I wasn't raised in the Detroit area, but I had lived there for two summers. In addition, during my college years in Ann Arbor, I had regularly attended Red Wings hockey games, often taking the Lodge Freeway from I-94 to Joe Louis Arena. Right before I exited for “The Joe,” a large used bookstore loomed up, John King Books, with a block-letter sign promising over 600,000 books.
In 1991, I finally got the opportunity to spend hours wandering the book store's caverns. On my first trip, I walked away with The Great Books of the Western World, 54 volumes, from Homer to Freud, with Aquinas and Augustine, Darwin and Marx, Dante and Chaucer, and over 60 others. It was a beautiful set, unmarked, only slightly worn. And only $200.00.
When I got home, I dived in. I figured I'd have the set read in about five years, if I skipped the science books by Galen, Copernicus, and others. Sixteen years later, it's still a beautiful set, unmarred by hardy reading.
It appears I'm not the only one. My old friend Alex Beam (not really a friend, but he subscribed to Gilbert Magazine while I was the editor, and we talked on the phone as part of this article he wrote for the Boston Globe; in terms of cyber-relationships, that's practically intimacy) has written an interesting book about the history of that set and its shortcomings. Brendan Boyle recounts it at City Journal. Good stuff. Excerpt:
The 54 volumes were hawked door-to-door by frequently unscrupulous salesmen. The Federal Trade Commission twice sanctioned the project for deceptive sales practices (the salesmen's preferred trick was to pass themselves off as University of Chicago professors). Beam recounts critic Michael Dirda's memory of one such salesman arriving at his parents' door: “He offered the kind of snake-oil enticements common to all door-to-door fast talkers. I admired his patter and remembered it, a few years later, when I took a job selling Fuller Brush products.”
The sales pitch was strictly middlebrow mercantilism. “A problem?” asked an ad for the volumes. “Consult this evening with the greatest minds of the Western world, grasp their precious wisdom. Start reading immediately at the point of your own maximum interest.” Career stuck in a rut? “The ability to discuss and clarify basic ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.” Bored on a Friday night? The Great Books are a “prime source of self-improvement and an exhaustible fund of adult entertainment . . . the best entertainment is that which elevates as it entertains.”
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That's it for today. My son, Jack (12), was hospitalized with some sort of nasty infection/inflammation of the lining in his appendix/pelvis area. It turned my whole week on its head. The little guy seems to be mending, though, so the topsy-turviness is worth it.
