Do You Have An Odd Book Shelf? (Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman)

The late-great Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) would, I feel have approved wholeheartedly of Anne Fadiman and her family. The idiosyncratic exponent of the art of Professional Book Handling (http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/i-want-to-be-book-handler.html) would have been delighted by their belief that books are there to be read and enjoyed, and that it is quite right for them to look battered and well-used, because the content is more important than the book itself.

Anne’s family, as revealed in Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, are book handlers par excellence.  They leave open books face down on surfaces, break the spines, turn down the corner of pages, underline passages, and write comments in the margins. Anne’s father used to reduce the weight when reading on planes by tearing pages out as he read them, while her young son eats books.

The book is a beautifully crafted collection of essays on books, reading, language and writing, all originally written for the author’s Ex Libris column in the American magazine, Civilization. And it refutes my theory that one should never believe a book blurb, because it really is ‘witty, enchanting and supremely well written’ – just as The Observer’s Robert McCrum says.

Fadiman, who is both literary and literate, covers a range of topics. I had huge sympathy for the difficulties outlined in Marrying Libraries, which discusses the problems of merging your book shelves when you set up home with your partner. Do you discard duplicates, and if so which copy do you keep? And if each of you has a different system of storing books do you opt for volumes stacked in categories (Anne) or a miscellaneous jumble (her husband)? I’ve been through this: last summer, after nearly 30 years together, The Man of the House  have a lot of sympathy ... after nearly 30 years together, the Man of the House and I culled our books and tried to establish a joint ‘library’, with all the fiction together, in alphabetical order, irrespective of genre, but I am still not happy about the shelf full of Sharpe novels which has appeared in the middle of my classics. On the other hand, he questions whether Discworld, Harry Potter and all my childhood books need to be on general display.

Share and share alike: The nice neat row of Bernard Cornwell's
Sharpe novels belongs to to the Man of the House. My novels are
shoved in wherever I can find a space.

I particularly liked My Odd Shelf, though I cannot agree with Fadiman’s assumption that most people have an ‘odd shelf’ full of books unrelated to the main collection. On the whole, people I know are like me, and every shelf is an odd mish-mash!  However, Fadiman, who is obviously better organised, has an odd shelf which contains 64 books about polar expeditions, and her comments on Scott’s last journey are very moving.

Anyone who has ever been angered by misplaced apostrophes, double negatives, spelling errors,  and other mistakes of that ilk, will love the piece on language (I can’t give the title, because it’s got a printer’s ‘insert’ mark in it, and I can’t reproduce it on the compute, but it’s page 65 in my Penguin edition). Fadiman, her brother, father and mother are pained by such inaccuracies. Fadiman once wrote to Nabokov, listing the misprints in an edition of Speak, Memory; her brother offered to trade a complete list of mistakes in a computer-software manual for an upgraded version of the software; their mother collects newspaper mistakes, intending to send them to the editor, and before he lost his sight her father corrected menu cards, and library books.

Lost for Words by Johnny Jonas is a Medici
Card, which reminds of the Oxfam bookshop
where I am a volunteer.

Secondhand Prose, which discusses the joys of secondhand books is wonderful. Fadiman is the only person I have heard of who was whisked off to such a store as a birthday treat and returned home with a stash of books weighing nineteen pounds. Initially, explains Fadiman, she hunted out used books because she couldn’t afford new ones, but:

... I developed a taste for bindings assembled with thread rather than glue, type set in hot metal rather than by computer, and frontispieces protected by little sheets of tissue paper.  I also began to enjoy the sensation of being a little link in a long chain of book owners...

And, as you might expect from someone who loves ‘real’ books so much, she also enjoys writing with a fountain pen and ink, and has some fascinating tales to relate about writing in the essay entitled Eternal Ink. Did you know, for example, that :

One day, when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.

Writing on a computer cannot compete with that! All I can say is that if you love books, you should love this, so please read it - and I've posted this for the Essay Reading Challenge 2012 hosted by Carrie K. 

