A Running Tally of Literary Larceny

​The ABAA has got its eye on book thieves.

By Alex Dalenberg

​March 25, 2013

A few weeks ago I stumbled on the literary world’s version of the old MISSING notices that used to be printed on the side of milk cartons. Or maybe a better analogy would be the AMBER Alert.

Kidnapping is (obviously) in a different league than book theft, but, if an antique text goes missing, there’s a good chance that an alert will be posted to the Missing and Stolen Books Blog maintained by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.

Perusing the pilfered book listings, it struck me as something of a mournful chronicle.

​A few examples.

Stolen: ‘Habits of Monks’, 36 Hand Colored plates.

This piece, circa 1850, was taken from the Pennsylvania Rare Books & Manuscripts Company and contains illustrations of the various ordained and non ordained members of various orders.

Stolen: 1611 Bible

Taken from Staniland Booksellers in the U.K.

Stolen: First Edition of Huckleberry Finn.

The entry describes it as an original 1885 copy with a green pictorial cover, taken from Lost Horizon Bookstore in Santa Barbara.

Items Missing from the San Francisco Fair

These included a First Annual Report of Central Park and Plain Facts about North Dakota, 1888.

And the listings go on.

When I talked with Susan Benne, executive director at ABAA, she told me that, because the collecting world is so small, the blog has actually been effective in helping owners track down their stolen goods. Benne said, in one case, a thief attempted to sell an antique book stolen from one side of Manhattan to a bookseller across the park on the other.

The blog itself is the evolution of a database that the trade group has maintained for years. And this isn’t the only stolen book database online. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers keeps its own, as well as the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

So I guess the point is, don’t steal books.

Also worth checking out is ABAA’s regular blog, regularly updated with news in the book collecting world, including information about conferences and fairs. We’ll be checking out the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in April, hosted by ABAA.

Liberal, Kansas: Home of Dorothy, Oz and the BeeJays

​Via Get Rural Kansas

By Alex Dalenberg

​​March 13, 2013

Dad’s post on Oz the Great and Powerful brought back memories of a long-ago family road trip that brought us over the rainbow to Liberal, Kansas.

What’s that? You’ve only heard of arch-conservative Kansas? Well, I haven’t looked at the precinct data, but being that it’s in the far southwest corner of the state, almost bordering Oklahoma, the rural town of Liberal is likely that in name only.

Politics aside, tiny Liberal has attempted to carve out an identity over the years as a kind of Wizard of Oz tourist destination. In 1981, it claimed the mantle of Dorothy’s hometown and was officially recognized as such by none other than the governor of Kansas. If nothing else, it’s a decent pit stop if you’re driving across the interminable Kansas prairie. In the sense that anything is a decent pit stop if you’re driving across the interminable Kansas prairie.

See the attached screen cap from Google Maps, taken from an area just north of Liberal. You get the idea.

​Near Liberal, Kansas. Via Google Maps

We went through Liberal either on a trip to New Mexico. Dad and I both remember the Yellow Brick Road being overgrown; the Scarecrow, Tin-man and Cowardly Lion being off exhibit due to repairs, leaving three metal skeletons in their place; and the only actual relic from the movie being the miniature house shown spinning around in the tornado that whisks Dorothy to Oz.

Given the shape it was in during our visit, probably 10 years ago, Dad kind of doubted that the museum is still there. And he hasn’t seen a roadside billboard for it in years. But an official website is still live and I also tracked it down on Google Street view.

The address: 1-599 Yellow Brick Road, Liberal, KS.

​Via Google Maps

Looks fun, huh? The shed holds a walk-through Oz landscape which I recall as being more than vaguely creepy.

Via the Website:

The Land of OZ consist of 5,000 square feet of animated entertainment – good and bad witches, the Munchkins, talking trees, winged monkeys, and of course, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto, too

Dorothy’s house, on the other hand, is a legitimate 1907 farmhouse, which is quite comforting after a hellish voyage through Oz. Maybe this intentional, not every Kansan is happy with the state’s longtime association with the movie. At least according to the Kansas Historical Society, Kansans have long bristled at the film’s depiction of the state as flat and drab. 

The sad thing is, Dorothy’s House is not even Liberal’s best tourist attraction. That would be Pancake Day, in which women, ages 25 to 52, race through the frozen streets clutching pancake skillets.

A little more about Liberal, according to the town’s official website:

Residents of Liberal enjoy an unhurried life-style with a cosmopolitan flavor. Golf, swimming, soccer, tennis, polo, fishing, and some of the best pheasant hunting in the country are just a few of the recreational opportunites available.

And this gem.

Everyone enjoys watching the Liberal BeeJays, our local semipro baseball team play opponents from across the nation.

Liberal BeeJays! I guess there really is no place like home!

