A Passion for Books

by Harold Rabinowitz

  “Well,” I said, “I guess so, but—what’s in them?”

  “Like I told you. Presents.” He looked harassed and swallowed air and scratched at his neck. “Well, what’s in all dem boxes is actually nuttin excep’—books.”

  I gulped. “Books?”

  “Maybe two hunnerd. But I don’t have no place for books an’ I ain’t gonna read ’em, for cryin’ out loud, so we just pile ’em up in your closet, see, and . . . phtrr . . . krsh . . . you hold on to ’em, huh? Just till I take ’em away.”

  My heart was knocking a sizable hole in my ribs. The unbelievable vision of two hundred books resting in my closet made me delirious. “You’ll leave them, Potch—I mean the books—in my closet?”

  “Yeh. Glawk. Chrr. Why not?” He rubbed his fingers on his shirt like Jimmy Valentine. “Just till I take ’em away.”

  “Why’ll you take ’em away?” I asked, already too greedy.

  “To sell them. Jeeze! . . . Chlog . . . I take away maybe six, ten at a time . . . to peddle, thassall.”

  I tried to keep the hammering out of my voice. “While the books are in my closet—Potch, you wouldn’t mind if I read them?”

  “I have to sell dem books!” he cried, hopping up and down. “Prsh! Shkr! They have to be bran’ new.”

  I shouted, “I can wrap a towel or something around each book I read! No one’ll know anyone even opened up a book!”

  “Pipe down,” he moaned. “You wanna tell the whole goddam neighbahood?” He rolled his eyes and waggled his head in the throes of indecision. “Damn books have to be absolutely clean, I’m tellin’ ya!”

  “There won’t even be a spot on ’em!” I exclaimed with a fervor never exceeded on Kedzie Avenue. “Not one crease—or scratch even. I promise! Ask any of the guys—”

  “Don’t you ask no guys! This is just between you and me only. . . . Thrrp . . . klup . . . strr . . . So, okay. I’ll bring over da boxes. I’ll come up the back, like just now, an’ shove ’em t’rough ya window.” He sniffed and snaffled, and one eye twitched and teared up. “Hey, your old lady! . . . While I’m deliverin’ the merchandise, you better see your old lady is busy in the kitchen or someplace, huh? . . . Knrr . . . Flggh . . . Old ladies stick their nose in everyt’ing!”

  “I’ll say,” I warmly agreed. “Don’t worry. She’s in the front.”

  And so, in five separate trips, Potch carried cartons (not boxes) up the back stairs, soft of tread, but puffing and whirring away. He wiggled the cartons through the window onto my bed, then crawled in and placed each one in my closet. The cartons were clean, brown, and sealed. “You open up a box real careful,” he whined. “You read a book don’t even touch it, for luvvah Mike!”

  “Holy smoke!” I feigned disgust at his unconfidence. “I told you I’d be triple careful!”

  “Hanh . . . krr . . .” He disappeared down the steps, a ferret.

  The moment Potch left, I dashed into the kitchen, opened a drawer stealthily, found a knife, and scurried back to my room. Silently I closed the door. I moved a chair under the knob with care and, my throat crowded with unfamiliar muscles and organs (my tongue seemed to have fallen into my larynx), I carefully cut along the divided top of the first carton. Slowly, I bent the covers back. Eldorado blazed before my eyes: there, in pristine, shiny, illustrated jackets, were books—a row, a line, a jeweled chain of them.

  I washed my hands and took a pillowcase and reverently removed all the books from the first carton, using the pillowcase as a glove, spreading the books out on my bed, devouring the titles with my eyes. I repeated this ritual with the second carton, and the third, and the fourth—until over a hundred precious volumes shone their glory on my bed and dresser and desk. I resavored the titles, one by one, feasting on the names that glittered such promise and invitation. I must have done this for half an hour, like a gourmet prolonging the pleasure of caviar, then carefully placed all but one of the golden trove back in their unworthy containers.

  Then I wrapped a fresh towel around my first choice and turned to page one. I was instantly transported beyond time, beyond space, beyond matter, beyond immediate sensation of the immediate, glossless world, far out into the kingdom of print, the only kingdom in which the humblest traveler can find his throne.

