Old Books = New Treasures

Somewhere along the way I went from being a reader to being a collector. Oh, I still read rather a lot, but much of my pleasure reading is from electronic sources— online articles and news, posts on internet forums, even eBooks downloaded to my aging Palm Tungsten E. But, I still enjoy books, and I especially love prowling used books at some of the vendors in my area. A couple of weeks ago, I took some books that didn't win a spot on my keeper shelf to The Bookstand of Northeast Georgia, which is located at Banks Crossing. This store is bright and looks more like a "new book" retailer; there are no musty smells or books which look like they came from great-grandma's attic. The shelves are well stocked and the merchandising is similar to a chain bookstore, with sections for the Oprah bookclub, and most big name authors have their own section. Indeed, there are plenty of new and very recent items there, including my own books, which are part of the local authors display. I used part of my trade-in credit on books by my current favorite authors, including paperbacks by Christine Feehan and Merline Lovelace. Both of those ladies turn out suspenseful yarns.

On Saturday, while my son was at a martial arts lesson, hubby and I spent an hour perusing titles at The Corner Bookstore in Winder. Located in an historic building on a side street, this large bookstore has a vast inventory. In some ways, it is diametrically opposed to The Bookstand; it is old and while it is fairly neat, the books are jammed together due to excess inventory. There is an isle over 20 feet long devoted to "classics." Organization is far more broad at the Corner Bookstore, with science fiction and fantasy shelved together, and new books will be displayed beside books which are decades old. I found some current titles which I just bought for general reading, but I also scored some wonderful collector items: a hard cover copy of Heinlein's Friday, a paperback Modesty Blaise title, and a copy of the long out of print Shakespeare Alive. For those who are not teachers, that last title is the best book I have seen for teaching about how Shakespeare's England figures into his work, and it is a keeper for any English teacher.

To say that one person's junk is another person's treasure is a cliché, but in a used bookstore, that is certainly true. For less than the price of a really good dinner, I came home with both current reading and some book collector treasure.

In Honor of...

I really should have posted this on Wednesday, April 23rd, but I didn’t quite finish it on time. That day was both Shakespeare’s birthday and “Administrative Professionals” Day, the latter used to be called Secretary’s Day. This combination of the old and the new struck me as ironic.

Okay, I do know that English is a “living language” unlike Latin, for instance, so words in our language are constantly changing. Not all of them, and not all at once, of course, but changes do occur. For a glimpse of how this happens over time, just check out these lines (insults, really) from Shakespeare—

• Ah, you whoreson loggerhead, you were born to do me shame
• Pernicious and indubitate beggar
• A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy

The Bard’s plays were not written for high school anthologies, but for paying customers, so the language in them was typical of the time, and often the insults brought a smile to the faces in the audience. As we looked at sites which quote the Bard, we smiled at some of them too. Indeed, upon arriving at school on Wednesday, my son got out of the car, looked about him and quoted, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” I didn’t argue the point.

My teens have been talking about “speds” lately. My son had a close encounter with one last week, so both of them have discussed (not favorably) the practice of placing behavior disordered students in regular ed classrooms. From them, I learned that since I left the high school, it has become a violation of school policy to utter the term “special education” in association with a fellow student. I am not kidding. There are six teachers of special education at that school, but no special education students. Weird, huh?

I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but it still strikes me as odd that the United States still has a Secretary of State, but the person who answers the phone at a local office is likely termed an “administrative professional.”

English is a changing language; however, and when “couch potato” makes the latest version of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, it is clear that some slang is destined to become standard usage. Other expressions are likely to frozen in time, so “whoreson” and “groovy” represent different eras of English. I wonder what words being coined today will make it, and which ones will be mere relics of the text-message age.

The Good Parts Version

Do you remember The Princess Bride by William Goldman, or the excellent film version of that same story? I read it decades back, as a young woman with plenty of summer and a library card. The frame for it stated that it was “the good parts version” and I had never read anything like it. By that, I mean I hadn’t read a story within a framework. Of course, I hadn’t quite read anything so funny and yet so filled with adventure. Doing a “good parts” version did work for that piece.

That said, I found out on Monday that my son’s teacher skipped the end of Romeo and Juliet. Yep, you read that right. He said they were reading it aloud and their reading became laborious, so the teacher summarized the rest of the play and showed them the movie version. I asked when they stopped and he said just after Friar Lawrence gives Juliet the vial. That means he didn't get to hear the fourth act, with the magnificent soliloquy by Juliet as she debates whether or not she should take the potion. That scene is also omitted in the film version most popular with teachers.

As a former high school English teacher, I was appalled. Oh, I usually relied on a tape of professional Shakespearian actors rather than ninth graders for the reading, but by gosh, we read the whole play. Indeed, I’ve struggled with Julius Caesar and Macbeth from time to time, but anyone ought to be able to teach ninth graders (kids who are 14 and 15) a play about a pair of rebellious teenaged lovers. If you can’t, I do believe it is time to find a new line of work.

The Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta does Romeo and Juliet each year, in February , of course, so I must get tickets to that. My son deserves more than the good parts version, and so do most young people. Great stories deserve to be told, and R & J qualifies as great in my mind.