Shopping Brooklyn bookstores
December 6, 2011
Oh that every city had indie bookstores like those in Brooklyn. I visited five in the New York City borough this past weekend and was reminded what we miss out here in the other-land that sells books via food markets, big-box “I can sell you everything” stores and, of course, Barnes & Noble. The browsing was extraordinary, tables covered not with the typical and predictable, rather the unusual and hard to find in novels, art books, travel memoirs, classics and literary non-fiction. Here I found shelves devoted to the New York Review Book Classics Series and Melville House Art of the Novella Series. I found signed books in paperback and hard-cover, including The Day Before Happiness by Italian author Erri de Luca at Book Court in Cobble Hill. A very nice store with a wide space for author readings. This independent has been around since 1981.
The Community Bookstore in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn is a small, comfortable shop filled with literary discoveries. A cat snoozed beside a bookcase and a lizard chirped in the back of the store. This is the kind of shop we all think about when imagining an independent bookstore, crowded with books but easily navigated and smartly organized, cozy in lighting and exuding a sensory feel of profound riches. One shelf provided the personal recommendations of authors who reside in Brooklyn, including Paul Auster, Mary Morris and Jonathan Safran Foer.
I came away with one of those Melville House novellas, Henry James’ The Lesson of the Master, and also Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which recently won the National Book Award for fiction – a choice copy because it’s a first edition without the NBA award sticker. Also, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, which somewhere in my reading this year someone said must be read, and also The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis.
Greenlight Books is nearby in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a bright modern space offering a plethora of signed books, many of them paperbacks stacked among the unsigned, the signature within signified by a sticker. Here I purchased a signed copy of my all-time favorite Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and also a debut novel by Justin Torres, We the Animals, which I’ve been meaning to read since it came out this year. A glance at their literature shelf, and there I saw not only Hans Fallada’s popular Everyman Dies Alone, but also his lesser-known books. It’s just that which is so lacking in literary mega-store retail and depriving us of possibility and exposure – the lesser-known books kept in stock to be discovered.
Most impressive for its distinctive selections is Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers (“I’ve been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down”*) in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. I couldn’t figure out its focus at first, seeing eclectic art, philosophy and design books among recently released novels on its large center table in the 
small space. The bookseller told me “it’s not a literary bookstore,” and then added the owners don’t like it when she says that, but it’s true.
There’s something very different about Spoonbill & Sugartown, as if the selections come from someone’s vision for the store, which has been around since 1999. The store’s website says, “We also hand pick thousands of good books every month for our voracious clientele.” The bookseller told me the owners are descended from a former gallery owner in New York City and that the bookstore opened with books from his personal library. I wish I could’ve spent more time asking questions about the store’s history, but it was time to move on. I came away with a copy of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
Also in the Williamsburg area, selling used books and specializing in literary fiction, both classic and contemporary, is bookthugnation. I didn’t spend much time here, but I came away with a vintage paperback, Aldous Huxley’s After the Fireworks and Other Stories. It was originally published as Brief Candles by Harper & Bros. and likely one of those paperback editions bestowed with a passionate,romantic illustration to sell more copies.
Across the street, not a bookshop but the Brooklyn Art Library where the Sketchbook Project is underway, a collaborative series of art books created by 5,000 artists. Anyone can participate. The Brooklyn Art Library sells vintage notebooks, art supplies and stationary inspired by the past.
If you go to Brooklyn, here’s where you’ll find the bookstores:
- BookCourt 163 Court Street, Cobble Hill
- Community Bookstore 143 7th Avenue, Park Slope
- Greenlight Bookstore 686 Fulton Street, Fort Greene
- Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg
- Bookthugnation 100 N. 3rd Street, Williamsburg
*Quoted on the Spoonbill & Sugartown bookmark, this line is from a Bob Dylan song, Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.
The title of this post was changed 12.13.11. It formerly was ”I’ve been to Sugartown.”
Santa-land in the Mission District
November 29, 2011
In Joshua Mohr’s new novel, Kris Kringle is drunk on cheap booze most of the time and using a pool table for a bed. Of course, he’s not our North Pole man — it’s not even Christmas – rather, he’s Owen, the owner of Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. His out-of-season costume is a means to cover up an embarrassing birth mark underneath his nose that looks like a Hitler moustache and to find asylum from his insecurity.
