THE BOOKMAN'S DIARY

This winter Door County is once again participating in the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” program. This year’s selection is a classic and uniquely American tale of place and people, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

My Ántonia is at its core a documentary novel that portrays the pioneer immigrant experience on the farms and in the towns of the plains of Nebraska. As such, the work reflects the author’s own experience of the land and the peoples of Nebraska, as they were when she grew up there in the late 19^th century. Though a work of fiction, the book is a faithful rendering of rural American life and American homestead pioneering. It captures a particular moment of our history when the land seemed young and ripe with opportunity, and when there were many would-be farmers anxious to put their backs into the chance to till land of their own.

Willa Cather arrived to the Plains from Virginia as a nine-year-old girl, just as her narrator Jim Burden does as the novel begins. Interestingly, her experiences in the landscape, as she presents them through Jim Burden, are very much like other first encounters with vastness of the Great Plains. These featureless landscapes can psychologically swallow people up. As Jim Burden arrives and leaves the train upon his arrival he marvels at his sense of desolation and smallness, “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” So commonly the first reaction to the Plains is to shrink in the expanse and to lose an accurate sense of perspective and scale. Jonathan Raban writing of the dry-land farmers of Montana in his non-fiction work, Bad Land relates the same sort of almost vertiginous confusion as he writes of his own first encounter as well as those of the early settlers. So too, the young Jim Burden finds his eye searching for a reprieve from the monotony of the land. Reverently commenting on a tree that managed to find a way to cling to life, Jim remarks, “It must have been the scarcity of detail in the tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

Likewise, My Ántonia is an unvarnished depiction of the hardships of the human experience of pioneers in this difficult land. While Jim’s remembrances of his boyhood are often shaded with sentimentality, these memories are juxtaposed with real deprivation, desperation, violence, and much death. The lives of the immigrants could be brutish in the extreme. Such was the case for Antonia’s newly arrived family, the Shimerdas. They faced starvation and grinding poverty, suffering through their first winter in a house –perhaps more accurately, a cave – carved into the bank of a draw. Antonia’s own father, overwhelmed by the loneliness, hardships, and desolation on the prairie one winter could bear it no longer, and he took his own life. The next July Antonia is forced to take on the responsibility of men’s work, partly driven by her brother Ambrosch. Startled by her transformation, Jim questions her new coarseness. Her response is reproach, “If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.” And so it was for many of the immigrant families.

My Ántonia is a quintessentially American novel, and in my mind’s eye, one of the aspects that makes it so is the tension, sometimes subtle and other times overt, between the various immigrant groups and also between the immigrants and the more established families (who interestingly never seem to think of themselves as immigrants). Each immigrant group is its own community of people, and has its own suspicions and preconceptions of the others. The established families, even enlightened families such as Jim Burden’s, regard the recent immigrants with a sense of otherness. After Jim’s family moves to Black Hawk, he notes the townspeople’s general assessment of the Bohemian girls who come into town to work:

If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all “hired girls.”

One need not search long or hard to find examples of these cultural divides and prejudices in today’s America, or even in our own family histories. Throughout small-town Wisconsin, or in the neighborhoods of Milwaukee or Chicago, these old (and sometimes new) ethnic clusters and partitions plainly exist. Communities of German heritage can be easily discerned from communities of Norwegians, Italians, or Irish, and so forth. Today’s newest and most recent immigrants face their own challenges in finding a place in the larger society, but in the end, this too is an American experience.

Through the novel, Cather succeeds in demonstrating how our history on the land informs so much of our identity. The book is also a reminder that the struggles of immigration and the mixing of culture and heritage has been part of what makes us all American for a very long time. So, while My Ántonia is a sort of record of a particular moment in our history and from whence we came, it also a reflection of who we are, even still today.

One of the great pleasures that I have enjoyed in the first weeks of this winter season has been to take a few hours out of one day each week to work in the public library. In fact, it is where I am sitting just now. Libraries have been much changed over the past years, largely as a result of the development of and the shifts in information technology. Some have gone so far as to question whether collections of physical printed books will be at all necessary in these institutions in the future. There have been some extreme examples of the deaccessioning of library collections already, such as the gutting of the San Francisco Main Library in the late 1990s, when something on the order of half a million books were dumped.