I am a Guest Blogger!

WOOHOO! Today I am a guest blogger for Vulpes Libris, with a piece about my family’s somewhat eccentric reading habits. As a child most people have hidden a book under the bedclothes or beneath the lid of a school desk – but have you ever read while ironing? Or left clothes behind to make room for the books you bought on holiday? Find out how it’s done by turning to http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/a-bookish-family/

Vulpes Libris (Latin for the Book Foxes) is a lovely site, with some beautifully written and very erudite book reviews, so I was thrilled when they asked me to produce something for them, and I can't believe the incredible response I have had - I am really touched by all the wonderful comments people have made, and delighted that there are so many people out there who love books and reading.

Anyway, I am sticking with the writing theme, because I am still reading The Far Pavilions. I’ve been reflecting on the art of essay writing - this is what comes of studying on an Open University course! Now I’m not going to reveal exactly how long it is since I left school, but when I tell you that BR (Before Redundancy) I was a journalist for more than 30 years, you will realise that it is a very long time indeed since I last engaged in any kind of formal study, let alone attempted to write an academic exposition.

The learning process is not so difficult. It’s simply a variation on the ‘Three Rs’, with a fourth thrown in for good luck: reading, research, writing notes – and remembering!

Writing essays presents more of a problem. I quickly established that years of writing for a newspaper in no way prepares you for composing university assignments. Creating a 300-word front page lead right on deadline is one thing, but an essay cannot be approached in the same light. It needs much more thought and much more planning.
For example, when I was a very young rookie reporter an older and more experienced colleague once told me to imagine any article as a verbal rather than written exercise. Ask yourself what’s the first thing you would tell your best friend, partner, mother etc because generally whatever you say to them will be the most interesting or most important thing about the story, so that should be the intro. This advice works fine on a newspaper, but is not necessarily to be followed for an essay, which demands a more formal and structured approach, with an introduction outlining the argument you will use to answer the assignment.

There is also the question of attribution. Contrary to popular opinion, reporters don’t make things up, and you are expected to tell readers where the information came from. You know the kind of thing: ‘Mrs Beryl Bloggs said’, or ‘according to a council planning report’….

What you don’t have to do is to give chapter and verse of exactly where your data came from, thus avoiding any accusations of plagiarism, and proving that you are able to locate and interpret the necessary facts. Referencing has become something of a nightmare, which I feel I am failing to get to grips with. I do not seem to have progressed at all, and still end up in an eleventh-hour panic, desperately searching through my sources, while trying to insert the right reference, in the right way, in the right place. Worst of all referencing is included with word count, so my method of adding it at the last minute is a Bad Thing (Sellar WC and Yeatman RJ, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates, Penguin Books Methuen, 1963) as I then have to start cutting.

Bother, I forgot the page numbers! And as if that isn’t enough, you also need a bibliography, listing every ‘publication’ you used - the books, articles, websites, CDs, DVDs and anything else – all listed in the correct format under the conclusion, which should draw all the threads of your argument together and hark back to the intro and the original question.

And quite apart from all that there are stylistic differences. The short snappy paragraphs I’ve always used are too disjointed for an essay, and don’t go into nearly enough depth, while Journalese puns and cliches are frowned upon.

However, there are similarities and some of the skills I have acquired over the years can be put to good use in my studies. I’ve always enjoyed researching, and I can usually weed out extraneous details and focus on the relevant facts. In addition I know just how important it is to be accurate, so I’ve developed an eye for detail, and will keep on checking facts.

And checking is what editing is all about. It’s the final process, before hitting the ‘send’ button. After all, editing OU essays is not so very different to editing copy on a paper, and it must also be akin to editing literary works in progress. I amass my notes, create a plan, write a draft, add things, take things out, put things back, shriek with horror at the word count, try to sub it down, remember I have forgotten the referencing, swear loudly, start again, panic in case I haven't answered the question, start again... and worry about that elusive perfect ending!