Owen’s deadbeat bar customers similarly find asylum behind the doors of his bar, where the ceiling is a star-filled night sky created from mirror shards and cotton balls. Damascus may be, in simple definition, an alcoholic’s hangout. To understand its true nature, though, this colorful establishment is better described as a demented Cheers in atmosphere and an assisted living facility in function. The perpetually soused Owen desires to give everyone a break. He provides refuge to an ex-Marine paratrooper, Byron Settles, who’s too drunk to drive home, and opens his bar to Sylvia Suture, an artist needing space for her olfactory installation that’s been rejected by 15 galleries.
No wonder, there. With the sound of whirling helicopter blades in the background, Sylvia nails dead catfish to 12 portraits of American soldiers who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, recreating what she believes is the stink George W. Bush created for our nation. Her effort lays the groundwork for explosive tension to arise between Syl’s fans and Byron Settles’ fellow U.S. Marines, who threaten Owen and storm Damascus in anger.
If the novel Damascus is beginning to feel like just another bar story showcasing the antics of the alcoholic down-and-out population, don’t be fooled. Yet I’ll admit to having gone down that path, when I first heard about this book being set in a dive bar, thinking I might be getting into one of those novels where the prose virtually reeks of stale beer and rank drunks. You could say I was engaging in literary profiling, and would’ve made a big mistake, had I let the preconceived misjudgment influence me. Because what we’re given in Mohr’s third novel is not the problems and burdens of alcoholics crawling around in society’s margins, rather a brilliantly quirky and compassionately heartfelt story about diverse people wearing their own versions of a Santa suit while seeking a semblance of self-worth.
That’s especially true for the most memorable Damascus customers, Shambles and No Eyebrows. No Eyebrows is a gifted litigator, now suffering under the ravages of stage-four lung cancer. He skipped out on his family to spare them the hardship of his death. Shambles is the “patron saint of hand jobs,” claiming the Damascus bathroom as her office. She walked away from a stable marriage, unable to cope with that very stability. These two find themselves cruising the San Francisco streets in a cab that’s unable to make progress going forward due to street flooding, a metaphor for their own inability to go forward as a couple.
I don’t want to tell you what happens to Shambles and No Eyebrows, let alone the consequences of Syl’s installation under the wrath of the Operation Iraqi Freedom vets. That’s meant to be discovered when reading this unique and exceptional story that reveals the inner being of a bar and its inhabitants. Instead, I’ll offer what comes to mind for me as I think about the conclusion of Damascus. It’s an image of No Eyebrows’ daughter tap dancing her heart out on a tiny plywood stage to cheer up her mother. It’s working because, “There’s something naked about it. Something simple.” The novel Damascus is working for the same reason, with kudos to a bizarre cast of characters you can’t help but love.
Our imperfect memory
October 24, 2011
I expected Julian Barnes’ new novel to be stunning. Not because it recently won the 2011 Man Booker Prize (the odds-on favorite) but because of the subject of memory and remorse captured in a small page count (163 pages). No over-written narrative that spans a character’s life legacy here. The Sense of an Ending promised instead an emotional snapshot of potent human elements. What I didn’t realize was how strongly The Sense of an Ending would drive home a truth we casually brush aside — as we grow older, our memories become not only approximate but also deformed by time into certainty.
That’s what the novel’s ordinary and “peaceable” narrator Tony Webster discovers in his 60s. He lets us know from the outset that his “approximate memories” are at the heart of this unforgettable story that he begins in Part One with his pretentious high school days in 1960′s central London. His chums are Alex, Colin and Adrian, who go their separate ways after graduation to universities and a father’s business. Once, they come together again in London to meet Tony’s girlfriend, Veronica. It’s pretty clear Tony and the difficult Veronica aren’t marriage material – Tony informs us that she’s not only difficult but manipulative and, after a home visit to meet her parents, likely “damaged.” They break up, and Veronica falls into the romantic arms of Adrian. Tony writes the two off, graduates from college and travels for six months in the United States. When he returns, he learns Adrian committed suicide.