A library without stacks of bound books strikes me as a bleak vision of the future. It also strikes me as dangerously foolhardy to consider trading physical volumes for digital files. Formats for file storage or recording change rapidly. While we can still reliably open and read any book extant book we can put our hands to, from papyrus rolls to Darwin’s Origin of the Species, how many of us have the technological capability to play a recording made for a mini-Victrola, or even a standard LP for that matter? I have a box of VHS tapes that are no longer of any use to me. I have written it before, but it once again applies here: Books are a perfected technology, they always work; the only real problem with them is the issue of storage. In my mind, here lies much of the responsibility of our libraries.

Despite this worry, there remains much comfort to be found in the mere fact of the existence of these institutions. Here we have a space set aside for scholarly pursuit, for individual advancement, for cultural exposure, for learning. These places are simultaneously sanctuaries and monuments. Prolific book critic and author Nicholas Basbanes devoted an entire volume to the subject of book collections, how they are assembled, who assembles them, how they are maintained, and the difficulties they face. Patience and Fortitude is a discussion of the library, both the public sort of library as well as private libraries and personal collections. This volume is the best consideration of the very idea of the library,  from the perspective of a devoted bibliophile, that I have ever encountered.

For readers interested in books, Basbanes’ work should not be overlooked. He has written syndicated columns on books for years, and has authored numerous volumes on books, bibliophily, and book culture, beginning with A Gentle Madness in 1995. Later works include Among the Gently Mad (2002), A Splendor of Letters (2003), and Every Book its Reader (2005), and Editions and Impressions (2008).

Works of narrative non-fiction that have a strong sense of place have a particular attraction about them. Such writing that focuses entirely on place, especially forbidding or difficult places are even more compelling. Tales of people living in a landscape, trying to make “place” for themselves, or tales of people merely fighting to survive in hostile environments are at the core of the drama of human existence. Now, for most of us, our daily lives are quite distant from these struggles. We live ensconced in centrally heated and cooled homes and transport ourselves in vehicles that make exterior conditions irrelevant. We may no longer face regular reminder of how hostile nature can be to us, but literature born from the experience of that hostility beckons to us. It is that fundamental struggle that draws us to accounts of exploration and adventure. I have found that I have been often writing about people and the land or people in nature, and it is this classic tension between our reverence for and our struggle with the elements that keeps bringing me back.

I recently read Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land. It is entirely a story of place, and the place is the vast plains of eastern Montana. In part it is a work of history, chronicling the period of the second Homestead Act which opened eastern Montana to would-be farmers and ranchers from the east in the early 20^th century. It is also a sort of travel writing, as Raban recounts his experience of the same place at the very end of the same century while he is researching there.

At the urging of the great railroad interests and of eastern banks, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act in 1909. According to the Act, half-section (320 acre) grants of land in the area formerly known as The Great American Desert were made on easy terms. Claims were proved up by keeping the grant in cultivation for five years. Along its route to the west, the executives of the Milwaukee Road arbitrarily invented towns at regular intervals along the line. Raban writes,

“Trains need to be filled with freight and passengers, and it was part of the essential business of railroads to furnish its territory with customers, to create ready-made communities of people whose lives would be dependent on the umbilical of the line.”

At the same time a new pseudo-scientific method of agriculture was introduced that claimed to make it possible to raise cash crops and livestock in arid lands. Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual became a marketing device for the railroaders and the central source of optimism for recent immigrants and land hungry easterners alike. The Campbell Method proposed to instruct dry land farmers in methods of cultivation that would conserve the little moisture they had, and even suggested that new agricultural activity would attract increased precipitation through magnetism; somehow the act of working the land would improve the circumstances its geography.

The ranchers dispossessed of their former grazing lands by the Act regarded the notion of farming small sections of the dry prairies as destined for failure. They derisively referred to the homesteaders as “honyockers,” and thought of them as foolish, at best. Of course, the ranchers were correct. They knew that it required vast areas of the arid grassland to graze just a few head of cattle. But, as the homesteaders were fencing off the open prairie and bringing their first harvests to market, the Campbell Method seemed to be proving itself and the banks were eager to loan to the new farm owners.

Early optimism crumbled as the first few years of greater than normal precipitation passed, and typically dry conditions returned. Coupled with the brutality of winter on the northern plains, the conditions quickly brought failure for many of the homesteaders. Some hung on and scratched a living from parcels slightly better suited for agricultural production, but the scene recalls the iconic dustbowl imagery of the Joads, as most of the failed families struck out for point further west with what little they had left strapped to their Ford.