  The first line (can I ever forget it?) was: “ ‘Crack!’ went the bat.” These were scarcely surprising words, need I add; in those days, boys’ fiction began with an instant hurdle over introductory nonsense to plunge you smack into the center of breathless crisis: “ ‘Pow!’ came the sound of Bob Sterling’s boot against the pigskin.” “ ‘Look out!’ shouted the frantic engineer.” “ ‘On your marks . . . set . . . Bang!’ rang out the gunshot.” Not even “Call me Ishmael” could have sent the blood racing through my veins so.

  For three days, in the morning before breakfast, in the afternoon after school, from after supper until my eyes ached with fatigue, I read. I read and read and read.

  On the third day, I heard an ominous tapping on my bedroom window and saw Potch’s furrowed brow and vapid eyes above the sill. He was kneeling on the back porch, and he held up a large brown paper bag. “Gimme eight,” he croaked.

  My heart sank. I went to the closet, hating him: I had read only six books. Undiscovered worlds were slipping forever beyond my ken. I got the six books I had read and tried to select two more with the least enticing titles, but Potch was krechtzing and “phtrr”ing his impatient gibberish. . . . I handed the books through the window, two by two, suppressing my bitterness. He stuffed them into his bag and tiptoed off, trailing his rumblings and snufflings.

  I was not caught short again. I now realized that I had to consume the books in the closet faster than Potch, an enterprising salesman, could retrieve them. And I did. I read earlier in the morning, and at the breakfast table, and after school (racing the four long blocks home each day), and after supper, and farther into the night. To explain my temporary resignation from the primal horde, my non-availability for Skoosh or “pinners” (what New Yorkers call “stoop ball,” in which you threw a rubber ball at a flight of stairs, aiming for an edge so that you might catch the returned ball on a fly, for five points, instead of on a bounce, for one), or the hectic exchange of baseball stars’ pictures, or the aimless, exquisite, interminable dawdlings at which the genius boy shows such genius—I explained my staggering renunciation of these ecstasies to my pals with a mish-mash of excuses: I had to sweep out the cellar; a cousin was arriving from Moldavia; I had to stock up coal for the stove; my bike needed emergency readjustments on the “New Departure” brake that worked by reversing the thrust of the foot pedals. The coarse pleasures of sport and play were renounced; I entered the divine sanctuary of reading.

  Behind my bedroom door, I soared away each day—on great adventurings with the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu and fearless Henry Ware, brave Dave Porter, gentle Penrod, priceless roly-poly Mark Tidd. I lived in a haze of unutterable bliss, made drunk by deeds of valor at Chickamauga and ninth-inning rallies (score 3–0, bases loaded, our hero at bat) and last-minute touchdowns for God and Yale. I chortled over the inspired pranks of the Prodigious Hickey and the Tennessee Shad, matchless Doc Macnooder and Hungry Smeed and Skippy Bedelle. I saw hand-to-hand combat against the shifty-eyed Boxers in Peking and ran down treacherous natives on the Amazon. I joined patrols against the howling Berbers screaming “Allah!” and trapped skulking guerrillas in the steaming Philippines. Down a most precious and magical cascade of words—by Zane Grey and Sax Rohmer, Booth Tarkington, Burt L. Standish, Joseph Altsheler, and their immortal peers—I was borne from intrigue in Singapore to vigils in Tangiers, from Apache massacres to high crime in Mayfair or small-town deviltries or long, cold nights on the Chisholm Trail. Was ever any boy more blessed?

  But—a nasty, nagging unease gnawed at me in my paradise of print. Those two hundred volumes. . . . In our neighborhood, a boy might receive a book for his birthday. Maybe two books. Possibly three. But two hundred? . . . And if Potch’s books were pr
esents, I could not help wondering, why were they in sealed cartons? And why didn’t Potch keep them somewhere in his own house? I had to confront the insistent, unremovable suspicion (how I tried not to) that Potch wanted to conceal the books from his parents. And why would anyone do that? . . . I twisted and turned and dodged to keep from colliding with the awful, dreadful, unevadable possibility that the books were (oh, dear God, don’t let it be!) stolen.

