Book Patrol is pleased to welcome its newest contributor Stephen J. Gertz. Gertz is a historian and bibliographer of the rare literature of popular culture, writer, and antiquarian bookseller in Los Angeles. He began his career in the rare book trade as a book scout and private dealer in the mid-1980s, later joining William Dailey Rare Books as manager and head cataloguer. He is currently Executive Director of David Brass Rare Books. He has contributed to Sin-A-Rama: sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties (2005), Everything You Know Bout Sex Is Wrong (2005), L.A. Review, and the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. He writes a regular blog for Fine Books and Collections magazine, and his latest book is Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975 (2008).He is currently Vice-Chair of the Southern California Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.
A man lies in bed in dawn’s twilight. The mists of time evaporate, rise to the ceiling, fall back down as raindrops of memory, and the man swims the way-back stroke in a pool of remembrance:
A ten year old with a hot ten-spot in his pocket rides up the escalator of Marshall Fields department store in Chicago. Birthday loot on fire, he’s anxious to reach his destination, eager to see it materialize as he rises toward heaven but is concerned that if he isn’t careful the escalator with seize his feet at the top, pull him into its knashing machinery, shred his legs, realize his mother’s worst fears, and he’ll be hearing the maternal ostinato “I told you so, I told you so, I told you so…” for the rest of his pathetic, crippled life.
“It was the escalator; listen to your mother,” I’ll plead to strangers as I wheel down the sidewalk using my heavily mitted hands to propel myself forward on the furniture dolly that has become my legs. I have become a character in a 30s Cagney movie, the kid who had promise thwarted by bum luck now hawking newspapers by day, drinking by night.
I hop over the escalator’s terminal point and avert disaster. Safe. Valhalla, the Book Department, looms just ahead.
Three years before my Bar Mitzvah, larynx maturation, and the appearance pubic hair, I have an inchoate sense that the day is special. Though my mother is still laying out my clothes in the morning for school, today I am a man. Time to put away Even Steven, Curious George, Horton, Green Eggs N’ Ham, comic books; kid stuff. I’m going for the big time: A lot of lines on the page, small print, no pictures: A grown-up book.
I perused the shelves and display tables with diligence, like Alice Waters in the organic produce section, carefully turning over each tome, closely examining them, seeking just the right dish to sate my hunger. Forty-eight years later, I have no idea why I chose the book I did but I did. Having just put a period to that sentence, I now recall: It was the year after the movie Spartacus came out. Having failed to convince my classmates and teachers that, alone amongst those who survived Marcus Licinius Crassus’s crushing defeat of the army of gladiator-slaves and who now wished to save me from crucifixion by standing in my stead, “I’m Spartacus!” I internalized the entire ancient Roman world, fascinated by it.
Hannibal Enemy of Rome by Leonard Cottrell was published in 1961 by Holt, Reinhart and Winston to excellent reviews. Not that I’d read any of them. I saw the word Rome and the portrait of Hannibal on the dust jacket and that was all I needed to know. It turned out to be a primer for higher reading skills and between looking up words every five minutes and having to take a nap after every other twice-read dense paragraph, it took me a year to get through it.
Hannibal Barca of Zama, Carthage in North Africa, in one of the wonders of the ancient world, invaded Italy in 216 B.C., crossing the Alps, after a 1,000 mile march from Carthage-controlled Spain, at the head of an army of 90,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry and thirty-seven elephants. He obliterated 70,000 Roman infantry at the battle of Cannae. Checking all Roman attempts to oust him, Hannibal then hung out in Italy for sixteen years, enjoying la dolce vita in his BarcaLounger while Rome fretted and fumed. I’ll spare you the details of what happened next. Suffice it to say, Hannibal was annoyed out of Italy by Quintus Fabius Maximus, “The Patient,” who took his time, slowly sapping the Carthagenian army of its vigor; there were two more Punic Wars, with Hannibal’s brother, the other Barca, Hasdrubal, joining the fray; Carthage was defeated; Carthage rose up; and Carthage was finally destroyed, the Romans razing the city, though the tale that they sowed her soil with salt to prevent the city from ever rising again is a later invention.
You take a year to read a book, you tend to remember it.
Livy, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius, and the rest of the usual ancient Roman suspects, poets as well as historians, made it onto my reading list. I ate‘em up like Romans at an ancient feast – gorging myself, then visiting the vomitorium to make room for more. Every book was a thrill.
But I have had no greater charge than to have pass through my hands for research and cataloging the first published edition of Livy, Historia Romanae decades (Rome: Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, [1469]).
Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz introduced printing to Italy, and they produced Cicero’s De oratore in 1465 at a Benedictine abbey in Subiaco on the outskirts of Rome. The set of types they used is said to have been the first Roman type, and later, Ashendene Press printed books using an homage font, Subiaco. Sweynheym and Pannartz moved to Rome in 1467, and by 1475 they had printed 50 works using the new Roman type. Their output included works by St. Augustine and St. Jerome as well as many ancient Roman writers, including Cicero, Apuleius and Pliny.
But as thrilling as it was to hold that book, examine and study it, I couldn’t really enjoy it. It was in Latin, and while I, as many others in the antiquarian book trade, have taught myself a rough, awkward reading knowledge of Latin, it would have taken me five years to get through the book.
I’ve picked up a few Latin phrases over the years. I swear that if I’m ever presented with the prospect of reading Livy – or any other ancient Roman writer – in Latin, I will recite the phrase that Cato the Elder, like a bull terrier who won’t let go, used to end all his orations to the Senate, no matter what the subject, and that I use to end this column:
“Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”: Furthermore, it is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.
Yet, OMG, there may be a situation where I’ll actually have to read the book, despite invoking Cato’s curse, in the original Latin and lose five years of my life. In which case, I will make the declaration that all ten year old gladiator-wannabes who want to win their freedom from the arena make when confronted with the scourge of P.S. 2, Mrs. Stallone, and one of her deadly flash-card arithmetic tests that turned the classroom into a circus maximus for the poor sap who was chosen to undergo the ordeal alone, in front of the whole class:
“Morituri te salutamus”: We who are about to die, salute you.
“A” in history. “D” in math. An hour in detention.
____
And what was your first grown-up book?