Oz the Great and Powerful: Good, not great. We liked the China Doll

​Via Disney

​By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 12, 2013

Oz was always too big for L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel.

Baum himself enjoyed years of success thanks to the traveling musical show based on his work, replete with dancing girls and romantic subplots that were intended more for adults than for children. The 1939 MGM film masterpiece transformed Oz by giving the picaresque tale of Dorothy’s adventures a villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, who had only been a minor nuisance for the one short chapter in the original book. And Broadway gave the Witch a back-story in Wicked.

But now, we have a new back-story. Oz TG&P gives us the Wicked Witch as a woman scorned after a romantic tryst with none other than. . .you guessed it, the Wizard. Hell hath no fury. Wicked gave us a Witch who was an outcast because “it’s not easy being green.”  But Oz TG&P ups the ante on sheer witchiness, because she’s got something to be really mad about this time, and something the droves of teens in the audience can sink their teeth into. This witch’s problem is that she gave it up too easily to the man from Kansas, a wizard unready for romantic commitment, and now she’s regretting her hastiness. She’s gone from green at love to green with a flying broomstick.  

The Wizard, a hapless cad from Kansas, charlatan magician and con man, finds himself in Oz by way of tornado while trying to flee his romantic and other entanglements in Kansas. But instead of escaping such things, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a three-way witch fight. There is a fair bit of magic, with the good witch Glinda making bubbles, and the two baddies throwing fireballs and Emperor-of-the-Galaxy-style green lightning. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like this was really just a chick flick with magical trappings, a film about three sisters fighting over a dude who is afraid to commit, only he grows up in the course of the story to recognize which sister is worthy of his affection, and in the end he is ready to settle down and start a family with her, only in this case he is settling down to rule the country of Oz from a throne in the Emerald City and the family is one little china doll who needs new parents.  

Speaking of the china doll, Oz TG&P does have a few treats for fans of the Baum books.  The china town was in Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” but it was left out of the 1939 movie. It is charming to see it show up in the new movie. The flying monkeys were in the book too, but they were only evil because the Wicked Witch had control of the wishing cap that forced them to grant her three wishes. After they escaped the thrall of the Wicked Witch, they were good monkeys. Oz TG&P features one of those good monkeys, presumably in the days before the Wicked Witch of the West gets control of his kinfolk.  

The film makes him into a new character named Finley who becomes the Wizard’s valet of sorts.  He makes for an endearing addition to the story, dressed in a bellhop uniform that is very similar to some of the pictures of the monkeys in W. W. Denslow’s original illustrations for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”  

True Oz fans may bristle at the departures from Baum’s vision (in the book, for instance, the china people freeze into statuettes when they leave their village, but in the movie the china girl stays animated after leaving home to go on the voyage.) But, overall this version of Oz is a fair representation of what the Oz books were all about. They are certainly no farther from the Oz vision than some of L. Frank Baum’s own spin-offs of his fantasy world, like the Oz musical or the films from 1914.  

The main failing of Oz TG&P is really not anything that you can blame on this film or its makers.  The main failing is simply that it isn’t a timeless classic. But how can you top or even match a film like the 1939 Wizard of Oz where every moment of that film, every visual, every line of dialogue has become iconic?  Simply put, you can’t. As for me, I’m just happy that Disney has pulled off a qualified success a couple times now in the Oz arena, and in both instances was reasonably respectable to the source material.  

I refer, of course, to the 1985 Return to Oz which did a nice job of folding the second two L. Frank Baum Oz books into one movie. 

Finally, a comment on the 3-D. Oz TG&P was made for 3-D, not retrofitted after the fact for 3-D.  Starting with the old-fashioned stereoscope style title sequences and on into colorful Oz, this film’s 3-D absolutely pops. Go see it in IMAX 3-D, if at all possible. A little technology goes a long way toward making this less than timeless film a little more of an experience.  

The Wizard, all smoke and mirrors, the man behind the curtain, can relate.  

---​

Oz the Great and Powerful

Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Sam Raimi

Featuring:  James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams. . .

Vintage Barkley

By Alex Dalenberg

February 20, 201

And now for something completely different. At the risk of alienating our nascent fan base of one or two readers who may or may not care about sports (I haven't dug deep into the analytics yet), I just want to take a moment to recognize Sir Charles Barkley's 50th birthday. 

​H/T to Wired staffer and fellow UA Journalism alumnus Nathan Olivarez-Giles for cluing me into the fact that the NBA Hall of Famer is hitting the big Five-O. 

But what does this have to do with popular literature? ​Not much except for the incredible volume of now-retro Barkley swag generated during the Mound Round of Rebound's heyday. Sure, Michael Jordan's 50th birthday got the bigger shout-out this week. But while Jordan's global brand was always tightly controlled, Barkley is the hands down winner in the sense of humor department. 

