THE BOOKMAN'S DIARY

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.

The idea of an electronic book reader has been around for a while, but Kindle is the first model to gain any serious traction. Several of our customers here at Peninsula Bookman have them, and most of them express that they are generally happy with the performance of the device. I have not purchased one of the readers, but I could imagine that I might if I were traveling more often – the one application that makes a lot of sense to me is using the reader for daily newspapers. Anyway, the idea is that you can carry lots of reading without carrying a lot of weight. From the point of view of the publishers, it eliminates the expenses of raw materials, printing, warehousing, distribution, and print over-runs inherent in traditional books – essentially all the costs associated with the sale of books but the cost of the manuscript. There is also a compelling ecological argument in favor of the device.

I suppose obviously, I count myself among those who prefer to have a physical copy of a book. There is more to the experience of books than the text alone. You can learn a lot about this by sitting here in the store for an hour, watching people select books. There is a tactile comfort in a book that is difficult to describe, but easy to recognize when a book lover handles the object of their desire. There is even the olfactory element. I would be a wealthy man if a dollar were deposited in the till for every time someone remarked on the odor of the bookstore when they walked through the door. Being surrounded by a roomful of books is a sensation that cannot be simulated. Aside from all that, I believe that the book is a perfected technology. My book “works” even when there is no electricity. It generally remains whole when dropped. In twenty years, when yet a new technology is upon us, my book on the bookshelf will still be mine and it will still be functioning fine. Books have permanence.

In July something happened with Kindle that I found unnerving, and Amazon is still trying to correct the problem. It turned out that a company that was selling George Orwell’s 1984 for Kindle and through Amazon did not have rights to the manuscript. Amazon’s response was to delete all of the copies that had been sold from the customer devices. The unnerving thing about this is not that there was a pirated edition being sold. What is shocking is that Amazon can completely and instantly delete a book from all these devices without notice or consent from the owners. More incredible is that it happened to be 1984. If I allow my imagination wander to an Orwellian dystopia, I can imagine a day in the future when all books are electronic, and should one offend the wrong element, a book could disappear so completely it would be as if it never existed. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, destroyed books are preserved in the minds of individuals, memorized entirely to prevent their total loss. Had Kindle existed when Bradbury was penning Fahrenheit, the eradication of books could have occurred in a keystroke, leaving no time to attempt to preserve a remnant of the texts.

Worse still in my dystopian imagination, there is a time when the book is surreptitiously altered. In the middle of the night, one edition is deleted and replaced with another. Strangely, a geology states authoritatively that the earth is but 6,000 years old. I was certain that I had read about a genocide in Rwanda, but it has vanished from all the histories. Iran-Contra … must have imagined it…. It does not require a paranoid mind to imagine the manipulations that might occur if they could be executed so completely and irretrievably.

Amazon is now offering to replace the deleted books with authorized editions, or offering a $30 refund. It seems to me they don’t entirely understand the problem. They have drawn attention to something that most of us would never have guessed at or imagined: that the content on the Kindle can be removed by the seller at a whim. Suddenly the book and one’s rights to a copy are less than ethereal or ephemeral. Suddenly this version of the book has no permanence. It seems that a bookseller should be guarding the gates against such an attack at the foundations of the book, not facilitating the assault.

“Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, ‘I am here. You are part of me.’”

So begins Ben Logan’s The Land Remembers. This memoir of a boyhood on a southwestern Wisconsin farm will always be at the top of my list of favorite rural Wisconsin books.

Ben Logan was the youngest of four boys born to a Norwegian immigrant father and schoolteacher mother. The family farm sat atop a ridge in the un-glaciated corner of the state. There they raised dairy cows, pigs, and chickens, and crops including corn, oats, alfalfa, and tobacco. Logan’s book is divided appropriately into sections by season, each section containing chapters of the various chores and events that marked the rhythm of the year. The reminiscences are nostalgic to be sure, but there is a recurring theme that can be read as cautionary: that the land does not so much belong to us, as we belong to it.

This may be an increasingly difficult idea for people to comprehend, as food production becomes daily more distant to most of us. Logan reminds us of a time when seed was carefully chosen, livestock was carefully tended, and when crops were rotated and soils were rested and rejuvenated – and when the family’s livelihood depended on it. These were days when it was unusual enough to acquire commodities from off the farm that they would be preceded with the adjective “store-bought.” The farm and its land existed in a cycle; it provided nourishment and in turn needed to be nourished.

Still, The Land Remembers was not written as a commentary, but as a recollection of the author’s treasured boyhood memories of his family and their deep and abiding connection to place. As a memoir it is poignant, and it also presents a portrait of a way of life that has become a memory to some, and unknown altogether to others.

First published in 1975, The Land Remembers has now been printed in eight editions. After a brief period out-of-print, it was re-released in 2006 with a new afterword from the author. Our friends Caroline Beckett and Frank Sandner at Itchy Cat Press have done a great service in bringing this book back into print. This is one Wisconsin book that should always be in print, we hope that it is available on the shelves here for many years to come.

Earlier today Green Bay writer Mike Dauplaise stopped by to drop off copies of his new book Torture at the Back Forty. The book tells the story of the murder of Margaret Anderson, the investigation, and finally the capture and trial of her attackers. Torture was released by Titletown Publishing at the same time as Lynda Drews’ Run at Destruction, both books concerning murders in the Green Bay area in the early 1980s.

Anderson’s rape and murder happened in Green Bay in 1983. Her body was found on a manure pile on Lime Kiln Road, where she was dumped after she was assaulted in a local tavern known as The Back Forty. It was a particularly shocking incident for the small town for its brutality. Her attackers were part of the motorcycle gang culture, and the book delves into that aspect of the crime.

Dauplaise also dropped off a few copies of his earlier book Bodyguard to the Packers. Dauplaise authored the book with Jerry Parins who was the former Security Director for the Packers. His position provided unique insights into the operations of the team and the NFL.

As we were talking earlier today, Dauplaise explained to me that it was the book with Jerry Parins that ultimately led to Torture at the Back Forty. Parins had been on the force of the Green Bay Police Department before working with the Packer organization, and a chapter in his book deals with being called to investigate the murder of Margaret Anderson. Researching and writing that chapter with Parins eventually led to an entire book devoted to the subject of the Anderson murder.