  For a month, I pushed that horrendous thought away with ever-new, ever-more-ingenious rationalizations. After all, I was not the one who had stolen two hundred volumes. And they had been purloined without the slightest knowledge, aid, comfort, or encouragement from me. And they had come to me clearly represented by their possessor as presents. And Potch surely had a right to lend, store, or sell his own presents. . . . But . . . and still . . .

  I was too young to know what being accessory to a crime (before or after) meant; but some basic moral sensor kept bleeping that it was wrong to reap the fruits of thievery; and wrong not to ask Potch, at least, if he had stolen the books; and wrong not to consult someone—my father, my mother, our gym teacher, a policeman. . . .

  I did none of these. To ask Potch himself, however subtly, was to run the unbearable risk of learning that what I feared was true. And if it was true, I could not read on so happily, however skillful the rationalizations to soothe however gullible a conscience. . . . And if I asked Potch and it was true, Potch would bring no further loot to my bedroom! . . . And if it was not true, he might demand that I return his entire cache at once, in proper retaliation for being so unworthy a beneficiary.

  There was no answer, no solution, no sop, no deliverance. What, then, did I do? I read faster.

  I finished the last book not more than an hour before Potch came for the last volumes of his booty. He put them in a suitcase. The suitcase was new. So was Potch’s cap. So were his mittens. So was his fob. So was the pearl-handled knife that fell out of his pocket . . .

  If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

  —JOHN RUSKIN

  “Damn it! Wait your turn!”

  © 1988 by Bill Woodman, reprinted by permission of Sam Gross.

  A Good Time to Start

  BY AL SILVERMAN

  The Book-of-the-Month Club, founded by Harry Scherman in 1926, is the oldest, and still the largest, book club in America. In this excerpt from the introduction to his 1986 book, The Book of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American Life, Al Silverman briefly recounts the historyof the club through the mid-1980s.

  Harry Scherman picked a good time to start a book club. It was 1926 and Hemingway was posing for a photograph with Joyce, Eliot, and Pound at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris. Scott Fitzgerald was in Paris, too, with Zelda, waiting for The Great Gatsby, published the previous fall, to take off.

  It seemed like a good year for everyone. Calvin Coolidge said so. The stock market was booming, and nobody was poor, and only the Lost Generation seemed disillusioned. But that was okay, too; for the Lost Generation, as the critic John K. Hutchens said, it was “creative disillusionment.”

  Popular art flourished in 1926 and, in some cases, became high art. Rudolph Valentino made his last film, Son of the Sheik; Buster Keaton starred in Battling Butler; Lillian Gish played Hester Prynne in a Swedish film of The Scarlet Letter; Ronald Colman was Beau Geste and John Barrymore was Don Juan. Martha Graham did her first dance solo at New York’s 48th Street Theater, and Henry Moore’s “draped figure” was undraped for the public.

  It was a vital year for books, too, though not quite as exciting as 1925 had been. The literary flow that year must have persuaded Harry Scherman to undrape his creation. In addition to Gatsby, the list of novels published in the United States included Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the English translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, and new novels by Ellen Glasgow and Willa Cather. Pound wrote, “It is after all a grrrreat littttttttterary period.”

  The r’s and t’s would have to be shortened for ’26. The harvest was less rich and the poet Rilke had died. There were a lot of popular best-sellers, including Edna Ferber’s Show Boat and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was also an array of nonfiction best-sellers that could be smuggled onto today’s best-seller list and nobody would know the difference: Diet and Health; a new edition of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer; Why We BehaveLike Human Beings; Auction Bridge Complete; and The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. In that first year of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s life, only two books of the month were best-sellers: Show Boat and John Galsworthy’s The Silver Spoon. Not chosen as books of the month but recommended to the charter members of the Club were The Story of Philosophy and The Sun Also Rises.