Raban structures his narrative around the stories and experiences of a few of the original homesteaders. He traces the thread of the these families to the current era, meeting the some of the descendents still on the land, and visiting the crumbling structures of former claim shacks and farm houses. Raban’s own experience of desolation and loneliness out in that vast and virtually featureless landscape is palpable, and it leads one to wonder at the resolve it must require to keep hanging on in a place so forbidding.

Over the past few nights I have been watching a PBS documentary on the city of Chicago, based on Donald L. Miller’s book City of the Century which was published in 1996. The book, and the documentary derived from it, cover the history of the city from its exploration and earliest settlement through the rest of the 19th century. At the time, Chicago’s rapid growth, its unbridled capitalism, its extremes of both wealth and poverty, seemed to indicate the future of our whole society – for better or worse. Even Europeans were looking to Chicago as a portent of changes that were coming for them. As if in a crescendo, the 1893 World’s Fair brought all eyes to Chicago and the spectacular achievement of the White City.

Much of the story of 19th century Chicago is a story of struggle. Empires were built out of sheer will by men such as Fields and Armour and Pullman.  Simultaneously great masses of laborers, mostly immigrants, struggled for survival and for better lives for their children in tenement slums. Labor organized to struggle against the giants of capital for better wages and working conditions. Capital struggled to find a solution to the “labor problem.” Still, Miller points out, that even amid the squalor and chaos, it was generally an optimistic time. There was the shared belief that through hard work people could better their lot.

To illustrate this point in the documentary, Miller says that this was a time that people believed in cities. He goes on to refer to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, noting that his utopian vision is an industrial urban paradise – a city. That sparked a curiosity, as I had not looked at that book since college. Today I picked it up again.

Looking Backward 2000-1887 was first published in 1888. In the book, upper crust Bostonian Julian West is placed in a hypnotic trance to relieve his insomnia. Some unknown catastrophe befalls the house he is lying in, but he is reposed in an hidden chamber. He is discovered and revived from his state of suspended animation in the year 2000. He went to sleep in an age of great labor unrest, and great unease among the privileged classes, and he wakes in an age of peace, contentment, and equality.

The premise of the development of the utopia of the 20th century is that it arrived merely as a natural extension of the progression of the economic activity of the 19th century. The escalating agglomeration of capital into larger and larger monopolies, eventually resulted in a single monopoly – the government. The people then relieved of the oppression of large capitalist juggernauts, took control of this government to operate it to the equal benefit of all members of the society. In a running dialogue between West and the doctor that revived him, Bellamy makes great efforts to describe the institutions and practices of the new society. Those engaged in labor have a prescribed term of service lasting from age 21 to age 45. The fruits of the continued abundance of American production are shared rather than accumulated by the few. Excess is spent on the development and beautification of the cities for the benefit of all. Government is the sole capitalist, and governmental corruption is a thing of the past.

Bellamy’s socialistic vision of the 20th century, of course, did not come to pass. Even within the novel, West wakes to realize that his experience in that future paradise was just an elaborate dream. The ideas of Bellamy’s new society, however, did  immediately inspire a political movement and social activism.

Plenty of the customers of The Peninsula Bookman will remember and ask about my dog Chloe when they are in the store. When we were in our original location, Chloe came to work with me nearly every day. She even once came to work with me only two days after being sprayed by a skunk…that was poorly thought out. Fortunately one of the neighbors sold scented candles, so for days the store exuded the heady perfume of artificial cherry with merely a musky skunk afternote lingering in the background. When we moved the store to its current location, Chloe came to work a bit less often, but she could be found here lots of days. Being that she was a golden retriever, she was a gentle and personable dog who genuinely loved to meet people, and lots of those people remember her.

Now for more than a year I have been living without a dog. On quiet off-season days especially, it was nice to have the company in the store. On days like today, I miss having the dog around. Looking forward to winter travels again, I remember how much that dog loved riding in the truck, and how pleasant it was to have her along for the ride. Should I head west again this winter, it would be nice to have a traveling companion.

In 1960 John Steinbeck undertook a trip to reacquaint himself with America and the Americans who populated his novels. He was under the impression that he was losing touch with the people of the heart of the country, and was, as he put it, “working from memory.” He decided that he would drive through the country, out to his native Salinas and coastal California and back again to his home at Sag Harbor, making a great lap around America. He special ordered a pick-up truck with a cabin mounted on its back – a common enough sight today, but an unusual contraption at the time – and he named it Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse. Into the rig he installed some basic creature comforts, provisions, writing supplies, and his standard poodle Charley.

