Good morning. Over the last week, I have been reading Martin Latham's The Bookseller's Tale, enjoying every word...sometimes going back over to catch again names, titles, places, events. I came to it from another bookseller's book, a slim little volume of small prose and poems called When it slows down, I will do a display, which I'd found browsing around Epilogue downtown while waiting for my coffee. I like walking up there for just those pastimes...a decent length of walk, a coffee (maybe a Mexican pastry on a cold day), and books new and used.
Anyway, Latham, the author of the Tale, is a clearly well-read, long-time bookseller, now running a Waterstone Books in Canterbury, GB. Canterbury, in case you have forgotten your sophomore high school reading, is the site of the famous cathedral, to which we owe one of the great "chapter novels" [sorry, all you medievalists out there] in English history: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, no slouch when it comes to what we even now look for in books...bravery, one-up-man-ship, false piety, betrayal, sex, foodies, Romance (the capital letter changes the meaning though not the origins) and lessons learned.
Latham's is about books...the way we find them, corner them, collect them, hunt them down, dig them out from moldy basements and back shelves of second-hand stores, attach to them for comfort and sneak them under the covers for excess, read them in corners and attics and libraries, open or closed. It's about the eccentricity, dedication, dangerous encounters, and savvy saviors among 4,000 years of collectors and hoarders; about discovering and uncovering...like the book-edge paintings or the often ribald medieval hand-drawn scenes adorning the copies of ancient sacred texts (apparently, the scribes enjoyed bringing bestial delights to higher words).
Before you start yawning, Tale is actually written in quite a witty way, so that the well-researched and discretely arranged information makes you turn every page as if you were reading a novel. I don't think I've read anything so volunteerily closely since my parsing graduate school days.
But here's the part I wanted to share with you personally. Not long into the beginning of Latham's book, he introduces a section called "Comfort Books"...those that, over the years and particularly since childhood, we've read over and over, with an attachment that we may or, more likely, may not, have understood. In his bookstore to customers, on the street or at coffee shops to strangers, and in conversation with authors and other public people, he asks a question: What book did you go back to time and again as a child? And what have you become, perhaps in consequence of it?
I sat up straight at that one. It's no secret that a lifelong of reading (often with elders discovering me in some dark corner to say, "That's enough reading! Outside with you!") has led me to my vocation...almost a default one, if truth be told. But a single book?
Immediately, though, it came to mind. I couldn't remember title or author, but I did well remember the story about a young girl being taken as an indentured servant in New Amsterdam in the 1600's. Neither could I count now the number of times I walked to the library to read and re-read it; I must have been 8-10 in those years, so I also knew the book was probably written in the 'thirties or 'forties.
As we do these days, I went online to see what was out there with such a plot. Nothing. I eventually recalled that the title was the girl's name and something, and that her name began with J. Still, nothing. Even the Library of Congress catalog came up with nothing. (But that's not a surprise...as Latham notes, the L of C had the habit of ignoring, burying or outright rejecting books at various chief librarian's dispositions or Congress' political leanings...you'd be unpleasantly surprised at what's not in our national collection.)
So, I did the far better thing...walked to our public library and found a children's librarian at her desk. When I presented my bibliographic problem, she brightened up and took up her resources. "We love this kind of problem!" she claimed as she wrote down a faithful description of the plot I knew.
The next day, an email delivered the collected librarians' finds: three possible books, of which, she wrote, this first one would likely be it.
 |
| This is exactly like the book I remember reading |
It began with a J, yes; its plot was mostly what I remembered. Jonica's Island, by Gladys Malvern, who, when I looked her up found that she had written a number of children's historical novels, well-researched and -written, pointed at middle-elementary school age. She included a glossary of Dutch terms, too, which she used throughout. Malvern, I went on to read, had an interesting history herself, in part not unlike some of our heroine Jonica, which I'd have loved to know back then...but I'll leave that off now, for brevity's sake.
