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

Issue 15. October 31, 2001

This is a free email newsletter published by Continental Books for its customers and interested others. It has short articles and stories about the book trade and book collecting, but there are occasional turns in other directions. Our purpose is to call attention via entertainment and scraps of information. If you catch a useful idea, it is with our compliments.

1. Humor in the decade between slapstick and politics.
2. Unexpected knowledge for even the casual reader.
3. What ever happened to??
4. Toward a 9/11 bibliography.

HUMOR IN THE 1920's.

Humor is required. In ordinary life it is the joke, the manifestation of a hidden wish. From an anonymous source it diffuses through a social group by word-of-mouth. It is a moment of both personality and culture.

Walter E. Traprock. THE CRUISE OF THE KAWA, Wanderings in the South Seas, Putnam's, 1921 is a professional, carefully crafted joke in the form of a parody. Towards the end of the story it introduces the several authors whose work it has aped: Fred O'Brien, Martin Johnson, William Beebe, MacQuarrie, Captain Bligh and Joseph Conrad. Traprock is a pseudonym

In a yawl a small group of companions discover a Pacific paradise named Filbert Islands where the nuts fall from trees in constant profusion. They settle into a life of sensuality with native wives and a local variant of pink gin. Their creative energy expands for natural science, painting, photography and writing. They survive hurricanes, savage fish that eat man-eating sharks, small prehistoric birds that lay square eggs that resemble gambler's dice.

They are finally driven off, (except for the crewman, a common sailor with no real last name, who opts to remain), by the fear that they will infect the natives with modern diseases--rashes from prickly heat erupt as warning--and they return to the regular world of Papeete and New England.

It's actually a nice little read, charmingly illustrated and with a few unexpected dark moments for variety. It found an audience, I would guess, as sort of a Fitzgerald and Hemingway light. The actual author was George S. Chappell (1878-1946); a professional architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris after graduating from Yale in 1899. He was also known as George Shepard.

He wrote a series of similar books over a 15-year period, into the 1930's. Among them?

MY NORTHERN EXPOSURE. The Kawa at the Pole, 1922
SARAH OF THE SAHARA. A Romance of Nomads Land, 1923
THROUGH THE ALEMENTARY CANAL WITH GUN AND CAMERA, 1930
ROLLO IN SOCIETY (With woodcut illustrations), 1921
DR TRAPROCK'S MEMORY BOOK, or Aged in the Wood, 1931
EVIL THROUGH THE AGES, 1932
RESTAURANTS OF NEW YORK, 1925
ANIMALS ARISE, 1935
SHOAL WATERS, 1933
THE YOUNGER MARRIED SET, 1926
FLASHBACK, Dancing Girls in the Pages of Vanity Fair. (No date)
A BASKET OF POSES, Verses by George S. Chappell, pictures by Hogarth, Jr. (Pseudo.)

And with someone named Ridgely Hunt he wrote THE SALOON IN THE HOUSE or a Garland of Rumblossoms, 1930 A GARDNER'S FRIEND AND OTHER PESTS, 1931

He had an article in NONSENSORSHIP, edited by G. Sundry in 1922.

As far as I can tell he never got to Hollywood, as did Robert Benchley who pushed a similar brand of comedy. Question: Who is carrying on their tradition now?

WHEN NOT ENOUGH IS TOO MUCH?

Reticent information in books is like gold specks in a river's sandy bottom waiting to be stirred up and found. An Elmer Conshohocken story.

1
There are three levels of knowledge in any book: (1) The ostensible. What the author supposedly intended to give his readers, (2) The latent. The subtext of attitudes, values and issues, and (3) The hidden. The unintended and unexpected moment, very like the suddenly emergent door in the blank wall, a way through to another place.

2
Elmer Conshohocken, the composite book dealer, always thought it was a combination of mood and luck. One reads along in the ordinary way and is suddenly drenched in something else, suddenly through the door. One of his experiences was with Alejo Carpentier's novel, THE LOST STEPS. In it the narrator, a musicologist whose life in New York has been reduced to meaningless rote, travels up the Orinoco River to the Amazonian jungle on an anthropological quest. He has three women in his life: Ruth, his careerist wife; Mouche, his companion in escape; and Rosario, the Indian woman with whom he finds being.

Mouche was Elmer's door because he couldn't understand her name. It had no reference other than being French and suggesting lightness and frivolity. He looked it up in a French-English dictionary and found that it meant fly, also beauty-patch, button and bull's eye. Frenchmen call their girl friends Mouche as a term of endearment.