Steinbeck drove off in hopes of rebuilding his relationship with the landscape and with the cultures of the regular people, as varied as they were, all across the nation. It was a great irony, and it very much struck him that the distinctive regional ways of life were vanishing just at that time. In some ways he was chasing a ghost. When he and Charley set off, the interstate highway system was quite new and expanding rapidly. The new mode of travel not only changed the speed and style of travel, it reshaped cities and restructured towns, sometimes killing them altogether. This was the beginning of the strip mall, and the beginning of the end of Main Street. At the same time, a nationwide mass media of television and radio were homogenizing American culture so much so that Steinbeck noticed that regional accents and dialects were disappearing among the younger generation.

Travels with Charley is Steinbeck’s account of his experience of this trip through America. It is a journal and a commentary, at times it is a sociology and at others it is a meditation. There is a scene he recounts in the Mojave desert where he happened to stop to pour some water for Charley. Looking up from what he is doing, he sees two coyotes off in the near distance. He slowly reaches for a newly purchased rifle, takes aim and turns off the safety. He was trained to think of these animals as destructive vermin, and to think that killing them a public service. It is at the moment that one of the coyotes sits on it hauches and scratches as a dog would, that the tone of the account shifts. He blames it on his age, but he abruptly sees no point in taking the life of the animal. He writes that there would be little justification because there were no chickens to steal anywhere near there, nor was it quail country. I think it was because he looked at the coyote, and recognized a dog.

Of course, Charley influenced the way that Steinbeck experienced his trip in other ways too. He served as a conversation starter and an introduction to strangers – Steinbeck referred to him as his “ambassador.” When he fell sick, Steinbeck used Charley’s eyes to examine an unsteady veterinarian. Charley serves as a mute foil, and a good reason to walk and wander away from the roadway. A dog will force you to slow down, to linger outside a bit.

I have taken Travels with Charley along with me on several long driving trips. The first time I traveled with the book I had it on cassette while driving an old pick-up truck down to Texas.  A good memory. While I am generally reluctant to talk about “favorite” books as I am often asked to, in this case I can unequivocally say that Travels with Charley is my favorite travel account. It is a book I have gone back to again and again, and I have not yet been through it for the last time.

A little more than a month ago I decided it was time to start looking for a dog again. For a very brief time I was once involved with rescue animals, and have come to feel that rescue is the best first place to look for my next dog. I have decided to try to find a flat-coated retriever. They are much like the golden, but black, a bit slighter, and less prone to hip and knee issues. The personality is similar, though I have read that the flat-coat needs even more contact and attention, and that is fine, she will come to work with me everyday. I have put in an application with the rescue groups, and have been watching the shelters.

When the long winter trips come, I hope that I will have found a traveling companion, though I probably won’t name her Charley.

It has been quite a while since I have made an entry, but the fall season is busy and the time to start traveling to restock the store comes at the same time…

The first three weekends in October are extraordinarily busy every year, and the attraction is easy to understand. In the last week, the colors have exploded. We enjoyed an extended summer through most of September, but once the weather turned to fall, the leaves responded on cue. Hundreds of shades of yellow, orange, and red now color the peninsula, and the cool weather has brought out the scarves and stocking caps, as well as the hot cider. It is a nice time of the year to be here, and the presence of the crowds reflect that fact.

The winter-long process of filling the shelves back up with books begins for me in October every year as well. These are the first weeks of the year that I am able to break away from the store to attend auctions and sales and to otherwise travel for inventory. Not even halfway through the month, and already my truck has twice been filled with new stock. There are also short trips planned for each of the following three weeks. By the time May arrives, I will have packed the store full, plus built up a back-stock to feather in throughout the season. Like every previous year, I should also manage to build some more shelving units before the the next season arrives. Every year it becomes a bit more tricky to find more space to put things, but there is still room for more. Always more.

So here we are, in the midst of the last few busy weeks of this year’s season, and planning for the one to come. October at the bookstore…

For Fish Creek, the first weekend of the fall season is the last weekend of September when the Fish Creek Civic Association sponsors what they call the inside/outside sale. On this weekend the retailers and businesses in the town are allowed to display merchandise outside. Most of the businesses take advantage of the sidewalk sale to reduce inventory left over from the summer season. Here at Peninsula Bookman we put out  tables of books for $1 each.

