Amanda Dunbar

I recently discovered a young artist of immense talent, Amanda Dunbar, when I found a copy of her book, Guided by Angels: Divinely Inspired Paintings, Longstreet Press, Atlanta, 2000.

The book exhibits 132 pages of the young Texas artist's work, which has landed her on Oprah, ABC's World News Tonight, PBS, and many other regional and national broadcasts.

Dunbar's amazing talent and vision extend to three distinct styles: French Impressionism, American Expressionism, and Abstract. From the video below, you can also see what a genuinely gracious and giving person she is.



Her painting A Journey in Brotherhood, pictured below, captured my attention as I had just come across a few books that featured photos and paintings of people reading books. With Dunbar's book, I noticed the trend and think I may have the start of a pictorial post about reading, or readers. Stay tuned for that.


I find something in this painting that I connect with--something that evokes the words Amanda Dunbar wrote to accompany A Journey in Brotherhood: "Reading builds knowledge and knowledge builds understanding."

Farewell, Horton Foote

I just learned that Horton Foote died yesterday. A wonderfully gifted writer with a seemingly simplistic style that belied much deeper themes and complex characters, Foote wrote the Oscar-winning screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies and the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama The Young Man From Atlanta. I am only familiar with several of his works, but The Trip to Bountiful is my favorite.

I had an opportunity to meet him several years ago at a book signing in Houston. His Texas home in Wharton was south of Houston about an hour or so and I suppose he came up from there to talk and sign books at a Houston bookstore in conjunction with the publication of Charles Watson's, Horton Foote: A Literary Biography (University of Texas Press, 2003). Also, if my memory is correct, The Trip to Bountiful, in which his daughter Hallie was performing, was being presented in Houston at that time. Yes, the Houston Chronicle article on Foote, in the first link of this post, just confirmed that for me. Whatever it was that brought him to town, I was glad of it and made sure I was there well in advance of his arrival.


When I got to meet him and have some books signed, he was such a kind and gracious man to exchange a few words with. When I showed him my copy of Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow, his eyes lit up and he asked in an excitable tone that caught me off guard: "Where in the world did you get this?" He looked up at me, eagerly awaiting my answer. He really wanted to know. "Down the street, actually, at another bookstore almost twenty years ago," I answered.

I don't know that he had ever seen this book before, though it's hard to imagine he hadn't. He held it and really looked it over, and said something to the effect that it was really something or really rare--I'm not sure what exactly. But I was thrilled that I had brought something that elicited such a reaction as that. I almost gave it to him, but couldn't make myself do it. I had really been planning on getting his signature in that book.

Published by the University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, 1985), the word Tomorrow is repeated three times to represent three different pieces: William Faulkner's 1940 story of the same title, Horton Foote's 1960 teleplay for CBS's Playhouse 90, and the 1972 screenplay for the film version that starred Robert Duval as Fentry. Duval contributed an essay for this collection, in which he states: "I still point to Fentry as my favorite part." This was before Lonesome Dove and Mr. Duval may have updated that statement to replace Fentry with Augustus "Gus" McCrae.

Mr. Foote signed my books and I asked him about Wharton and if he kept in touch with Robert Duval. He said he did and had talked to him on the phone not long ago. I commented that I'd love to have him sign the book as well. Mr. Foote smiled and said yes, that would be nice and that maybe it would happen one day.

I thanked him, we shook hands, and I moved on. For awhile, I watched others talk with him and observed what kinds of interesting things they brought for him to sign. I never heard another exclamation to equal the one my little paperback got. Little could I have known when I bought the book in 1985 that it would provide such a treasured memory for me.

Horton Foote lived 92 years. The few minutes of those 92 years that he gave me will last a lifetime. The world lost a class act and a true artist.

Farewell, Horton Foote.

The cadaver that went to war

What happens to dead bodies, the subtitle of this book asks. Well, I "dug up" a fascinating anecdote in this intriguing book that provides an answer for one dead body that went to war.

Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?, by Kenneth V. Iverson, M.D. (Galen Press, Tucson, 1994) is the book. Despite it grisly title (and there are some squeamish chapters), it is packed full of literary and historical references about death that are quite interesting.

The most fascinating incident I came across in a random sampling of contents concerns a dead body used as a decoy in World War II and the key role it played in the war's outcome.

