Department of Book Reports: Quality Street

Quality Street: a comedy in 4 acts, by J. M. Barrie, Illustrated by Hugh Thomson (Hodder & Stoughton 1901) Here's a lovely volume from the 42 Cartons I wrote about last week. Id like to talk about why markings in a book (usually markings of any sort mean the value of the book is dramatically reduced) can actually be a fascinating aspect. This would be a valuable volume without these defects, but I'll try to show you why I think these are quite charming defects.

The text block is tight, and the boards are not separated from the body of the book. The illustrated endpapers show little browning.
Over all, the book does have a few problems, the main being that the text has numerous cross-outs and both pencil and ink notations heavily throughout. The half title page tells us the original owners name was June Moore. A taped in newspaper clipping has browned the paper due to pH issues over the years. The very final page has a rectangle cut out of the top outer corner.

Here's the title page to give you an idea of the Thomson drawings.


Here is the newspaper clipping, which is the San Francisco Chronicle's Mon, Mar 10th obituary for George Stevens, the director & producer of many Hal Roach & RKO movies, including I Remember Mama, Shane, Giant The Diary of Anne Frank and of course, Quality Street.


And here we have what I consider the hidden jem of this book:

At an audition
Mr.Stevens, chose
me for the lead!
Then he was ill
and had to give
up directing! The
new director bro't
along his own
leading lady----
& I, was left with
nothing. TRAGIC!

I really can't believe she's referring to the Stevens film of Quality Street, as all movie databases say that Katharine Hepburn begged Stevens to make it as a come-back vehicle for her. The only reference I find to QS from Hepburn herself is on page 201 of her memoir, Me

I had made a string of very dull movies.

The tipped in plates are lovely and bright with coverlet pages that have a pen & ink drawing and the picture's title printed on them. Some of these sheets are loose, but are all intact.


And here is a page typical of the mark-ups and writings. First penciled in, then later finalized in ink, these are the working script notes from Ms. Moore's audition. I've been unable to find exactly which production she was referencing, probably somewhere in California, the family had lived in San Diego & San Francisco.

The last page has yet another touching note to the reader:

I memorized this whole play.

Quality Street and many other fine volumes can be found at (Jackson Street) Books on 7th. As always, as a gift to our online pals we'll include a free bonus book from our stash of publisher's Advance Reading Copies.

Department of Book Reports: This Old Book

We had a huge estate of books come in this week so I thought I'd show some of the treasures we've found in the 42 cartons we are sorting through. This lady never met a cookbook she didn't buy. I think there is probably a full run of those little sideways format Nitty Gritty cookbooks. There are hundreds of the 9x12 Sunset/Better Homes & gardens/HP titles. And she collected cookbooks from foreign cuisines.
Here are Norway's Delight, by Elise Sverdrup, HT Cook Like a Jewish Mother, by June Roth, and Elena's Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes by Elena Zelayeta.
Tasty Thai Cuisine (the recipes are in English & Thai), Tempura and Sukiyaki, The Pleasures of Japanese Cooking by Heihachi Tanaka, and The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking by Grace Zia Chu.

The Galloping Gourmet, Vol 1 Favorite Dishes: Deep South Pacific. This has a spot in my heart from my childhood watching this (now) local chef on teevee.

There are a couple dozen of various "community" cookbooks, from organizations across the country. Favorite Recipes of Home Ec Teachers, and perhaps my favorite title: Favorite Recipes of Methodist Women: MEATS. I'll let you make up your own jokes.

Now, here's an interesting volume from an author Dano has discussed last year. It's a first printing of the 1963 Pullitzer Prize winner Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter. The delicate dust jacket has some small chips and tears, but it still quite bright considering the age of the book.

Here's a sweet one from the many Home Repair titles, The Handywoman's Guide to Repairing Small Appliances. The interior line drawings all show nicely manicured fingers fixing various household machines.


We have both volumes 1 & 2 of these technicolor beauties, Flower Arranging A Fascinating Hobby. Printed in 1940 and 1941, they have lovely bright photos of mid-century modern floral sculptures, and it isn't apparent until the final chapter that these booklets were produced by the Coca Cola company. Next time you need to decorate in Coca Cola, you'll wish you had these volumes.




This 1974 edition, Exotic Plant Manual is chock full of photographs, 3,600 in fact.

I apologize for the quality of my pictures, but this slim volume quite surprised me. Draw Horses It's Fun and Easy by Paul Brown in 1949.


There's many more Craft books (the Seventies are coming back, right? We'll have any macrame book you could ever need) Pet Care, mostly fish & cats, (some bird books), Gardening, Natural Healing, Fiction and Non Fiction, and oh, did I mention cookbooks?
Today's selections are from approximately 10 cartons. We'll be getting the database updated as soon as we possibly can. The range of books span Great Grandma's books from 1902 and onwards. I'll be posting more pictures on our blogspot throughout the next couple weeks.

