Whooping Cranes and the Freedom to Read

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Mark Willis

An endangered Whooping crane takes flight. Yhe large bird has a 7-foot wingspan. It is all white except for black wing tips and face markings. In this photo its long neck stretches forward; its wings sweep upward; and its black legs trail straight behind it. [Source: International Crane Foundation]

Whenever I hear sanctimonious debates about wokeism and banning books, I think of Whooping cranes. In my family, the gawky, audacious, elusive and endangered birds are synonymous with our values about the First Amendment and the freedom to read.

This came to pass when I was ten years old, a nascent bird-watcher, and I tried to check out a book on Whooping cranes at the Dayton Public Library. I found it in the science and technology department, my favorite room in the library. But my age and status required me to go to the children’s department to borrow it.

The librarian there refused to let me check it out. “You can’t read a book like this,” she said. “You have no business getting books from other parts of the library.”

I tried to explain my interest in birding — and the fact that other librarians had allowed me to borrow books from science and technology. My humiliation deepened when she told me she was a member of the Audubon Society. She knew all about Whooping cranes. The book I wanted was not appropriate for ten-year-olds. End of discussion.

But it didn’t end there. The next day my mother went with me to the library, furious at the injustice. “He can read this book and understand it,” she said. “He can read any book in this library. I don’t care if he wants to borrow Peyton Place — he has the right to read it!”

When I left the library that day, I felt like Patrick Henry emboldened by the defense of liberty. I had my book on Whooping cranes and a brand new library card. Typed in red capital letters across its top were the magic words, ADULT PRIVILEGES.

At dinner that night, my father commemorated this victory with a sardonic opinion that burnished it indelibly in the family tradition. “Those cranes must have been whooping about something to ban that book.”

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Buddy, Can You Spare Me A Top-Hat?

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Mark Willis

This historic photograph was taken in the midst of the Great Depression on March 4, 1933. It documents President Herbert Hoover riding in an open car with President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt sits between them. They’re taking the short ride from the White House to the Capitol for FDR’s inauguration. It symbolizes the peaceful transfer of power at a genuinely scary time. Both men wear top-hats.

Whenever Financial Doom & Gloom (FDG) fills the 24/7 news cycle, my cardiologist forbids me to listen to crackpots like Jim Cramer at CNBC. He frowns on Tom Keene, my wonky calculus-drivenguru at Bloomberg News. I’m permitted a small dose of Lisa Abramowicz on fixed income securities, a small dose of warmth like a nip of Calvados on a cold winter night. Everything else is too risky for my heart arrhythmia.

Since I want to quote the teachable moments, I’ll call my cardiologist Dr. C. I’ll translate his clinical discourse into parlance I can understand.

“Stop listening to that shit!” Dr. C says. “Take a deep breath. Count your blessings and live your life.”

Cardiologists learn to say that in medical school. “Live your life.”

Today, Blessing #1 is the inaccessibility of window ledges at my house. I won’t climb out on one because I haven’t removed the storm windows yet. I’d have to smash the glass if I were serious about the ledge. You won’t need to talk me off it.

During the FDG in 2008, also known as the Little Big One, I worked in a basement office at the university. No worry about ledges there. I didn’t even have a window.

Blessing #2 is this historic photograph taken in the midst of the Big One on March 4, 1933. It documents President Herbert Hoover riding in an open car with President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor sits between them.

They’re taking the short ride from the White House to the Capitol for FDR’s inauguration. It symbolizes the peaceful transfer of power at a genuinely scary time. The two men hate each other. Hoover’s glower hints at that. FDR’s jaunty upturned jaw feigns insouciance. Eleanor probably thinks, “Men will be men. At least they’re not fighting about who gets the front seat.”

I am specially blessed by their top-hats. They remind me of the plutocrat in the Monopoly game. I think the TV pundits and politicians opining about the latest FD&G should be required to wear top-hats. It would put their blather about moral hazards and woke capitalism in perspective.

Then there is Donald Trump. He never met a moral hazard he wouldn’t exploit. If he didn’t find one, he’d invent it. He said something like this yesterday:  “The economy is so bad we’re having a Great Depression.” In other words, grab your wallets and look for a ledge.

