There are a few subjects about which I can speak with a reliable degree of expertise and authority, but literature is not one of them. My reading habits, especially over the past four years, have been sporadic and scattershot at best, and I somehow missed out on reading most of the classics that people are "supposed" to have read by the time they graduate from college. I might blame the fact that my high school literature program was really half focused on international literature and half focused on drama. I know a lot more about Mahfouz than Hemingway.
It saddens me to think how terrible a reader I am now, since I used to read voraciously. Although when you count up the words read per day (in tweets, web articles, emails, and magazine articles) I probably still read just as much as I ever did.
Anyway, I've never really taken the time to explore Ann Arbor's collection of great used book stores, so a couple weeks ago, I walked over to West Side Book Shop. I'm not sure what I expected to find, but after a half an hour of browsing the packed shelves, I emerged with two small, old volumes: The Fotygraft Album by Frank Wing and I. Youth & Egolatry by Pio Baroja.
The former is a strange little book from 1915 that basically contains portrait drawings of wacky people, ostensibly someone's relatives. The subtitle is "Shown to the New Neighbor by Rebecca Sparks Peters, Aged Eleven." So each drawing is accompanied by this imaginary eleven-year-old's commentary on the people depicted. It's pretty bizarre, but cute. I can only imagine that this is the 1915 equivalent of a Family Circus anthology.
This drawing, for example, is accompanied by the following description:
"Pa's cousin Stella, dressed up in some of her ma's old clothes fer a mask ball. Pa drawed in that streak and that printin'. He's a reg'lar artist and he ain't never had a lesson in his life, neither.
The second book, Youth & Egolatry, is certainly less fluffy, but equally perplexing in its own way. As the introduction by H. L. Mencken (or as the West Side Books guy exclaimed to me "Mencken! From Baltimore!") explains, Baroja was a prominent Spanish author and intellectual around the turn of the twentieth century. The contents of the book are a strange mix of commentaries, thoughts, and observations, broken into short segments, which generally follow a loose thematic train of thought. For example, a section entitled "The Veils of Sexual Life" is followed by "A Little Talk," in which he discusses how he sometimes thinks he would have been happier if he were impotent."He calls this pitchure 'Stella as Ajax defyin' th' lightin'!' "
Both books hold a collection of odd little gems that you can pick up on a whim and admire. They're foreign, archaic, and perplexing, but ultimately fascinating.
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