Through the sewer with one drag...

In 1988, I got a copy of a more-or-less blank book called Book Notes: A Book Lover's Journal (c. 1987, Book-of-the-Month Club). The book is divided into sections by the alphabet. Each letter is featured in a collage by Joan Hall based on the letter itself (in a typeface whose name begins with that particular letter) and an allusion to an author, character, book or place starting with that letter. Following each collage, the next page features the full name of the typeface and a bit of its history, along with the title of the collage. A literary nerd could play the book like a game, trying to guess the title of the collage from the hints it contains. A really nerdy typeface junkie could... oh, never mind, we don't know anybody that nerdy, do we? Besides, these days it's fonts we're into, not typefaces.

I've never liked my handwriting. I started out kindergarten with a death-grip on my pencil and I never lightened up. (As a result, I have a very prominent writing bump on the middle finger of my right hand, and the finger itself has a permanent bend at the second joint, in the direction of the little finger. I suspect this little distortion of complicating my current physical therapy issues.) Consequently my printing, and later my writing, have always been very labored and heavy and lacking the graceful flow of my grandfather's beautiful script or my mother's neat, pretty hand.

That fact and the school librarian's injunction against writing in books seriously inhibits my ability to make use of bound journals of any kind. Fear of making mistakes or saying something permanently stupid in ink further complicates my issues. (Consider that the weblog form has addressed both of these issues, thus freeing me to make a complete international fool of myself in cyberspace through time immemorial by merely ignoring the existence of Google cache and billions of potential readers.)

Nevertheless, in the interest of justifying whatever I'd spent on my copy of Book Notes, I sought out two books I had greatly enjoyed as a child and duly noted them thus:

• Josephine Scribner Gates, The Book of Live Dolls, c. 1901, The Bobbs Merrill Company, N.Y.

  "...I don't know of a lovelier thing that could happen to a little girl than to
  have her doll come to life. What a fine time there would be in the dollhouse!"
  (p. 11)

  And there was! This is my earliest book memory, checked out of the public library when I was very young and reread in March 1988.
• Julia Lina Sauer, Fog Magic, c. 1943, The Viking Press, N.Y.

  "Most of us live in two worlds--our real world and the one we build or spin for
  ourselves out of the books we read, the heroes we admire, the things we hope to do." (p. 58)

  On foggy days, a young Nova Scotian girl named Greta walks over the mountain and is welcomed to Blue Cove, a fishing village that existed there a hundred years before.

  "...women who stay ashore have to learn the same lesson that men learn who go to sea... they have to learn to be content and at peace shut in by their horizon." (p. 50)

  I first read this book when I was in sixth grade. I would have been just about the same age as Greta. Reread in March 1988.

Book Notes came with an envelope glued inside the back cover, a place for clippings of reviews, book lists, or whatever. I think I'll print out the voluminous notes I made when I read all those great books by Eric Kraft. He deserves a presence in there. And, off the top of my head, here are a few others who should probably be included:

• James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, The Pistol, Whistle, and World War II)
• Marilyn French (The Women's Room) [a review by Anne Tyler here]
• Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael, Providence)
• Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons, Deception Point, Digital Fortress)