As the Allies planned an assault on Sicily, they schemed to deceive the Germans that they intended to land elsewhere. Cutting to the chase and an ingenious plan... the cadaver of an anonymous pneumonia victim was dressed as a Royal Marine and provided with phony papers about plans to invade areas east and west of Sicily. The corpse was strategically placed in the sea, in a simulated drowning, to where it would wash up along a part of the Spanish coast into the hands of German spies in the area.

Operation Mincemeat, as the plan was called, worked beautifully. The Germans took the bait hook, line, and sinker (if that's not too distasteful an analogy). They moved a significant number of troops to the suspected area of attack and the Allied invasion of Sicily ensued successfully against a much reduced defensive force. Mincemeat had the further benefit of causing the Germans to disregard later discoveries of genuine documents uncovered a few days after the D-Day invasion and later the drive into the Netherlands. In each case, critical information recovered was disregarded as another ruse by the Allies.

A more detailed account of Operation Mincemeat can be found here or in The Man Who Never Was, by Ewan Montagu--a 1954 book about the operation.

Mickey Mantle for bibliophiles

Last weekend, TRISTAR Productions in Houston hosted a sports memorabilia show downtown. Monday's Houston Chronicle reported that the current recession seemed to be on hiatus for attendees at the show. Sales were very good with purchases trending away from trading cards and more toward autographs and other memorabilia. Many athletes (retired and current) were there with pen in hand ready to sign. For a fee, of course.

I wondered how Mickey Mantle fared in this memorabilia bubble. I have in my collection the very first Mickey Mantle book: The Mickey Mantle Story, by Mickey Mantle (with a whole lot of help, I'm sure, from Ben Epstein), Henry Holt & Company, [1953]1955, second printing. It's a great book for baseball fans, especially Mantle fans, of whom there are untold thousands.

This book is rare enough in its early printings and with the dust jacket, but what sets my copy apart from the rest is the fact that Mickey Mantle held it in his hands and signed his name to it for some lucky fan long ago. The look of the ink indicates this was an early signature. That's value added for this copy because Mantle went crazy with the autographs late in his life when the sports memorabilia industry seemed at its peak. Earlier signatures are not as easily found.


I can find only two other signed copies, which are valiantly trying to keep the sports memorabilia bubble propped up with extraordinarily high prices. Here's a signed copy for $3,500 and here's one even higher for $6,900.

Autographs on baseballs, photos and other objects don't approach these numbers. So, is the fact that this signature is in a collectible book behind the high expectations for the signature's value? Perhaps the symbiotic relationship between book and sports memorabilia is more attractive to the bibliophile than to the baseball collector.

I paid x amount for my signed book (second printing) without a jacket, and then a bit less for an unsigned first edition with a jacket. The price difference between the two was surprisingly little. I married the first state jacket to the second printing signed book. The result would be the earliest signed printing, with jacket, on the market--if my copy were for sale, that is. And if I were to list it for sale, could I reason that my copy, in comparable condition to the two above and in an earlier printing, be worth more than $6,900?

Only the market could answer that question, but I would doubt it. I don't know that $2,000 or even $1,500 would find a buyer. Of course, I would aim a lot higher. But even with the optimistic numbers at the show in Houston last weekend, in spite of the current economy, I don't think the Mick could knock one out of the park for my book.

To an Old Book, by Edgar Greenleaf Bradford

This poem, from Howard S. Ruddy's compilation, Book Lovers Verse (Bowen-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1899), speaks to all bibliophiles in describing that instant bonding experienced with the serendipitous discovery of an interesting old book.

Old Book forlorn, compiled of ancient thought,
Now bought and sold, and once more sold and bought,
At last left stranded, where in time I spied,
Borne thither by an impecunious tide;
Well thumbed, stain-marked, but new and dear to me,
My purse and thy condition well agree.
I saw thee, yearned, then took thee to my arms,
For fellowship in misery has charms.
How long, I know not, thou hadst lain unscanned,
Thy mellow leaves untouched by loving hand--
For there thou was beneath a dusty heap,
Unknown. I raised thee, therefore let me reap
A harvest from thy treasures. Thee I found--
Yea, thee I'll cherish; though new friends abound,
I'll still preserve thee as the years go round.