In Part Two, 40 years have passed. Barnes effortlessly leaps us forward through Tony’s marriage, parenting, divorce and retirement, keeping us focused not as much on the events as on “the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of.” Also, Barnes keeps us deeply involved and as baffled as Tony by the turn of events, especially when he inherits 500 pounds and Adrian’s diary from Veronica’s mother. Veronica and Tony haven’t seen each other for all these 40 years.
Veronica is in possession of the diary and won’t give it up. The former college lovers enter a battle of wills via email and uncomfortable, brief meetings. When Tony asks “why me?” about the inherited money, he receives a terse, perplexing reply in his inbox: “blood money.” That’s a small glimpse of the monstrous resentment the difficult Veronica presents to Tony. Her refrain of “you don’t get it” to his insufficient responses illuminates how he failed – and continues to fail – to see the depth of the story between her and Adrian. But Tony’s lack of awareness comes across as an uncomplicated man just trying to connect again. His combined innocence and ignorance intensifies the mystery.
Throughout the slim novel, Barnes elegantly walks the fine lines of what was and is between Tony and Veronica, unfolding the story as Tony first knew it in his memory versus what, as an omniscient narrator, he knows now. An easy example to give is a school event, observing the Severn Bor: In Part One, Tony attends the natural event with university friends, but in Part Two, the 60-year-old Tony realizes Veronica was there also. And so this award-winning novel, short enough and compelling enough to read in one sitting, leaves us not only with a good book to recommend but additionally some disquieting messages that Barnes communicates through his humbled narrator: “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed” and “the reward of merit is not life’s business.”
Obsession of a modern-day Ahab
October 16, 2011
I haven’t given Moby-Dick its due in my reading life, not like Matt Kish, who’s read the classic close to 10 times. Now he’s illustrated the whaler’s story using the Signet Classic paperback edition with the Claus Hoie painting “Pursuit of the Great White Whale” on the front. In the Foreword to his new book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, Kish writes, “So many editions of the novel have boring historical illustrations on the cover; this one really appealed to me for its fearless modernism.” But the Signet Classic also conveniently fit Kish’s project by beginning the story, with its famous opening line “Call me Ishmael,” on page one – Kish intended to create one illustration for every page of the book.
Working like a modern-day obsessed Ahab, he also set a goal to create those illustrations for the book’s 552 pages one per day, forcing himself to work creatively but efficiently. He ended up completing the project in 543 days.
I heard Kish speak at the official book launch held at the Wexner Center for the Arts where he remarked that as he got further and further into the project, he struggled with the relentless schedule that at times became depressing and bleak. It didn’t help that his creative space was the size of a closet – because it was a closet, approximately three feet wide and six feet deep. Much of Kish’s story about his days illustrating Moby-Dick in Pictures can be read in his book’s Foreword and also on Kish’s blog, which began the day he started the project, August 5, 2009.
The pace sounds like torture, but to hear Kish speak about the project with his energized joy is to hear the truth about what it’s like to set your mind on a project without any ultimate value attached to it other than personal achievement. No one urged him to start this rigorous creative project except himself, and he kept to it, day after day, while holding a full-time job that involved a 90-minute commute one way. That is, three hours in a car every day to get to and from work. Kish, having no formal art education, does not consider himself an artist. “Since I have never had to depend on art for an income, I have always been able to make whatever kind of art I want. The work is for me,” he writes in the Foreword.
"I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale."
A publisher eventually came knocking, but that was neither envisioned nor expected. And when that happened, Kish said he “weirded out” over the idea that someone now wanted to put his illustrations into a published book for retail. Thoughts of “Will the book sell? Will people like it?” troubled him but not for long. Kish said he knew the illustrations were about Moby-Dick, not him, and that’s what kept him going, focusing on his personal and immediate responses to Melville’s story, guided by his intuitive and instinctive reactions.
"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The St. Elmo's Lights (corpus sancti) corposants! the corposants!" All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
The illustrations are created with an assortment of acrylic paint, colored pencil, ink, marker, spray paint, watercolor and other materials. And because they are created on found paper, intriguing images and words often are visible in the background of the drawings, such as a description of sleeve finishes for a sewing project, numbers on a tube placement chart and instructions on how to prune roses.
...then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.
