Acquisitions: Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

Last week we hit the Lake Agassiz Regional Library book sale; this week was the Fargo Public Library book sale. The website was very clear: the sale started at 9. When we arrived, we found all the posters said the sale would begin at 10. So, after filling 45 minutes with people-watching and being obnoxious in public, the Wifey and I finally got to be one of the first people into a book sale. The first thing I grabbed was the book to the right — I'm certain it would have been gone seconds later had I not headed tight for nonfiction. How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, by John Muir, must've been a good manual if they recently came out with a 30th Anniversary Edition.

John Muir, who is in fact a descendant of the conservationist Muir, wasn't your average VW-driving hippie. A skilled engineer, Muir worked for Lockheed for years, until deciding late in life to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to lead a simpler life. Muir started working on Volkswagens, eventually acquiring a level of expertise that he felt he needed to share, so he self-published the first edition of How To…Volkswagen Alive. The book quickly became the go-to reference for VW repair, and combined a sensible readability, including humor and philosophy, that appealed to VW owners. The illustrations are by "Juniperus Scopulorum", a/k/a Peter Aschwanden, and add a very R Crumbish feel to the book. Trippy imagery, trippy writing, and a counterculture subject all make this book probably the mosy hippyish book I own — but being a mechanic's reference, it's going next to my Chilton's. I had originally intended to sell it, thinking it was obscure and desirable, but mine's a 4th printing of a quite common book, so whenever I get around to reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I may have to read this one, too, and actually get some mechanical learning out of it. From a young age, my daughter said she wanted a VW Beetle when she got of age, I might as well start preparing now.

Acquisitions: Dali's As You Like It

You don't get a cover image for this one, and that's probably the only reason I got this book. This weekend, the Lake Agassiz Regional Library had one of their book sales,and we arrived at opening time — which, we knew, meant we were competing with book dealers, book collectors, and frugal packrats (of which we could be considered any of the above). The sale was in the basement, in a poorly-vented windowless room, making it claustrophobic, hot, and everybody seemed ruder than I would have usually expected. Considering how rude some of the local book dealers are on an average day, it wasn't the kind of fun book-browsing shopping trip we usually enjoy. In that first hour, you need to grab what you can, as soon as you can, because if it's that good, you're not going to see it again.

This book, one of its illustrations at the right, is in a very plain library binding, a few generic gold-leaf feathers on the front, and the spine says just As You Like It. In fact, the spine is printed upside-down; if shelved with the text the same direction as the books around it, the front is on the wrong side. Generic Shakespeare play, unimpressive binding, stains on the cover, it's no wonder it had been passed over. Inside, however, is why this is was such a find, and completely worth it all — and the book's introduction explains it all:

Imagine someone picking up this edition of As You Like It: he reads the words 'Folio Society': Folio — the word conjures up ancient manuscripts…of Shakespeare played in Shakespeare's way: he opens the book, there are designs by Salvador Dali, the notorious surrealist: one who is famous for his intimate knowledge of the anatomy of spiders but not for his interest in the structure of the sixteenth-century playhouse.

This is pretty much how my experience went. "Ah, Shakespeare…Folio Society, nicely typeset—wait, Salvador Dali?!?" In the 1940s, Dali was closely involved in the theatre, designing costumes and sets for operas and plays. In 1948, for the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, Dali designed costumes for Shakespeare's As You Like It. In 1953, The Folio Society produced combined the New Temple Shakespeare edition of the play with Dali's sketches of costumes and backdrops. My edition is the third printing, from 1965, but both D and I are Dali fans, and I haven't seen these designs before. The first printing is quite valuable, and ours is a little beat up, but from the start this was intended to go on my Shakespeare shelf and the interior is excellent: it is to my advantage that, rather than the quick dash-and-grab through the library book sale like the dealers and collectors, I stopped to open the cover and look closely at the book's contents, despite rude elbows and invasion of my personal space.

Acquisitions: The Dakota Maverick

Governor "Wild Bill" Langer was probably the most colorful politician in North Dakota's history once Teddy Roosevelt moved away. Langer notoriously called up the National Guard to prevent himself from being removed from office — he locked the doors, barred the windows, and issued declarations, one of which I've heard sounds a lot like assertion that North Dakota is a sovereign state immune from national laws, which may or may not be true. That's what I'm hoping to learn more about in this book, The Dakota Maverick: the Political life of William Langer. It's not a common book, having been published and printed right here in Fargo, so when I was recently at BDS Books, browsing their North Dakota section, I bought a copy with highlighting inside and missing its dust jacket, because the better copies were all running in the $15 to $30 range. Two weeks later, I'm at the thrift shop and run across the one pictured to the left: clean interior, with dustjacket, seventy-five cents. Oh well, now I've got two, one with the important parts already isolated for me, and one for the bookshelf.