So who was Edgar Greenleaf Bradford?

A forgotten poet of the late nineteenth century, it appears, though he shares an unusual middle name with a fellow poet of the same century, who "made it," the better-known John Greenleaf Whittier. Was the 19th century not big enough for two Greenleafs?

I can only find a few fragments about Edgar Greenleaf Bradford, one of which was a review of his book, Search Lights and Guide Lines, circa 1890s. The reviewer's comments on Bradford's writing style are not flattering:

"The author has rather a cumbersome vocabulary, and in his endeavors to be concise is sometimes obscure."

So in this modern age of the google search, that's all that can be found about a published poet's work? Sad. But his stuffy Victorian language still gave a good account of what it feels like to find an old book to your liking.

Accidental bookmarks among the leaves

I recently found a couple of trivial things between the leaves of old books that were obviously used as bookmarks. Well, one was obvious, one debatable. At any rate, they appear to have been spur-of-the-moment markers when a conventional bookmark was not readily available. And I thought about a brief post on Bibliophemera, but they're not really ephemera.

First up, the obvious. Say you're reading Hubert Wales' riveting [yawn] The Yoke in 1908 and you just can't put the book down. But you have to. You haven't got a bookmark handy, so you have to improvise. You search your immediate surroundings for something, anything... what to use... what to use... Your eyes fixate on the dust jacket of a nearby book. Aha! Just take that useless thing off the book and tear off a piece to mark your place.

Apparently that's what happened with this book's long-ago reader. A stiff piece of paper, say in the neighborhood of 80-100# stock (look and feel of a paper jacket), torn in such a way as to leave a message for a reader (me) 100 years later to ponder: The book title on the back of the jacket. The more I look at the shape and design, I'm not sure it was a dust jacket. It could have been. It certainly appears to be a cover of some kind because of the thick stock. No matter, it's the printed message found on it that counts.


Could there be a more appropriate emergency bookmark than a piece of paper with IN AN EMERGENCY printed on it? This was either the donor book's title or an ad of some kind for another book. Either way, this emergency bookmark came with its utility printed on it.


Bookmark number two: A leaf among the leaves of Essays: English and American. This item is not so obvious as a bookmark. It could have just been put in the book to press and was forgotten. This leaf marks the beginning of the essay, Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, by Charles Lamb. I can't place any significance on the relationship between it and the essay. Again, it may not have been a marker at all. In a kind of role reversal, the book may have been preserving the leaf. One-hundred years later, it still looks as though it were picked up off the ground on a cold fall day in New England.


Now to research the bookplate in The Yoke (the reason I bought the book), which will find its way into Bibliophemera.

Countee Cullen and "A Birch" to Katherine: A gift of two poets on Inauguration Day

Arriving back home late Sunday from a weekend trip, I was greeted with a copy of this book in my mailbox: Color, by Countee Cullen (Harper & Brothers, NY, 1925).

Cullen was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, an explosion of black literary and artistic creativity comprising a cultural and social movement within the African-American community.

When I purchased the book more than a week ago, the significance of its probable delivery date was lost on me. I was busy preparing for a book show and was interested in the book for two reasons, and resale was not one of them.

One, I remember stumbling onto Cullen's writing in one of my college literature anthology texts. I had no recollection of having studied Cullen's work in the classroom or on my own. Those bloated Norton anthologies are packed with so much literature, that a professor can only hope to skim off a representative sampling of the intended theme of the collection (American literature of the twentieth century, British literature to 1800, etc.).

I recall thumbing through a twentieth century anthology many years later, mid-90s maybe, and really liking what I found in the several poems that made up the Countee Cullen section. I do remember wondering why I had never heard of him before. So when I saw this book for sale online, I decided to buy it and get reacquainted with his work. I knew he was a fine wordsmith and I would enjoy new discoveries in his art.

The second reason for the purchase was the mention of some items lurking inside the covers waiting to be discovered and explored. The book's description included a bookplate and a poem handwritten on the front endpaper to "Katherine" from another poet, H. Campbell Scarlett (a literary name if ever there was one!). Mr. Scarlett's obituary was also included. All that sounded like a story, maybe even a mystery, waiting to be unraveled. Certainly, I knew I would explore it here in this format.


