Key to the Kingdom

    Let's say you're a librarian, and a patron walks up to you and says he never went to college, but he'd like to read his way to a good liberal arts education; he'd like to touch all the bases—history, art, music, mathematics, literature, philosophy, science.  So would you show him where to start because he'd like to go about this systematically?  And quickly, please, because he's on his lunch hour and he's due back at the office.
    And you know just the book to start with, right?

    In his essay "The Lifetime Reading Plan," Joseph Epstein tells of a student who wanted to do a second draft on his college education.  The student felt there was too much he hadn't read and too much he'd missed, so he asked Epstein what books he should be reading.  Epstein's resulting essay on reading habits and what books should be read is witty and worth your time—you'll find it in his book ONCE MORE AROUND THE BLOCK.  Epstein concludes his essay by observing that "there is no systematic way to go about it, no list, no key to the kingdom of the educated."
    But there is.

    Books about books usually belong to one of two types.  The first is the Great Books List.  Here you'll find Clifton Fadiman's THE LIFETIME READING PLAN, J. Sherwood Weber's GOOD READING, and others.  The second is the Where To Look It Up Directory.  Alden Todd's FINDING FACTS FAST, Lois Horowitz's KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK, and dozens of others fit here.  They're all useful.  But they aren't helpful to our hypothetical patron.  Not yet.
    The people who wrote those books weren't asking the same questions as our patron.  They were dealing with questions like: "Which books are the best in their fields?" or "Where do you find specific types of information?" or "What books should an educated man have read?"  In the case of Mortimer Adler's HOW TO READ A BOOK, we see a guide to reading intelligently in particular areas, but that's not quite what our patron's looking for either.  Our patron doesn't know where to start; he's looking for a systematic way to go about getting his independent education, a key to the kingdom.
    But would your patron believe it if you told him that a fine place to start was with a book published fifty years ago by a middle-aged jewelry salesman from New Jersey?  For that matter, would you believe it yourself?

    The salesman's name was Cornelius Hirschberg.  He published two books.  The second was a mystery novel called FLORENTINE FINISH, which won a Mystery Writers of America award in 1963.  His first book was THE PRICELESS GIFT.
    That first book wasn't a novel.  Nor was it the treacly "inspirational" book that title may suggest to the cynical contemporary ear.  The title is dead serious; when Hirschberg called his book THE PRICELESS GIFT, he meant it.
    Cornelius Hirschberg never had the opportunity to go to college; he decided as a young man that though he made his living as a businessman, he would spend his free time learning all he could about art, literature, music, science, history, and philosophy, getting on his own the education he was never able to get formally.  He intended to acquaint himself with everything the world's best minds had to offer.  He didn't understand that nobody (except perhaps Isaac Asimov) could become acquainted with such a wide range of human knowledge any more.  And so, not knowing that it couldn't be done, he got on with the joyous work of doing it.
    But Hirschberg didn't stop there.  In 1960, he published THE PRICELESS GIFT; in that book, he explained exactly how he went about the process of self-education, and how anyone who can read and count can do the same thing if he's willing to work.
    In his introductory chapters, Hirschberg tells the reader that he isn't writing to teach any subject, but to help the reader plan the curriculum of his own independent university.
    Hirschberg divided his book into sections on history, literature, math, and so on, saying "... I do not teach these subjects.  I only show how I study them. . . This is a book to read before you read the books from which you will learn things."
    Hirschberg describes his self-education, lists books he found to be most useful and explains his methods of approach to each subject.  His writing communicates not only what he did and how he did it, but also the excitement of it and the sense of accomplishment.

