By Stuart Mitchner

By the time the Friends of the Princeton Public Library Book Sale begins a week from Friday, the second presidential debate will be history. Most post-debate book-sale browsers looking for something to focus their frazzled minds on will find what they’re looking for, if not their heart’s desire. The book of my dreams won’t be there because it hasn’t been published yet and for all I know may never be put between covers, even though J.D. Salinger devoted the last 50 years of his life to writing it.

Pearl Diving

Among the 2016 sale’s stellar offerings is Léonard Rosenthal’s The Kingdom of the Pearl with Persian-miniature-immaculate plates by Edmund Dulac that have to be seen to be believed. Its only defect is a gouge on one edge of the front cover where a bibliophile in a frenzy of desire appears to have taken a bite out of it. Except for that minor, perfectly hygienic blemish, the volume is in a condition comparable to that of copies going for $750 online.

For this semi-retired browser, Dulac’s Pearl evokes the Golden Age of the Book Quest in Princeton when rare finds would turn up at garage and estate sales or on the shelves of Micawber Books or in the bank vault that housed Witherspoon Books and Art. It was around this time of year circa 1981 that I found an unflawed Pearl in the Dickensian clutter of a secondhand/antique store in East Millstone. As often happens, the treasure had arrived with a large assortment of bric-a-brac and ephemera purchased by the owner, who knew next to nothing about book values. If there had been an internet in the early 1980s with access to sites like abe.com and add.all, the he’d have had no need to hire me to research various price guides about the other volumes in the lot, a rehearsal for what I’d be doing a decade later for the Friends of the Library.

the inimitable e.e

Another of this years’s gems is a signed limited edition of e.e. cumming’s “persianly poemprinter predicated picturebook” CIOPW (for charcoal, ink, oil, pencil and watercolor), which features a cummingesque introduction that includes his take on the familiar storybook line (“for once-upon-a-time read, neither life nor living, but originally infinitive cooling through participle into compulsion; therefore, once-upon-a-now equals ‘art’”). Bound in brown-burlap boards, with a watercolor title page signed by the artist/author, the images display widely varied styles from self-portraits and line-drawings to a densely figured depiction of a prize fight.

Thoughts of cummings bring back the moment during a San Francisco party in September 1962 when we heard that he’d died and a charismatic girl recited a poem she knew by heart, the one that begins “somewhere I have never traveled” and ends “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”

Edward Albee (1928-2016)

It goes without saying (I know, then why say it?) that Friends sales over the years have included books by Edward Albee, who died at 88 last month. This year’s stock will also most likely have a few, if not the signed copies that occasionally turn up among the donations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in October 1962, a month after cummings’s death. People tend to forget the seismic impact Virginia Woolf had on the culture of the sixties before the Beatles, Vietnam, drugs and assassinations shook things up. The 4-LP original cast recording seemed to be playing everywhere in 1963, the soundtrack of the time a battle of the sexes with George and Martha drinking and swearing, reciting poetry, quoting Bette Davis, and generally making magnificently nasty music together.

Inspirational Librarians

As I read Jane Eyre ahead of a visit to Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will at the Morgan Library and Museum, I find myself imagining Jane as the ideal librarian, someone like Dudley Carlson. Parents whose children came of age in the Princeton Public Library during the eighties and nineties will know what I’m talking about. My son was fortunate enough to have two inspirational librarians; in addition to Dudley Carlson, who made him feel at home with books, there was Terri Nelson, who understood and encouraged his sixties lifestyle.

My own favorite librarian lives in the imagination of J.D. Salinger. Known only as Miss Overman, she works at the public-library branch in Manhattan regularly used by Seymour Glass and his Wise Child siblings, notably Buddy, Franny, and Zooey. In Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Salinger has Seymour thinking of Miss Overman whenever he finishes a poem like “John Keats/ John Keats/ John/ Please put your scarf on,” written when he was eight. Seymour felt he owed the librarian “a painstaking, sustained search for a form of poetry that was in accord with his own peculiar standards and yet not wholly incompatible, even at first sight, with Miss Overman’s tastes,” which favored Browning and Wordsworth. Alerted by his younger brother Buddy to Miss Overman’s shortcomings as a judge, or even a reader, of poetry, Seymour reminds Buddy “that on his first day in the public library (alone, aged six) Miss Overman, wanting or not as a judge of poetry, had opened a book to a plate of Leonardo’s catapult and placed it brightly before him.” There the matter ends: “You can’t argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet’s function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.”