And lest we discount the classic 1990s film Space Jam, let's not forget that Jordan basically played straight man to the Looney Tunes, not a very difficult draw.

Barkley, meanwhile, battled Godzilla one-on-one and solved mysteries. The former in the aptly titled Godzilla vs. Barkley, by Dark Horse Comics, and the latter in Hamilton Comics' Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders​, both published in 1993, the same year Barkley's Phoenix Suns fell to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. 

I can proudly say that — growing up in the Phoenix suburbs — our family had a copy of each, which my stepfather kept in an armoire convinced they would one day become collector's items. Alas, they might need to live in the attic a few years more, because, as far as I can tell, they're worth maybe $20 today. 

I was surprised to learn that the Referee Murders​ were actually written in part by Alan Dean Foster, a successful fantasy and science fiction author. Foster is probably most notable for his film novelizations and expanded universe novels, including the Alien series, Star Trek and Star Wars. Foster actually wrote the original novelization for the first Star Wars film.

According to almighty Wikipedia, he also has what basically amounts to a lifetime achievement award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. Sure, he's never won a Hugo Award, but, in my mind, if you're going to pick an industry, there's no shame in being the best at it. I'd take it. 

At any rate, Barkley remains a huge personality in every sense of the word and, at least in an alternate universe created by Alan Dean Foster, one hell of an amateur detective.

Also, in perhaps one of the weirdest Nike spots ever filmed, an opera star.​

Cold truths about In Cold Blood

By Alex Dalenberg

February 18, 2013

Not to make this blog — which is ostensibly about vintage popular literature — an extended meditation on fabrication and the variable nature of truth, but I felt it was worth touching on the recently unearthed revelations about the accuracy of Truman Capote’s pioneering work of creative nonfiction In Cold Blood.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news early this month. My neighbors over in Brooklyn Heights also have a nice post (Capote penned the iconic nonfiction novel from his Brooklyn apartment). I recommend reading both articles but, to sum it up, recently rediscovered documents from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation show that Capote gave favorable treatment to detective Alvin Dewey, Jr. It was Dewey who gave the writer the extraordinary access necessary to write a book such as In Cold Blood.

Among the Journal’s findings: that Capote exaggerated Dewey’s role in solving the case, changed critical details and omitted key mistakes to improve Dewey’s standing as the hero of the story.

Full disclosure: I’m a journalism guy, not a literary professor, but I’m feeling some cognitive dissonance here.

On the one hand, my gut reaction is to have little to no professional sympathy for characters like Jonah Lehrer, who recently got a handsome $20,000 payout from the Knight Foundation to discuss his dismissal from the likes of The New Yorker and Wired for plagiarism and fabrication. Although, personally, it’s hard to watch someone so bright flush their career down the toilet. I’ve made a lot of boneheaded mistakes. I’ve gotten things wrong, but I’ve never flat-out made anything up, not that I could or will ever match the likes of Capote in terms of sheer writing chops.

But still, I feel that if you get into the nonfiction game, the rules are at least fairly clear. If you make stuff up you will pay a the price in terms of reputation and lost career opportunities.

On the other hand, as I was discussing with my literary editor significant other earlier this week, Capote basically invented an entire genre with In Cold Blood. So does he get something of a pass? To go way back, the Roman historian Livy, for example was not history’s most academically rigorous historian, but, nevertheless, an important one. The discipline was by and large still figuring itself out. It takes awhile for the rules and standards that govern a genre to fall into place. I’m not sure if we’ll be reading In Cold Blood some 2,000 years from now, but, at least in contemporary terms, it’s a toweringly influential book in terms of how books are written today.

For me, this probably does dim some of Capote’s star, if only because he himself proclaimed it to be painstakingly factual. That doesn’t leave any room for artistic interpretation. And, in this case, the details aren’t even altered in the service of so-called higher truth. Although I would argue that, unless you’ve advertised that you’ve taken those kinds of liberties with the material, that’s still a weak defense. But you can get really deep in the weeds when it comes to what constitutes taking liberties.

Maybe the problem is not getting caught. At least while you’re alive. Writing a masterpiece helps too, just make sure it’s both really, really masterful and really, really influential. Unless you can guarantee both those things, I wouldn’t recommend what Capote did as a career booster.

Because, let’s face it, something like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces may have been a pretty good read, but it was never going to catapult the guy into the literary firmament, whether it was mostly bogus or not. In Cold Blood will never not be influential. It’s kind of like how USC will never have not won the 2004 Orange Bowl game, even if the Bowl Championship Series stripped it of its national championship.

In some ways, this is all old news. The accuracy of In Cold Blood has been a point of contention for decades. But how about you, dear reader, if you’re a fan of the book, do these new revelations affect your opinion?