Invocation

Perhaps my fond regard for books printed and bound in India comes from my fondness for and close association with the middle generation of pulp magazines, the iconic Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, and the first generation of the massmarket or paperback book. Whatever the source, I think fondly of the pulpy text paper, the sewing of the bound signatures reminding me of my own early attempts at sewing, the covers more reminiscent of a fast food hamburger than a book. Books published in India frequently begin with some invocation to some deity, frequently to Ganesha, sometimes to Saraswati. Praise to Ganesha, the text will begin, shifting immediately to whatever subject the book addresses, suggesting that the invocation has worked and we may now go secular, Ganesha or Saraswati or some other divine being having delivered up the connective tissue to make the reading of the text a benefit for the reader.

Perhaps my favorite of the T.S. Eliot Quartets is Little Gidding, this because in it, Eliot, no stranger to prayer and invocation, attends a cemetery:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time...

Close to exquisite in his description of the state beyond time, space, and causation the creative person must seek when venturing into a new work, Eliot encounters a ghost who, in my view, has to be the ghost of a poet I have long admired, perhaps as much as I admire any poet. No, not Hopkins, not Sexton, nor Thomas, although I dote on them. Not Chaucer, into whom I read so much and from whom I draw so much more. Not even Ezra Pound, whom, his anti-Semitism and archness to the contrary not withstanding, I follow reluctantly at times but doggedly. I speak here of Willie--William Butler Yeats, brought to life for me for the first time by a mentor from my university days, a man who knew him, explained him to me in a way that made sense to my callow nineteenth year. Meeting Yeats thus, Eliot is now free to get on about the understanding and connection he seeks in the very act of writing the poem.

Earlier invocations from writers may be seen as wanting an okay from a divine being, a kind of cosmic sign-off on a task or venture to be undertaken. If we track back such remarkable ancients as Hesiod or Homer, we may find source or contemporary theory that the Muses, those daughters of Zeus, were more capricious than we might have imagined, and since I am dancing around with the capricious nature of such sources can imagine Yeats, who had among other things a sense of humor, thinking it would be fun to have Eliot on, possibly even by suggesting to Eliot that he write a series of poems about cats. Oh, well.

Hesiod and Homer did not begin their careers wanting to practice the narrative arts and may have been led to it by the Muses thinking it would help with their farming ventures. What a surprise.

Which is the point of all this; these events are freighted on the potential for surprise no matter if one ventures forth invoking Ganesha or Saraswati, putting Hebrew letters on one's forehead, or going secular and giving a nod to the forces of inspiration. No matter what wireless service one uses, the results are the same. When thought stops and inspiration takes hold, grab on for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride on steroids.

The Little Blue Book

Lowenkopf's Law of Coincidence: The older one gets, the more likely one will become increasingly involved in a series of coincidences that will cause one to think there is a predestined order and structure in the universe.

A bit too long, perhaps, for an aphorism, but maybe by removing the occasional noun or verb here and there, it can be tamed, brought in line.

Yesterday, a smal, sturdy envelope arrived from one of the myriad Amazon dot com retailers, containing in nearly mint condition a three-and-a-half inch by five-inch booklet entitled Facts You Should Know About American Literature. The author is E. Haldeman-Julius; it is title 1289 in a series of similarly sized little books, mostly printed on a pale blue cover although some are rendered in an off-white while other yet appear as the color of a pea soup provided at venues where one is forced to listen to some aspect of Christian doctrine before being allowed to slurp. Lubavitchers would not dare to serve soup of such a color, thus they are excluded from the trope.

The coincidence occurs when I am seated at the Xanadu Bakery, directly in front ot the Von's of the Stars, a market so called because it attracts individuals from Hollywood, not merely persons who drive up here to shop but rather those who do well eough in the entertainment industries to afford a pied a tierre or more, enabling them to have filled refrigerators in two different counties of this rambunctious state.

I am working out with Brian Fagan an approach to the opening four chapters of a book already contracted dealing with our forebears, the Cro-Magnon. Smugly satisfied over the prospects of this early insight into the venture, we slide into an atmosphere of near ebullience when, intent on some recondite purchase, Mark Collins appears, assumes the thrust of our scattered papers and bear claw crumbs if not the actual subject matter, then proceds to tell us not to forget the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books rights.

Why, I wonder, would you mention such a thing? I ask.