Waiting for Salinger

Miss Overman’s greatest challenge is the list of “reading material” six-year-old Seymour puts together for her in the epic letter from summer camp he sends his parents, as recorded in Salinger’s novella, Hapworth 16, 1924. Seymour’s list, which has been mocked as “improbable” by various benighted readers of a work that is still confined to the June 19, 1965 New Yorker, indeed seems to know no bounds. It has room for “any bigoted or unbigoted books on God”; two “heart-rending, handy, quite handy volumes” by Vivekananda; the complete works of Tolstoy; Don Quixote; Charles Dickens (“either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form”); George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray (“though not in entirety”); Jane Austen in entirety (except for Pride and Prejudice, a copy of which Seymour took with him to camp); Marcel Proust and Sherlock Holmes “in entirety”; “any book on the World War in its shameful explosive entirety,” any books by “men or women of genius, talent, of thrilling modest scholarship,” and any “marvelous, very good, merely interesting, or regrettably mediocre poems that are not already too familiar and haunting to us.” By no means is that the list “in entirety,” and it’s up to Miss Overman to get the lot to Camp Hapworth.

For all the fun Salinger has composing the list and Seymour’s running commentary, it’s an enterprise he takes seriously. It may be that there’s a vicarious librarian in the author of The Catcher in the Rye, a Miss Overman crying to get out. My abiding question is, once again, when are Salinger’s heirs going to release Seymour’s letter from the ad-choked pages (32-113) of a 51-year-old magazine to take its rightful place in book form among the Glass stories he devoted more than half his life to? So it goes: the book of my dreams is still in limbo in spite of reports that the new material would be published sometime between 2015 and 2020.

Charles Rojer (1934-2016)

I wish I’d been able to have at least one conversation over coffee with Charles Rojer, the Friends Book Sale volunteer to whose memory this year’s event is dedicated. The few words and smiles we exchanged were always related to the task at hand. As happens every time I read the local obituary pages, I find someone with an extraordinary history. Born in Brussels in 1934, Charles was six when the German army invaded Belgium, forcing the family to flee to France, only to be stopped by German troops who seized the train. Sent back to Brussels, they found conditions deteriorating rapidly, food scarce, and laws passed that restricted the father’s leather goods business and mandated the wearing of the yellow Star of David. With the threat of capture looming, Charles’s parents found him a hiding place with the help of the Belgian Resistance. Although his parents were captured and deported to Auschwitz, where they died, the Resistance helped hide Charles and his two sisters over the next four years in a variety of safe houses. After being liberated by the American army in December 1944, he was reunited with his sisters, and with the help of an uncle immigrated to the U.S. in 1948, where he attended high school in Philadelphia, graduated from Temple University, and earned a doctorate from Hahnemann Medical College. Having been on the medical staffs of two Philadelphia hospitals, he served on the Board of Health in Princeton and eventually became its chairman. He called his family, his children and grandchildren his “personal victory over Hitler.”

It’s fitting that the sale dedicated to Charles Rojer features 14 volumes of The Bibliophile Library fine edition of Elie Wiesel’s works, including a signed copy of The Jews of Silence. The Jane Eyre I’m reading, by the way, is from the edition of works by the Brontë sisters illustrated by Edmund Dulac in a more realistic mode than the lavish style of The Kingdom of the Pearl. For the record, I found the Brontës at the Wise Owl, a dream bookshop in Bristol. Each copy bears the book plate of The Catholic Library, Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge.

The Friends of the Library sale will begin with a preview Friday, October 14 and end with a half-price day and bag sale on Sunday, October 16. (Images shown here are not of the actual volumes for sale next week.)

For more information, visit princetonlibrary.org/booksale.