Acquisitions: The Nation's Trashiest Humor

The cover is a bit beat up, and the internal content is all a re-hash of previously published items, but I had to pick this up. The entire title is America The Beautiful: A Collection of the Nation's Trashiest Humor, but there's very little even remotely adult about the comedy therein. This is publication number 2048 of The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, originally published in 1970. The book consists of thirty comics, from the funny pages like B.C., and some from the editorial pages of publications from the New Yorker to Cleveland Plain Dealer, all focusing on the problem of waste disposal. Amusingly, about half have something to do with outer space, especially with moon-men discouraging us from mucking up their home. I won't be able to read my copy in its entirety, though — several pages are torn out, and a few others are stained. Much to the enjoyment of the people who prepared this book, it has not ended up in the trash: I bought it for seventy-five cents at a local thrift shop, one of the best mechanisms to avoid throwing out trash that doesn't need to be trash. I can, amazingly, read the publication in its entirety online at the EPA's website.

Acquisitions: True's Best Cartoons

True magazine was the poor man's Playboy in a sense, containing the lifestyle content without as much sex and nudity, but it was also in its own category by including all kinds of off-the-wall content about UFOs, pirates, deadly animals of all sizes, and a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek. It was in print from the 1930s until the 1970s, but most issues I own or have seen are late 50s to 1960s in vintage. This book, Best Cartoons from True Magazine, came out in 1955, but was reprinted into the 1960s. The book isn't completely cartoons: throughout are short jokes and humorous stories for the more literary readers. I just flipped through a bit, and found that I really don't get a lot of the humor of the time. These aren't Collier's comics, aren't New Yorker comics, and lack that broad interest that makes the comic cross-generational. These look very rooted in their time, and I suppose I'll have to do some research if I decide to read it.

Acquisitions: Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual

I hope nobody took this seriously, but there's little chance it ever passed as a serious book. Phyllis Diller — who, surprisingly, is still alive & kicking — compiled a bunch of her stand-up punchlines into this book in 1967, at the height of her career. Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual comes with the tagline on the back: "If the last time you smiled was for your wedding photo, this is the book for you." This is for the Wifey's feminism collection: Diller was an early comedienne of the feminine style, and her wife-sympathetic humor has probably driven much of the lazy-lout image of men these days. In flipping through the book, there's a lot of illustrations, done in a style that I initially thought was Gahan Wilson, but is credited to Susan Perl. Maybe if I ever feel the need for a marriage manual, I might have to finally read this; it might not help, but it'll probably make me laugh.

Acquisitions: Tangerine

I picked this up at a church rummage sale where there were selling everything for $5 a bag, so everything remotely intriguing got tossed in the sack. I had hoped one of the kids would be interested in it, but everyone had wrinkled their nose at the book — so I'll probably read it myself. Tangerine, by Edward Bloor, is a lite gothic horror for kids, about a legally blind boy whose family moves to an unusual new town where reality is almost inverted, causing mystery-solving revelations. The book originally came out in 1997, and I'm rather surprised I haven't heard of it: it won several awards and is ranked highly on Amazon. Maybe the kids don't know what they're missing out on.

Acquisitions: Caught In The Act

No, I wasn't the one caught: the book is called Caught In The Act: The Photographer in Contemporary Fiction. Despite the "photographer" in the extended title, there's very few pictures in this book, just one at the start of each chapter. The cover makes the book look like it's a series of mysteries, but it's not exactly that, either. This collection of short stories focuses on main characters who are photographers: paparazzi, portraitists, and, yes, it sounds like there's a crime scene photographer somewhere in there. At around 150 pages, it won't be a long read, but it looks interesting, mostly as a collection with an unusual theme. Published in 1996, it is now out of print.

Acquisitions: Portrait From The Heartland

Another rummage sale book: Portraits From The Heartland. I probably would have overlooked it, except I noticed was published by the Plains Art Museum, the prominent modern art museum in the area. Sculptor Duane Hanson posthumously had an exhibition at the Plains in 2005, which I didn't visit, sadly, and the book appears to have been produced specifically for the show. The publisher is New Rivers Press, which I just learned is the university press of MSUM.

If you're unfamiliar with Hanson, he's the artist whose expertise are jarring, hyper-natural statues of average people. A few years ago, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a group of us encountered his 1975 sculpture, "Museum Guard." The installation was, as you see in the Flikr photo, just standing, off to the side, as a regular museum guard would. It took a good three or four minutes before we realized he was a statue — and fifteen years later, it's about the only thing I remember from that museum. Going to an entire show of his work bordered on causing heebie-jeebies, but now I wish I had gone. The book doesn't do the statues justice. In fact, the photos are too professionally done, too well lit and framed, so the non-real qualities of each piece are too emphasized. They should have been shot in low light on grainy film, and they would have shown off what makes them great art pieces.