Excuse me, but a leader who won’t show up for the inauguration of the next leader doesn’t get a bully pulpit anymore. And he doesn’t deserve a top-hat.

 

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A Bouquiniste Dilemma: To Sell or Not to Sell

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Mark Willis

About the Image: Elliott Erwitt of Magnum Photos took this iconic image of a baguette and its boy in 1955. [Cropped image via C’est La Vie Sarasota 2016]

If I had only one afternoon in Paris, I’d spend it all with the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine. After one afternoon with them, I’d sell my soul to the devil, jump ship, and hitch my wagon to their star. Pick your metaphor. I don’t care about buying books anymore. I want to sell them.

If you grew up in Dayton, Ohio in the 1960s, you may remember a guy named Harry who sold carpet at an eponymous outlet called Harry’s Carpet Corner. He made his own cheesy TV ads. “I don’t care about making money,” he’d say unctuously. “I just LOVE to sell carpet.”

That’s me. Just trade carpet for books.

The problem is, fewer and fewer bouquinistes sell old books these days. Instead, they peddle not-so-cheap souvenirs made in China. Eifel Tower key chains and Mona Lisa place mats, stuff like that. Gone are your great grandpa’s naughty postcards of fleshy fin de siècle “actresses”. Replacing them are glossy movie star prints from Sunset Boulevard. If you want to smuggle forbidden books through customs, brown-wrapper classics like Tropic of Cancer, you’re out of date.

One afternoon I walked by a bouquiniste near the corner of Boule’ Mich. He sat in a plastic lawn chair, spoke loudly on a cell phone, and dragged languidly on a cigarette. He looked like James Dean or the Marlboro Man. I knew from the accent that he was an American.

That’s me, I thought, living the dream. He wasn’t trying to sell anything to anyone. I wanted to ask him how it worked. Did he make a living? Was he happy? He looked bored. The last thing he wanted to do was talk with another American.

I need to be realistic here. If I packed my library into a shipping container and sent it up the Seine on a barge, I’d probably go broke. Who buys old books anymore, even in Paris?

There might be another way to do this. I could be a bouquiniste on the banks of Dayton Street. Imagine a green metal bookcase with folding shelves. It’s mounted on wheels so it rolls out to the sidewalk. I sit there in my own plastic lawn chair and wait. And wait.

I have the location, but it could be a tough market for book-sellers. Five thousand cars a day zoom down the street. On a good day, maybe five pedestrians go by. Most of them are walking dogs that pee on my trees. The motorcyclists who blast Z Z Top from their motorcycle sound systems don’t seem like bookish types.

While I wait, I give myself a pep talk. Where is your entrepreneurial passion, Mark? What did Willy Loman say? “You’ve gotta dream, boy. It goes with the territory.” P. T. Barnum and Steve Jobs never quit. Harry didn’t build Harry’s Carpet Corner in a day.

That’s me, the All-American business failure. I don’t want to sell anything to anyone, not even my soul.

Something crucial is missing from this scene. It’s the terroir, the pretty girls and the stone parapets and the bronze bells of Notre dame chiming across the river. Even if I could dig up Dayton Street and turn it into a canal with gondolas, it wouldn’t be the same.

So I fold up the bouquiniste box and walk down to Current Cuisine for a crusty baguette. I tuck it under my arm insouciantly, with purpose. Maybe I tear off a chunk to chew on the walk home. It’s enough. It’s as close as I’ll get today to a stroll along the Seine.

About the Image: Elliott Erwitt of Magnum Photos took this iconic image of a baguette and its boy in 1955. [Cropped image via C’est La Vie Sarasota 2016]

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A Bouquiniste Dilemma: To Buy or Not to Buy

Posted on March 14, 2023 by Mark Willis

Mark Willis peruses a 1745 volume by Voltaire at a bouquiniste book stall on the banks of the Seine in Paris. He wears a brown leather jacket and checkered flat cap. He holds the open book in his hands. Rows of old books are seen on shelves behind him. [2005 photo by Ms. Modigliani]

I remember the book I held in my hands that day. I remember the feel of its time-warped, water-stained pages. I remember its murky, moldy river smell, call it the book’s bouquet, suggesting years of storage on the banks of the Seine. Had I bought it then, I could feel and smell it now and know it from a hundred other books in my library. Its touch and bouquet would transport me into the midst of its terroir, several blocks of the Latin Quarter only a stone’s throw from the river, where it was printed and published, sold and re-sold, read and debated, discarded and read again in other hands — for three centuries.

