Day of the dedications

(photo: @sfpubliclibrary Instagram 15 September)

Time for the book dedications of the year! Not written this year, or not necessarily, but the best I've come across this year. It's a tradition dating back to my very first post for Books in the City, in which -- with the whole world of books available to me as subject matter -- I chose to celebrate the art of the well-written book dedication. That tells you something about my affection for those little solitaires twinkling and winking at us from the centres of white pages.

I'm talking about the best dedications, of course, the ones that speak from the heart with the tongue of a writer, that neither surfeit us with lists (how did that start, those endless pages of acknowledgments in novels, for God's sake!) nor starve us of landmarks, the ones that, despite us knowing they are for a certain someone, we discover are magically also for us.

Here are this year's finds:

1.  Yuyi Morales in Thunder Boy Jr. 

To the Western Addition library in SF where, as a new mother and immigrant, I found my first home in the USA. Nancy, I hope you remember me. You changed my life forever when you put books in my hands.

A book dedication to a library! I had to start with this one. I've shared dedications to an author's typewriter, and to an airlines whose delayed flight inspired the book in question, but this is the first dedication to a library I've come across, via the San Francisco Public Library's Instagram feed @sfpubliclibrary (Western Addition is one of their branches).

As a librarian, I'm going to say that I'm sure Nancy remembers her.

The post went up as we were counting down to Banned Books Week, which was appropriate given that the author of Thunder Boy Jr is Sherman Alexie, whose The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian is one of the most challenged books in libraries in his country, the USA. The dedication in that semi-autobiographical work also makes a point about home: "For Welpinit and Reardan, my hometowns", it goes, the first being where Alexie grew up, on an Indian reservation in Washington State, and the second the town where he went to High School, his first time off the reservation.

Thunder Boy Jr is Alexie's first picture book, about a boy looking for a name of his own; Yuyi Morales is the illustrator.  Here's a short trailer from the publisher:

 



2. Gloria Steinem in My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem was asked by her interviewer at the Auckland Writers Festival this year to talk about the dedication to her new memoir, My life on the road. "Shall I read it out loud?" she rejoined. "I don't want to assume everyone has read my book!"

Her reading of it made exactly my point: great dedications have it all there; they don't need to be commented on.

This book is dedicated to:
 Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.
 Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life".
 Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.

3.  Jerome K Jerome in Idle thoughts of an idle fellow

After two new books, here's an old one, published in 1886. I knew about this dedication but for the longest time I was mixed up, thinking it was by Italo Svevo, so I could never find it. It could have been by Svevo, who had in common with Jerome K Jerome a love of what in Svevo's native Trieste was referred to with the Austrian term witze, meaning witty paradoxes and contradictions.

TO

THE VERY DEAR AND WELL-BELOVED

 FRIEND

OF MY PROSPEROUS AND EVIL DAYS--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, THOUGH IN THE EARLY STAGES OF OUR ACQUAINTANCESHIP

 DID OFTTIMES DISAGREE WITH ME,

HAS SINCE BECOME

TO BE MY VERY WARMEST COMRADE--

TO THE FRIEND

 WHO, HOWEVER OFTEN I MAY PUT HIM OUT,

NEVER (NOW) UPSETS ME IN REVENGE--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, TREATED WITH MARKED COLDNESS BY ALL THE FEMALE

 MEMBERS OF MY HOUSEHOLD,

AND REGARDED WITH SUSPICION

 BY MY VERY DOG, NEVERTHELESS SEEMS DAY BY DAY

 TO BE MORE DRAWN BY ME, AND IN RETURN TO

MORE AND MORE IMPREGNATE ME WITH THE

ODOUR OF HIS FRIENDSHIP--

TO THE FRIEND WHO NEVER TELLS ME OF MY FAULTS, NEVER WANTS TO BORROW

 MONEY, AND NEVER TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF--

TO THE COMPANION OF MY IDLE HOURS,

THE SOOTHER OF MY SORROWS,

 THE CONFIDANT OF MY JOYS AND HOPES--

MY OLDEST AND STRONGEST

PIPE,

THIS LITTLE VOLUME

IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED.