  Durant and Hemingway, as no other authors, thread their way through the sixty-year history of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Today, new generations of members are buying The Story of Philosophyas their parents and maybe their grandparents did—more than 300,000 copies have been distributed to members since 1960 alone. And Durant’s massive fifty-year undertaking, The Story of Civilization,accomplished in partnership with his wife, Ariel, is one of the most popular “premiums” of the Club. In book-club terminology, a premium is a book (in this case eleven books) that can be had for a minimal price by anyone willing to enroll in the club. Over the years a lot of people have been willing.

  As for Hemingway, what began in 1926 remains alive in 1986. In February of 1926 Hemingway came to New York and switched publishers. Scribner’s was willing to publish his novel Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway’s first publisher, Boni & Liveright, had turned it down. In April of that year, just as the Book-of-the-Month Club was emitting its first infant squeals, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s was reading the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. And Hemingway, the man who, the French said, had “broken the language,” was on his way. In 1986, Hemingway’s last, unpublished novel, The Garden of Eden, became a “Book of the Month.”

  Over the years Hemingway’s effect on the Club and its members has been pervasive in various ways. In 1985 Elmore Leonard, the Raymond Chandler of our time, spoke at the Detroit Institute of Art, a lecture sponsored by the Club for its members in the Detroit area. Leonard, who established his literary reputation late in life, told of BOMC books coming into the house, beginning in 1937. His older sister had joined the Club, and Leonard began to grab the books. He remembered reading Out of Africa, The Yearling, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Captain Horatio Hornblower, Native Son, Darkness at Noon, The Moon Is Down—all BOMC Selections— and, he told the audience that night, “the novel that would eventually get me started as a writer, For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Some years later he reread the novel, this time, he said, “to use the book as a text that would teach me how to write.”

  If the middle 1920s had a distinctiveness, beside prosperity, it was this: Entrepreneurs of the word had captured America. DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace founded the Reader’s Digest in 1922; Henry Luce and Briton Hadden started Time in 1923; Henry Seidel Canby became founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924; Harold Ross created The New Yorker in 1925. And, in 1926, Harry Scherman invented the book club.

  Scherman was a word man. He always believed in the power of words to change people’s lives. This was a belief that turned into a vision, a vision of an organization that could reach out to a vast and varied and interested and untapped reading public.

  Born in 1887 and reared in Philadelphia, Scherman quit the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to come to New York to work for an advertising agency. He had a bent for advertising, particularly mail-order. He was a brilliant copywriter and idea man.

  In 1914 Scherman, with Charles and Albert Boni and Maxwell Sackheim, formed the Little Leather Library. These were miniature classics bound in sheepskin. Scherman persuaded the Whitman Candy Company to enclos
e a book in every one-pound box of chocolate. The venture was too successful—more than 40 million copies of these miniature classics were produced, and they exhausted the market. But Scherman was ready to move on. His next idea was to distribute the best new books being published—books that would be chosen by an independent and eminent board of literary experts, books that would be sent through the mail across the country. It would be the first such organization in the English-speaking world.

  The first announcement appeared in the February 13, 1926, issue of Publishers Weekly, the book-publishing community’s bible then as it is now. It described a plan “to solicit subscriptions to an A-Book-a-Month program.” In April of that year “A Book a Month” was launched as “The Book-of-the-Month Club.” The first book was Lolly Willowes, a first novel by an unknown British writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner.

  It was not by accident that the original board of judges should choose a new author rather than a surefire name as the Club’s first Selection. As Scherman wrote years later, the Club has “provided that swift accumulation of renown which is the most valuable support and encouragement a working writer can have.” The Cinderella example of Scherman’s swift accumulation of renown came in 1936.

  Margaret Mitchell was a writer none of the Club’s judges had ever heard of. When Gone with the Wind came to them for discussion, the debate was lively. There were some doubts about the characterization and the quality of the writing. One judge admitted that it was “a page turner,” but he wasn’t sure if other readers would like it well enough to turn the pages. In the end the board felt that the book would do. The Club released Gone with the Wind just before its publication. Still little known, it received a polite but underwhelming reception from members. But becoming the book of the month did something for the book and the author. The following letter from Margaret Mitchell to Harry Scherman, dated June 20, 1936, ten days before publication date, explains what it meant to the author.