Like the fish that got away, it looms ever larger and more mysterious just below the surface of my memory.

It was a 1745 edition of Voltaire. The price was 45 euros. I had as much cash in my pocket, but that seemed exorbitant for a book slowly composting like leaf-mold. Voltaire never meant that much to me. I was hoping to stumble upon an affordable antiquarian volume of Rabelais. Still, 1745 is 1745, and I liked the smell of leaf-mold.

“You don’t need to buy books,” Ms. Modigliani said after snapping the photo. “You don’t need to read them. Just touching books is what you really want.”

She was right. Until then, she’d always been a little dubious about my passion for collecting books. Charitably, she overlooked the impracticality, the apparent futility of a half-blind man acquiring (and housing) countless printed volumes he could never read. Patiently and generously, she read to me more than a few obscure books over the years. She could have read this one in French. As we made our way through the bookstalls along the Seine, she gamely surveyed the titles for me, translating snippets of this text or that. She almost succumbed to the passion herself as she haggled with bouquinistes on my behalf. Nonetheless, she couldn’t ignore the incongruity that I might pay more for a musty old book than she would spend for chic new shoes. It seemed, well, profligate.

So it was a moment of deep insight and acceptance when Ms. Modigliani said, “Just touching books is what you really want.” I felt understood then — and loved. How could buying any mere physical object compare with that?

I didn’t buy the book. We walked down Quai des Grands-Augustins to the Institut de France, then turned left onto Rue de Seine. Ms. M lived there once upon a time when she worked as an au pair.

Suddenly, there was Voltaire! Chancing upon his statue unexpectedly must have been an omen. I took a picture as if to prove to myself that I truly was a free agent in this situation. Then I heard a cold marble voice mocking me. Maybe it was an oracle from the terroir. “You should have bought the book!”

A white marble statue of Voltaire, the 18th-century French writer and philosopher, stands on the side of Rue de Seine in Paris. Green foliage is seen in the background. [2005 photo by Mark Willis]

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A Bouquiniste’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Mark Willis

A photo-facsimile of the original 1854 title page of Walden depicts a vivid illustration of the shack at Walden Pond. It was drawn by Henry David Thoreau’s sister Sophia. Built with rough boards, the shack is surrounded by several pyramid-shaped conifer trees. A front wall with door and window appear to be illuminated by the morning sun.I will never forget the book. I wanted to touch it reverently. I don’t remember wearing white cotton gloves, but I probably did. Back then, gloves were a necessary precaution taken to preserve the condition of old books. Today, librarians consider gloves to be misguided props in the theater of rarity and respect. The practice poses more hazards than it prevents.

The year was 1978. The place was the rare book collection at Berea College in Kentucky. And the book?

It was an 1854 first edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau. By 1978 I knew already that it was the most influential book I ever would read. I’ve read it completely half a dozen times, and I read some substantial part of it every year. I quote from Walden, chapter and verse, almost every day. Now I have an audio edition on the phone in my pocket. What would Henry say about that? Since I have rambling, one-sided conversations with him every time I walk to my office at Ellis Pond, I expect he will let me know.

So… back to 1978 and the rare book in my gloved hands. It was one of 1,000 copies printed by the Boston publisher Ticknor and Fields. It wasn’t exactly a best-seller in its time. Shortly before his death in 1862, Thoreau boxed up 800 remaindered copies, observing dryly, “I am the proud owner of a library with more than a thousand volumes. I wrote most of them myself.”

The book I held did not appear to be well-read. It had no dog-eared pages, cracked spine, or owner’s inscription. If I opened it randomly to one page or another, I saw no marginalia penned in some book lover’s fastidious hand. I didn’t thumb through it with clumsy white gloves, though, so rare book librarians can relax.