    Much of Hirschberg's study was done in what he calls "The Subway University."  He rode the subways, or buses, or commuter trains to and from work, and read during the commute.  That time and his lunch hour gave him two and a half hours a day for serious reading -- over 20,000 hours of reading by the time he wrote THE PRICELESS GIFT, covering enough ground for several degrees. 
    He used history as the starting point.  Once the reader has a grasp of history, other learning becomes easier.  This notion is echoed in Robert Heinlein's 1980 essay/story "The Happy Days Ahead," in which Heinlein states "The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics.  Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn."  Without history, other areas are more difficult to master.  Hirschberg points out that for us the works of Dickens, Tolstoy, and others are historical novels now. Awareness of their context helps the reader understand them better.  This holds true not just for literature, but for other areas as well.  For Hirschberg, history is the most important leg of the stool, and he makes a persuasive case for that opinion.  Indeed, he states that the sections on history and literature are the essential portions of the book, and that approaching any subject through its history will take you anywhere you want to go.  So, to get the meat of this book, you don't even have to read all 350 pages—100 will do. Reading the first 100 pages of Hirschberg's book can give any reader the tools necessary to plan a program of study that will fill in the gaps in his education.
    Hirschberg wrote well, as an ordinary man speaking to ordinary readers, and if he pushes a little hard sometimes. . . well, what of it? He was a salesman, making what he had to believe was the most important pitch of his life.  He was selling the tools for self-education, performing a public service.

    Now, when our hypothetical patron came in, did you steer him straight to Hirschberg? Did you know about Hirschberg?  If you didn't, and you're a librarian, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that you didn't know about him? Did you hear about this book in library school?  Did you ever run across references to it anywhere? Doesn't that seem odd to you? It does to me.
    This book should not be as obscure as it is.  In its essentials, it is not outdated.  As a road map for the general reader trying to broaden his education, it is still extremely helpful.  But THE PRICELESS GIFT is long out of print, and it does not appear in the standard catalogs for public and college libraries.  I recall no mention of this book in library school.  The first book in which I saw it referenced was Ronald Gross's THE LIFELONG LEARNER, published in 1978 by Simon & Schuster and now also out of print.  Gross didn't mention Hirschberg's book in his more recent INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR'S HANDBOOK, though he did describe Hirschberg's self-education in the introduction.  Hirschberg goes unmentioned in numerous books about books and the guides to reference work.
    That this book goes unmentioned in high schools and colleges is regrettable.  That it is apparently almost forgotten in the library world is inexcusable.  One of the ideals of the library is the notion of the library as the poor man's university—the place where anyone can go to learn anything.  But when the reader gets there, he may find nothing to help him start.  We can show him how to use card catalogs and periodical indexes.  We can show him reference books until he and we are senile and we can provide all the proper great books lists.  But how many of us could show him how to plan the best curriculum for his needs and temperament? Hirschberg could and did.
    So why is it out of print? Why no rediscovery of this book?
    It was apparently received well on publication.  The reviewer for LIBRARY JOURNAL said that the book should be known by all librarians and should be found in all general libraries.  Comments from other reviewers were favorable.  But as Jay Jacobs pointed out in his review in THE REPORTER, Hirschberg had no formal academic credentials.  People without academic degrees sometimes have a hard time being taken seriously by people with them.  THE PRICELESS GIFT was probably never bought by all the libraries that should have purchased it, and many of those have probably weeded it from the collection in the decades since then.
    THE PRICELESS GIFT is 50 years old now, and Hirschberg wrote portions of it several years before it actually saw print; it's likely that its age may lead some people who know of the book to think it outdated.  A few of his recommended titles are now outdated, but Hirschberg's methods are not, and many of the books he cited are still widely available (some in updated editions and newer translations) and still of use to Hirschberg's proper audience.
    And who is that audience?  Every high school or college student.  Every librarian and teacher.  Every adult with the nagging feeling that he didn't learn as much in school as he should have.
    If there's any justice, THE PRICELESS GIFT will one day occupy a place on the same shelf with Adler's HOW TO READ A BOOK and Fadiman's LIFETIME READING PLAN.  But until then, you'll have to haunt used book stores, or pay steep prices for the occasional copy online, or try to borrow it through interlibrary loan if you want to read it.  If you're in libraries or education, you should look it over. THE PRICELESS GIFT is still one of the best reader's advisors ever.
    And if anyone out there has any clout with Simon & Schuster, why not drop them a line recommending that THE PRICELESS GIFT be reissued? Making it available again could be one of the nicer things to happen to lifelong learning in some time.

