A Very Successful Operation

There are people who will cheerfully drive an hour for a good rolled taco. A five-hour road trip to Las Vegas isn't out of the question for people in Southern California. I fall between those two levels of craziness: I don't do it often, but I'll occasionally drive three hours to get to a good bookstore.

Yes, three hours. I'd happily drive less distance, but it turns out that Powell's Books is 160 miles away. So what are my options here? Am I going to not go to the biggest bookstore in the world, just because it's a piddling one state away? Let's not be silly.

But I don't go very often.Last time I went was a year and a half ago, so it's not like I go there all the time or anything. I don't have a problem! Get off my back!

Last time, I went with one person. This time, we were a team of three, which meant that we had enough people to justify splitting up. That's really the best way to approach Powell's, because with nine floors of books, it'll take forever for each person to lead the party to their favorite sections.We got there at about noon, and agreed to meet at the coffee area three hours later.

Through careful budgeting (heh) I decided I could afford about $200 in books on this trip. Yeah, that sounds like a lot, but the way I figure it, I have to justify the trip somehow. I'm not doing a six-hour roundtrip just to pick up a magazine. But my basic strategy was to shop until I couldn't carry the basket anymore. That just sounds cooler; it's along the lines of "shop until you drop," which is a philosophy I'v enever really gotten. Except as it applies to books, obviously.

My first stop was the humor section. I'd planned ahead and printed out a list of P.G. Wodehouse books, with the ones I already owned checked off. Just as a reminder, he wrote like a hundred books, and I own about thirty. So it's not my fault if I can't remember which ones I own. Unfortunately, the humor section was bereft of Wodehouse. So I decided to indulge my taste for antique humor. On one hand, it's always interesting to see what was considered funny eighty years ago. It's a lot like trying to understand another culture. Plus, sometimes it's funny, which means I know something funny that no one else does. This makes me feel special and clued-in, not to mention being a safe place to steal jokes from.

Speaking of which, the first book I grabbed was Inside Benchley by Robert Benchley. I love Robert Benchley! And I don't own nearly enough of his books. Although I appear to already own this particular one. Sigh. Next time, I'm just bringing the big list of all my books so this doesn't happen again.

I also got a collection of the radio broadcasts of Will Rogers. I've never quite gotten Will Rogers; I understand his historical place in political comedy and I've read a lot of his stuff, but I've never really found him funny. He's a lot like Lenny Bruce in that respect. So I've decided to give him (Will, not Lenny) one more chance with these shows. If nothing else, it'll be interesting to see 1930s-era jokes about Roosevelt.

Speaking of radio broadcasts, have you ever heard of Fred Allen? He had a radio show which wasn't as funny as Jack Benny. But that's a hard standard to live up to, really. I don't know much about Allen, although I read one of his autobiographies, and it was really funny. So this book I got ("all the sincerity in hollywood...") is, according to the flyleaf "Fred Allen's comic essays, pensées, letters, commentaries, radio scripts, and pieces from his best-selling memoirs." So that's a pretty good cross-section of Fred Allen for me to make a judgment on. Plus, how often do you see a good pensée these days?

While I was in the Humor section, I saw that there was a whole shelf devoted to someone called Irvin Cobb. Never heard of him. But the books looked pretty old, which means that this is somebody who was probably once huge but got left by the side of the road that is the pop-culture short-term memory. I got Favorite Humorous Stories of Irvin Cobb, which claims to be "A hearty collection of the funniest writings of one of America's great humorists." Huh. You don't say. Most of the copyrights are pre-1920, although this book was published in 1940. They seem to mostly be extended anecdotes, but there's a section of shorter jokes. I present one for your consideration:

There were two brothers; a truthful brother and a brother who was the most incorrigible and persistent liar in the country. As a result of the latter's chronic embellishments of facts the whole family was getting a bad reputation.

The truthful brother took him in hand.

"Look here, Bill," he said, "you're disgracing the name. This thing has got to stop. The next time you start in to exaggerate just keep your eye on me. When you begin to go too far I'll give you a hard look and that 'll be a signal to you to start soft-pedaling."

The very next day the two brothers were in the company of a group of their fellow citizens. The talk drifted to the subject of big city hotels. This was a cue for the liat.

