NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

Issue #12. September 4, 2001

Continental Books issues this free newsletter biweekly for customers and interested others. Short articles and stories center on books as a trade and as a collecting habit. If you find it useful and entertaining you can encourage us by recommending this experience to others. We are like a tricycle, easy on and easy off. You'll notice that we sprinkle references to books and web sites that either intensify development of a topic or race off in other directions. These are the unexpected doors in the blank wall. Open them. They are for the curious, the investigators, the seekers. If you have been there, done that, good for you. Keep moving with us. We'll catch your attention yet.

1. The Book Trade. Elmer Conshohocken's Daddy finds himself.
2. Book Review. Three forbidding philosophers turn out to be human
3. Notes and Recommendations.

THE CONSHOHOCKENS DISCOVER THE BOOK BUSINESS

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The Conshohockens are a composite book dealing family with several contradictory starts in the business. Once while dusting his stock Elmer Conshohocken claimed that a fortuitous association of a person with a book drew his father Karl into the trade. "Even the most ornery customer," Elmer said, "can't resist a complimentary association to himself."

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Karl Conshohocken, Elmer's father, served with the U.S. 63rd Infantry Division in World War Two with his close friend Max Wells. They had been students together in Philadelphia, were drafted at the same time, and remained together in the Army. In the invasion of Germany they crossed the Saar River with Company G of the 255th Infantry Regiment and deployed in a deserted town with most of the houses severely damaged. Entering an evacuated, broken and looted home they found the householder's library of some 500 volumes in disorder but intact. Both being avid readers they combed through the collection, but all the books were in German, a language with which they had scant familiarity. Only one book stood out. It had a picture of a man making a face, a real distortion of his features as though the photographer had caught him mixing a grimace of displeasure with the harsh lines of anger--an ugly image. Slowly they sounded out the picture's gothic script caption until it deciphered to "Negro-Jew of New York."

They were startled by this negative stereotype and its insane Nazi racial ideology, but something about the photo itself was signaling another meaning. "Good Lord." exclaimed Max. "That man is our old swimming instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, Splash Waters."

"And Splash is neither Negro or Jewish," added Karl, "Just the opposite. Remember, Max, that he was considered the honcho fascist on campus and the biggest fascist presence in West Philadelphia."

"He was an authoritarian alright," Max agreed, "A mean, humiliating, demeaning SOB. As a teacher, he didn't have an empathic bone in his body. No sane institution would hire him to instruct a herd of wild horses, and yet the University had him running the compulsory swimming program for human beings."

"He was the most hated man at the University." said Karl, piling it on. "Everyone said he must have been Hitler's cousin."

"And yet here he is," observed Max, waving the book, "Definitely and unexpectedly on our side."

"I remember the source of this picture now," said Karl, "He was on the high board, letting his face express his stress before his initial dive at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. I'll bet Splash would like to have this book, might be worth a few dollars to him for the associations. Let's take it back to Philly and sell it to him."

They left a note: "We've liberated the New Yorker. He's smiling now."

They lost the book somewhere on the way to the Danube River. After the war, Max went on to teach high school physics, and Karl, fixed by that moment in the bombed out library, spent his life rescuing unhappy books. Splash remained unreformed, but when word got around he eventually and grudgingly was loved by his suffering students as a loyal American whose image had been captured and abused by the bad guys.

References

1) Adorno, T. W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, et al. "The Authoritarian Personality," New York, 1950. Adorno and his psychologist colleagues argued a connection between an authoritarian personality syndrome and fascist politics. Most famously, at the time, they constructed a test called the F-Scale (for fascist) that measured just how prone a person was to this "disease." Today it would be recognized, no matter how much we may agree with their bias, as science influenced by politics.

2) Association copy. A specific book with a physical connection to the author, or to his companions or relatives, or to another famous or well-known person. More generally a book that has a meaningful link to a known person or place. An association book is a unique book. See our note on this "Provenance and the Unique Book" at http://www.continentalbooks.com/essays.html

A NOVEL BUILT ON THE REAL BIOGRAPHIES OF THREE VERY IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHERS

Some novelists use historical figures as actors in their plots, but without having them conform to their actual lives. They are treated as malleable clay, as servants to the story. Other writers garner the historical settings and sequences but instead of being locked, as is the biographer, by the actual, they use novelistic means to tell a tale that approximates what might have happened.

Bruce Duffy. "The World As I Found It" is of the second variety. His is docu-drama without the hysterics. Dealing with real people in real events he tracks selected actions of three famous and influential Cambridge University philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore. Their stories, with asides for other important characters, weave together and apart from 1911 until Wittgenstein's death in 1951.

There is a tension between the reader's beliefs about these three men and the characters Duffy draws, and this carries one through without a discernable plot though each sequence is complete in itself. The early half is riveting, though excruciatingly dark, because the characters are young and have the hope of uncompleted and still growing forms. The second part, where each reaches a resolution, a stability of pattern, their characters remaining unchanged, is lighter and occasionally comic. Wittgenstein is so angry, rigid, and driven that one derives as little pleasure from him as he appears to have achieved for himself. Close to his death he claimed a wonderful life, but all a reader can concede is that it was active. He did what he could, and, given his genius, his wealth, and his energy, this was quite considerable.

I was troubled by Duffy's treatment of Wittgenstein's World War I service with the Austrian Army. In real life he served in the artillery, where his mathematics and engineering could be useful, but in the novel's world he served in the infantry on the Russian front with experiences that, though beautifully written, really belong to the Western Front of Remarque. Wittgenstein as a platoon sergeant, active and commanding, doesn't feel right. But maybe the incongruity is the point.

Before reading this book I thought of these three men as forbidding, distant, and formal, each defined by his professional work, everything else gray and shadowy. Duffy's novel goes the other way. Their actions and characters as lively and flawed humans come forward while their philosophical acts recede. The two visions together evoke the mythical Homeric heroes. How grand to live in a time of such stories.

I can't imagine a philosopher or a psychologist or an acute observer of our recent past who could resist this reading experience.

References

Remarque, Erich Maria. "All Quiet On The Western Front" A novel viewing World War I from the perspective of the private German soldier.

For a Bertrand Russell web site see http://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm This is the Lord Russell archive. Also http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/rus.html which is part of Björn's Guide to Philosophy..

For G.E. Moore see http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/moor.htm

For Ludwig Wittgenstein see http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/w/wittgens.htm which is part of The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Calling All Readers -- Sojourners in Foreign Lands see Much that is Familiar and a Little that is as Mysterious as the Far Side of the Universe

1. Kathy Callaway "Lithuanian Letters" in the literary journal "Archipelago." A travel memoir of a teacher. Deserves your attention if you have an interest in the eastern side of the Baltic Sea or if you like travel tales. Found on recommendation by Jim Winter. Kathy Callaway is an editor of "Archipelago," now lives in Minnesota. See http://archipelago.org/vol5-2/callaway.htm

2. Birkett, Dea. "Serpent in Paradise" a book by a young travel writer from Britain who visits Pitcairn Island and finds trouble. We have a copy in stock at http://continentalbooks.com/books.cgi?bk=1371

Editor's Note

We made some progress with our web site. The archive of this newsletter series is now in place, and we have room for the additional writings we have planned. I hope you'll visit and look around at http://www.continentalbooks.com/notes.html The data base was designed and constructed by Joseph A. Katz, and the revisions and add-ons were designed and constructed by Jamie N. Katz. In this brave new world the children can once again, as of yore, do useful work for their parents. Many thanks. If you need a computer programmer, they both shape-up.

Salute.

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Copyright Alvin Katz 2001

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