# # #

And a brief commercial: Have recently put up another short story at Amazon's Kindle Store and Smashwords (from where it will eventually find its way to Sony, B&N, Diesel and others).  It's a dark time-travel story called "The Old Neighborhood."  DRM-free, 99 cents.  Give it a look if you get a chance.

A Few Recommendations

With books like BLEAK HOUSE, WAR AND PEACE, and A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME still in the to-be-read pile, other titles get added to the stack and, simply because they're not as massive, get read first.  Sometimes I ask myself how this happens when I know that if I stopped buying books today and started the backlog I could keep myself busy for at least three years (and possibly until I'm planted).  But there's no need to ask, really -- I know how it happens.

It's Amazon's fault.

If you search an author's name in Amazon's book and Kindle stores, you'll get results that include other authors as well.  So while checking to see if any more of Jack Ketchum's backlist had been published for Kindle, up popped a title for which Ketchum had done an introduction.  The book was a novella called "Midlisters," by Kealan Patrick Burke.  After reading Ketchum's introduction in the sample, I bought "Midlisters," and by the time I read it several more of Burke's stories were available.  If you're a fan of horror fiction and have not yet read Kealan Patrick Burke, you're missing out.  His short story "Empathy" is one of the most frightening pieces I've read in years, and while I haven't yet read all of the ebooks now available by Burke, I've yet to be disappointed by any of those that I've finished.  This guy's GOOD.

While checking to see if any more of Shirley Jackson and Ramsey Campbell had been issued for Kindle, a title that showed up in searches for both was James Everington's THE OTHER ROOM.  It's a collection of short horror stories, light on grue and long on chills.  Everington's author page notes Jackson, Campbell and Robert Aickman as influences -- it shows, and I don't think that readers of Jackson, Campbell, and Aickman will be disappointed if they read THE OTHER ROOM.  Very nicely done, particularly the title story and "A Writer's Words," "Red Route," "First Time Buyers," and "Home Time."

And while checking to see if Thomas Williams' work had been issued for Kindle, there was a listing for his National Book Award winner from 1975, THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX.  I wasn't planning on unloading the hard copies, but wanted his titles as ebooks as well.  The ebook included a new introduction by Andre Dubus III and a new afterword by the author's daughter Ann Joslin Williams, of whom I hadn't heard until reading the afterword.  Ann Joslin Williams is also a writer, and her short story collection THE WOMAN IN THE WOODS and her recently-published first novel DOWN FROM MOUNT CASCOM use the same New Hampshire settings (and the fictional town of Leah) where most of Thomas Williams' work was set.  The collection and the novel are both excellent; somewhere Thomas Williams is smiling.

No need to bother with plot descriptions -- you can find them in the book descriptions at Amazon.  Here are links to Amazon's author pages for Williams, Everington, and Burke.  Enjoy.


Ann Joslin Williams:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AAnn+Joslin+Williams&keywords=Ann+Joslin+Williams&ie=UTF8&qid=1310833903&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B001K86Z50

James Everington:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AJames+Everington&keywords=James+Everington&ie=UTF8&qid=1310833947&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B004FMKDH4

Kealan Patrick Burke:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AKealan+Patrick+Burke&keywords=Kealan+Patrick+Burke&ie=UTF8&qid=1310833983&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B002BLW1IU



And bests to all.


-------

Brief commercial -- free short story offer.
My short ghost story, "The Point," is available free through the end of July at Smashwords as part of their summer site promotion. 
Link is:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/55647
Use discount code SSWSF when purchasing to get it as a freebie.