Italo Svevo also had a close relationship with tobacco, but in his case it was the cigarette, and in particular the last cigarette. In his book The confessions of Zeno, one of his alter ego Zeno's neuroticisms is to repeatedly smoke the last cigarette, in order to re-experience the joy of quitting. When Svevo was mortally injured in a car accident, he asked at the hospital if he could have a cigarette. His request was denied. Ah, he sighed, that really would have been the last cigarette. 

In addition to the dedication, Jerome K Jerome also wrote a fine preface for his book, which I would love to hear read out loud by John Cleese.

One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change.



4. Tony Ross in Sticky ends: twenty-six cautionary verses with sticky ends 

To my dear mum and dad -- they always thought that I would come to one. T.R.

5. Ogden Nash in The Face is Familiar 

This collection of poems by the man who gave us "I never saw a purple cow..." and "If called by a panther, don't anther" is a treasure I found in the Central City Library basement. Although the book was first published in the USA in 1940, our copy is the Australian Edition of May, 1943, a fact which some librarian of the past underlined by recovering the book in wallpaper featuring red and blue stripes interspersed with golden crowns. Not that this would have been her only foray into book preservation. Recovering books in serviceable wallpaper was once a thing in public libraries. I imagine this librarian's ghost floating around in our basement checking up on all her handiwork.

Before disposing of the original cover, the librarian cut out the blurb on its flap and pasted it into the book, turning the book into a sort of time-capsule:

In re-issuing this book in an Australian edition, the publishers are confident that it will add considerably to the gaiety of this land at a time when our sense of humour is in danger of being submerged in a total war effort.

It goes on to cite a poem in the book, a dig at Japanese expansionist tendencies on the eve of Pearl Harbour, which the Australian publishers - how realistically I don't know - hoped the Australians would still be finding funny in 1943.

On the other hand, I myself found a comment apropos of Ogden Nash's death funny enough to note down - or maybe I actually came up with it? It's scribbled in my own hand next to my notes for this post. It'd be nice to think I could be so witty as to quip "Merde! Improperly prepared!" in reaction to learning that one of the most famous rhymers in the history of poetry died from eating improperly prepared coleslaw. Googling brings up nothing. If anyone knows the origin of this genial epigram, please let me know!

I was taking notes because I had discovered that a postage stamp honouring Ogden Nash made history by being the first US postage stamp to contain the word "sex"- "although as a synonym for gender", Wikipedia tells us. Whew!

"It appears under the letter O" the wikipedia pundit continues. With my librarian skills I was able to quickly unearth a reproduction of the stamp, just to check that fact. The pundit had it right.




But I could not believe my eyes when I saw the price of the stamp and realised that this could not have happened in the fifties as I had assumed. In fact, it turned out to be issued in 2002, on the centennial of Nash's birth! What, the word sex made history in 2002? Are we kidding?
                                  
The Amarillo, Texas newspaper article where I found this information contained, further along, a telling insight. The other set of new stamps to come out that year was "Discover Canada", highlighting popular tourist attractions. So, images of Foggy Cove and the Icefields Parkway and Buffalo Jump, vying for attention with Nash's racy poem "The Turtle".

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks

 Which practically conceal its sex.

 I think it clever of the turtle

 In such a fix to be so fertile.

The dedication I found in the book, to Nash's wife, is not scandalous, antic or clever. It's sentimental, a bit reminiscent of the classic era poetry schoolboys of Nash's time (and of my father's, although he was a generation later) used to learn. "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by..." But it's definitely going straight to the book dedication wall in my pool room.


For Francis

And now to settle for the years,
That flew like frightened birds;
As fee for ten of happiness
I offer ten of words.

Book dedications of the year

Every year I like to honour the art of the book dedication by posting some dedications which have caught my fancy through the months, a tradition harking back to the very first Books in the City post.

Just as there is no one recipe for a good book, there is no one recipe for a good book dedication. It's a bit like stone soup. Cryptic or poignant, cabbage or peas -- put in what you've got; the one essential ingredient is the magic stone, which in the case of dedications is personality, as so often in life.





1. Daniel Nester in How to be inappropriate

For our daughter, Miriam Lee Nester.
I’ll try to behave myself from now on.

