Benjamin L. Clark

20 June 202220 June 2022

Bookshop Memories — York College Bookstore, York, Nebraska

York College Bookstore — York, NE

York College, a little, private liberal arts college where I did my undergrad degree in history was right for me at the time. The tree-lined campus on red brick streets is idyllic, even romantic. My parents met there. Three generations of my family have attended and worked for the college, including a one-time president, who was a first cousin of my grandfather’s. I love the place. However, the less said about the bookshop, though, the better. It’s a cartoon of a college bookshop and not a funny or flattering one. But, it does come with a ghost story.

I can vaguely recall the college’s bookshop in my pre-school days when my parents came back for alumni events. We only lived an hour or so away, and my paternal grandparents lived in a nearby town that was even smaller than York. For decades the bookshop was in the basement of the oldest building still standing on campus. It had that old basement smell mingling with the smell of new books and creaky wire spinner racks of postcards and bumper stickers. The building it was in was wonderful. Hulitt Hall was built in 1903 and when I was there as a student myself, it still had the original wood trim featuring the college’s first mascot: the pansy. As a history major, most of my classes were in that building’s single classroom.

At the basement level, at that time, was the mailroom for the campus, which included all the student P.O. boxes, and the bookshop. But, there was a new, large building on campus under construction at that time, and the college bookstore was slated to be housed in the new building. My roommate and I had work-study jobs in the maintenance and grounds department of the college, so it fell to us to dismantle the bookshop’s fixtures, shelving, and furnishings and move them into storage. New fixtures, shelving, and furnishings were planned for the new bookshop. There were no plans to use the old junk, but a thrifty ethos of “waste not, want not” hovered over every task. We did a lot of schlepping crap into storage.

This particular job had no precise schedule. We had a key to the building, so we decided it would be good to go over after dinner one evening and do the job. There would be no classes, and probably fewer professors to disturb, who had offices on the upper floors. Almost all the professors of the various humanities had their offices in the building beginning two floors above us. After gorging on cafeteria food the way only college freshmen can, we went over to Hulitt to see the job ahead of us. The place was deserted. The basement level had two ground-level entrances. One walk-out basement door, and another up a staircase that was then approaching 100-years worth of herds of students stomping up and down to the one and only mailroom on campus for decades. The threadbare carpeted wooden stairs were the creakiest stairs I’ve ever heard in my life.

I checked upstairs on the office floors to see if anyone was around and let them know we were in the building. I had some regulars and favorites already, but no one was around. My roommate and I recited to each other the fact the creepy old building had been built as the music conservatory with tiny practice rooms on the third floor and that a female student one winter’s night in the 1950s left via the fire escape from one of those rooms and slipped on some ice and fell to her untimely death.

We went back into the former bookshop, now empty of books, t-shirts, and a few tchotchkes for alumni. I saw the buzzer on the door to alert a bookshop worker who may be alone in the back that they had a customer. No need for that thing anymore, so I yanked the wire out of it, disconnecting it from the electricity in the building. We didn’t need the annoyance as we went in and out.

We started to work, dismantling metal shelving units. There were posts and shelves. All of it made a clatter as we tossed them into banging-clanging piles of like things and sizes, to make loading and organizing easy on ourselves. We found a radio in a back room and turned it on to keep us company as we banged around.

We’d been working for a couple of hours and the music on the radio shifted formats as the sun went down. By the time it was dark, we had to just shut it off. We worked with only our din and conversation for the company.

Then, the radio, still in the back room and both of us together in the main area, snapped back on at full blast to blaring static. We were dumbfounded and both went and looked in the back room where the radio had been the whole time. The sound shifted horribly and was warbling and was frankly eerie. My roommate snapped it off. Just as he did so, the buzzer on the front door, that I had disconnected, started buzzing. Not a normal in-and-out, door open and close buzz, but a fast-paced staccato.

We ran out, and no one was there. No one was in the hall, no one was on the stairs. No one was there, yet someone seemed upset, perhaps using a ruckus to bother us the way we’d been making a racket that night.

My roommate and I maintain that we don’t believe in ghosts, but something we were never able to explain happened that night.

We went back and finished the job in the broad light of day. In four years there, we never had anyone tell us they pulled a prank on us. In fact, we told very few people of that night until much later.

We helped install things over at the new bookshop in the new building. It was soulless from the start and has since been kicked out to another building with less prestige, a thing no one knows what to do with, and no ingenuity to make it into something great. At least it’s probably not haunted.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

1 June 20222 June 2022

Bookshop Memories — The Bookshops of Omaha, Nebraska

Bookshops of Omaha — Omaha, NE

Clerk Magda Andreassen is in Kildahl Olsen’s Bok og Papirhandel in Vadsø, Norway. The store’s shelves are filled with books, magazines, and other stationery. The calendar on the wall is the date Friday, September 15, 1922.

In 2000, I got a summer job in Belleview, just south of Omaha, Nebraska. “The big city” for Nebraska kids. With around a half-million residents in the metro area, it surprises people. “It’s like a real city,” my New York City-raised father-in-law said on a visit once many years later. You have to imagine it in his NYC-Italian-Bronx accent, expressing genuine surprise.

Back in 2000, it was my second summer vacation of college. I’d made the mistake of just going home the summer after my freshman year. It was dumb, but maybe I’d been more homesick than I could admit after that first year away. I had no idea what to do with myself besides going home and working again at my old job and hanging out with the few friends still hanging around.