I have not been disappointed with either the content or the artifacts of the original owner. This book arrived a few days in advance of Inauguration Day, and today America has its first African-American president. In honor of this historic event and in deference to President Obama's theme of unity, here's an offering of Countee Cullen's writing from Color:

Tableau
For Donald Duff

Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day,
The sable pride of night.

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.

Oblivious to look and word
They pass and see no wonder
That lightning brilliant as a sword
Should blaze the path of thunder.

I expected such writing, but the real prize in this book is what was preserved in it by the book's owner, Katherine. Her... what... lover, admirer, friend... H. Campbell Scarlett wrote the poem and is described in the obits as a writer and a teacher. That he aspired to write poetry is evident. That he ever ascended to a higher stage than book inscriptions is not. Doesn't mean he didn't--I just can't find any hint of evidence to support it. But he summoned his poetic muse to express his feelings to Katherine and Katherine apparently was moved enough by his feelings, his friendship, or his love to keep it for what I would suspect was the rest of her life. Here is Scarlett's heartfelt attempt to compare Katherine's beauty to that of a birch tree against a deep blue sky:

A Birch
To Katherine

The trunk, cream white picked out in black
The leaves part green, part touched with golden brown
A birch, etched 'gainst the sky's deep azure blue
By this, dear one, shall I remember you.

A birch, all gold and white and black and green,
A birch, caressed and teased by every passing wind
A birch, as lovely as these words would be
By this, dear one, do thou remember me.

On the facing page are two clippings of the poet's obituary. I am intrigued by the bread crumbs of a life or lives left behind in books. Just a trace of something--a poem, an obit, an inscription, a photo--can create an event, a story, or an entire life around that something.

Certainly, more questions than answers exist. Questions that come immediately to mind are: Why this book for a gift? Why the birch tree for a metaphor? And what exactly is the metaphor? And if the two were lovers, why was that love unrequited, as evidenced by the fact that Scarlett died unmarried and without children? There is no way to know the answers to these questions, but that's okay--I have my own.

This was a teenage romance. Scarlett's obits list his age at death as 55. The date of the obits is May 17, 1965, which means Scarlett was born about 1910. This book by Countee Cullen, Color, was published in 1925. This particular copy is an early reprint, likely within a few years. That makes Scarlett somewhere around 16 or 17 when he wrote to Katherine, who was part black, part white... and there's the the birch tree metaphor--the black and white skin of the tree. That's also a scandal within the Scarlett family. Campbell was survived by by his father, who is listed in the obits as a judge, which, in the 1920s, most assuredly makes him and son Campbell white. The judge's re-election could not withstand an interracial dating scandal in his family and so young Campbell was forbidden to see the light-skinned black girl he was so smitten with. He had the heart of a poet, but the firm hand of the judge overruled his emotions. And Katherine never forgot her young poet and the gift of his feelings inscribed in a book by an exciting young African-American poet. Katherine kept the gift of two poets close to her and when Campbell died some 30 years later, she felt moved to leave another scrap of Campbell's life, symbolic closure perhaps, and, in effect, her own feelings toward a young man whose love could not overcome the social conventions and restrictions of the day. A sad ending.

Of course, I could be way off base here and probably am. But however else the story might have unfolded, I'm sure it's not near as interesting as my version.

A Flying Tiger in the kitchen

Joe Rosbert is a charter member in the Greatest Generation. During World War II, Rosbert trained as a Naval aviator before America's involvement in the war. Later, he left the Navy to serve with the Flying Tigers of the original AVG (American Volunteer Group) in China, 1941-42.


After the war he traveled around the globe, combining business with pleasure as a businessman, airline exec, and chef. He documented his life in an interesting and unusual format: An adventure story cookbook.


Rosbert published his life story in 1985: Flying Tiger Joe’s Adventure Story Cookbook, Giant Poplar Press, Franklin, NC. He chronicles the interesting and the dangerously adventurous into six parts, further divided into chapters, and concludes each part with recipes pertinent (sometimes) to the regions represented by these stories.

Naval aviator training in Philadelphia segues into hoagies, scrapple and crab cakes. Part II concludes with a chapter on the Flying Tigers in combat. Appropriately, Rosbert invites his surviving fellow pilots to contribute recipes for this part of the book. "Tex" Hill contributes Oriental Barbecued Pork Ribs and that's about the only recipe with flying and fighting in China. But these guys are guest contributors and anything from them is welcome. Rosbert kindly provides a brief bio of each.