Moby-Dick in Pictures is a beautiful book. The natural response upon picking it up is to flip through the colorful illustrations, and then to casually read Melville’s quoted words next to them. But true engagement comes from starting as Kish did, on page one, so you can see how Melville’s story evolves under Kish’s creative eye. Also, that approach inspires a desire to read Melville’s classic again, or for the first time. Because as Kish writes, “…Moby-Dick is a book about everything. God. Love. Hate. Identity. Race. Sex. Humor. Obsession. History. Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on. I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.”
Illustrations posted here are photos I took from my copy of Kish’s new book. You can see more illustrations from Moby-Dick in Pictures on the websites of The Huffington Post and The Atlantic. Finally, the Signet Classic paperback of Moby-Dick includes an introduction by Elizabeth Renker, who teaches English at The Ohio State University.
History is now and England, 2060-1940
September 21, 2011
Connie Willis is at the top of her game. She won her 11th Hugo Award last month in the category of “best novel” for her two-book time travel story Blackout/All Clear. The Hugo Awards, presented annually since 1955, are science fiction’s most prestigious awards. Normally, I wouldn’t chomp at the bit to read a sci-fi novel, even an award-winning one — I’m a reader who likes her novels to take place on planet Earth with present-day or historical elements. No Miles Vorkosigan of planet Barrayar, thank you very much. But Blackout/All Clear intrigued me with its focus on Oxford historians in 2060 traveling back in time to World War II. I thought, this may be a science fiction adventure I can get into, and that proved true. Except I’m only halfway through this fascinating two-book novel that concludes with All Clear. Willis states in the acknowledgments of Blackout, “I want to say thank you to all the people who helped me and stood by me with Blackout as it morphed from one book into two and I went slowly mad under the strain.”
In Blackout, we follow three Oxford historians performing on-site research in 1940 England. They are Polly Churchill, who observes shopgirls during the London Blitz; Michael Davies, who studies the heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation; and Merope Ward, who observes children sent to safety in the English countryside. They’re implanted with key historical information that ranges from pronouncing words correctly to knowing when and where the Germans will drop their bombs. And they’re secure in knowing they can always get back to 2060 Oxford through their drops, the time-travel portals. Should these curious historians have problems returning home, a retrieval team will fetch them.
But things don’t go as expected. Merope is detained in 1940 because of a quarantine, due to her young evacuees contracting measles. She can’t get to her portal and then, when she does, the drop won’t open. Polly discovers a similar problem with her drop in a bomb-devastated London street. Michael inadvertently gets taken to Dunkirk to help bring home the British soldiers. Dunkirk is a divergence point, a place where historians are forbidden because their presence risks changing the course of history.
This is the stuff that adds tension and mystery to Blackout, whether it be the worry about Polly, Michael and Merope getting back to their real lives in 2060 — no retrieval team showing up for any of them – or the grave possibility they’ve changed the course of history. But what’s equally inviting is the dearth of period details. They are so engaging, so intricately woven into the story, they make Blackout a delightful let alone very convincing time travel story. An advertising sign in a department store reads,”Hitler can smash our windows but he can’t match our prices.”
The story takes a while to gear up, with Polly, Michael, Merope and others dickering in Oxford over their schedules, but it’s worth the set-up time. Indeed, Willis creates the sense this is exactly what it would be like to time travel to the past, given we could, especially to London during the Blitz. Now, onto the conclusion in All Clear because, at the end of Blackout, I still don’t know the fate of Polly, Michael and Merope.
“History is now and England” is from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, specifically “Little Gidding,” the fifth stanza, and quoted in the front of Blackout.
Update: Broken links fixed 3.21.12.
An impulsive reaction turns fatal
September 14, 2011
Will Allison’s new novel, his second, relentlessly pierces us with uneasiness as he focuses on a lie about vehicular homicide. The page count is a slight 182, but the story is so gripping you’ll feel like you’ve spent far longer with the narrator, Glen Bauer, than the few hours it will take to reach the last page. Told from Glen’s perspective, the drama is written as a confession to his daughter, a kind of letter she can read when she’s older. Such an approach creates an intimacy with readers that brilliantly heightens the tension.
