The Vinyl Café Notebooks (17 page)

23 July2006

BOOK BUYING

I moved, lock, stock and barrel, a year ago; over a year ago, come to think of it, and I still haven’t unpacked the ten cartons of books that are in the basement. I haven’t a hope of unpacking them until autumn at the earliest, and, let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen. I did go through the boxes at Christmas and pulled out the books I wanted to read first, and I have the ones that don’t fit on the bookshelves stacked neatly, more or less, in piles in my bedroom and in the den, and there is a pile in the living room and one in the kitchen (but they are smaller piles), plus the ten boxes in the basement. They were heavy to carry down there. So, I’ve made myself a resolution, a firm and binding resolution that I’m not going to buy another book, not one, until I have read all the ones I have in the piles and gone through the ones in the basement.

Unless, of course, it is a book by Patrick O’Brian, who wrote the Aubrey/Maturin series, which
The New York Times
called the best historical novels ever written. Patrick O’Brian is exempt, that’s fair, even though I’ve never read him before. Although I have started the first book, several times, and I didn’t much like it, but I might start it again, and I might like
those books this time. And if I do, I might finish the first four that I already own, and in case I do and want to read the next fifteen, I am allowed to buy them. So clearly I’m not including Patrick O’Brian.

And I’m allowed to buy a book if it’s a book that I’ve already read and it’s somewhere in the boxes in the basement and I want to reread it. I think you would agree it would be easier on everyone if I bought another copy rather than go into the basement and look for it. You can imagine what that would be like.

And it also doesn’t count if the book is in the basement, or I think it’s there, and I don’t want to exactly
read
it but want it around so I can do any of the following things:

•   consult it

•   look at it

•   have it on my shelf because it makes me feel better to have it there than to worry about it in the basement

•   sell it to a second-hand bookstore

•   lend it to a friend.

If it falls under any of those “special” circumstances or any other circumstances that I can’t think of right now but might qualify as “special” at a later date, then I’m allowed to buy that book, even if I already own it and it’s in the basement somewhere.

And I’m allowed to buy a book if I know it’s a book that I might not necessarily read but need to have on my shelf because having it there might be helpful in some way that is hard to describe but has something to do with the phenomenon
where you learn things just by being near them, like how you can learn a language by listening to tapes while you sleep—you go to sleep with the tape playing and you wake up and can speak the foreign language (as long as you’re still able to speak your
own
language, because I don’t want to wake up speaking Urdu if it means I have lost the ability to speak English).

And I’m allowed to buy books on subjects like losing weight, or meditation or any number of practical things like killing squirrels who ransack your garden or building a sauna in the woods. Those books are exempt. And I hardly think I have to list all the exempt categories because they are pretty obvious.

And I’m allowed to buy books if it’s a book that more than one person says I should read, like say
five
people mention it. Okay, maybe five is a lot. Make it three people. And they don’t necessarily have to tell
me
to read the book, but if they mention it in some way, even if they aren’t speaking to me, then that should count. Like if I overhear them talking about the book at a dinner party. Or, say, see them reading the book on an airplane.

In the case of a book that has had a movie made about it, or won a major award, or appeared on a bestseller list, then less than three but more than one person.

And I’m allowed to buy a book if it was written by E.B. White or W.O. Mitchell or Margaret Wise Brown, even though I own everything by E.B. White already, but not in every edition, and there might be editions that are better than the ones I own, or even not as good, which might be good to have as backups, so everything by E.B. White is okay and isn’t covered by this.

And if they discover something new by Shakespeare whose first name is strangely escaping me right now, or decide one way or another about
Double Falsehood
, even though I haven’t read anything by Shakespeare since school, and even then I only read
Macbeth
and for the rest of them read the Coles notes or not even, if they discover a new Shakespeare, that is exempt because it might be the best one, and I wouldn’t have to hear that from three people; in this case, one would do.

And first editions don’t count.

Especially if it is by Shakespeare, but anyone else too.

I think that covers it.

3 June 2007

THE THOMAS FISHER

RARE BOOK LIBRARY

P.J. Carefoote is a librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. P.J. called to tell me he had a book he wanted to show me.

The Fisher Library is the largest rare book library in Canada. The collection includes clay tablets from 2000
B
.
C
., papyrus scripts from the time of Christ and velum books from the Middle Ages.

It is housed in the odd-looking tower at the south end of the Robarts Library. From the outside, the Fisher appears to be stuck onto the end of the Robarts, like a figurehead on the prow of a Viking ship, albeit a concrete one. Inside, however, it’s something else all together.

Walking into the Fisher is like entering a medieval cathedral. The light is dim and filtered, and the room (there is just one large room, a stunning six-storey atrium ringed by booklined balconies) is, quite simply, breathtaking.

Umberto Eco spent time at the University of Toronto when he was working on his medieval mystery
The Name of the Rose
. Many believe the tower in his fictional fourteenthcentury monastery owes much to the time Eco spent at the Fisher.

If it’s a cathedral, however, it isn’t a cathedral to the glory of God. It’s a cathedral to literature and to the glory of man’s struggle in the world of ideas. As you stand at the bottom of the atrium, in light so dim it could almost be candlelight, and look up at the thousands of leather-bound books, it is aweinspiring to think that the library holds the collected sum total of human thought. It is, more than books, a collection of the ideas that men and women have considered worth preserving over the centuries.