"Speakin' of hotels," he said, "I know a hotel out in Californy that is twenty-two stories high, has a thousand rooms in it, eight dining rooms, fourteen bowling alleys, twenty-two swimming pools, thirty soda-water fountains, forty-eight billiard halls and" -- here he caught a hard look from the good brother -- "and is three feet and a half wide."

Well. I enjoy that joke, so I have hope for Mr. Irvin Cobb. Some of it needs to be updated (did you notice the space between "that" and "'ll"? Apparently, contractions haven't been accepted into English yet), but he's definitely got something there.

Next up, I got a couple biographies: George Burns and W.C. Fields. There's a couple people that led entertaining lives, and I look forward to reading about them. I mean, I've already done that, but I think I'll enjoy these biographies, which I have not read.

I forget why I was in the sports section, but I got a book by Red Barber, who was a legendary boradcaster. And he was a good writer, so I expect that I will not regret it.

I may well regret The Mating of the Blades, by Achmed Abdullah. Let me first say that I suspect that to be a nom de plume. And second, I mostly got it because it's a hardback that will look nice on the bookshelf. But! This book by the author of "The Trail of the Beast" and "The Man on Horseback" sounds really entertaining! Again, I shall resort to quoting, this time from the top of Page 1:

CHAPTER ONE

A prologue -- yet quite necessary to the tale -- switching incongruously and illogically from the heart of Asia to the gray heart of London Town. Also introducing a dead Ameer, two oily, shuffling Babus out of Bengal, and a sandy-haired gentleman who likes the view of Poultney's Inn.

Well! Casual racism aside, this sounds like quite the 1920s-era thriller! And flipping through the book, there are many passages along the lines of "A sharp pain tugged at his heart. His knees tottered. The low-dipping sun seemed to swing to and fro in a blazing brownish-yellow pendulum. A flood of red color with broad, interlacing veins floated before his eyes." I love talk like that. Heh.

Okay, I've done some research, and have established that Achmed Abdullah appears to be the author's actual name. He wrote the novelization of The Thief of Baghdad (you know, the silent movie staring Douglas Fairbanks Sr.) and cowrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay to Lives of a Bengal Lancer starring Gary Cooper. He does indeed appear to be a pulp author like Sax Rohmer (creator of Fu Manchu). So for a random pickup, this looks like it should be a pretty entertaining book. It's already let me do research!

I also got Patience & Fortitude which is about people who like books even more than I do. Sure, I've got a problem, but those guys are crazy!

So finally I was in the Literature section, and I found the P.G. Wodehouse. I got a Jeeves book and a Blandings Castle book I'd been missing, although I'm pretty sure I've read them already, probably in library copies. But what's really exciting is that I found a copy of Love Among the Chickens! This is a really early Wodehouse book, and it's the first appearance of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a fairly minor and not very popular character! Sweet!

Okay, this is largely interesting for historical reasons. Even the introduction says "There is no thrill quite like the discovery of a great work immediately before he finds the voice, style and subject for which he will become famous," which is obviously code for "Not very good, but at least it's really early." There were a couple of even rarer books, but they were in the locked glass case, and I felt like maybe I already had enough books in the basket. I figured I'd amassed about $200 in books, but it ended up being only $120. Wow! I'm a smart shopper! Especially because further review establishes that the books were $75 and $60, so I was wise not to grab them.

So we all eventually bought our books. Whee! And then we, um, went to a weird alternative bookstore down the block. I know, that's weird. It's a little like going to Disneyland and then stopping at the crummy miniature golf course across the street (which I have also done).

At the emergency backup bookstore, I got the new Fortean Times, two Evan Dorkin collections (Hectic Planet #3 and Dork!) even though I already have all the individual issues (it's important to encourage the publisher to keep giving him money), an assortment of pornographic comic books, and this book called Astonish Yourself! This last thing is kind of a bunch of Zen/Surrealist exercises. Like "Spend three minutes saying a word repeatedly until it's drained of all meaning" or "Go for a long run in a cemetary." Each exercise has a couple of pages on why you should do it and what you're supposed to get out of it. It looks interesting.

Finally, we drove home, which took another three hours. Jessica is quite correct that it's important to have people capable of carrying on a multi-hour conversation. It's not that you have to be talking the whole time, but the radio doesn't work that well between big cities, so conversationalists are key.

The end! I'm tired now, because of all the driving and carrying things and more driving and then the talking about what I bought.