I like the honesty of that "try", from someone who is so attuned to the inappropriate as to be able to offer an absorbing variety of examples, including "an Australian opposition leader caught sniffing a woman's chair; two more Australians, cadets this time, of Chinese descent singled out by superiors to play-act Koreans in knife combat; a Russian formalist points out a playwright's disregard for logic, and offers as evidence how characters break into scenes with strange or 'inappropriate' remarks; a proposed new drug treats 'inappropriate' levels of separation anxiety in dogs... ".

In other words, he goes on to say, anything "odd, out of place". Hey! I think I've found an example of that:

It just seems like the second something becomes really solemn [like poetry], I want to do something wrong with it. I cant help but think it has something to do with being an alter boy. -- from an interview with Daniel Nester, as quoted by the online magazine Smith

2. Jane Hill in The Murder Ballad

For my dad, who was proud of me

This made me so happy, and all the more when I saw a photo of Jane Hill.
This is Jane Hill, isn't she great?
















3. And these are the Nabokovs, Vladimir and Véra:

(Photo courtesy of Christie's)

Vladimir Nabokov in Speak memory, Lolita, Pnin, Pale fire, Ada, Transparent things, and Look at the harlequins:

For Véra

I learned this from Brian Boyd at this year's Writers' Festival, where he was presenting Letters to Véra, the book he edited of Nabokov's letters to his wife over their 52 years of marriage, the longest marriage in literary history, if I remember correctly. Starting from his memoir Speak memory in 1951 and until his death, Nabokov dedicated every one of his books to Véra.

The passionate lepidopterist also presented her with the first copy of each book as it arrived from the publisher, having first drawn in it an imaginary butterfly, a different one every time, playing on the occasion. Here's the harlequin butterfly he drew in Look at the harlequins, possibly a reference not just to the book but also to the harlequin mask Véra was wearing when they first met.

On their 43rd wedding anniversary, in Véra's copy of The Gift Nabokov wrote "Here is the tenderest of butterflies worthy of the anniversary, 1925-68", and labelled the butterfly he drew a male Charaxes Verae Nabokov. I looked up Charaxes. It is a genus of butterflies known for their constancy in returning always to the same spot.

                                                   




4. Jules Feiffer in Backing into forward


For my children, my grandchild, my future grandchildren –

    Success is nothing to sneeze at, but failure, too,

                      Offers great possibilities.

And always remember, do not let your judges define you.


I saved this one for last. A summa cum laude dedication, a capture in amber of that moment in which the book is finished and ready to be sent off, a message to the dedicatee, but also to us, idiosyncratic and direct from the heart. I love the dedication and I loved the book, a memoir by the great cartoonist, playwright and illustrator (most notably of the children's-classic-for-all-ages The Phantom Tollbooth). A boy growing up in the Bronx who lacked "the basic Bronx gene, the ball-playing gene", with a father "primarily gentle and not very significant in my life -- or his own", a mother whom he would happily have murdered, but didn't want to wound. The girl he hitch-hiked across America to rejoin, who when he shows up at her door can't change her weekend plans. "If you didn't love me anymore, why didn't you write me? I wouldn't have come!" he says.

"I didn't know I didn't love you," she said.

"When did you find out?"

"When I opened the door and saw you."

If you have never at any time in your life thought that could happen to you, this book isn't for you, and I feel sorry for you for that.


If you'd like to see more dedications, here are the posts:

Dedicated by -- or to -- the beats: Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Bob Orr

Book dedications n. 5: Balzac, Rostand, Conrad, Edward Gorey, and Neil Gaiman

Best book dedications n. 4: Hunter S. Thompson, Diana Wynne Jones, Lady Chatterley's lover

My dedications collection:  Christine Lvov Lealand, Larry McMurtry, JD Salinger

Dedications, again: Cornell Woolrich, Michael King, H. Rider Haggard

Dedicated to the one I love: Ken Kesey and Diane Wakoski

Dedicated by -- or to -- the Beats

There's nothing quite like a good book dedication, that brush with mystique which you encounter, if you're lucky, opening a new book. And yet, for all the times you come across book lovers exalting the smell of books, the feel of books (I did recently spot one new and genial appreciation of the pleasure of books -- "They don't catch on my braces!"), you rarely encounter celebrations of the well-written dedication. Which, I might point out, is even more valuable for being an attribute any book may boast, no matter its form: print, electronic, or even read aloud.

