Today is World Book Day. #WorldBookDay2021 And so, I thought I would post something about my favorite book, which it turns out, is the reason why I started this blog ever so long ago. But first a short something about books in my early life....
When I was a teenager, I had a couple of jobs. I went to a private high school, and payed my own tuition. I also saved up for college. With my extra spending money I bought books, usually one a week, at the local B. Dalton, which was located in a nearby shopping mall named Eastland. I grew-up in Harper Woods, an uneventful suburb of Detroit, and besides the local public library -- which I rode my bicycle to on a regular basis -- the local B. Dalton comprised my entry into the world of books. I liked to read books, and I liked to browse books. I was a nerdy kid. Books, and the worlds they represented, were what I had going on.
Three of the books which had the biggest impact on my life I came across as a teenager. They are Walden, by Henry David Thoreau; the Collected Stories of Franz Kafka; and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I can't remember exactly how I came across the first two. Like most teens, I was idealistic, and that's what likely led me to Thoreau and his literary philosophy. I also used to tune into radio documentaries broadcast on the CBC out of Canada, which was just across the Detroit river. That's likely how I first heard about Kafka, a strange and awkward fellow who no doubt appealed to the awkwardness I felt as a young person. I also recall, quite vividly, having seen Truffaut's terrific film of Fahrenheit 451 broadcast on Canadian television, channel 9 out of Windsor. It made a big impression, and that's what led me to read Bradbury's great novel. I still have those same books I bought ever so long ago. They remain favorites.
My interest in Thoreau led me to another book which I still own and which also made a big impact on my life. That book was a biography, The Days of Henry David Thoreau, by Walter Harding. I recall reading it and when I came to the end of the book and the end of Thoreau's life, I cried. Perhaps I shouldn't admit it, as it may make me look foolish -- a teenage boy crying in his basement at the death of someone from long ago. Of course, intellectually, I knew Thoreau was dead. He died in 1862, more than 100 years before I was born. But emotionally, while reading Harding's beautifully told story of one man's life, I became so involved in Thoreau that I thought it was unfair that he was taken from the world.
Walter Harding was a great Thoreau scholar, and the author or editor of a shelf-full of books on the solitary transcendentalist. Not only did his The Days of Henry David Thoreau have a big impact on me, it also got me hooked on biographies. Some people enjoy reading fiction, or poetry, or true crime books, or history or sci-fi. As a genre, I really like biographies. A great biography -- an empathetic biography well told, can put you into the shoes of another and in some small way let you experience another time and place. Harding's book did that for me as a teen, and it lead to a longstanding interest in 19th century New England and the writers of the American Renaissance. One of the highlights of my life was a trip to Concord, Massachusetts where I visited Walden Pond, the Alcott House, Emerson's house, Hawthorne's house, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc....
There have been other biographies which I have greatly enjoyed, like Neil Baldwin's Man Ray: American Artist and Mark Polizzotti's Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. Each tie-into my love of surrealism. But none after the Harding biography of Thoreau have had as large an impact on my life as has Barry Paris' biography of Louise Brooks. I first read Paris' book in the early 1990s, a few years after it was published and not long after I had first watched a rented VHS of Pandora's Box. I had to find out more about more about the actress who played Lulu! Paris' book was not so much the answer to my many questions, but the perfect book at just the right time in my life. It started me on a quest to explore all I can about Brooks and her life and times, which of course has led me toward even more areas of interests -- from silent film and the Jazz Age to Denishawn and the culture of Weimar Germany.
I have written and blogged about the Barry Paris biography in the past. And as I have said in the past, the Barry Paris biography of Louise Brooks is the best biography I have ever read and the best biography I will ever read. The San Francisco Chronicle used to run a small feature called "What's Your Most Treasured?" They recruited local personalities (like Isabel Allende, the celebrated novelist, or Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig's list, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the late poet) to pen a few words about books that mattered to the contributor. In 2011, they asked me to contribute a piece. I wrote about the Barry Paris biography, a book I had first read nearly twenty years earlier.
I am not the only one who appreciates this book. It was widely and well reviewed when it was first published in 1989. And not just in film journals, but also in the mainstream press like the New York Times. And not just by film critics, but also by literary writers like the novelist Angela Carter and the sci-fi writer Fritz Leiber Jr. The Paris book enjoyed good sales, and went into paperback and sold steadily for a few years until it eventually went out of print in the late 1990s.
I launched the Louise Brooks Society and its website in 1995, and would occasionally hear from fans wanting to know were they could purchase the biography of Brooks. More than once, but trying not to be a nuisance, I wrote to Random House and Barry Paris' editor urging them to bring the book back into print, but to no avail. I believed in this book, but I was just one voice. It was early on in the development of the internet, and petition drives were the thing. I figured I would try my hand at a bit of cultural activism, and launched an online petition drive through the Louise Brooks Society to bring the Barry Paris biography back into print. And it worked!
Sometime in 1999 or 2000, the rights to both the Barry Paris biography and Brooks' own Lulu in Hollywood (which had also fallen out of print) were sold to the University of Minnesota Press and their burgeoning series of books on the movies. And both were brought back into print in shiny new editions! And what's more, I and the Louise Brooks Society were acknowledged in each of the new editions. I was proud. I was pleased for Brooks' many fans and many new fans. And I felt I had done some good about something I cared about.
At the time, I was working in a San Francisco bookshop where I arranged and hosted the store's many author events. As a thank you and an acknowledgement for my efforts, the University of Minnesota Press agreed to send Barry Paris from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to San Francisco for a special author event. This was very unusual, as his book was an older title and from a relatively small university press. Such expense, and what profit could there be? But I made it work. The store drew a good size crowd (I recall a couple came all the way from Los Angeles) and we sold lots of books, at least 100 signed copies went out the door or were mailed off to fans around the country. Incidentally, I had been in touch with the press since then, and was told in the years following their re-release of the books that each of these two titles was among the press' best backlist selling books. And they are still in print today.
I had met Barry Paris once before, in 1998. It was a thrill and a pleasure and an honor. He is a good guy, and I was pleased to meet one of my heroes. Then, he signed a copy of my hardback first edition of his biography, inscribing it to me and my wife as the "Tsar and Tsarina of the Louise Brooks Society." However, it was at that later event in 2000 that he so graciously signed my original softcover reading copy of his book - the biography that has and still does mean so much to me that I have spent 25 years learning all that I can about my favorite silent film star. In my book Barry wrote "For Thomas - who resurrected me & LB the way Tynan did in the New Yorker." I almost cried.
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