Generosity

A cursory glance at the Amazon rankings for Stephen King's books suggests that his 1981 non-fiction title DANSE MACABRE may be the King title least likely to have been purchased by the horror fan.  I was still working at Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in Chicago when the book was originally published, and DANSE MACABRE didn't sell nearly as quickly as King's fiction.  Understandable -- if you're looking for a horror novel, will you really want to read a survey of horror in film, fiction, television and radio?  But for even the casual horror fan who isn't interested in studying the field but just wants a good book to read, skipping DANSE MACABRE is a mistake.  Most readers of science fiction and fantasy probably never picked up an issue of LOCUS or FANTASY NEWSLETTER.  Readers who never miss a novel by Dean Koontz may never have bothered to read a copy of his earlier non-fiction title HOW TO WRITE BEST-SELLING FICTION.  Fans of any particular writer may read the novels and short stories, but ignore interviews with them.  In doing so, they may be missing acts of generosity by those writers.

Some of the best money I ever spent was at the 1969 World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis.  Three dollars bought a copy of THE DOUBLE:BILL SYMPOSIUM, a small press pamphlet that collected the responses of science fiction and fantasy writers to a number of questions on writing and books and reading.  The writers generously took time to answer questions from Bill Bowers and Bill Mallardi.  One of those questions asked about their formative reading.  The answers introduced me to writers I hadn't read, and pointed me back toward writers I'd read in school without really paying sufficient attention.

When I was following science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery fiction more closely than I do now, one of the best things about the genres was the number of fan and specialty journals that printed interviews with the writers.  And at some point in the interviews, the writers were usually asked which writers they themselves enjoyed reading.  And the writers were always happy to recommend books and writers they thought worth seeking out.  This is why anyone who checked out those interviews, who looked over books like DANSE MACABRE, or HOW TO WRITE BEST-SELLING FICTION, or THE DOUBLE:BILL SYMPOSIUM has probably never been in danger of running out of things to read.  If anything, there's always been so much worthwhile material recommended that there's no way to ever get around to all of it, or even a majority of it.

Their generosity steers readers not only to other works of their own, but to writers who may not yet be household names.

Just a couple of examples.  Harlan Ellison's long interview with Comics Journal in 1980 steered readers to writers like Jorge Amado, V. S. Pritchett, Jose Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa.  Comments and blurbs from Stephen King pointed to the work of Jack Ketchum, Don Robertson, Thomas Williams, Ernest Hebert, Ron Carlson, and more; the lists at the back of his books DANSE MACABRE and ON WRITING are gold mines of recommendations.  And note that most of the recommendations mentioned in this paragraph weren't for the work of fantasists, but for the work of general fiction writers.

If there's a writer you like, do you read interviews with them as well as their fiction?  If you run across an article by that writer in which he talks about his reading and the influences on his writing, do you read it?  You should -- if a writer you like mentions a book he likes, there's a good chance that's a book you'd like too.

Blurbs can be a little trickier.  Far too often, the blurb on the paperback will consist of glowing commentary from a magazine or newspaper rather than an individual.  But if you check all the blurbs, not just on the front or back cover but on the blurb pages preceding the title page, you'll usually find some individuals quoted rather than just periodicals.

The interviews, and articles, and blurbs are often acts of generosity by writers who may be among your favorites.  Watch for them as well as for new books by your favorites, and you'll never run out of books or stories to read.  Your problem will be finding a way to keep up.

The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span

    In a new book called THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet, in changing the way we search for information, is also changing the way we absorb and process that information.  That change is not for the better.  Specifically, the capacity for sustained concentration on lengthy or difficult material, the ability to stay focused on arguments and exposition developed at book-length, suffers from our growing tendency to take in our information in bite-sized bursts.
    At this time, I've read only Carr's opening chapters, though the book has joined one of about eleven gazillion on the to-be-read pile, a pile that I'll be getting around to One Day Soon...  But Carr's view of this harmful effect of the way we use the tools offered by the internet doesn't strike me as something new.  The same phenomenon was noted years ago in connection with television by McLuhan, Neil Postman, and others, if memory serves.