I've made it a tradition to post, every year, the standouts among the dedications I've discovered at the library over the previous twelve months. They've included one to a typewriter (noir, of course, both the novel being dedicated and the typewriter it was dedicated to) and one to absinthe drinkers, and the authors who composed them have ranged from Edward Gorey to JD Salinger, not forgetting Hunter S Thompson.

There's a Beat theme to this year's finds -- wholly unplanned, I hasten to say, as befits the Beats.

Here they are:

1.  From  Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac

   Dedicated to America, whatever that is

Reading On the Road when I was a teenager rates as one of the most exciting reading experiences of my life, but I'd never tried Visions of Cody, Kerouac's later, posthumously published hymn to Neal Cassady and to those days on the road when the highs were still coming easy, until this year, following a slow, appreciative read of Big Sur. I skipped large swathes which I found too intemperate (who changed more? Jack? me? probably me), but the last 50 pages held, and did they hold.

The Penguin edition I found at the library also includes wonderful, sad, notes provided by Allen Ginsberg, where he calls the book "a dirge for America... for the American Hope that Jack (& his hero Neal) carried so valiantly through the land after Whitman..."

Kerouac himself suggests in his foreword, "This feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri."

Not yet, though, Jack, not yet!

My sentimental snap of Beat wheels by the Mississippi River
Hannibal, Missouri, 2012

2.  From These are my rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The owner of the fabled City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the publisher who gave us Howl, the poet who sang of the pennycandy store beyond the El, 95 years old this year, prefaced a collection of almost 40 years of his poetry with these lines:

For 

various brothers & lovers

eternally present

The book's title, These are my rivers, is taken from a bittersweet and nostalgic poem by the Italian modernist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, Questi sono i miei fiumi, in which he evokes the phases of his life by naming the rivers which flowed through them, the Serchio of his ancestral home in Lucca, the Nile of his childhood, the Seine of his youth, and the Isonzo, the river which runs through the devastated Carso where Italian troops, Ungaretti among them, had fought a series of terrible battles against the Austrians during World War One.

Ferlinghetti quotes the poem in his book's epigraph:

Ho ripassato
le epoche
della mia vita

Questi sono
i miei fiumi...

[I have revisited
the ages
of my life

These are
my rivers...]

(You can read the whole of Ungaretti's poem here.)


3. From Odysseus in Woolloomooloo by Bob Orr

   to the mysteries

Just three words on the otherwise all white third page of this fine new poetry collection, just out this year. 

Bob Orr is the most beat of New Zealand poets, and if you don't believe me, check out this picture.

Bob Orr's Odysseus in Woolloomooloo in the window of  the City Lights Bookstore

The year I moved to New Zealand, I came across Bob Orr's own "The Names of Rivers" in The NZ Listener. I ripped it out (no, it wasn't a library copy) and still have it, over ten years later. Read it and you'll see why.

The Names of Rivers

The names of rivers
suggest them:
The Nile weaving its scaly blue coolness
serpent like from Africa's hot heart.
The Mississippi each syllable a broadening
of its passage to the ocean.
The Amazon hallucinogenic as the zircon flight
of butterflies above its jewelled rain forest.
Those are the big rivers
the ones we all were taught about
but I would like to take you
to a small creek
whose taste I still recall --
a slight rustiness on the tongue
like old steel or blood. The Mangawara.
I would like to be able to say
that this creek runs through my life
runs through my poems. In fact until
the age of twelve it did.
not a river so much as water.
Not water so much as something as simple as time
perhaps even timelessness. Where I live now
the water is salty and it's blue and huge beyond belief
and you would drink of it only to stop

something from within yourself from bleeding.

Bob Orr has a wonderful poem about panel beating Neal Cassady's car, which ends,

Tomorrow with the tiny hammers of a typewriter
I'll make this poem cool again
As if it were a car once stolen in America by Neal Cassady

-- I think it's that one I found in a parking lot along the Mississippi River, panel beaten roof and all.

