When Books Go To War

In these books is wonderfully instilled and preserved the spirit of each warrior while he is alive; and after his death his soul transmigrates thither to inform them.


At least, that's the theory ... before writing today I was thinking about Jonathan Swift's 1704 essay "The Battle of the Books" (about a generation before Gulliver's Travels) I remembered reading part of in senior high English (good ol' Mrs. Hooten!) and its depicted battle "the ancient and the modern" books and ideas and authors, etc. For really that's what you could say the battle still is, with teachers lamenting having to teach remedial English to college freshmen and the chosen list of books to read often being not older than twenty years or so. During World War II, this was very definitely a battle for survival, not only of national independence but also of time-transcending ideas and a climate in which they could flourish. Also, reading was something soldiers could do when they were in the many Many MANY off-duty lulls when battles and other soldiers weren't exploding around them.


When Books Went To War (ISBN 9780544570405) is a story I'd never heard before, or thought of really ... but soon after I bought the Molly Guptill Manning book I devoured it. And you thought John in Revelation had a stomach ache, but I digress. Besides honoring Raymond Trautman as an unsung American hero who headed the U.S. Army's Library Section and worked in conjunction with the American Library Association (ALA), this is the story of how paperbacks became so ubiquitous -- because soldiers and sailors carrying loads did not want to be weighted down with hardcover books -- in our lives as well as how certain books BECAME classics (The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) and how this whole program arguably led to a renaissance of education and dedication when World War II was over! In today's wording, Armed Services Editions rock!


Punctuation, is? fun!


I use part of Charlie Gordon's April 6 entry in Flowers for Algernon (by the way, is that a short story or a book?) to introduce another book I read, this one in a day. Books of poetry usually do, that. Richard Armour's On Your Marks: A Package of Punctuation (LOC 77-76820, with a foreword by Ogden Nash) is a handy and funny stroll through all those marks we use and when and where we should use them so you are not confined to writing run on sentences like the ones you find in a Saramago novel. *wink* With the poet's words in black and the punctuation in red, passages like "Or is it a seal/In a circus pose,/With a ball that is balanced/On top of its nose?" from the page on the semicolon -- hey, my personal favorite and I'm writing this! -- are funny and teaching at the same time. What I'm trying to get my family to realize, that learning may be painful but not evil.


"I really don't know what the critics said about me," she sniffed the next day. "I haven't read them at all. They might disturb me if I did."


Theda Bara, the day after performing in The Blue Flame on Broadway. But she herself born Theodosia Goodman is better known as a silent film actress who got accolades and excoriations for the character she got ... we'd say "typecast" today as a vamp, which in the parlance of early last century was a seductress, a vampire -- not a literal one -- who sucked the life out of others. The real-life Theda Bara (and even the origin of that stage name has several accounts) was almost the opposite, and in Eve Golden's biography Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara (ISBN 1887322000) we're exposed to both sides. Through the films she was in we can't tell much for most of them were lost in a 1937 warehouse fire; right now photos from many productions she was in as well as five entire films and a few seconds of others are known to exist.


I'd like to think you will have more record of me after I pass on,


David