Chapter 126 Introducing Antiquarian Books to the Newcomer, Part 1

When I communicate with veteran booksellers about the future of antiquarian books, they frequently lament the fact that they don’t know where the next generation of collectors will come from. Most young people, it seems, are not book collectors. When I was teaching high school English, I often heard a related lament from the veteran teachers: These kids today don’t read.

Well, of course they don’t. There are 500 television channels (about 488 more than existed during my own childhood) with endless options, including 24 hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week cartoons, movies, and music. There are video games, which are so well-animated these days that they have the intensity and production values of a feature film. There are multiplex movie theaters, allowing one to choose from as many as 15 different cinematic experiences. There are the internet and email. Kids aren’t the only ones who can spend hours wrapped in these technological pursuits. In my own pursuit of buying, selling, and blogging antiquarian books, I myself have been — ahem — known to spend excessive time in front of a computer screen. When I hear that someone under the age of 35 likes books and chooses reading over these other activities, I am thrilled, even if this type of person seems to be in the minority.

When I started teaching high school English, I took over the classes of another teacher mid-year. The curriculum was already set. On the agenda for the students in Advanced Placement English were William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mario Vargas Llosa, Toni Morrison, Naguib Mahfouz, and Chinua Achebe — a challenging group of authors for most adults, let alone teenagers, even those qualified to be in Advanced Placement. I worried whether students would actually read the books or go straight to the Cliff’s Notes to pass their exams and write their essays. My experience teaching these books for six years was that those who already liked reading — and there were some who did — read the books. I could tell from the quality of questions asked, class discussion and written work that this was so. There were also those who just read the Cliff’s Notes to get by, much the same as I did the bare minimum in Algebra II/Trigonometry as a student. I just wanted to pass the class and get out so I could work on reading and writing, the subjects I really loved.

There were students whose strengths were in reading and writing. They tended to gravitate towards the most challenging English classes, to write for the school paper, and edit the school literary magazine. Now, mind you, I was glad to have these students, but it was also my job — actually, it was especially also my job — to teach the reluctant learners — the ones who just wanted to pass the class and move on — that there was something to be appreciated in good books and in articulating one’s thoughts clearly and concisely. This concept may seem obvious to us bookish folk, but I promise you that when you are trying to convince a roomful of 37 seventeen-year-olds of the merits of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and its relevance to their daily lives, it is a tall order indeed.

So, how did I try to engage the reluctant learners? I did a number of things that would be regarded as unorthodox, but which I found to be effective. In addition to their traditional academic essays and tests, when they read Dante, my students designed their own high-school hells, complete with nine circles of hell created just for certain types of teachers, students, friends, administrators and classes. (Really, is there any more hellish time in life than high school? What a perfect chance to think about punishment fitting crime.)

When we read Dostoevsky, we spent a lot of time talking about Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman (ubermensch), who considers himself so valuable to society that he is above the law. Next, we read Crime and Punishment and discussed how Raskolnikov fits that concept when he commits murder, but, with his emotional breakdown after the murder, discovers that he is not indeed the Superman he had supposed himself to be. Finally, we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the film where two young men who think of themselves as perfect Nietzsche Superman candidates murder another young man just to see if they can get away with it and if they are indeed Supermen. When we compared the film to Dostoevsky, I tried to point out how the themes of the enduring classic books are transcendent — readers can recognize and relate to these themes down through the ages.

These supplementary activities (always done in tandem with more academic written assignments and tests) were the type of thing that helped some of my reluctant students to engage with the text. Did they work all of the time? No, but I do think they helped. Indeed, my Dante collection started as a modest collection of illustrated editions of The Divine Comedy to show students how the work had been interpreted differently by artists through the centuries.

I’m having a tough time articulating what I want to say in this post. (Ironic, for the English teacher to be without words, isn’t it?) I’ve covered why kids don’t read and how I got some to think about literature and how it relates to their teenage lives, which tend to revolve around relationships, film, art, and music. What I haven’t said is how this concept relates to introducing antiquarian books to the newcomer or even to someone who doesn’t yet know antiquarian books exist. I’ll cover that tomorrow, and I hope you’ll be able to see the connection then. My apologies for being so discursive today. Thanks for reading this far!

To be continued tomorrow.