Department of Book Reports: F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Poor Scott Fitzgerald", the protagonist of Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro muses. "Poor son of a bitch", Dorothy Parker muttered at Fitzgerald's funeral. There is something to the epithet. Pathos permeated both his life and his writings. Of the four great American authors of the first half of the 20th century, Fitzgerald lived a much shorter life, dying in Hollywood at age 44 in 1940.

There is still much to admire in his work. He was obsessed with the rich. I think we can all remember his famous quotes: "The rich get rich and the poor get...children"; "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me". His novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned", The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon, all deal in some way with the rich and the privileged. And his novels describe the corrosive effects wealth has on its holders. Fitzgerald, who was always short of money, had insight and wrote well about them. It is true of Nicole and Dick Diver (who were modeled on Sara and Gerald Murphy, American ex-pats in Paris who also figure in the film-bio pic De-Lovely, the recent picture about Cole Porter). It is true of Jay Gatsby who says, "Can't repeat the past?...of course you can!", who pathetically is murdered in a case of mistaken identity.

But even more so, Fitzgerald was able to create art from his times. He was the author of the phrase Jazz Age, and was its main portrayer. And, oddly, none of this translated particularly well to the screen Both film versions of Gatsby were not great. And the latter one not only starred Robert Redford, but had a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by the fine Jack Clayton. Perhaps, it is irony at work. Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood the last years of his life and never had one of his screenplays produced. (Checking the Imdb, apparently a remake of Gatsby is in the works for next year; perhaps this one will have better luck).

That Fitzgerald is not held in the greatest regard these days probably has to do with his obsession with the rich. Reading him superficially can be like watching an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I would tend to agree with that assessment, but there are things worth reviewing. His own view of himself at the time Gatsby was published was that he was a magician with words. And there are flashes of that. Even Andy Kaufman agreed! Maybe he was wrong, Maybe there are second acts in American Lives.

His books, and numerous biographies, can be found at Jackson Street Books and fine Independent bookstores everywhere. Visit us on Facebook Jackson Street Books.

Department of Book Reports: There's this, and then there's that.

from here.
It's been a wild week here in our small town, what with the assault while carrying a dead weasel/marten incident going viral. The mayor was not amused, but did mention the bookstore in this interview.

HOQUIAM, Wash. (AP) - Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into an apartment and assaulted a man in Washington state.

The victim asked, "Why are you carrying a weasel?" Police said the attacker answered, "It's not a weasel, it's a marten," then punched him in the nose and fled.

The Dave Barry rule applies here: You just can't make this stuff up. Hoquiam Police Chief Jeff Myers was contacted by the Game Department, as martens hadn't been seen on the Harbor for 50 years. After seeing a photo, they replied "Never mind, it's a mink."

Both Seattle Dan & I find ourselves between books to report on this week. We received a call asking if we could take a bunch of books, to help the family clean out grandma's house. They estimated there were a couple hundred books and they needed us to take everything. Well, 42 cartons of books later... the living room floor is bare. We'll be cataloging and listing this truly wonderful cache of titles. Watch for our cookbook list to expand a great deal. I saw many Japanese and Chinese cookery and early teevee chef books from the 60s & 70s. There are also a great many volumes of classic authors, both fiction & nonfiction.

I'll leave you with this video, Carolyn Parkhurst has totally convinced me to read her new book The Nobodies Album and buy lots of swag from her


What are you reading these days? Share your recommends in the comments.

Department of Book Reports: John Steinbeck

There were a couple of things that happened this week that go me to thinking about American Literature, and some of the great writers our country has produced. One was hearing the NPR story about the Library of America's inclusion of Kurt Vonnegut into its canon. (The Library of America does publish beautiful editions of American authors. Unfortunately there are not inexpensive.) The other was viewing John Ford's classic re-telling of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1940 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which SeattleTammy and I did earlier this week. I thought it might be fun and instructive to do a series of book reports on American authors, and start with the American modernists, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Later in the series we can see who might be comparable in the latter half of the 20th century.

Of the four listed, Steinbeck is probably the least critically regarded. I'm not sure why that is, except that his prose can be a bit "preachy", but I never found him to be as didactic as, say, George Bernard Shaw, who tended to write history lessons in his plays. Part of that is, in relation to the other big four, Steinbeck spoke most directly to injustice in America. That is certainly true in what is thought of as his Dustbowl trilogy, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck was also at ease with writing both epics (like East of Eden), and small stories (The Red Pony), all dealing with the hopes and dreams of real people, and how those dreams can be thwarted by the evils of capitalism and the worse angels of our society. But the dreams are never forgotten and never completely beaten. There is always hope at the end.

I'm thinking especially of the end of The Grapes of Wrath, which has both a devastating and yet, ironically, uplifting end. Obviously, for the time it was made, Ford could not shoot the Steinbeck ending of the novel, and substituted the equally uplifting speech from Ma Joad. But the book end with RoseofSharon giving birth to a stillborn baby, malnourished, but willing and able to suckle a dying boy in a barn.