The book's cover, in particular, has a poorly-done glossy coating which (you can kind of see in the scan above) is puckering and peeling. No big deal, though; it doesn't affect the interior, and it's for my own enjoyment, not resale. I think I paid fifty cents for it. The previous owner, however, must not have paid anything: inside the front cover is a sticker that reads, "This copy of Duane Hanson: Portraits from the Heartland compliments of the Plains Art Museum."

Acquisitions: The Orchid Thief

Picked this up at a rummage sale of a middle-aged, rather attractive woman. Wifey humorously chastised me for chatting the MILF up about the book while counting my quarters to purchase The Orchid Thief. The rummage-sale woman complimented it for being an approachable book on an odd obsessive subject. My only familiarity with the book is the film Adaptation, which, I understand, has little to do with the actual book itself. I normally would pass a recent, common book, but I just reviewed The Dangerous World of Butterflies over at Collector's Quest, and The Orchid Thief is mentioned several times in its media materials. Butterflies is about the seedy underbelly of butterfly collectors and poachers, and when combined with the recently-read Flight Maps, on capturing and using birds for everything from fashion to target practice, then, too, The Orchid Thief and its illicit flower collectors, rounds out a trilogy of humanity's obsession with possessing the beautiful parts of nature.

Acquisitions: Speer Ammunition Manual

While rummaging this past weekend, we happened across a little bundle of hand-reloading resources. The rummage sale was rife with western novels, a few WWII novels, and the host looked like he had rode more than his share of motorcycles in his life, so it isn't a large leap to figure he made good use of these books during his hobby time. I have no interest in hunting, and only a passing interest in gunplay (I had fun skeet shooting once), so these books aren't for me. Although, the detailed mechanics therein do appeal to the geek in me: who knew bullets were so complex? No, I can't talk myself into keeping yet another book of statistics of no use to me: each one is for sale over at WeHaveYourCollectibles.com.

Acquisitions: Hansi's New Life

Lastly, a book I picked up more for its internet notoriety than anything. I often see the comic book Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika pop up online as a non sequitur, "WTF?" contribution to the world of online content because the cover looks so "Yay, Nazis!". I actually own a copy: I had bought it long before it was appearing online. The comic was published by a Christian comic house, and is decidedly anti-Nazi throughout, so the funny cover is about the biggest chortle in the funnybook. What few people recognize is that the comic was based on an autobiographical novel by the real "Hansi," Maria Anne Hirschmann, that was first issued with the same title as the comic, but was later revised as "The Girl Who Left the Swastika," probably to cut back on the amusement of loving Nazi symbols. The book above, I believe, is Hirschmann's second book, Hansi's New Life. If you don't believe me that Hirschmann is the real Hansi, here's proof, taped in the front cover:


Yes, folks, that's the real Hansi, sitting in the Fargo Holiday Inn, sometime in the 1980s. Strangely, despite the photo, the book is not autographed, which may mean the book was purchased after the appearance. I currently own a copy of the comic, the original biography, and now the sequel, putting me well on the way to a complete swastika-loving Hansi library.

Acquisitions: Almuric

The Wifey picked up Almuric, by Robert Howard, probably to re-sell, but I'm including it because the cover is so full of awesome. Howard was best known for Conan, but he put out pulp novels of swordfighting loinclothed men like there was no tomorrow. I will note, since it's not obvious in the image above, that the undies the hero on the cover is wearing were heavily outlined in ball-point pen by a previous owner.

Acquisitions: The Mad Scientists' Club

The Mad Scientists' Club, by Bertrand R Brinley, was chosen for one of the kids, probably Hunter, because there's so little good adventure stories for pre-teen boys these days. Also still in print despite decades since its release, this series was compiled from short stories printed in Boy's Life magazine. Brinley is no longer around, but his son is holding down the fort by documenting his father's books with an official website.

Acquisitions: The Lutefisk Ghetto

The Lutefisk Ghetto, by Art Lee, is still in print (mine is the 10th printing, 1988!), despite being a small press and an obscure title. Since Firefox's spellcheck doesn't understand lutefisk, I better explain: it's a white fish, pickled in lye to make it last longer. When cooked, the lye is drawn out, leaving a jelly-like substance that once was fish. I eat a token amount at Christmas time; Grandpa would eat it for every meal if he could, I'll bet. The book is sub-titled "Life in a Norwegian-American Town," and I suspect it's written in a similar vein to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion stories, but with a lot more Norwegian. Wifey is enamored with the self-deprecating Norwegian humor, and buys Ole and Lena books all the time, but I grabbed this both because I love local authors and publishers, but it has personal anecdotes from the area culture.