Alaskan Range: Reading Pictures
...Reading is hard enough as it is and is physically difficult for lots of people. Comic literature has a history of helping in this regard, since pictures help the assimilation of text. For example, thousands acquired their early, and often only, exposure to important literature through Classics Illustrated. My first exposure to “Red Badge of Courage” came via Classic Illustrated in 3rd grade and led directly to my reading the uncut version...
Greg Hill, head librarian in Fairbanks, Alaska, tells of a well-trodden path that leads to a delight in reading.
To read more of Greg’s columns please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/alaskan_range/
Bookshelves often reveal a lot about their owners. So I read Mark Ellingham’s list of top ten travel books with interest because he’s a veteran Rough Guide author and responsible for the first book in that series. It was about Greece, and his list included three travel books by Patrick Leigh-Fermor, who’s written extensively about living in Greece and his long treks in Europe. His books “Mani,” “Roumeli,” and “A Time of Gifts,” are classics of travel writing, and while Leigh-Fermor is relatively unknown today, a BBC article called him “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene. After walking across Europe in his teens, he parachuted into Nazi-occupied Crete during World War II and captured its German commander. Today, aged 89, he is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of his generation.”
Not so classic is Leigh-Fermor’s “Sex O’Clock High,” a humorous piece he wrote in 1963 that’s composed almost entirely of “eponyms,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a word or name derived from the name of a person.” His piece begins, “It was an iridescent August morning and the effects of morphia and onanism were wearing off,” and quickly grows annoying, like most gimmick writing.
NY Times writer Ben Schott wrote about such books in an essay titled “The Bibliognost’s Handbook.” A “bibliognost” is someone with a deep, sometimes too deep, interest in books. Schott described the “commendably futile literary contortion” of “lipograms,” writings that exclude particular letters, and “pangrams,” which are phrases containing every letter in the alphabet. He also mentioned “boustrophedons,” which the AHD defines as “An ancient method of writing in which the lines are inscribed alternately from right to left and from left to right.”
Reading is hard enough as it is and is physically difficult for lots of people. Comic literature has a history of helping in this regard, since pictures help the assimilation of text. For example, thousands acquired their early, and often only, exposure to important literature through Classics Illustrated. My first exposure to “Red Badge of Courage” came via Classic Illustrated in 3rd grade and led directly to my reading the uncut version.
Classics Illustrated was the brainchild of Albert Kanter, who published the first one, “The Three Musketeers,” in 1941, and the last, “Faust,” in 1962. They’ve been reprinted off-and-on ever since. Generations of Americans grew up with the cheesy illustrations and severe editing that were Classics Illustrated hallmarks.
Reading text is actually reading pictures. Our letter “A,” for instance, was originally a picture of a cow’s head, since “ah” was the first sound in the ancient Semitic word for cattle. Most letters and pictograms used in modern languages were originally illustrations, and you can’t get more classical than that. And when it comes to librarians, they don’t come more classic than Mabel Wilkinson.
Wilkinson was a “library field worker” in Wyoming who organized the Platte County Library district in 1915. She reported on her adventures in a paper presented to the American Library Association’s 1916 annual conference. The manuscript was discovered hidden in an old file by Lesley Boughton, one of Wilkinson’s successors at Platte County and now the Wyoming State Librarian. Ms Boughton mentioned her predecessor at a meeting I recently attended, and she quoted a great line from Wilkinson’s paper about the rigors required of frontier librarians.
A Wyoming librarian, she wrote, “must be able to get along with Western people, ride and drive, as well as pack a horse, follow a trail, shoot straight, run an automobile, and be able to rough it when necessary.” Delivering library materials to remote areas remains a classic library service, but sometimes even classics need improving. Instead of horses like Wilkinson’s Joker, we rely on bookmobiles.
The library’s constantly changing its collection to keep it fresh, and another change is approaching. Donated and old library paperback books have been sold for a quarter and hardbacks for fifty cents since 1977, with the proceeds dedicated to buying new books. Patrons have long urged charging more, so we’re doubling the price beginning July 1. Hurry on down to find a bargain, for as the classic proverb states, “Change is inevitable.”