Best book dedications, no. 4

So Bob Dylan didn't get the Nobel after all. But would being cited in a Hunter S Thompson book dedication make a Nobel citation, or the lack of it, small beer? If Bob Dylan is anything he's unpredictable, but I’d like to imagine he thinks it does.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, after all, is the award Alfred Nobel decreed be given not for literary merit, but for "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” -- not a very clear guideline, and one not made clearer by the judges’ record, which smacks more of realpolitik than idealism. Except perhaps for Camus. I give them Camus.

But no prize for Graham Greene, friend of too many Latin American líders hostile to the US? And how about the Czech writer Karel Čapek, who was passed over in the late '30s because the judges were worried that choosing the author of War with the newts, a brilliant satire on European dictatorships, would offend the Germans? (According to his widow, the Nobel Committee asked him if he couldn't write them something uncontroversial and he replied, "Thank you for your good will, but I have already submitted my doctoral dissertation".)

But to get back to Hunter S Thompson and Bob Dylan: I recently spent a few days and nights unpacking 41 boxes of dusty books at my house to set them out on our new bookshelves, at a pace which so infuriated my husband you would have thought they were letters from ex-lovers. Of course, in a way they are. I dusted each one with a little paintbrush (this particularly maddened him), which at times made me feel as though I were on an archaeological dig, which, once again, in a way I was, stopping to leaf through some of the ones I hadn't had in my hands for a while.

And that was when I stumbled on Hunter S Thompson's dedication of Fear and Loathing to Bob Dylan, and realised that I had let Books in the City's anniversary go by this year without my usual post honouring shining examples of the fine art of book dedication. So here they are:

1. From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson


"To Bob Geiger,
for reasons that need
not be explained here
--and to Bob Dylan
For Mister Tambourine Man"

The first Bob would be a friend who gave HST, his first wife and his son Juan, just a boy at the time (rather than an IT guy in a polo shirt as he is now), a place to stay after they'd been evicted from one or another home, and I would say something else of value as well, which HST doesn't feel the need to spell out in detail in public, thus meeting one of my main criteria for a good book dedication.

And in a copy of his Hell's Angels: a strange and terrible saga, which I had never read and got for half-price the other day at Andrew Rumbles's bookstore's closing-out sale, one of those bargains which in one way you'd actually rather not get, I found this:

"To the friends who lent me money and kept me mercifully unemployed. No writer can function without them.
Again, thanks. HST."

Another interesting thing which happened to me recently in relation to HST was coming across an article which appeared in a Colorado newspaper the year he died, titled "Hunter Thompson’s family seeks permanent home for his archives".

Thompson’s family and executors hope to place the archives, now in temporary storage at a secret site in Aspen, with a university in a city or state with some connection to the author. Obvious candidates include Kentucky, Thompson’s birthplace; Colorado, where he lived for nearly 40 years; and literary-rich New York, where he once worked. 

“Something that would feel right for Hunter,” added presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who also is Thompson’s official biographer. “He’s somebody who didn’t like Phoenix.”

Douglas Brinkley was also a personal friend of HST's, so I expect he has a good sense of humour. I was curious to know if this dislike of Phoenix was something HST had actually expressed, or if Phoenix were a metaphor Brinkley came up with for the occasion. Perhaps it's a 21st century version of when East Coast theatre critics used to use Peoria, Illinois as an example of the cultureless wasteland of mid-America: "Will it play in Peoria?" they used to say.

I tried googling Phoenix and culture to see what would come up. So, Douglas, there are actually five book clubs in Phoenix, including one called "Chow Bella" devoted to books about food, and one called "Devouring Divas", which, as much as I'd like to think that it's a bookclub where Hannibal Lecter types discuss books while munching on opera stars, is probably not.

But best of all, for me, were these two lines which appeared near the end:

Juan Thompson recalls hotel bills from 20 years past, and 1,000 small, hotel-sized bars of Neutrogena soap Thompson probably purchased when he first discovered the brand.
Anita Thompson said her husband learned his archival ways from his mother, a librarian.

