Ex Libris. A new day dawns for books and we bibliophiles are sad, resigned.

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. This is an article about books and the people who love them…. people who are seeing what they love so much undergoing the most profound changes, challenges right before their eyes. Books, in all their glories, were we were sure as much a verity for us as for our grandparents. The only thing that could take them away from us was the kind of thought control dictatorship so convincingly drawn in “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953).

But now, for us, it is not some menacing autocracy that threatens books… it is the very Internet you are using now. And so I went in search of a perfect sound for this article and while I was looking I remembered the superb musical theme when “Anne of Green Gables” and “Anne of Avonlea” made a most memorable television event. The touch- your-heart music was composed by Hugh Hagood Hardy, and you can find it in any search engine. Go find it now… and allow the music to create the perfect background for this article.

Anne was (as all bibliophiles, and some others, know) a reader of books, a collector of books, a writer of books. And now her theme garlands an article about the dwindling future of books. Anne would be distressed by this development and would wax eloquent, that “Something must be done.” Thus she would stand ready to mobilize her fellow kindred-spirits, but to what end, for what purpose: because we should do it, she’d say, because it is the right thing to do, because to go down fighting for a thing so important is just what bibliophiles should be doing.

From as early as I can remember…

I am the kind of person books were invented for. I love everything about them and always have. I love them in paper backs which can be spilled on and written in with impunity. I love them with tooled leather covers with seigneurial coats of arms and the mottos of kings and noble princes. I love textbooks… I love olde books… I love new books (but the pas goes to the olde).. I love the way they smell… I love the ways they pile up… and, so high, then fall down to litter the floor.

I love them when I can easily find them… and when, determined, I cannot.

I love the kinds of paper they’re printed on… I love the names of the companies which have published them… and most of all I not only love but venerate all the authors who have written them and, in their way, advanced and preserved knowledge (and ignorance) for future generations as yet unimagined.

As such whatever threatens books, threatens me, the life and pleasures I have known and wished to know forever, the purposes they were written for, and the utmost feeling of total satisfaction one gets on an early day in springtime sitting under a newly budded tree lost in a world conveyed between two covers and opening just for you.

Book stories…

When I was a boy in 1950s Illinois, mine was a house of books. All the denizens of 4906 Woodward Avenue (requisite two parents and three offspring) were book readers, book collectors, and (to a person) scribblers of profound thoughts and declarations running wildly in the margins. I know to this day, 60 years on, just what books they were; my mother fancied Carl Sandberg and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. My father liked Edgar Cayce, Napoleon Hill, and the Good Book. And the children had boxes full of books, each a “favorite” for a time, only to be replaced by the next, but never forgotten or (don’t even ask) loaned to anyone.

Our village was so small we did not have a good book store. That was a discovery yet to come. For us the annual school book fare took its place. Every year the teachers of the elementary school would arrange for a huge array of books to be shown and sold for the benefit of the school. We ended up “needing” a vast number of these books and had the wheedling of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles et al down to a science any publisher would have envied. So important the event, I could tell you precisely how the display tables were set up and who came amidst the throng of eager readers. I always walked away with a grand selection of the newest Landmark titles, principally on American history. I read them so often and thoroughly I can quote them today.

“King Arthur and His Knights”.

My favorite book growing up was based on Sir Thomas Mallory’s celebrated tale. Every page spoke to me… and the mere fact one had one hundred times thoroughly and carefully read it did not mean one would forego a hundred and first reading, just in case some small detail had been, no disrespect intended, overlooked. Like my Landmark books I memorized pages and pages… and made a positive fetish of ensuring I knew the name of every noble knight, his pedigree, and the complete details of each of his adventures. Bibliophiles are like that.

It was this book that produced the first great book trouble. My mother, for all that she loved books, thought her eldest child should spend less time inside “nose in a book” in the dismissive parlance of the day and more outside in God’s green acre doing the usual things prairie children did. Thus, on one never-to-be-forgotten day she came to my room, saw me and Sir Thomas Mallory tete-a-tete again and raised a broom, urging me with the utmost clarity and vehemence to go outside… and now! As she pushed me out the door and locked it, she screamed, “Now play!”

She might have known bibliophiles, especially those destined to write as many books and articles as I have, would have had a superb memory. I told this tale at the Parker House in Boston, when my suave and gentlemanly publisher Louis Strick, gave a party in honor of the publication of my first book, “Insubstantial Pageant: Ceremony and Confusion at Queen Victoria’s Court”. She wasn’t pleased but she had to admit the story was true, not ben trovato.

The Childcraft books.

My grandmother was not a great reader, unless you except her unmatched collection of recipes; under other circumstances she might have massaged them into a book. But for all that she was not a great reader… she understood that one of the myriad roles grandmothers play is to foster a love of books. Here she gets full marks, particularly for giving me a complete set of Childcraft books.

In the volume dealing with Boston there was an evocative line drawing, not a photograph, of Beacon Hill. There was that in the picture that made me want to live, not just in a similar place, but in that place. When I was a student at Harvard years later, I set out to find that street and, in due course, resided on it… where in a room with Ivy covered bow window, I joined the company of authors… so proud, so honored, so determined to keep writing and so remain in the best possible standing amidst so many such.

The end of Border’s Books.

All these reflections came to mind the other day when I read in my fast shrinking newspaper The Boston Globe (also being undone by the ‘net) that once proud Borders Books, once a significant chain which often carried my books, was now bankrupt, going out of business, another e-casualty. Life is constant change, old truths and venerable institutions tumble, their places taken by the “cutting edge” which will in due course be demode’ as well. I know all this. But there will be a void in the world now dawning where there are fewer books every day and fewer to rue their passing. But I shall always be one of them. I hope you will, too.