Over the course of the year I am commonly buying collections of books, private libraries, and other large book lots. The general rule is that I have to take all the books, not just the ones that I would want to display in the store. Over the course of the year we accumulate loads of these cast-offs. Some of them have condition problems, others just don’t fit the regular inventory, but many of them are still worth reading, just not really worth devoting space to in the store. There are at least a few customers that make it a point to turn up for the event every year and load up.

This year we rolled out about 1,800 volumes, which is somewhat less than last year when we had well over 2,000. Today is the last day of the sale, and I have to load the boxes up one last time. Happily there are fewer books to move after three days of the sale. From here they will be donated to Feed My People in Sturgeon Bay where they will be sold in the thrift store.

Eventually lugging all these boxes around forces one to wonder whether it is worth the effort or the lower back pain, but then it is pretty hard to just throw away a book…

Since the very beginning, we have always had a selection of mass-market paperbacks (the pocket size paperback) in the store. For our eight years the price has always been the same, $1 each or 6 for $5. As these aren’t exactly a profitable commodity to deal in, we don’t spend any time keeping them organized. We put them up by the boxful, and welcome our customers to sort through them to find a cheap read, for the beach or wherever. There are always interesting books in the pile, and anyone can afford a buck. These days our mass-market section is two six-foot high bookcases jammed full and double-shelved.

Earlier this afternoon I decided I could fit another box of books into that section, and retrieved one from storage. In the course of unloading the contents of the box onto the shelves one slim volume caught my eye, and I set it aside. I first read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when I was in grade school, and I think the edition that I found today was the very same one I read then. The one image that was indelibly seared into my memory from that first reading was the lonely seashore that the Time Traveler arrives to near the end of the book. At the time of  that seashore visit the rotation of the Earth has ceased, human civilization is gone, hideous giants crabs roam the beach, the sun is a swollen red giant, and the end of the planet is apparently near. A bleak and frightening imagery.

Going through the book a second time today, I became reaquainted with the Eloi and the Morlocks. Arriving in the year 802,701, the Time Traveler discovers the descendants of the human race evolved into two species. The Time Traveler theorizes that the species was bifurcated as the natural evolutionary result of the development of the priveleged leisure class as seperate and distinct from the classes of industrial labor. In this future vision, the laboring classes evolve into subterranean creatures adapted to the darkness like cave creatures while the privileged have evolved into dim-witted effete little vegetarians. While the Eloi are apparently care-free, they actually serve as the meat for subterranean tables. Beware the darkness Eloi, the Morlocks are hungry.

The Time Machine was first published in 1895. It is easy enough to imagine how a nineteenth century Londoner could imagine such a future for the human race. Without even ever opening a history book, we all have an idea of what industrial England looked like if only from Dickens. Wells lived in a highly stratified society with an enormous labor class that struggled for survival in the mills, mines and factories while the upper class escaped the smoke and stink of the cities for estates in the countryside.

The Time Machine is considered to be the first true work of science fiction written in English, and Wells (along with Jules Verne) is considered to be one of the fathers of the genre. The very fact that we refer to time traveling devices as “time machines” is the result of this book, as Wells coined the term.

While in grade school and high school I read a bit of science fiction and fantasy, I no longer do. Finding that familiar cover today sparked a memory that made me want to reread a classic. Glad that I did.

Yesterday a friend and fellow reader of H.L. Mencken dropped by the store for a personal call. Our acquaintance actually began years ago when he entered my original store in its first year, wondering whether I had any Mencken in stock. That I did sufficiently impressed him to strike up a conversation on the subject of the late essayist and critic. We have been exchanging letters since. Actual – as in written on paper – letters!

Anyway, yesterday I was presented with two copies of The American Mercury, Mencken’s own monthly magazine. One is Volume 2 Number 8, for August of 1924. The other is Volume 7 Number 27 for March of 1926. In the past hour I have had a chance to read a few articles, and came across this in Mencken’s own column in the August 1924 issue:

“The most certain way in which to impress, persuade and convince the American public about the virtue of anything, from a war to a pill, is first, to devise a catchy slogan and, secondly, to make sure it has in it only a minimum of accuracy. The invention of the catch-phrase, ‘To Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ was a masterpiece of boob-fetching, and a not less masterful instance of technic that was displayed by the late Creel Press Bureau when it enlisted the services of a number of writers of popular fiction to make the public swallow the slogan, and the war, whole……”  He later writes as a conclusion, “The American public thinks in terms of catch-phrases. It remembers the Maine, says it with flowers, and needs no stropping or honing to sharpen its gullibility.”

Insightful even 85 years later.

