In September it began to rain again, until the ground was saturated.

Mary worked through it all in a factory in Providence, RI, on Pine Street. She was 21 and had had to quit school to take care of her mother in 11th grade. When September 21 turned out to be sunny and pleasant, she was almost reluctant to go in that day.

Later that morning the wind picked up, however--it grew cloudy, then dark. Her workplace had big windows on one side of the room so that the lights were augmented by natural sunlight on nice days. Today she had to peer at her work.

Then, in the early afternoon, she looked outside and saw bricks flying, one by one, past the windows. It was raining steadily and then hard, lashing the glass.

She mentioned it to her supervisor, who only told her to get back to work. She was doing piece work at the time and every minute she dawdled meant a penny or two less in her paycheck. When she mentioned the bricks to other people, they only pooh-poohed her. Once she said she was going home early, but was told to sit down and do her work.

A scant half-hour before quitting time they announced, "It's pretty stormy out. Everyone can leave early."

Mary was lucky--she didn't have to take the bus home or walk as always; a girlfriend's brother had called: "I'm coming to pick you up." They had to walk six blocks in driving rain and were drenched by the time they got to the car.

When she got home her mother was frantic. Her father had chosen that day to go up to their vegetable garden allotment and was not back yet. The power was out and Mary's younger brother trudged to the hardware store in drenching rain to buy kerosene for the storm lanterns. At nine o'clock, finally, a voice from the darkness outside asked, "Hey! Where are all the lights?"

It was her father, who had had to take a different bus to get home in the storm and then got trapped downtown as a storm surge flooded Providence. Mary's niece Anna and her godmother had been in Providence, shopping for a dress for the former. They also made it home unharmed.

The place where Mary worked, Coro's, hadn't been touched because it was on high ground; the flying bricks weren't even from that building. Most weren't so lucky, especially if they had a home at the shore.

What Mary--my mom--had struggled home through was the great Hurricane of 1938. The Weather Bureau didn't believe a hurricane would hit New England and did not send out timely warnings. They were sure it would go out to sea. Instead it hit Long Island--to this day the fast-moving storm is referred to as "the Long Island Express"--and New England like a battering ram. It not only tore up the coastline, it roared inland, destroying pine in New Hampshire, a quarter of Vermont's maple trees, and countless little New England tree-shrouded greens. Downtown Providence was submerged under 17 feet of water that had roared up Narragansett Bay, flooded the basements of the department stores and killed shoppers, submerged cars and drowned their drivers, short circuited trolley cars so their horns blew endless ghostly symphonies under the water.

The hurricane of '38 tale was one of the stories I always begged from my mother as a little girl. It was like the tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or some other fairy tale cataclysm to me, but this one came with photos--we had a "hurricane book" from Hurricane Carol up in the attic that compared the damage done in 1938 and again in 1954--and an "up close and personal" extra. I vaguely remember Hurricane Donna in 1960, lashing the house and tearing shingles from the roof, leaving us under the light of the kerosene "hurricane lamp" for three days.

R.A. Scotti's Sudden Sea, which I recently re-read after purchasing the book in paperback, transports you to 1938--to the salt-air homes on Napatree Point, RI, the hardscrabble farms on Conanicut (Jamestown), the coastal communities of Long Island, and even "Fenwick," the Connecticut home where Katharine Hepburn was spending the summer with her parents and brother. I re-read the book in a sultry setting that was as warm and oppressive as the approaching storm, and blinked and felt lost and disoriented when I finally finished and returned to my own world.

This is a fabulous book, with all the intensity and realism of Larson's Isaac's Storm and Junger's The Perfect Storm, a time machine back to "the last of the old New England summers," and is much recommended, along with Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World, which was written in the 1970s. Not only did Scotti used Wind as part of her research, but his narrative equally absorbing and evocative, and Allen knows of what he speaks: he was there. A neophyte newspaper reporter, Allen began his first journalism job in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1938.

(BTW, I have only read the excerpt on Amazon.com, but Willie Drye's Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, sounds super as well.)

(YOW! I'm glad I found my copy of the Everett Allen book last spring...it's now going for a minimum of $20. Someone at Alibris wants $619.00 for it!)