Listen my children and you shall hear of Sarah Palin’s version of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. So, who needs facts anyway?

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Sarah Palin came to Boston June 3, 2011 with her traveling circus of friends, children, grandchildren, and hangers on… On vacation, she wanted to show herself off to Boston while instructing her claque in the finer points of American revolution history, so much of which took place right here.

Frankly, we were glad to see her since our tourist business was hard hit by the recent recession and is only just recovering, glad that is…

… until she started lecturing us locals on what we know best: our own history, whose facts she so scrambled that she managed to turn Paul Revere from our celebrated hero into a stooge for the British, a spy treacherously working for the very people we were fighting against, our 18th century owners and oppressors.

Here’s what she said after a visit to Old North Church when she was asked about Paul Revere’s historic ride, April 18, 1775. With the ringing certitude she’s made all her own Professor Palin commenced her mangling. Revere, she said, “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms. By ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”

Except for the part where Palin says Revere got on his horse and rode… Professor Palin is wrong on every single point.

Revere was not on a mission to warn the British. (Where does the lady get these ideas anyway?).

He rode to warn the colonists to get up and defend themselves for the “British were coming”, by sea.

He didn’t work alone but as part of a team of brave people who each, once briefed, had to get up and get out fast, to warn the colonists along their appointed route so that they could defend themselves and the arms they had dangerously, laboriously assembled.

If Paul Revere had done what Palin said he did (“warn the British”) he would have been snuffed out by the locals as a dangerous snitch, a traitor, not raised to the pinnacle of national respect and admiration.

This entire imbroglio, this tempest in a tea cup, should never had taken place. Palin could have chosen to do what I did when I took my nephew Kyle out to the same historic sites.

First, get a guidebook and read it.

Second, visit the superb visitor centers along the way. They are packed with pertinent detail and good (air-conditioned) films, a real pleasure to see and get out of the humidity, too.

Three, pepper the well prepared park service employees and local volunteers in period costumes with all your questions. They’ve heard it all and, in my experience (for I’ve taken friends and family members thither many times) are well qualified, well versed, and always warm and welcoming in the New England fashion.

Sarah, of course, chose none of these sensible alternatives.

Sarah likes “going rogue” about this, as everything else. It means she does things, everything, her own way… and those who don’t like it can lump it. She so liked the idea and the phrase that she titled her autobiography “Going Rogue: An American Life”. (Simon and Schuster 2009). In Palin’s “Alice in Wonderland” world whatever she says, no matter how wrong, is right and anyone criticizing her, however right, is always wrong.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, her Fox colleague, was the latest victim of Palin-think. Sunday June 5, he discovered why even suggesting that Palin could be mistaken ever about anything is like fighting with a skunk. And we all know what that means…

The daring but hapless Wallace suggested that Palin had erred in her Boston lecture on Revere. But Palin wasn’t about to suffer that. What? Sarah! Make! A! Mistake! Not just impossible… but inconceivable. And what’s more, that was just another instance of “gotcha” journalism, bad people out to get her. (In Sarah’s conspiratorial world there are always such evildoers at hand for Sarah’s world is lined with paranoia.)

“You know what?” Palin spat at Wallace, “I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we’re already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms.”

There was more, lots more, delivered with the usual ingredients of her verbal Molotov cocktails… surety, disdain, condescension and her usual “Look brother,don’t tread on me. Get off my back” nastiness, which can in an instant turn her smile into a sneer. Make no mistake about it, Sarah’s a tough customer and any suggestion that she’s not as good as the Virgin Mary directs her firepower at you, while her stiletto comes down hard on your foot, the better to make her point — maggot, don’t mess with me.

And this to Chris Wallace, a professional colleague at the Fox Network!

She went on, fire and brimstone at the ready, for Palin always comes armed with the arsenal of the street fighter:

“Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming.., and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take it,” Palin said June 5.

“But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in the area. And part of Paul Revere’s ride –and it wasn’t just one ride — he was a courier, he was a messenger. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we’re already there…. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British.”

And that, she suggests, is that. But, most assuredly, that is not that… and not just because she misstated a few facts which are all easily available in libraries and online. Even Boston’s own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his famous poem “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” (published 1863) erred in focusing solely on what Revere did, to the detriment of his many other colleagues who also rode hard for freedom that April evening.

No, Palin’s fault is the assumption of infallibility with which she now approaches everything, great and small. That every word she mispronounces is faultless; every sentence she twists and destroys is perfect…. and every fact she gets wrong was in fact just previously misunderstood and is now clarified by her. This is not an American citizen and possible presidential candidate. This is the first, infallible American pope… and a woman too. And if you purists in the Vatican suggest that a non-Catholic and a woman will never be pope, Sarah will tell you different, thundering with words like schism and anti-pope at the ready.

For you see, Sarah aims for bigger fish than the White House with its tiresome term limits and insistent people always to propitiate. Sarah aims for the very seat of St. Peter and a lifetime audience commanded to listen and obey…

“A cry of defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo for evermore…”

The word of our Sarah urbi et orbi “In the hour of darkness and peril and need”… Amen! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

* * * * *
About The Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is , where small and home-based businesses learn how to profit online. Dr. Lant is also a historian, syndicated writer and author of 18 best-selling business books. Details at http://homeprofitcoach.com/listbuilding