And speaking of the Ford movie, Steinbeck, of all the great American modernists, created the most cinematic work. As good a job as Hollywood did with Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms (Gary Cooper version), I believe both films of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney jr. is prefered, though the Sinise/Malkovich film is good). The Ford movie is a classic, and though it doesn't follow the narrative of the novel with complete faith, the spirit of the book is in there. It also served as the basis for Woody Guthrie's epic song, Tom Joad. I think Steinbeck wrote with the eye, visually constructing his work. His scenes, his vision is vivid. And it is not like there is not some depth to his work either. One thinks of the Trask family in East of Eden representing the original family of the Judean-Christian bible. Or Preacher Jim Casy, who may have lost his calling, but sets out with the twelve members of the Joad family for the pastures of plenty.


I heartily recommend reading, or re-reading John Steinbeck. As it would seem, his stories are not out-dated and still touch us today. Many of his books are available at Jackson Street Books and fine Independent bookstores everywhere. Visit us on Facebook Jackson Street Books.

Department of Book Reports: The Wilder Life

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, by Wendy McClure (Riverhead, $25.95) She had me at the opening sentence:

I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in Wisconsin and maybe you were, too.

Why, yes I was! I was immediately charmed by the cover of this book, and, to see it was by one of my favorite BUST columnists, well.

The Wilder Life is a most entertaining history of the American West. Wendy McClure sets out for her "year on the Prairie" after her mother's death reunites her with the yellow spined paperbacks of her childhood. The Little House on the Prairie ( or, LHOP, as it were) series was dear to my heart while I was growing up on the farm. I had my bonnet, and calico dress for the Yelm Prairie Days Parade. When I saw this book: I was so there! Transported entirely. I am of the book generation of the Laura World, not the television version. Wendy was too, because, as she explains: "It was up against WKRP, and Holy Howard Hesseman, that show was funny!"

This bright, humorous travelogue took me to all the places I've only imagined before. Wendy tracks down the houses and museums that have sprung up at the original home sites. It's here she meets other Laura devotees and learns there is a home schooling curriculum. The LHOP books are also being used for inspiration by survivalists. And here's something I hadn't known: in her later life, Rose Wilder Lane would become one of the founders of the early Libertarian movement, and indeed the first use of the term "Libertarian" is credited to her in 1947(!). After growing up in poverty, she considered herself a Communist, but a trip to Russia changed her views (in some logic I still don't quite follow). Rose was befriended by Roger MacBride, and willed all her belongings to him, including the valuable copyrights to all the LHOP works. It was the Libertarians who franchised it to the television series.

Warning! 27 minute video from the avclub (the narrator sounds as if he went to the Troy McClure school of dictation, but you'll wish they had gotten the real Troy McClure to read this).

I do enjoy this sort of personal memoir, and this one is funny and irreverent while still holding a great deal of affection for the LHOP Laura World. You certainly don't need to be a Bonnethead to enjoy this, but if you are, this book is a real treat.

The Wilder Life is available at (Jackson Street) Books On 7th and fine Independent bookstores everywhere. Visit us on Facebook Jackson Street Books.

**I do want to send a virtual Thank You to Donna, long-time member of the Troops, for the box of books for the store. Much appreciated!

Department of Book Reports: A History of the End of the World

Well. if you find yourself still around today, ya know, left behind as it were, you might enjoy this book: A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (Harper, $14.95, or used HC$15) Jonathan Kirsch is a biblical scholar, who really lays out the history of this single book in the Bible that has caused so much turmoil over the past 2,000 years. Long claimed to be authored by the John of the gospels, Kirsch argues it was actually written by yet another John, one with a real axe to grind about the Roman occupation of his day, some 50 to 60 years after the death of the Christ. He traces the origins of this controversial book right up to current times, and its ties to modern fundamentalist churches.

I wanted to go read reviews, to refresh my memory, since it's been a few years since I read this. At first I thought the New Oxford Review had a good overview, but I was disappointed by the conclusion:

Endeavors to marginalize people on the Religious Right (the narrative's bête noire) unfold as Kirsch blends spiritual thrill-seekers, stooges, and crackpots into the ranks of the reasonable devout. The Branch Davidians (of Janet Reno fame), the Heaven's Gate cult, and the Left Behind book series are employed to demonstrate Revelation at work on unstable minds, but Kirsch makes too much of low-level televangelist theater and weirdo tales spewing from discredited apocalyptic charlatans. The book continues a slide into political correctness, a newer feature of post-modernism that blurs morality and reduces integrity to negotiable transactions.

"spiritual thrill-seekers, stooges, and crackpots ", um, I pretty much think that's the folks we're seeing give $70M of donations in negotiable transactions. It may have seemed Kirsch was overstating when he wrote this book, but it kinda looks like time has proved him right. At least, this week.

Warning! This is an hour long panel discussion from the 2007 Los Angeles Festival of the Book. But hey, you got that long before you have to fly away.

The History of the End of the World is available at (Jackson Street) Books On 7th andfine Independent bookstores everywhere. Visit us on Facebook Jackson Street Books.