The chapters that comprise Part IV give way to the "real" Chinese dishes such as Duck Tongues Moon Chen, Kung Pao Ching Ting, and Szechuan Duck. Following a lengthy list of Chinese recipes... what's this? Pasha. A traditional Russian Easter dessert. Skip over the next recipe and you crash into Squirrel Stew a la Chennault (contributed by General Claire Chennault). Still ahead in the same section, the Flying Tiger Joe ventures into Southern Style Biscuits and Clam Chowder and Whiskey Sours.

Don't try to make sense of the placement or sequence of these and other recipes in certain chapters--just enjoy the ride! You're flying through this book with a fighter pilot after all.

Rosbert had a passion for living--from flying to fine cuisine--that is undeniable the deeper you get into his book. He engaged Japanese pilots in dogfights over China, survived a harrowing crash in the Himalayas and the months-long journey back to civilization, helped start a cargo transport airline, opened and operated a hotel and later a restaurant that shared a name with the title of this book.

Flapper doodles and water chairs

This English text book belonged to a teenaged girl in 1925, who seemed more interested in art than in her English lessons.


Then again, check out the subtitle of the book (Projects in Expression) and maybe she was doing just as the subtitle suggested. The young artist here is assumed to be Anna Grace Caughron from Manhattan, Kansas. That's the name written at the front and back of the book.

I call these drawings flapper doodles because the women portrayed look like the young girls of that era who were called flappers. The drawings are pretty elegant for doodles, but I'll stick with doodles because obviously the young lady in a long-ago English class was doodling in her book while she should have been paying attention to her lesson. Or maybe she was multitasking.













Her doodles are quite good, actually, and capture pretty accurately the style of the flapper girl of the Roaring Twenties. In case you're wondering what a flapper is, or was, check out the girls in this video. Their parents must have been horrified!

Now for the water chairs...

Turning the pages to see what might be of interest in this old book, I came upon a section that sought to instruct the student on persuasive writing. Example No. 5 is titled Persuasion Through Comparison. This exercise shows a written advertisement with the heading, Years ago they killed by dripping water. Below that is a picture of a water chair with the caption, The Water Chair - a form of torture of the Middle Ages.


This is actually the inauspicious lead-in for a persuasive ad for Sullivan's Heels. As in shoe heels. This misguided example strives to show how walking around in shoes with hard heels results in virtually the same physical torture, over time, as does the constant drip of water upon the hapless victim of the torturous Water Chair. I'll bet one hundred percent of all victims that suffered in the Water Chair would have jumped at the opportunity to walk around in "torturous" shoes with hard heels. Talk about a cake walk!

But what a wretched comparison and writing lesson to impart on a young mind! No wonder young Anna Grace took solace in her flapper doodles. As she could have been only 16 or so in 1925, I doubt she ever got the chance to live the flapper lifestyle, which was out of vogue several years later, and may never have been in vogue in Manhattan, Kansas. I always associated that style with that other Manhattan on the east coast.

But that was the style of the day for young women and it must have fired the imagination of a Midwestern teenage girl struggling through her English and writing lessons. And she wouldn't be the last to create her own projects of expression to exchange classroom drudgery for artistic fantasy.

That long forgotten artwork of hers now lives on within the confines of cyberspace. And I'd like to think that young Anna Grace would have been one flattered flapper-wannabe.

The dark side of bibliophiles

One might think of bibliophiles as a friendly lot. Biblio-friends, so to speak. So what did artist Oliver Herford have in mind when he offered up this dark interpretation of, not biblio-friends, but biblio-fiends for A.S.W. Rosenbach's "Unpublishable Memoirs?"

This drawing is from Rosenbach's
Books and Bidders in the previous post.
Click on the image for an enlarged view.

Decorate your mind with books

I'm rereading Books and Bidders, by A.S.W. Rosenbach; Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1927. Rosenbach was one of the giants of the bibliophile/bookselling world and any bibliophile would enjoy reading about his book exploits.

