Summertime always equates, to me, a lot of reading. Actually winter does too but winter reading has always had something to do with school, as either student or teacher.
Here in ever-stylish North Baltimore we have this wonderful establishment known to man as The Book Thing. It used to be in the basement of a rowhouse on Charles street but it has lately moved to new digs in Waverly. Some of the fun is gone: in the basement, it was a rathole full of gigantic stacks of books. (I was tempted to call it a rabbit warren but I figure that rabbit warrens are somewhat more organized and clean.) There were stacks of books six feet high and seven stacks deep — God alone knew what might be in the rear of the stack, and He wasn’t telling. Now it’s all well-lit and reasonably well-ordered, so you can actually find what you want, but it’s much less entertaining. Best of all, the books are all free. It’s very Utopian; you can take as many books as you want, donation of books you’ve read is encouraged, and the staff is volunteer.
In any case summer usually involves several Book Thing trips. I love to sift through the stacks, discovering random weird things to read while sacked out with a Tom Collins in the backyard, or, occasionally, on the beach.
I decided at the last minute this morning to head to Sandy Point (a bay beach, near Annapolis), so I didn’t want to fart around picking out reading selections. I just grabbed one of my Book Thing finds and zoomed down to the bathwater-warm Chesapeake.
Yesterday I read one of the finds in about two hours — a sweet little novel of 1908 entitled “The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman,” by F. Hopkinson Smith. The author evidently had some connection to Maryland as he’d set the opening chapters in (as it turns out later) Frederick county and sets you up with a pretty romantic vision of Western Maryland as it must have once been. The conflict of the story revolves around a young artist who’d fallen in love with the pretty young wife of a much older man. He never does anything about it, but the implication is there and of course, being a gentleman, he leaves the scene and goes to Europe without doing a bloody thing about it. Marylanders, in 1908, were clearly perfect gentlemen in novels if not in fact.
Today’s selection was one that I’d picked up chez Book Thing (I wonder: if they open a Washington branch, will it be named “Le Chose des Livres?”) because it was an icon of the mid ’40s, something that my parent’s generation snickered about in school lunchrooms, purloined from Mom’s bedside table and perused with eyes opened wider than Eddie Cantor’s. Essayist par excellence — nay, sans pareil — Florence King has recalled Forever Amber in her jaded recollections.
“The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman” is the 1908 version of a bodice-ripper. In 1908, the implication of a less-than-respectable romance that never came to fruition was enough to set the lace-fichu’d bosoms of proper Grove Avenue ladies to heaving. By 1945, Kathleen Winsor had managed to complete the circle that 1908 could only imagine. The prologue sets us up for things to come with a pairing of two aristocratic youngsters who, without benefit of clergy thanks to warring family interests, manage to spawn. The girl, however, feels married after the dirty deed, so this probably goes a short way to assuage any raised eyebrows.
The spawn, though — the titular Amber (ha ha, I said “titular”) — by page 18, where my little purple leather Sig Ep bookmark currently resides, has already:
a) been established as a beautiful but “different” girl resented by her peers, mostly because she has
b) evidently been shagging her way through all the local farm boys, but
c) has become a Strong and Resourceful Woman (read: is willing to boink her way to success.
If “...an Old Fashioned Gentleman” is the ancestor of bodice-rippers, Forever Amber is the bodice ripper in puberty. It hasn’t quite grown into having a paperback edition with a swooning woman being carried off by a shirtless, long-haired muscle dolt, but it does contain this paragraph:
“Amber felt her bones and muscles turn to water. She stood and looked at him, cursing herself for her tongue-tied stupor. Why was it that she — who usually had a pert remark on her tongue for any man no matter what his age or condition — could think of nothing at all to say now? Now, when she longed with frantic desperation to impress him, to make him feel the same violent excitement and admiration that she did. At last she said the only thing she could think of...”
— Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber
I shit you not, that’s really direct from page 18. I dunno — why IS her tongue tied? Because she wants to bang his brains out, and from the way Amber’s been set up already, she’s going to. Now, being a modern boy, my impulse — the only thing I could think of, when longing with similar frantic desperation — the only thing to inspire violent excitement — would be to stammer, with heaving pectorals and artfully batted lashes: “Dude, nice package! What do you like for breakfast?” Fortunately, to keep her heart a bit more pure under her straining, black-laced stomacher and — how does Winsor put it? — “her breasts which were full and pointed, upward tilting,” Amber coughs up “Tomorrow’s the Heathstone Fair.” This clearly goes a long way to illustrate why I gave up on writing romantic fiction.
While I was rather shocked — yes, shocked! to see this sort of thing in a 1945 novel, it was enlightening. Forever Amber was the first bestseller to actually go this far and, really, it is pretty racy. I’ve pretty much established, less than a score of pages into the action, that this ain’t a hallmark of Lit. It does, however, set the stage for the zillion-page paperbacks that my college roomie and I referred to as the “naked people books” in the supermarket book-and-magazine aisle. Winsor does pretty well with her history; most naked-people-book readers of 2005 probably wouldn’t know who Oliver Cromwell was if he were to fall in their Twinkie-laden laps. She did, however, create a genre. Historical romance (and its B-side, hysterical romance) had existed for eons, as evidenced by the F. Hopkinson Smith and the Old-Fashioned Gentleman, but Winsor gave her audience some soft porn and made it legit.