There are other words that build on the same root:

Mouchete -- spotty, speckled, flecked Mouchoir -- handkerchief Moucher -- to wipe (someone's nose), to snuff Se moucher -- to blow one's own nose

When he looked up fly on the English-French side of the dictionary he found the expected insect but also the moving through the air on wings like a bird or an airplane. But to the French these are two different ideas. The airplane flying is called volee, which is related to the English volley but is also used to describe a shower, in the sense of bath water thrashing.

So the English speaker sees fly as moving where the French speaker sees it as a spot. Flying is less agitated for the French, and they can blow their noses more delicately and simply. It's a matter of speckling. But for the English speaker it is difficult to distinguish this from snot for which the French have a separate word altogether.

For a monolingual like Elmer this door in Carpentier's book is a fall into a crack in reason itself. He comes to understand in a very specific way how two reasonable people might see the world differently, which is in itself a specific and shocking insight.

3
Elmer shared his discovery with his girlfriend of the moment, Mabel Rigette, who was a student of French at the time and later became a famous scholar and professor of French language and civilization.

"You have to be careful," she said, "roots might be similar but derive from different original sources. Like right, write, wright or sum and some. Get it?"

Elmer nodded, "Fair enough," and after a pause, "Oh sweet fly, you are so smart, a combination of beauty and brains both. I think I am falling?"

"Did you call me a fly?" she interrupted. Her voice rising, "You twit. Are you comparing me to an insect?"

"I'm only following the French usage and they are the world's greatest lovers," answered Elmer. "You can call me big cabbage, if you like."

On the argument went until Elmer, disappointed beyond the endurance of anyone from the Pennsylvania coal fields, left the house and slammed the door so hard that all the front windows shattered. That was the start of their break-up, Mabel eventually marrying a longshoreman who had no truck with either doors or books.

"It was a case of not enough being too much." Elmer concluded later. "If I had learned more French I might have found a better nick-name."

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) is an important Latin American writer and THE LOST STEPS is his most successful novel. He was identified as Cuban but his appeal is universal.

An academic evaluation of Carpentier is in Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. ALEJO CARPENTIER: THE PILGRIM AT HOME, Cornell University Press (1977). A difficult book but rewarding for the persistent. Some of Carpentier's titles in translation are still in print.

For our copy of Echevarria see http://continentalbooks.com/books.cgi?bk=8373

KEEPING TRACK

In the annals of book dealer adventures Reinhold Pabel must stand out. He used the trade to support himself when he was an escaped POW living in Chicago in the late 1940's He was known there as Phil Brick, operating as the Chicago Book Mart. Maybe some readers will remember him from that time. After his capture by the FBI he wrote up his experiences in ENEMIES ARE HUMAN, a book that includes his combat service on the Russian and Italian fronts, his capture and his escape as well as his description of his book work. In the 1960's he moved his business to Hamburg, Germany where it continues in operation today under the management of his daughter Lucie. Pabel, who will be 86 in a few weeks, still writes--right now he is working on a history of Hamburg. You can find their web site at http://www.antiquariat-pabel.de/.

Remembering a very popular series of books on people who achieved a moment of fame, written by Richard Lamparski and titled WHATEVER BECAME OF..? By the way, whatever became of Richard?

THE 9/11 WAR?

Anyone looking for background material should consider?

Carmichael, Joel. THE SHAPING OF THE ARABS, A Study in Ethnic Identity. Macmillan, (1967). In tracing identity the author outlines the history.

On the question of inserting regular troops into enemy territory: British General Orde Wingate was perhaps the greatest advocate and practitioner of this kind of irregular warfare. He was involved in such operations in Burma and Ethiopia in World War II and with Jewish irregulars in the Middle East. The following books detail his life and work.

Rolo, Charles. WINGATE'S RAIDERS.
Sykes, Christopher. ORDE WINGATE, A Biography
Bidwell, Shelford. THE CHINDIT WARS
Holley, David. WITH WINGATE IN BURMA
Royle, Trevor. ORDE WINGATE, IRREGULAR SOLDIER
Mosley, Leonard. GIDEON GOES TO WAR
Bierman, John and Colin Smith. FIRE IN THE NIGHT

The U.S. Army also had a unit in the Burma jungle in 1944, popularly known as Merrill's Marauders. Their story is told by a member of the unit, Charlton Ogburn in THE MARAUDERS, a first-class rendering of this rag-tag gang in action.

Perhaps John Masters in THE ROAD PAST MANDALAY gives the most graphic description of this kind of warfare. He was a long serving officer with the Gurkhas who lead a British unit in the Burma campaign. In his later, post-war career he was a very successful novelist

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That's it, friends and casuals all. .

Copyright Alvin Katz 2001.