(you can read the whole article online at www.summit daily.com)


2. From Howl’s moving castle by Diana Wynne Jones

"This one is for Stephen. The idea for this book was suggested by a boy in a school I was visiting, who asked me to write a book called The Moving Castle. I wrote down his name, and put it in such a safe place, that I have been unable to find it ever since. I would like to thank him very much."

I am a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones, who died this year in March. Not from having read her books, as they came too late for my childhood, and then when I had my own little girl, I still didn't hear about her because all anyone was talking about was Harry Potter.

Diana Wynne Jones, I found out when I started working in a library, had written a story years before JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter which was very, very similar to it, and the first reason I found to like her was when I read an interview where she got asked about this coincidence, and didn't have a mean thing to say. And the more I came across her, the more she appealed to me, this talented woman with her warm, slightly muddled and yet serenely unfazed, air.

She made me think of a beloved aunt of mine who somewhat resembled her physically, the cheeks and the unruly curls. Like Diana Wynne Jones she had not had a happy childhood, if for different reasons, and she seemed to live in a world where real and unreal coexisted without being aware that this could be seen as a problem. She would do things like announcing she was getting married and inviting us to her wedding, and then when her brother, my uncle, not a rich man, travelled all the way across the US to be there, he called us when he got home to report that they'd had a lovely visit, but that the entire weekend had gone by, not only without any incarnation of a wedding or a partner, but without either of these even being mentioned.

2003 interview with Dina Rabinovitch for The Guardian  in which the Harry Potter question is asked.
"The wild magic of Diana Wynne Jones" is a lovely obituary of Wynne Jones by Alison Flood which appeared in The Guardian

3. I learned about this during Banned Books Week this year. The 1960 Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence contained this added "publisher's dedication":

"For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959, at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of “Not Guilty,” and thus made D.H. Lawrence’s last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."

Penguin Books did owe those twelve people a lot, and not just for the $2,000,000 I think the book made them just in the first year. According to the Act, the purpose of which was “to provide for the protection of literature and to strengthen the law concerning pornography", the penalty for the publisher of a book which was found to have “a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences,” was a prison sentence.

The standard of the time was what was deemed acceptable for fourteen-year-old schoolgirls. No mention of fourteen-year-old factory girls. In this particular case this may have been an important distinction: factory girls wouldn't have been receiving French lessons so the concept of the demi-vierge, so morally equivocal, could be expected to go safely over their heads.

I was fifteen myself when I read Lady Chatterley's Lover, and yes, was studying French. But the part I remember being most thrilled by was not the demi-vierge, not the sap rising in the giant oak or whatever it was, but the letter Lady Chatterley's lover writes her during the time they are forced to be apart. "We won't let them blow the crocus out," was how it went, I think.

I remember still being excited by this morally unequivocal oath ten years later when for the first time I saw crocuses poking up out of the snow, in Scotland, at Easter.

My Dedications collection

It’s Books in the City’s second anniversary, and like last year I thought I'd celebrate by sharing the book dedications I've added to my collection over the last 365 days  -- at least the ones I remember, or can find where I scribbled them down, and can still read my handwriting.


1. From a very old-looking novel in the Central Library basement called Sally Lunn, by a certain Leo Walmsley, who turned out to be a friend of Daphne du Maurier’s, so not so old after all. 1937 is the publication date. I read the ending. Sally is accused by the man she loves of being “swank” and just wanting to go off to London. She swears she is not swank, and to prove it she pulls out the Guernsey sweater she has knitted him. They embrace.

The dedication reads:

For our darling Boodles, whose home is the sea.

Who is Boodles? I thought it might have been a family cat who drowned, but from the "Walmsley Society" website I learn that the family cat was named Choo-i.


2. And the prize for best sense of humour goes to Christine Leov Lealand, author of a R18 book at Central Library called Quintessence: Erotic adventures of fantasy and desire:

Dedicated to everyone who knows that sex is better than drugs
                And
To all who encouraged me as I wrote.
If you think you feature in this book please introduce yourself.
I’m always interested in meeting figments of my imagination.