Here in ever-stylish North Baltimore we have this wonderful establishment known to man as The Book Thing. It used to be in the basement of a rowhouse on Charles street but it has lately moved to new digs in Waverly. Some of the fun is gone: in the basement, it was a rathole full of gigantic stacks of books. (I was tempted to call it a rabbit warren but I figure that rabbit warrens are somewhat more organized and clean.) There were stacks of books six feet high and seven stacks deep — God alone knew what might be in the rear of the stack, and He wasn’t telling. Now it’s all well-lit and reasonably well-ordered, so you can actually find what you want, but it’s much less entertaining. Best of all, the books are all free. It’s very Utopian; you can take as many books as you want, donation of books you’ve read is encouraged, and the staff is volunteer.
In any case summer usually involves several Book Thing trips. I love to sift through the stacks, discovering random weird things to read while sacked out with a Tom Collins in the backyard, or, occasionally, on the beach.
I decided at the last minute this morning to head to Sandy Point (a bay beach, near Annapolis), so I didn’t want to fart around picking out reading selections. I just grabbed one of my Book Thing finds and zoomed down to the bathwater-warm Chesapeake.
Yesterday I read one of the finds in about two hours — a sweet little novel of 1908 entitled “The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman,” by F. Hopkinson Smith. The author evidently had some connection to Maryland as he’d set the opening chapters in (as it turns out later) Frederick county and sets you up with a pretty romantic vision of Western Maryland as it must have once been. The conflict of the story revolves around a young artist who’d fallen in love with the pretty young wife of a much older man. He never does anything about it, but the implication is there and of course, being a gentleman, he leaves the scene and goes to Europe without doing a bloody thing about it. Marylanders, in 1908, were clearly perfect gentlemen in novels if not in fact.
Today’s selection was one that I’d picked up chez Book Thing (I wonder: if they open a Washington branch, will it be named “Le Chose des Livres?”) because it was an icon of the mid ’40s, something that my parent’s generation snickered about in school lunchrooms, purloined from Mom’s bedside table and perused with eyes opened wider than Eddie Cantor’s. Essayist par excellence — nay, sans pareil — Florence King has recalled Forever Amber in her jaded recollections.
“The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman” is the 1908 version of a bodice-ripper. In 1908, the implication of a less-than-respectable romance that never came to fruition was enough to set the lace-fichu’d bosoms of proper Grove Avenue ladies to heaving. By 1945, Kathleen Winsor had managed to complete the circle that 1908 could only imagine. The prologue sets us up for things to come with a pairing of two aristocratic youngsters who, without benefit of clergy thanks to warring family interests, manage to spawn. The girl, however, feels married after the dirty deed, so this probably goes a short way to assuage any raised eyebrows.
The spawn, though — the titular Amber (ha ha, I said “titular”) — by page 18, where my little purple leather Sig Ep bookmark currently resides, has already:
a) been established as a beautiful but “different” girl resented by her peers, mostly because she has
b) evidently been shagging her way through all the local farm boys, but
c) has become a Strong and Resourceful Woman (read: is willing to boink her way to success.
If “...an Old Fashioned Gentleman” is the ancestor of bodice-rippers, Forever Amber is the bodice ripper in puberty. It hasn’t quite grown into having a paperback edition with a swooning woman being carried off by a shirtless, long-haired muscle dolt, but it does contain this paragraph:
“Amber felt her bones and muscles turn to water. She stood and looked at him, cursing herself for her tongue-tied stupor. Why was it that she — who usually had a pert remark on her tongue for any man no matter what his age or condition — could think of nothing at all to say now? Now, when she longed with frantic desperation to impress him, to make him feel the same violent excitement and admiration that she did. At last she said the only thing she could think of...”
— Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber
I shit you not, that’s really direct from page 18. I dunno — why IS her tongue tied? Because she wants to bang his brains out, and from the way Amber’s been set up already, she’s going to. Now, being a modern boy, my impulse — the only thing I could think of, when longing with similar frantic desperation — the only thing to inspire violent excitement — would be to stammer, with heaving pectorals and artfully batted lashes: “Dude, nice package! What do you like for breakfast?” Fortunately, to keep her heart a bit more pure under her straining, black-laced stomacher and — how does Winsor put it? — “her breasts which were full and pointed, upward tilting,” Amber coughs up “Tomorrow’s the Heathstone Fair.” This clearly goes a long way to illustrate why I gave up on writing romantic fiction.
While I was rather shocked — yes, shocked! to see this sort of thing in a 1945 novel, it was enlightening. Forever Amber was the first bestseller to actually go this far and, really, it is pretty racy. I’ve pretty much established, less than a score of pages into the action, that this ain’t a hallmark of Lit. It does, however, set the stage for the zillion-page paperbacks that my college roomie and I referred to as the “naked people books” in the supermarket book-and-magazine aisle. Winsor does pretty well with her history; most naked-people-book readers of 2005 probably wouldn’t know who Oliver Cromwell was if he were to fall in their Twinkie-laden laps. She did, however, create a genre. Historical romance (and its B-side, hysterical romance) had existed for eons, as evidenced by the F. Hopkinson Smith and the Old-Fashioned Gentleman, but Winsor gave her audience some soft porn and made it legit.
posted by Daniel | 12:18 AM
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