I didn’t thumb through it to find a cherished quote because I wouldn’t see it anyway. I’d lost the ability to read printed books several years earlier. Touching the book was enough. What I really wanted to do was hold the book close to my nose to imbibe it’s bouquet like a snifter of aged Cognac. That would have shocked and embarrassed the archivist standing next to me, who was an old friend. She had secured access for me on her good word when the Berea College library was closed for Kentucky Derby Day.

What I remember most about the book’s physical appearance was the vivid title page illustration of the shack at Walden Pond. It was drawn by Thoreau’s sister Sophia. I didn’t know that an authentic representation existed, drawn back in the day by an artist who had seen the shack with her own eyes.

Sophia’s drawing in that moment reminded me of the very first time I encountered the name Thoreau. I read it in the Amateur Naturalist’s Handbook when I was 12 years old. Extolling the value of field biology, its author posed the rhetorical question, “What museum director today has an office in the woods, like Henry Thoreau?” I didn’t know. I liked the idea of an office in the woods. That’s when I decided to figure out how to get one.

Allie Alvis, a.k.a. Book Historia, explains best practices for handling rare books in her YouTube series Bite Size Book History. She concludes, “Glove-free is the way to be.”

Jennifer Schuessler interviewed Alvis and other book curators for a story about “the glove thing” in the New York Times.

 

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A Flaneur on Rue Mouffetard, Paris 2007

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Mark Willis

The photo is a headshot of Mark Willis, author and publisher of this web site. It was taken in Paris in 2007 by JoAnn. He is bearded and wears a blue flat cap. His beard is not as gray as it is today.
A flaneur on Rue Mouffetard, Paris 2007: I went digging in the Internet Archive in search of a lost memoir about my mother and the paintings of Claude Monet. Didn’t find it. Found this instead. I wasn’t so much of a graybeard then. Still miss the Mouffe…

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Paying It Forward: Staying Alive

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Mark Willis

[WARNING: If you click this video you may hum a song the rest of the day. If that helps you remember the appropriate pace for CPR chest compressions, it’s worth a little earworm.]

Six months after my cardiac arrest and resuscitation, I was back in the hospital with breathing problems. I feared it was COVID. When the diagnosis turned out to be pulmonary embolism, I was strangely relieved, not knowing it would take a year to clear.

Before I left the hospital I had a teachable moment with the internist who treated me. I’ll call him Dr. N. He was a slender man in monotone hospital scrubs and a brilliantly-colored turban. I think he was a Sikh.

Dr. N began morning rounds the traditional way. “How do you feel?”

“Good! I just took a stroll around the ward on the arm of a pretty young occupational therapist.”

“I saw that.  I didn’t want to interrupt.” He listened to my lungs and checked the IV site where a heparin line was pulled an hour earlier. “We worked out other medications. You can go home today with a rew restrictions. You will heal better there.

I interrupted him. “My son is on his way over here. I’d like him to hear your instructions.”

“I called him while you had your walk,” Dr. N said. “He knows what to do. You’re in good hands.”

Indeed. That’s when I told him how Brendan performed CPR on me.

“So he had the training?”

“He had BLS. And the 911 dispatcher stayed on the phone to coach him through the pacing.”

“Broken ribs?”

“No. Severely bruised.”

“Clearly, he got it right.”

Dr. N paused, then he beamed. “You know how we learned CPR when I was in medical school? We learned that Bee Gees song, ‘Staying Alive’.”

Dr. N spun around slowly like a Sufi, singing “Ah- ha- ha- ha- Staying-Alive- Staying-Alive”. As he spun around he thrust his arms and crossed hands downward, making emphatic chest compressions in the air.

Had someone been there to shoot a TikTok video, it would deserve to have a million views. I repeated his words and moves to get the beat.

“Faster,” he urged. We sang it together. “Ah- ha- ha- ha- Staying-Alive- Staying-Alive.”

Dr. N approved. “That’s it. Keep that pace.”

“I will,” I vowed, “if I ever need to pay it forward.”

 

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