    Ever wondered why we had to take algebra or read Dickens and Eliot in high school?  That's not as great a leap into off-topic irrelevancy as it may seem at first glance.

    Before I hit the eighth grade, I'd read a number of books by Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Haggard, Verne, Stevenson, Defoe, and others.  Not all of their works by any means, but a respectable number for a kid of twelve or thirteen.  In eighth grade I discovered contemporary science fiction and fantasy books and for nearly twenty years almost all my pleasure reading was in those genres, with generous dollops of mystery and suspense fiction as well.  I didn't neglect my school work, but any reading I did that wasn't required was in work by contemporary writers, and most of those writers came out of the science fiction and mystery pulp magazines.  So heavy was my concentration on this material that one of my high school English teachers (Edith Nelson at Lindblom Tech in Chicago -- hello, if you're still out there) tried constantly to steer me back into more of the classics, to no avail.

    Fast forward a bit.  High school was 45 years ago.  There are a lot of books on hand, on my shelves and on my Kindle (and as I noted last week, that stack is more aspiration than accomplishment).  Among them: Montaigne's essays, Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Anthony Powell's DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, Samuel Johnson, and yes, George Eliot too.  All of these writers, dipped into, but not read in any systematic way.  Some of their books read, but not nearly all and not nearly all the ones I know I should get around to before I'm planted (and these are books I'd like to get around to because I expect to enjoy them much more than I would have in high school or college, and not out of any sense of obligation).
    And why are so many of them still unread?
    Call it the Carr effect if you like, but it predates him.  The internet can lead to atrophy in our capacity to concentrate on demaning material?  So can spending too much time on less demanding material regardless of the medium.  I'd never go so far as to say that good popular fiction is a waste of time -- I don't regret a moment spent reading the work of Theodore Sturgeon, for instance -- but an overemphasis on it can, I think, cause the attention span to shrink to the point where it becomes very difficult to stay focused on lengthy and demanding material.  The mental muscles, like the physical, atrophy if they don't get enough use.

    Why did we have to take algebra or read Dickens and Eliot in high school?  Call it mental gymnastics.  If you actually did the assigned work, you knew that you could read a long demanding book, you could focus on intricate problems; you knew you could concentrate.  That's something you don't get from reading a lot of contemporary popular literature.  That's my experience, anyway, and I'm probably not unique.

    How about you?  Finished BLEAK HOUSE, WAR AND PEACE, and Montaigne yet?

    If you have, my hat's off to you.  If you haven't, don't feel like the Lone Ranger -- I haven't finished them yet either.  But they're on my list.



And bests to all,

--tr

Downsizing

Just over a decade ago, Joseph Epstein wrote an essay called "Books Won't Furnish a Room."  In that essay, he talked about the process of trimming his personal library; Epstein cut a collection of 2000 volumes down to about 400.  At the time of publication, that essay filled me with the kind of cosmic dread usually reserved for the doomed narrators of Lovecraft's stories.  Dear God in heaven -- weed four books out of every five?  How could anyone force himself to do that?  Easier to saw off your own leg, I thought.  Shows how wrong you can be.  I didn't know it at the time, but I'd already started that process myself.

When my wife and I moved from Chicago to Kansas 25 years ago, we shipped more than a hundred cartons of books.  They weren't small cartons, either; we worked for Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in downtown Chicago for nine years, and when we packed all those books we got publishers' shipping cartons from the stockrooms.  The cartons would hold 25 or more hardcovers, 50 to 100 mass market paperbacks.  Our house once had 8 or 9 bookcases in the main living areas and two or three 6-foot metal utility shelves in the basement, all double-rowed (some triple-rowed) and sagging, and some boxes stashed in closets.