I came across a gem of a quote that I wanted to share here. Rosenbach wrote this in the Roaring Twenties, a necessary frame of reference for the quote below. He writes a sentence about increasing wealth in the country and, with it, an increasing appreciation for material things such as old books, old prints, paintings, and antique furniture. Then he offers this:

Books are the final appeal; when the collector is through with the things that decorate his house, he turns to the things that decorate his mind--and these last forever.

I like that. A nice collector metaphor applicable to anyone, collector or not, who opens a book and feeds (decorates) his mind.

A Christmas Day Visit to Christmas Cove, Maine

What do Maud H. Chapin and Theodore Roosevelt have in common? They were both authors, autographed one of their books, and donated their signed copies to a little library in Christmas Cove, Maine.

On Christmas Day today, it seems doubly appropriate to revisit The Cowboy Christmas Ball and follow the journey of its author, Larry Chittenden, all the way from Anson, Texas to Christmas Cove, Maine, where he started a very unique library.

The Poet Ranchman of Texas, as Chittenden was known, had a second home far from the panhandle plains of Texas. This unlikely place was Christmas Cove, Maine. Yep, the old rancher, seemingly out of place Downeast, was right at home with his library concept. He got authors to autograph their books and donate them to his little library. The town folk could then check these books out, read them, and return them. Sometimes they might keep them all winter while the library was closed and return them in the spring.

Word got around about this “autograph library” and its donated signed books. It attracted the attention of more and more authors, some some vacationing nearby, who liked the idea and thought it worthy of a donation. One of these authors was Theodore Roosevelt. He may have been the most famous. Can you imagine going to your local library and checking out a book out that was signed by a President?

After Chittenden’s death, the books in the library eventually scattered hither and yon. Roosevelt’s book recently wound up at an auction house in Dallas and sold for $1,434. I found these pictures on Heritage Auction Galleries’ site.



I was able to find and purchase one of the library’s books earlier this year, but it did not have the library label pasted inside the front cover, which would have become one of my bibliophemera collection’s more interesting pieces. Nor was its signature that of a well-known author. My book is Rush Light: Stories, by Maud H. Chapin.



Different from the Roosevelt book are the stamps used to identify the Chittenden library. The front endpaper stamp identifies the library's location as The Autograph Library in the Sea Bird's Nest, Christmas Cove, Maine.


And the rear endpaper sports a different stamp from the front endpaper, inviting readers (in addition to authors, it would seem) to donate signed copies of their books:



Finding one of these books with the Chittenden library markings and author signature makes a nice souvenir of a very benevolent concept that epitomized the spirit of giving in a place with a name that is synonymous with giving.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Reading New Year!

A letter from the Great Depression

Sometimes what you find tucked inside an old book is more interesting than the old book. And when the two work in concert to reveal clues about a life or lives touched by both, an imaginative mind has at its disposal the necessary tools to flesh out the characters and situations that spring to life from old ink and paper. That was the case with this book: How to Criticize Books, by Llewellyn Jones, W.W. Norton & Co., 1928.

I like to do a little time travel when I find something like this. I find it interesting to create an historical context for analyzing the artifact I’ve found and see if there is a story there worth exploring. Here, I think there is, with relevance to the tough economic times many find themselves in today.

Inside the front cover of this book was a letter written about 70 years ago from Horace to Bess in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I don't know where Horace was, but he was very unhappy. I'm guessing Bess is Horace's sister back home and he is thrilled to get a letter from her. I thought she might be a romantic interest until he signed off with "love to you and Floyd."

Two possible assumptions about the letter and the book:

Assumption #1: The book belonged to Bess and she saved her brother’s letter in this book. If so, she was interested in reading writing and possibly had a desire on some level to write book reviews.

Assumption #2: The book belonged to Horace. He was an aspiring book reviewer. He wrote this letter, but never sent it. Maybe because it was too depressing. He stashed it inside one of his books (he evidently read a lot) and forgot about it.

Both assumptions have some common ground, but each veers off into dramatically different stories. I’d love to write a story for each, but for now I’ll just give a general overview of what I found and why it’s interesting to me.

This brief one-page letter reveals many pages about a man struggling psychologically as well as financially. This is a life not being lived well. From Horace's lines, we learn that Bess seemed concerned about his mental state and urged him to focus on the things he has that he can enjoy and don't require money. Evidently, Horace is feeling quite a financial pinch and generally hating his life at the moment.

