Absolute Gentleman

I’m a used book junkie, so whenever I’m in a town that has such an establishment, not overrun with shelves upon shelves of romance paperbacks, although I didn’t seem so averse to them when I was reading them aloud to two classmates in high school after computer science class, and I swear it ended up getting them together for senior prom and who knows what else, I have to check in, wander for a couple of hours, and spend at least twenty-five dollars.

The same holds true for libraries and their book sales. I was recently turned off to library book sales because they’re hawked and plundered by ravenous used bookstore owners who buy the “Friends of the ________ Library” membership, something like twenty bucks, and then gain the right to bum rush the library before anyone else can, setting aside piles and piles of tarpaulin-covered choice titles that everyone has to step over but no one can touch. They walk around with this digital ISBN machine that tells them, somehow, how valuable these books are. I hate these people. Wait, to put it in a more mature way: I severely dislike these assholes. Somehow, I think it’s taking away from the spirit of what these book sales are all about. If you have a child looking for that next Captain Underpants book, don’t go to a library sale. The used bookstore vultures will grab your child with the book, take them to a remote corner of the basement in the library, and feed on their entrails until 4PM, when the sale ends on Sunday.

If you’re a teacher, though, YOU can be the vulture before the vultures. I worked at a school with an incredible library and librarian, and whenever she pruned the shelves, she’d email the teachers and let us have at the stacks before she turned them over to the local library, who’d sell them at their book sale. Seems like a cycling food chain of scavengers, but it’s always nice to be at the top once in a while. School libraries are always evaluating themselves, and one of the ways they decide which books to discard is by copyright date. Every librarian probably knows the average copyright date of her or his library. In order to be a library known for currency, it has to maintain a good average copyright date. I forget the average year, but an average copyright year of 1979 is better than an average of 1955, according to those who evaluate libraries. Really good librarians, and I’ve worked with a few of them, will take the statistics into consideration, but will more often turn to human beings before making the final decisions.

I’ve always thought that old books were somehow better, less commercialized, so to speak, and more academic – more to the point – less fluff, more instructional. Today’s books on writing are a bit too chit-chatty, cutesy, and roundabout. I picked up a book entitled The Art of Modern Fiction, edited by Ray B. West, Jr., Professor of English at Iowa State and Robert Wooster Stallman, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. I was excited. It’s exactly the type of book I salivate over, even if I don’t read all of it – even if all I do with it is take it into the bathroom for a session to thumb through the contents looking for a paragraph of sage advice. Plus, it took TWO professors to edit this thing; PLUS, it was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; AND the book is 463 pages. All of these are ingredients for a fantastic read on the examination of the short story.

The book consisted of an introductory section called “A Note to the Reader,” which was two and one-quarter pages in length and written by both professors and 460 pages of short stories. Sure, there were stories by all the greats: Joyce, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Katherine Anne Porter, but that’s it: no explanation, no annotation, no analysis. There were no parenthetical exclamations, no italicized editor’s notes before each story, no editorial presence whatsoever. It was a complete disappointment and a rip-off.

My first thought was It took two professors to put this book together? My next was: How many professors does it take to create a farce of a book on the art of the short story? Two: One to write it and the other to fight over who’s written the greater number of words for the lame intro and thus can have first billing on the by-line.

I paid zero for it, so there wasn’t any kind of financial loss. But, my god, what a waste of paper – what a thinly disguised Let’s-publish-a-worthless-book-so-we-can-make-our-introductory-lit-students-buy-something-with-our-names-on-it-and-make-some-money-at-their-expense.

This publishing fraudulence isn’t reserved for books in 1949, either. This month’s Poets & Writers weighs in with its own condescendence. On the cover, in generously-sized black lettering, appears “William T. Vollmann’s impressive and, let’s be honest, slightly disturbing body of work.” It’s listed as a “Feature” in the Table of Contents, despite it being nothing more than a one-paragraph introduction to a listing of the titles, page-counts, and summaries of his nineteen books. Oh, there’s also a picture of Vollmann carrying some of these books. Other than that, Anthony Miller, “a writer and critic” from Los Angeles, offers absolutely nothing else. Again: rip-off. What a cheap-ass way not only to get a publishing credit, but for a reputable writer’s magazine to fill its pages. Apparently, all you have to do to publish in Poets & Writers is have a favorite writer, find out how many pages each of his or her books has, and write a paragraph-long book report for each. It’s a summer reading assignment for a seventh grader.