The car accident happens on a typical afternoon, after Glen, a work-at-home accountant, picks up his six-year-old daughter, Sara, at school. On their way home, Glen releases road rage by giving the finger to a police officer, only to have a mean-spirited driver in a menacing black Suburban think he’s giving it to him. There’s a verbal confrontation and threats before Glen apologizes and the two drive off. If that weren’t enough to shake up a quiet drive home, a little further down the road, a convertible Jaguar driven by a teenaged boy cuts in front of Glen so close he has to practically stand on his brake pedal to stop the car in time.
Sara observes it all from the back seat, and that includes the next incident, when the Jaguar appears again, this time speeding toward them on the shady neighborhood lane where they live. This is how Glen describes it:
“And then, instead of laying on the horn or just letting him pass, I lashed out. It was instinct, more a reaction than a decision. I cut the wheel to the left – as if I were going to turn in front of him into our driveway – then back to the right, to get out of the way. I was trying to give him a scare, slow him down, teach him a lesson. I figured at worst he’d slam on the brakes. Instead, he swerved into our lane, like he meant to squeeze past us on the other side.”
The Jaguar hits the curb and rolls, killing the young driver. And here begins a kind of narrative so taught with psychological tension it makes your skin crawl. I squirmed uncomfortably under Glen’s sheepish lies to the police, his wife, the investigating detective, the victim’s mother and her lawyer, let alone to his daughter, whom he hopes didn’t comprehend the truth of what took place.
Pretty soon Glen’s wife, Liz, realizes he’s gotten them into trouble and worries they’ll be sued. She forces Glen into a legal separation to protect their assets, tearing apart their once idyllic suburban New Jersey existence. Meanwhile, the investigating detective hounds Glen with questions, as everyone waits for the boy’s autopsy to see if he was drunk. But for us, it doesn’t matter what the autopsy says, or even if the boy’s mother doesn’t sue, because we know what Glen thought and what he did. We live with him in his fear and anxiety, his snowball of lies and his hope that normal life with Liz and Sara will return.
Long Drive Home feels too close for comfort because it’s a story about an impulsive reaction that, in a blink, destroys a blessing we all take for granted – that of being able to wake up in the morning to an ordinary day. Glen is a good family man reacting emotionally over something that, on any other day, he wouldn’t have given a second thought to. What happens to him could happen to anyone, and Will Allison has captured what it feels like in Glen’s heart and soul with pitch perfect resonance.
Swedish crime from Karin Alvtegen
August 17, 2011
Karin Alvtegen’s most recent crime novel is one of the best I’ve ever read. This highly praised and award-winning Swedish writer weaves a captivating story of murder and deception with secrets that shock. Several times, I slapped the book down against my lap and gasped out loud, Oh my gosh! I can’t believe it! Yet it’s not just the shock value that makes the plot intriguing, it’s also the sophisticated nature of the lies that are designed to keep a family’s reputation in good standing. So not only does it feel like you’re on a thrill ride, but also held close in a smart, engaging and mysterious conversation.
Before I continue, I need to mention that Shadow is not yet published in the U.S. I purchased my copy from the London Review Bookshop. Having read so many overseas reviews/comments that lead me to believe the book would fall under the “unputdownable” category, I had to read it.
Shadow was first published in Sweden in 2007 and then in Great Britain in 2009, translated by McKinley Burnett. It opens with a mother abandoning her four-year-old boy at an amusement park. Next, we leap ahead 31 years to the death of 92-year-old Gerda Persson, who’s died from natural causes. There’s no apparent connection to Gerda and the boy, so there’s quick curiosity about what Alvtegen is up to.
A woman from social services enters Gerda’s apartment to close out her life and make funeral arrangements because neither the police nor the home help had been able to locate a relative. This government stranger unwittingly becomes a catalyst that opens dark secrets connected to the abandoned little boy and the esteemed Ragnerfeldt family Gerda served as a maid.
Alvtegen presents us with a fascinating cast of characters whose present and past lives unfold in alternating chapters, unveiling their misguided hopes and indiscretions. At the center is Nobel Laureate Axel Ragnerfeldt, a shy, elderly novelist now silenced by a paralyzing stroke. There’s his wife, Alice, an alcoholic who wishes she could have another chance at her life, and their son, Jan-Eric, who lectures about the Ragnerfeldt literary canon and repeats the sins of his father. Also among the cast is Kristoffer Sandeblom, Gerda’s surprised sole beneficiary, a young man who’s never met the woman.