I also learn in the first paragraph that the things he enjoys are books and music and studying because he states that his present job is so demanding that it keeps him from indulging in them. Except for reading metaphysics. This subject must be important enough to him that whatever free time he can muster will be devoted to reading and studying that subject. From that piece of information, I think I can safely assume that Horace has a nice little stack of books and old 78s for his intellectual stimulation and pleasurable diversions.

The date of the book and the tough times Horace seems to be going through indicate that the Great Depression has a grip on the country and on Horace. The book predates the stock market crash by a year, but the letter could easily have been tucked into an older, used book.

Further down in the letter, Horace critiques a book Bess gave him for Christmas:

It was so sparkling and refreshing that it was sipping a long cold drink. That Margaret Halsey has a flow of language and the most marvelous gift of pertinent synonym.

He goes on to say that although he hasn't had time to read, that doesn't include metaphysics, which he still indulges in, if in an unorthodox way.

So is he the wannabe book reviewer or is it Bess? Sounds here more like Assumption #2 is the likely scenario. This mention of Margaret Halsey is the clue I need to pin down the approximate year this letter was written. Halsey’s first book, With Malice Toward Some, was published in 1938. The Great Depression was in the process of bottoming out after nearly a decade of ravaging the economy and lives of millions.

He pines away for an opportunity to return home to Louisiana or Mississippi (they must have lived in both places growing up) and just have a normal life where he could work for enough to be comfortable and have time to enjoy leisurely pursuits. One of the most poignant lines in the letter reveal his resignation and frustration:

I realize we are always in our rightful places, but it is difficult sometimes to understand it.

His present employer is having trouble, much like his previous employer, whom he names as Saenger Co., which appears to started business as a chain of theaters for both vaudeville and movies in the early twentieth century.

This sad letter finishes with advice for Bess to make a change in her life by leaving Hattiesburg. He believes the change would be good for her. This opinion injects a new idea about just how well Bess is doing. Likely, she is not too happy with where she finds herself at this point in time, else why would Horace suggest a leaving Hattiesburg? I wonder if that change of address would include Floyd?

Also in the closing paragraphs, Horace laments a busted relationship between Bess and her girlfriends, and then Horace lapses into memories of a happier time when he and Bess would visit and play among friends, travel to the Gulf coast, etc. Horace seems to be retreating into the past to escape the present. A sad commentary on circumstances of the day, soothed somewhat by fragmented escapes into the pleasure of a book and memories of a happier time.

I'll never know whether Horace or Bess saved the letter. Whether it was sent or not. Times may have gotten worse before they got better. Did Horace's prospects ever get better? Did he eventually prosper and build a respectable library of books (emphasis on metaphysics, of course!) and music? Did Bess stay in Hattiesburg? Did either sibling ever find happiness?

Parallels to our present economy and its southward sprint of late makes me wonder what current-day ephemera of an unsatisfied or unhappy life will offer a future reader a time-capsule glimpse into that life and today's times. Maybe 70 years from now, sometime around 2075 to 2080, something laid in an "old" book from 2008 will give that reader pause to stop and consider it. And, hopefully, the chain of relevance will be broken, with respect to the economy.

Quiz: Name the authors

For the one or two readers I have on this thing... This husband and wife teamed up to write a book together in the 1980s. Who are they?




DING DING DING... We have a winner! Anonymous correctly stated that the authors are Lynne and Dick Cheney, "America's Sweethearts!" (Anon's comment, not mine). Dick was still a young guy with only five heart attacks and three hunting accidents under his belt.

Here is the 1982 book they co-authored (their photo was on the back of the jacket):

Message of the Bells

I set this book aside last month in advance of the holiday season. As Christmas is "in the air" now, I thought I'd share it here. The Message of the Bells, or What Happened to us on Christmas Eve, was written and illustrated by Hendrick Willem Van Loon, with music by Grace Castagnetta, in 1942. As it's a small, 16-page book, I thought I'd put the whole thing here for anyone to enjoy. An inscription indicates the book was a Christmas gift. The giver may have had the book's subtitle in mind with instructions to read the book on Christmas Eve, 1942. The story and the publication date occurred during World War II. One wonders what special significance Van Loon's tale had for the original owners of this book during a war-time Christmas celebration... or might have for present-day readers with family members fighting in a war overseas?


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