Most of the books on those shelves are gone now.  They've been given to libraries, or sold to individuals and second-hand book dealers.  It wasn't nearly as painful as I'd thought it would be, because quite a few of those departed books are still here.  The nicest thing about ebooks isn't price or search functions.  It's the space savings, the fact that ebooks let you eat your cake and have it too where shelf space is concerned.  Just replacing Stephen King's hardcovers with ebooks freed up something like 6 feet of shelf space.  We've been replacing print with ebooks for a decade, and while we haven't chopped 80% of our print volumes yet we're getting there as more backlist titles finally see ebook publication.  Thanks to ebooks, we've been able to keep our personal library while achieving Epstein's goal of living in a home where not every wall has a bookcase.

Of course, downsizing the physical space doesn't mean that the book collection has actually been downsized.  Anybody with a serious book-buying habit learns quickly to buy 'em when they're there, because later they might not be so easy to find; that's not as true in these days of online booksellers as it was pre-web, but habits are habits and they don't die easily.  And that means, at least in my case and I'm not unique, that I'm still buying them faster than I can read them; changing to ebooks hasn't changed that even a little bit.

In "Paladin of the Lost Hour," Harlan Ellison's protagonist talks about his library and says "Who wants a library full of books you've already read?"  Well, having a library full of books I've already read will never be my problem.  Leaving the question of catching up with the backlog -- these days, the books in the collection represent aspiration far more than they do accomplishment.  Bet I'm not unique there, either; but that's a subject for a little later.

----

A brief commercial and free ebook offer -- skip it if you like:
I've got a few short stories available at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords, and other ebook sites, and I'm hoping to see comments from reviewers, so until June 7 I'm making 100%-off-purchase-price coupons available at Smashwords.  You can find the ebooks at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TonyRabig

One story, "Ghost Writer," is already available free at Smashwords; the other two titles are usually 99 cents each, but you can get those free as well until June 7 by using the coupons at the time of purchase.
Smashwords coupon code for "The Point" is NL93T
Smashwords coupon code for "The Other Iron River, and Other Stories" is QP57C.

If you use the coupons, please post a review at Amazon, Smashwords, and Goodreads at your earliest convenience.

Thanks in advance, see you next week, and bests to all,

--tr

Who Is This Guy, Anyway?

A retired librarian, bookseller, teacher, and computer programmer, not necessarily in that order.  The publishing business is currently turning itself upside down and inside out and nothing works the way I used to believe it did.  So naturally I'll start writing now, when most of what I thought I knew about the bookbiz no longer applies.

While working at the above-mentioned trades, I wrote, but not nearly enough.  Most of my effort went toward paying the bills, and writing was backburnered.  Well, the mortgage is paid now and I'm working part time instead of full time plus extra, and the family won't have to eat cat food if I spend more time writing now than preparing reports for the office.

There's just one problem.

When you backburner something like writing, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get back into practice.  I wrote on and off, and it's coming back, but so very slowly -- if I hadn't written at all during those years, chances are that there wouldn't be anything left.

This will be a blog about books, ebooks, dealing with the eternal book-lover's problem of limited shelf space, writing when it feels like the faculties are so atrophied that you can't put together a single coherent sentence, the amusements of formatting and publishing your own ebooks, and the even greater amusements of trying to figure out how to market them, and any related subjects that come to mind.  I'll try to be pleasant and entertaining about it, I'll try to post every weekend, I'll try not to bore your backside off, I won't spend every blog post trying to get you to buy my stuff, and if I stumble over something that would be useful to those of you out there in the same situation, I'll pass it along.

And right now, the most useful thing I can say to those of you who want to write but spend most of their time paying the bills is this: Do as I say, not as I did -- make time, because the writing muscles are like any others and you've got to use 'em or lose 'em.

And on that cheery note, hello, welcome aboard, and see you next week.

Bests to all,

--tr