The deadly dynamite of Gerda’s death rolls slowly through the chapters, building tension in key moments that include Jan-Erik’s search for a photo of Gerda among his father’s papers and Kristoffer’s meeting with Axel’s tormentor, Torgny Wennberg. Wennberg notified the social worker he’d attend the funeral, and she referred Kristoffer to him, trying to help the foundling make sense of his connection to Gerda. Wennberg has the power to crush Axel’s lauded reputation.
That’s as far as I’ll go, so as not to give anything away for readers who want to do as I did and pay an exchange rate of 1.60 British pounds sterling, let alone a hefty shipping charge from Royal Mail. I’ve only done that one other time, in 2006, for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was published in the U.S. a few months later. I blame that on my collecting insanity — I wanted a true first edition of the book, not the American first.
Alvtegen’s crime novels Missing, Betrayal and Shame are published stateside. Missing won Sweden’s most prestigious crime novel award, the Glass Key, in 2000. Alvtegen is the great niece of Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking books, a childhood favorite.
Adventures in vintage drug paperbacks
July 31, 2011
Early this summer, a friend gave me a framed poster she found at a garage sale. It’s an uncut sheet featuring six rows of 36 vintage paperback covers from a box set of cards. At first, the books seemed to be random pulp fiction titles but then, it dawned on me, they were all about drugs: Marijuana Girl by N.R. de Mexico, The Pusher by Ed McBain, Black Opium by Claude Farrere and Acid Party by Anthony Yewker, to name a few.
I got it in my head to try to find these vintage books, realizing some might be beyond my budget because I recognized #17 on the poster, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict by William Lee. Lee is a pseudonym for William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and famous Beat Generation drug addict. The first edition price of this 1953 confessional paperback tends to head north of $1,000. It’s Burroughs’ first book.
Undaunted and unknowing of what I might be getting into with this decision to acquire the books, I headed to Pulpfest 2011 in Columbus to see what I could find among the 36. As is typical of most book shows, dealers are in a large room with their books spread over tables and in display cases. For the first-timer to any show, it can be overwhelming. All I could see upon entering the room was a sea of paperbacks on and under tables and in boxes. Also, I realized, to ferret out my books, I would have to ask, “Does someone here deal with books on drugs?” It sounded comical and naïve.
I approached the booth for Hooked On Books where the owners Wayne, a retired reference librarian, and Deb, a retired CPA, took a look at my list and began educating me about which ones were hard to find (expensive) and easy to find (less expensive) and also, which ones were pornography (ok, good to know). Then I talked with Scott Edwards of Dearly Departed Books in Alliance, Ohio, because displayed on his table was a beautiful copy of #16 on my poster, Marihuana by William Irish. Scott explained why the book was the narrative size of a short story — it was sold in 1941, along with other similar-sized books, in vending machines for 10 cents. William Irish, I learned, is a pseudonym for noir crime novelist Cornell Woolrich. The Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” is based on Woolrich’s short story “It Had to Be Murder.”
The vending machines explained the stories I found by such classic authors as William Somerset Maugham in those small-sized, 10-cent books. As written on the back of Maugham’s 64-page paperback The Beachcomber: “Now for the first time you get famous stories by famous authors that first appeared in higher-priced books or publications, attractively produced in a pocket-sized book at a price of 10 cents each.”
Authors listed thereafter on this Dell paperback under current and forthcoming titles include Wallace Stegner, Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, John O’Hara and Fannie Hurst. BTW, the original title of Maugham’s 1931 short story is “The Vessel of Wrath.” It became a movie under “The Beachcomber” title.
I came away from Pulpfest much wiser and with an affordable purchase for my poster collection — I Made My Bed published in 1958, written by Celia Hye. It happens to be the first book of the 36 on my poster and has all the dramatic blurbs written on it that you could want of this vintage literary art form: “A blazing novel of delinquency — intimately … frankly … shockingly revealed by a teenage addict.” To balance the tawdriness, I’ll add that I also came away with not only the classic Maugham (above left) but also a 1965 first printing Ballantine paperback of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, which, on the back, has a blurb by the aforementioned William Burroughs.