3. Larry McMurtry’s book The Last Picture Show is a sad book about two incoherent boys and a town beauty growing up in a small town in West Texas which was a "thinly disguised" (as they say) portrait of the small town McMurtry himself grew up in. Many years later, in his book about the lost art of storytelling, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at sixty and beyond, McMurtry returned to write again about this town, called Thalia in his books, Archer City in real life, like this:

"And always, there were diners who were just passing through, few of whom aspired to stay in Archer City. They stopped at the Dairy Queen as they would at a gas station, to pee and take in fuel, mindful, gloomily, that it was still a good hundred miles even to Abilene, itself no isle of grace. Few of these nomads, if they had stories to tell, bothered to tell them to the locals – and if they had wanted to tell a story or two, it is doubtful that anyone would have listened. People on their way to Abilene might as well be on their way to hell – why talk to them? Folks in Archer City knew the way to hell well enough; they need seek no guidance from traveling men."

The Last Picture Show's first page reads:

This book is lovingly dedicated to my home town.


4. Rudyard Kipling’s Plain tales from the hills:

To the wittiest woman in India, I dedicate this book.

She turns out to be a certain Lucy Hauksbee, aka Mrs. FC Burton. I found this out from a google book which was missing the pages, as google makes sure happens with their books, which might have told me something about her. For now, a mystery.


5. I thought Marie Corelli was a Saint, so you can imagine my surprise when I opened an old book of hers in the basement to find the dedication:

To the absinthe drinkers of Paris.

She turns out to have been a bestselling 19th century English author of eerie and occult novels, on record as having had various mystical experiences, which might be what had led me astray. I think mostly I just confused her with the Italian saint Maria Goretti. Pretty similar!

As it turns out, the novel is called Wormwood and the absinthe drinkers of Paris are depicted as poor tortured souls damned by their fatal addiction. So the dedication is actually a sort of “You who are about to die, I salute you.’


6. Thanks to Nick for this last and best, from JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey:


As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor, and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

Dedications, again

Happy Anniversary!
 
Books in the City made its debut one year ago with a post called “Dedicated to the one I love”, honouring the well-written book dedication. Since then I’ve run into a few more good ones and here they are, in celebration of a year in which I’ve really enjoyed the blog! and hope all of you out there reading have too.

1. To Leanora: WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY 

A book called 20th century ghosts caught my eye because the author was named Joe Hill, as in “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, an old song my father used to sing (as did Joan Baez) about the ghost of a slain union organizer. I flipped through the first pages to see if maybe it was a pen name – and found instead this dedication.

For the pen name, I still don’t know, but think probably so:  our very knowledgeable fiction selector told me he is Stephen King’s son. I’m tempted to read the whole book, or at least the story “Pop Art” which Christopher Golden in his introduction says is his favourite, and which opens with these lines: “My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don't remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective."


2. To Remington Portable No. NC69411

Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear window, father of noir fiction, alcoholic recluse and tortured soul, dedicated The Bride Wore Black to his typewriter.









3. Tad Williams, "To my father..."

Tad Williams dedicated the four volumes of his “Otherland” science fiction series like this:

Book 1: "This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love. Actually Dad doesn’t read fiction, so if someone doesn’t tell him about this, he’ll never know."

Book 2: "This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love. As I said before, Dad doesn’t read fiction. He still hasn’t noticed that this thing is dedicated to him. This is Volume Two – let’s see how many more until he catches on."

Book 3: "This is still dedicated to you-know-who, even if he doesn’t. Maybe we can keep this a secret all the way to the final volume."

Book 4: "My father still hasn't actually cracked any of the books – so, no, he still hasn't noticed. I think I’m just going to have to tell him. Maybe I should break it to him gently. 'Everyone here who hasn't had a book dedicated to them, take three steps forward. Whoops, Dad, hang on there for a second...' "


4. For C.K. Stead who, like execution, concentrates the mind.

-- Michael King, in Tread softly for you tread on my life.

Thanks to Steve Braunias for this one.








5. For H. Rider Haggard fan Kelly (my dedication):

The Faithful but Unpretending Record of A Remarkable Adventure is Hereby Respectfully Dedicated by the Narrator ALLAN QUATERMAIN to All The Big and Little Boys Who Read It

-- H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s mines.