I next went to find the book online, thinking it might be fun to have and re-read. Here I found a giant stumbling block. It was out of print; there were no new copies, nor were there likely to be, though others of hers had been reprinted (more about that in a minute); any extant copy was running at $500. to 700. on any used-book site, Etsy, Ebay and Amazon. Exhibit A:
Since that amount would buy me a hotel for a week in Istanbul, I passed. But I dug on, and nearly by accident found a site by a woman whose daytime job was personal tech-helper but whose avocation was re-discovering books and authors she once loved. She'd found Jonica at some odd place, like a library or yard sale, and realizing that others would like it, too, she copied the whole 200 pages, including the illustrations done by Gladys' sister Corinne, on a PDF file you could simply write and ask her to share.
So I did, and here it came. I'd rather have had the book in hand, of course...kindle doesn't inspire me, but this woman who saved children's books for strangers to read did.
What amazed me was not only the forgotten illustrations, which in I'm sure in those early years impressed me as much as the text, but the detailed and carefully laid out historical setting...what became New York Island a century later...and which included openly and clearly the temperment of the Dutch settlers, the pride of their work and harshness of the times, as well as the wealth accrued by some, the hypocritic treatment of others, including Jonica's alcoholic father and his thievery, the violence of whippings and humiliations of the stock, slave buying and selling (and the ignorant disdain of the Dutch to those they bought), a native massacre and reprising settler wars...all horrors portrayed...even the small pox epidemic and its human costs, as well as both the loyalty and discipline and sturdiness of its people. I must have read all of those words, and yet clung to the girl's story of poverty, servitude, service, affection, care, loyalty and brave perserverence until the romantic (note low-case r) ending satisfied her fate. Not quite the Velveteen Rabbit.
So what about this complicated story stayed so close to me in those days? And how on earth could this one come under Latham's "Comfort" category? I had to think about this slowly, but a few images came forth:
First, the Dutch frau's housekeeping, for she was a stickler about her house, with generous meals, elaborately sanded floors, and an attractive, comfortable and useful home for her husband and sons. Jonica, coming into the household from her sad upbringing, thinks this is paradise no matter how hard the work. Then all except one of the sons' loyalty and affection for Jonica; though their parents keep her stiffly distant as a servant, the boys each bring or make something homey for her small attic room...even, from the most dandyish of them, the gift of a mirror...quite an extravagence in those days...and treat her as a sister. Soon, the parents, while still wary because of her background, come to admire her considerable skills...she had learned them from her mother who had died and left her with a father who only brought her down in their world by his drinking and is almost her undoing later. (A nosy, imperious neighbor, by the way, often a villain in novels, is the nemesis.)
Finally, the line that stays with me was the first question the frau asked of her relieved husband as she is recovering, thanks to Jonica's fortitude and care, from small pox, "Are the floors sanded? The candlesticks polished?" It made me laugh then and still does.
Gladys and Corinne, each in their way, were geniuses at portraying things as they were, and people as they were. And portrayed them for children like me.
So, why not reprint this book? Political correctness might be the easiest answer...there is so much prejudice encapsulated, each small group of people subjugating each other group to suspicion, contempt, derision and expulsion from social contact. I wish I could say that we had evolved better, but alas I cannot. The brick walls of the Dutch settlement, the gated community, the pilloring and exclusion, the slavery...it's all still here. Sadly, maddingly. The history in this book is a microscopic and yet expansive lesson that school could not teach me.
On my trip to Victoria, I walked through the lovely, peaceful cemetery along the Pacific, and found the monument, newly erected, to the Japanese settlers of the area, who had brought so much culture and citizenship to that place over time...and yet whose graves had been destroyed by their neighbors because they were "enemies" during the 'forties. Why do we do this to one another, I wondered? In the midst of beauty, there seems always the pit of our ugliness.
Well, back to Mr. Latham's question...I think I found my answer. What would be yours? Do try and remember...it's a lot of fun to figure out, and perhaps yours will not be out of print and favor, like mine.
Happy reading.