Around mid-day yesterday I received a phone call that I had been waiting for and was frankly getting a bit anxious about. The news was that Stonehill Publishing had received copies of Door County’s Islands and they would be available for the reading tonight.

Some late corrections and changes had pushed the print date back, and while they originally expected a release around the beginning of September, it was beginning to look like we would be cutting it close for the signing scheduled for tonight. Yesterday’s call meant that all parties were spared the embarrassment of having a release party for a book not yet available.

When the first box arrived, I dropped a pile on the counter, and then retreated to a chair with a copy for my own eyes. Not having a great deal of time, I drove straight for the chapter on Chambers Island and read it through. Like all of the books previously released by the Burtons, Door County’s Islands does not disappoint. Well written, packed with information, and entirely accessible, this book should prove to be quite popular and of great interest to residents and tourists alike.

Like several of their previous books, Door County’s Islands is not written as a single narrative, but rather as a series of articles like a journal. The chapters are devoted each to an island, or island group in the case of the smaller islands like the Strawberries. Each chapter can stand independently of the others, so that entire stories can be read in a short sitting if the reader likes.  In the case of the Islands book, there is some value in understanding some of the islands in the context of the others, but I have found not much is lost by reading around in the book.

Please join us tonight if you can.

One of the more recent additions to the list of Door County titles we have to offer is John Fraser Hart’s My Kind of County. Hart is a geographer, well known in his field, currently at the University of Minnesota. He has spent summers in Ephraim for fifty years. The book is part of a series published by the Center for American Places at Columbia College in Chicago.

My Kind of County provides an overview of the county in its entirety, beginning with an explanation of its formation and geology, then a description of its primary physical features, and finally several chapters on how people live on and live with the land. That this book is the work of a geographer is evident throughout, as  interaction with the landscape is always at the forefront of the narrative.

For people new to Door County, I have always been quick to recommend Hjalmar Holand’s Old Peninsula Days as the jumping off point for a tour in Door County literature. My Kind of County may be a new place to start for a different sort of reader. My Kind of County provides the kind of general outline of the entire peninsula that Holand makes no pretense to attempt with his Old Peninsula Days. Where Holand comprised a series of sketches and stories to give a sense of the place, Hart provides a basic framework of the entire area. As a general survey, Hart’s book makes a good place to begin reading about our unique corner of Wisconsin.

Norm Aulabaugh, author of The Park stopped by around closing time last evening. Norm has always been good about paying a visit when he is in town to check on our stock of his book and his video. The projects were produced to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the crown jewel of Wisconsin’s state park system. Norm is one of the founders of the recently organized Friends of Peninsula State Park, and his book and video are both fundraising projects, with proceeds going back to the Friends group. A worthy cause to be sure, and surprising to consider that the Park had operated without an auxiliary for so long.

Aulabaugh’s book The Park is a sort of memoir-ish history of Peninsula State Park. It combines stories of the author’s recollections of years of visits with stories from other Park regulars and historical bits and pieces from the earliest days through to the present. Aulabaugh’s book outlines the history of the Park and interlaces the narrative with stories of his own experiences from camping in the Park as boy, to his honeymoon there, and annual trips since. The video is a four season tour depicting all of the Park’s most recognizable landmarks and features as well as panoramic aerial views.

Door County native and professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Bill Tischler, released his book on the Park in 2006. Door County’s Emerald Treasure: A History of Peninsula State Park is a comprehensive history of the Park from the period preceding its founding to recent years. Tischler’s book not only provides a history of the Park itself, but also sets it within the context of the movement that created the state park system. An important addition to the history of our peninsula, Door County’s Emerald Treasure will be of interest to readers for years to come.

Our own Peninsula Partners Publishing also made a contribution to the anniversary celebration. Our second map reprint was from the 1914 plat book for Door County, and depicts the township of Gibraltar. This is the first land-ownership plat that shows the Park with its current boundaries. The map shows several parcels of land still in private ownership within the park boundaries and some early roadways, and Horseshoe island still owned by the Folda family.

With only a few months remaining in the Park’s centennial year, perhaps it would be of interest to do a bit of reading on the history of this important Door County institution. There is no better place to start than with these two recent books. Better still, visit www.peninsulafriends.org and join the newly formed auxiliary to show your support of the Park. I understand that these days the Friends are busy in their battles against invasive plants spreading through the forest. According to Norm, garlic mustard continues to be a huge problem, but they are making progress against honeysuckle. I am sure the Friends would appreciate a hand, however you could offer it.