Because I have been inexplicably driven to collecting the things, Collins rejoins, whereupon we discover our mutual fascination with these books that sold millions of copies via mail order from about 1923 until 1956. My particular favorites were short stories of Chekhov, De Maupassant, and Jack London.

Collins has promised a full list of the books , photographs, and an opportunity to investigate his copies, thinking this might be a fun venture for my weekly book review column. I am not only agreeing, I am drawn back to the time when my collection was kept in a cigar box generously provided by my father who, at the time, favored a brand called Creamo. My Little Blue Books, stored in the Creamo Cigar box, began to take on a leafy tang, something between a wet dog and cooked cabbage which, now that I think about it, was exactly what Creamo Cigars smelled like.

Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books were in many ways the beginning of the paperback book industry in this country, a sort of everyman's Tauchnitz Editions and, indeed, later the Pocket Book, copies of which I owned even though the twenty-five-cent price could get me a convincing model airplane model kit. Soon, very soon, books won out, and the next step in my iconography was a collection of the paperbound books made available to American GIs during World War II.

More on these remarkable books, anon. Collins has already sent me a complete list of all the Little Blue Books; he promises photos which I will share.
Meanwhile:

Something Borrowed, Something Little Blue

Although I have put in my time at various pool halls, attempting to master the eye-to-hand skills variously of eight-ball, nine-ball, call-shot rotation, snooker, and three-cushion billiards, it is equally true that I hung out at used book stores. The skills I sought there had less to do with geometry, angles, and physics, more to do with the inner geometry and physics of ideas and drama. Beyond any magical notion of, say, being able to run the table in rotation, which is to say sink all the balls in one turn, my quest, my grail if you wish, was to find the one book that would transform me from novice into professional, from student into teacher, from researcher to informed.

I did better at pool than in the used book shop.

Of course there was no such transformative book, nor with all the titles being published each year, is there one today. But ah, the quest, the single-minded focus, the knitting of the brow, the lure of the unshelved stack of books in the very back of the store, the unsorted box of Reader's Digest Condensed Books in the thrift shop.

Beyond this lure of my potential enlightenment under the Bhodai Tree of the used book store and the occasional treasure that did in some way contribute to reading skills if not to writing abilities, was the inevitable counter-top display near the cash register. Often this display was housed in a shoe box or a relic from the days when bricks of Kraft cheese came in wooden boxes. I speak of one of the major forerunners of the modern massmarket paperback. Whitman sang of the body electric. I sing of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book. Just a tad larger than a three-by-five index card, these booklets were staple-bound, printed on a pulp paper, covered with a light blue cover. The series began publication in about 1920 and remained alive and well until about 1980, having sold hundreds of millions of copies as new books, untold millions as used books.

Through the Little Blue Books I gained introduction to De Maupassant, Balzac, and Ibsen. Hoping to gain some advantage among my fellow students, I also tried Margaret Sanger, as in What Every Girl Should Know; I also met Ibsen, Omar, Poe, Shelley, and Chekhov, as well as G.B. Shaw and other noted Socialists.

As I'd nourished the dream of a large collection of Big Little Books as a younger person, I thought to have the entire collection of Little Blue Books, the better to pursue the notion of being literate.

While composing this, I essayed a quick look at Amazon dot com to see if any Little Blue Books existed. They do and I can imagine some hours of catch-up.

I didn't realize it at the time one fateful afternoon when I wandered into Thrifty Drug Store at Wilshire and Cochran, midtown Los Angeles, but the handwriting was on the wall for the Little Blue Books. A coin-operated machine next to the tobacco stand beckoned me forth, urging me to part with quarters. Thus did I buy my first massmarket paperback, Microbe Hunters, a series of biographical essays about scientists, by Paul De Kreiuf. The very next day, I contrived to get another quarter, with which I bought a collection of science fiction stories.

I hadn't realized it at the time but this machine and these books were the direct result of a master's thesis written by one Ian Ballentine.

I hadn't realized it at the time but I was already aboard a train rushing out of the station, carrying me away from Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, clattering toward Dell Paperbacks (where I would one day work), particularly the mysteries with their idiosyncratic maps of the crime scenes on their back cover, plummeting toward Sherbourne Press, where I'd gone to publish and remained to edit and, in the process, receive an intercom message from Helen, the embodiment of the Sherbourne communication system. "A Mister Ballentine is in the outer lobby, here for his appointment."

But that is part of a longer story, one too long to fit in a Little Blue Book.