Very little lasts for a century. Not many of our buildings last that long. But most of the books in the Fisher have been carefully preserved for
centuries upon centuries
.

I stood in the atrium, lost in the beauty of the place, when I realized P.J. was smiling at me.

“A lot of people do that,” he said.

Then he said, “Come on.” He took me upstairs onto the first balcony and pulled a huge volume off the shelf.

He held it out. A leather-bound volume that looked like an encyclopedia.

“The first folio,” he said.

Published in 1623. The first printed collection of William Shakespeare’s plays. It was put together by two of his fellow actors six years after his death. There are about one hundred copies left in the world. It was sold for a pound when it was printed and is worth about $6 million today.

“I have seen men cry when I have handed them this,” said P.J. “This is where the art of the English language began. If this did not exist ...” P.J. shook his head. “Who knows?” he said.

He took the huge volume and began to flip through it.

“This one is called
The Rosebud Edition,”
he said.

He flipped to page 395, the middle of the tragedy of
Cymbeline
. Someone had once used the book to press a rose. The oil from the flower had stained this page, leaving behind the perfect imprint of a rose.

“One of the lovely things about these books,” said P.J., “is when you find something like this. A sign of everyday usage.”

He put the book back and plucked another from farther down the shelf. “This is the Wicked Bible,” he said. “There are only eleven of
these
in the world.”

Having the right to print bibles in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was a licence to print money. Robert Barker’s family had held the rights to print English bibles since the Elizabethan period. Rival printer Bonham Norton was jealous of the Barkers and their lucrative position. One night in 1631, he had one of his “printer’s devils” sneak into Barker’s print shop to mess with the type. The apprentice removed the word
not
from one of the commandments. When the bible was printed it read “thou
shalt
commit adultery.”

It was a huge scandal. Barker was fined, and Norton, sadly, I would have to say (me being a man who has perpetrated worse jokes), had to reimburse Barker his fine.

P.J. took the bible and put it back on the shelf. He had more he wanted to show me.

“This
is why you’re here,” he said.

He was holding out a leather-bound volume about the size of a large theatre program. The ninth edition of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

“Not a particularly interesting printing in itself,” said P.J. “But it is, nevertheless, one of the most interesting books in
Canada. Because this copy once belonged to General James Wolfe.”

He handed it to me.

Then he said, “We know Wolfe had this with him in Quebec. And from certain accounts, we believe that he was reading from it the night before the battle of the Plains of Abraham.”

I was barely paying attention. I was holding in my hands the very book that James Wolfe had once held.

P.J. smiled. “That’s not the most interesting thing,” he said. “The most interesting thing is that he wrote in it.”

I opened the book carefully. It was inscribed.
From KL ... Neptune at sea
.

The Neptune
was the warship Wolfe sailed on.
KL
was Katherine Lowther, his fiancée.

I had never considered that General James Wolfe might have had a girlfriend.

I began to flip through the book. A few pages in, I stopped. Wolfe had underlined the word
weary
. And again,
drowsy
.

I was looking for the poem’s most famous line.

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Each word was underlined individually.

It is said that the night before the battle, as he floated down the river, Wolfe quoted that line and said he would rather have written it than take Quebec.

There are four notes in the margins of the book, all in Wolfe’s neat and precise hand.

P.J. said, “Most people don’t like it when you write in books. I encourage it.”

He shrugged. “A clean copy is beautiful, but it is more
beautiful to know what another reader was thinking while he was moving ahead of you.

“When you write in a book, it is like leaving your testimony for other readers. People who will never know you but will know your thoughts.”

He nodded at the book I was holding. “Little notes like that are a reminder that these books belonged to someone else before they came here.”

I handed Wolfe’s book back to P.J.

As he walked me to the door, he said, “We are always looking for the sacredness beyond humanity.”

Then he said, “I would posit that there is something sacred about these books. There are books here that have been censored and banned. There are books that are
not
here because they didn’t survive.”

The library is not just a testimony to the books. It is a testimony to the people who wanted them preserved. Looking after them is a sacred trust.

P.J. waved his arm around. “People wanted all this saved. These books meant something to them. They are witnesses to those who went before us. They have existed for hundreds of years. This is a holy place.”

A secular kind of holy, perhaps. And yet the farther back you go, the more tangled it becomes, the harder to unknot the one from the other. Monks and nuns were once, quite literally, the keepers of knowledge: copying manuscripts and protecting them from harm. Now it is up to the librarians and those of us who support them in their sacred work.

5 October 2008

W.O. MITCHELL

My first job at the CBC was as a researcher on the national call-in show
Cross Country Checkup
. The first week I worked there, we did a show—prophetically, it turned out—on the death of the Eaton’s catalogue.
What
, we asked Canadians,
did the Eaton’s catalogue mean to you?
As hard as that is to imagine today, it meant a lot to many people. One of those people was the much-loved prairie writer W.O. Mitchell.
Cross Country Checkup
always has a few callers like Mitchell up their sleeve, standing by during the show to prime the pump. It was my job that week to call Bill Mitchell and book him.

I couldn’t believe my luck. It was my first day on the job and I got to call W.O. Mitchell at home. That was the first time I spoke to his wife, Merna. You always spoke to Merna when you phoned the Mitchells, regardless of whether she got on the line, because when you spoke to Bill, it was always a three-way conversation, Bill holding the receiver and Merna orbiting around it.