Rabinowitz Harold - A passion for books: a book lovers treasury of stories, essays, humor, lore, and lists on collecting, reading, borrowing, lending, caring for and appreciating books

Table of Contents

TO THE MEMORY OF CHAIM GRADE,
Great Soul, Great Poet, Great Jew, and Great Friend
HR

TO JOSHUA,
who is just beginning to appreciate
the joys of reading and books
RAK

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at astand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.

THOMAS V. BARTHOLIN

Disparage no book, for it is also a part of the world.

RABBI NACHMAN OF BRATZLAV

Foreword

BY RAY BRADBURY

Back in 1953 when I had finished a longer version of my novel Fahrenheit 451, I sought a metaphor for my artist friend Joe Mugnaini that would be appropriate to the text. Glancing through his sketches, I fused a combined metaphor: a neoDon Quixote armored in newspaper print standing on a pyre of burning books. That chap isnt really a faux Don Quixote, its me. My history is all books, and rarely anything else, which is why I am up front here, as preface.

The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldnt speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talks the best.

I found my wife, Marguerite (Maggie), in Fowler Bros. marvelous bookshop across from San Franciscos Pershing Square in the happy spring of 1946. She took a vow of poverty to marry me in 1947. Church-mice-poor, we lived in Venice before it was a funny-farm, surviving on hot dogs, pizza, and bad wine while I constructed literary rockets that missed the Moon but somehow reached Mars.

Along the way I increased my library with ten-cent and quarter purchases of much needed books at the Goodwill. Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shaw marked down seemed to me as one of lifes unbelievable bargains.

I believed in books so much that when I graduated from L.A. High with no hope for college, I carried with me the memory of my short-story teacher, Jannet Johnson, and my Yeats/Keats/Shelley/Lady Snow Longley Housh volume. My second novel, Something Wicked This WayComes, is dedicated to them.

The library as raving influence is best summed in my first novel, Fahrenheit 451. Trying to write in my carless garage was impossible. My daughters knocked on the back window, yelling for Dad to come play. I did so, with a diminution of stories and funds.

Wandering around the UCLA campus, I heard the clatter of typewriters under the library, went down, and discovered a typing room where I could hammer out my breathless prose for ten cents a half hour. There was a device under each typewriter, a slot machine in which to shove dimes against the clock. You typed madly until the machine froze, then ran to fetch more cash. In nine days I wrote Fahrenheit 451. It cost me nine dollars and eighty cents to write what I later described as my dime novel.

But the important aspect here was the wonderfully crushing weight of the library above. Between stints at my rented Royal I dashed upstairs to grope, blindly, along various shelves to seize strange books and make friends. When I found apt sentences I ran back downstairs to pop them in the mouths of Montag, my flame-throwing book burner and his equally inflammatory chief. Hyperventilation, then, was my lifestyle, plunging down to hammer my novel into shape. The library turned out to be the best damn maternity hospital in my entire life. My child, born in semipoverty (I was still writing short stories that sold for one or two cents a word), has survived McCarthy, Stalin, and Mao and their fear of information. It now lodges in schools, thank God, around the country.

Along the way I have written more stories, poems, essays, and novels about other writers than any others in our time. I have claimed in one poem that Emily Dickinson was my mother and Poe my father, with H. G. Wells and Verne crazed uncles up-attic. The title of one poem was Emily Dickinson Where Are You, Herman Melville Called You Last Night in His Sleep. My story, Any Friend of Nicholas Nicklebys Is a Friend of Mine, told how, age twelve, I helped Charles Dickens finish A Tale of Two Cities upstairs in my grandparents boarding house in 1932.

Finally, not so long ago with Last Rites, I invented a time machine so I could travel back to save my favorite authors on their deathbeds, offering them hope for their literary futures. Arriving in Melvilles last hour, I laid out new editions of his books published in 1930, 1954, and 1999 so that this old man, long abandoned, could see his immortality guaranteed. Herman, I whispered, open your eyes. Read the first line of your book, republished in 1939. Herman did so and murmured: Call me Ishmael. And died.

I then visited Poe and left copies of his Tales of Mystery and Imagination.Finally to Paris to bid farewell to Wilde.

So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and rememberingthe books.

The Egyptians often, in death, had their favorite cats embalmed, to cozen their feet. If things go well, my special pets will pace me into eternity, Shakespeare as pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far-traveling.

Meanwhile, I stand here with my hopeless prejudices, to preface these loves.

Please, to begin.

Introduction:

A Passion for Books

In February 1998 Sothebys in New York held a series of auctions of a rather unique collection of books. The collection, some three thousand volumes, had belonged to the late duke of Windsorthe former King Edward VIII of Englandwho had collected them since childhood and had taken the collection with him when he abdicated the throne in 1936. After the duke died in 1972, the books, along with the rest of his possessions, had remained in the hands of his duchessthe former Wallis Warfield Simpsonthe woman for whom he had forsaken his family, his country, and his crown.

On the duchesss death in 1986, their mansion near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and its contents, were purchased by Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman perhaps best known as the father of the man who died in an automobile accident with Diana, the princess of Wales, the estranged wife of the dukes grandnephew Prince Charles. Some ten years later, Mr. al-Fayed decided to sell the duke and duchesss possessions, and thus they found their way to Sothebys.

There were three things that made these auctions of particular interest to bibliophiles. First, many of the books were inscribed by famous and/or wealthy individuals. They included, for example, a copy of John F. Kennedys Profiles in Courage, inscribed To the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with the highest respects, as well as a Book of Common Prayer inscribed For My Darling little David [Edward] on his 7th birthday, when he went to Church for the first time, from his loving old Granny, by Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII.

Second, these auctions represented the first time in history that books from a British royal library had ever been offered for sale. Although the royal family, as would be expected, made no comment about the auctions, one doubts that they were happy about these books being placed on the market, the sale of such items being, at the very least, unseemly.