Sorry, I was fantasizing so much about quilting that I forgot that it was Booking Through Thursday yesterday.
- What is the most battered book in your collection? The one with loose pages, tattered corners, and page edges so soft that there’s not even a risk of paper cuts anymore? Oh, I love those soft edges! loose pages and torn dust jackets bother me (and so I mend them carefully), but I feel lucky to come across one with edges like velvet.
- Why is this book so tattered? Is it that you love it so much that you’ve read it a zillion times? Is it a reference book you’ve used every day for the last seven years? Something your new puppy teethed on when you weren’t looking? I suppose that it’s unfair to blame these books’ decrepitude entirely on myself, as they are paperbacks of a certain age, with all of the brittle and yellowing paper that that implies. But these three — chosen at random from the first shelf I visited — are some that I remember reading over and over again, and I’m surprised now that they are still relatively whole. Princess Tales was a Scholastic purchase — flyers were handed out regularly in school, and you could order a book or two and it would be delivered in class a week or so later. I got this one in late elementary school, so I was around ten or eleven, I guess — it cost sixty cents! — it’s one of the few I still have (the others are Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, and a Romeo and Juliet with the lovely Olivia Hussey on the cover). I wasn’t princess-mad in the way that my own girls are today — some girls I knew did have lots of frilly things like that, but it was generally a lot less widespread than it is now. I loved the adventure, probably more than the romance, and the international flavor of this collection as well, with stories from England, France, Ireland, Morocco, and such, much like Andrew Lang’s collections, which I also devoured at the public library. (E. Nesbit’s Melisande is still available in some places with lovely illustrations by P.J. Lynch.) As a mother now, and a feminist, I appreciate the variety of characters I see in this collection, not the rather silly and ineffective ones like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, who simply wait around for the prince to save them or recognize their beauty, but ones like Jay Williams’ "The Practical Princess," who does the rescuing herself, or bad-tempered ones like "The Princess and the Vagabone." Much more interesting! The Diary of Anne Frank needs no introduction from me, of course; this is probably the book that I reread most often as a teenager, and what started me keeping a diary at the tender age of twelve. Every rereading brought something home to me — the fact that teenagers could write so well, that I wasn’t the only one with those kinds of feelings, the horrors of war and their price in human suffering. (I have a lot to thank Anne for.) I actually remember buying The Song of Bernadette, from one of those revolving wire racks, I think at the grocery store, of all places — I was in high school, I guess, and already fascinated in a strange and inexplicable way by nuns and the monastic life (since I am not Catholic and am far too self-indulgent for such a life). I read this book many times, and mended the bumped and rubbed cover carefully with Scotch tape. Werfel wrote brilliantly, and I was impressed even then that a German Jewish man could so interestingly and effortlessly convey the story of a French Catholic girl. (Another lesson most likely unlooked-for by the author, that people whom one wouldn’t expect to understand things very often do.)
A Bluestocking Knits 
Leave a comment