If you’re reading this and you’re young and privileged enough to go away for school … stay away. Go somewhere else, anywhere, and do anything. ANYTHING. Except for work on a commercial fishing boat. I had friends that did that and still don’t talk about what happened that summer twenty years later. A good friend that went to northern Alaska that summer to work in an oil field had a better time. He also went to make “a ton of money,” but it turns out a bag of Doritos cost $20 or something and had to be ordered a week in advance. He came back about as broke as when he went but exhausted from the work and eager for the easy life of a student.

I learned my lesson, and about as far as I could get from Lincoln was Omaha — i.e., not far, but it was something. But living with family friends who fed me frequently, my expenses were virtually nil, which was good because my income was also almost nil. I made enough money for gas, liability insurance on my truck, and a little food. And, of course, old books.

Omaha still had several large used bookshops east of 72nd Street, including a cluster in Old Market. Twenty years later, I don’t remember the names and locations. They were all gone by the time I lived there again around 2015—all gone but one, Jackson Street Booksellers.

Jackson Street was and is an incredible shop. An excellent selection of books then and now. If you’re looking for a used copy of last year’s bestseller, they probably have it. If you’re looking for a first-person account about cooking donuts for troops during the Crimean War, they may have it. When we moved to California, I unloaded several hundred books on Jackson Street. They gave me great prices and were always available to look at another car trunk load of books. They’re also conveniently located in Old Market, where you can grab an ice cream cone or a beer (or both!) nearby if you require refreshment after browsing at Jackson Street.

One of the old bookshops, Pageturners, lives on in name only. The location in Dundee was bought and turned into a bar and now bears the name Pageturners Lounge. A nice bookish mural spans the back of the building, but other than that, it’s not much of a literary hangout. Going there for a beer on a quiet afternoon, a baseball game played on the TV. There wasn’t much else to look at in the big mirror above the bar. Even sitting there, I couldn’t recall much about the bookshop that had been there, though I’m sure I had been there many years earlier.

There was space for readings at the renovated bar and such, but I’d never attended any, though we tried. We were in the last months of pregnancy or had a newborn in our time there, so stopping in for a drink once was about all I could squeeze in. Omaha has a literary scene, though it is very small, and hard to get into if you’re not at one of the Universities. But Omaha does attract the occasional big name author for signings and such, so there’s often something good to look forward to if you’re a booklover.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

20 May 202220 May 2022

Bookshop Memories — Yellowed Pages, Lincoln, Nebraska

Yellowed Pages — Lincoln, NE

‘Mug, Book, Smoking Materials and Crackers’ by John Frederick Peto, Dayton Art Institute (public domain)

When my family first moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1986, we lived at the edge of a section of town known as University Place. UniPlace is a small district nestled between Nebraska Wesleyan University and the East campus of the University of Nebraska. Besides the mixed residential neighborhoods of droopy old houses converted into apartment buildings, there’s an old commercial district a few blocks long with two and three-story brick buildings from the turn of the 20th Century. To my young eyes, the architecture was old and interesting. However, there were not many places on that commercial strip on 48th Street a young family would go. There was an old-time barbershop on a corner where my Mom or Dad would take me for a fresh buzz cut every couple of months, but other than that, it was bars and pawn shops. Except for Yellowed Pages.

Yellowed Pages felt yellowed and crumbly inside. The owner smoked, so everything in the store smelled of tobacco smoke. And that was long before the building next door, an HVAC and plumbing supply shop, burned to the ground around 2002. As a young man, I lived in the neighborhood again, just a couple of blocks away from the bookshop, and my apartment had soot coming out of the ductwork. The bookshop closed later, around 2014.

I went back to the old bookshop in those last months it was open. It had changed a lot from my childhood memories of the late-1980s. It wasn’t smoky; the books were nice. But, the neighborhood had changed too. The city tore down something on the mini-downtown stretch, and a police station was put in. A more prominent police presence didn’t keep people from rifling through my car a few times. Someone stole my girlfriend’s stereo and some other stuff from her car. They took the radio out of my truck, plugged it back in, and left it on the floor, wires strung out of the dash. I know they unplugged it and plugged it back in since all the radio pre-sets had been wiped. Maybe they realized it was junk no one would buy, or maybe they felt bad for me. But, the wig shop was gone, the bars were gone, pawnshops were relocated or cleaned up, and the old barbershop was long gone. Boutiques were in, and the used bookshop had to go—a sign of the times in a gentrifying neighborhood. I moved away too.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

6 May 20226 May 2022

Bookshop Memories: A Novel Idea – Lincoln, Nebraska

A Novel Idea – Lincoln, NE

A Novel Idea opened in the early 1990s downtown, closer to the University of Nebraska’s campus than most of the other used bookstores in town. Downtown Lincoln was changing. It was becoming a destination for people who had moved to the suburbs a generation earlier. It was gentrifying. However, this area closest to the university has long been filled with various commercial enterprises. Bars thrived, of course, but now other smaller shops were opening. Even little shops you could generously describe as boutiques. A Novel Idea seems to have been established when increased pedestrian traffic began to grow, and not just on Nebraska football game days.

The shop featured at least one cat that I recall, except that it existed. I don’t remember the cat’s name. The workers were friendly, and I don’t know if I ever met the owners, but maybe those friendly smiles were from them. I didn’t go there often. It seemed more like a “standard used bookstore,” if that makes sense. Where you could find a book that is still in print, just cheaper than the original cover price. A good place to find a classic, not so much the strange and unexpected, for the book you could not conceive of existing. It was a good place to check if you had a specific book you were looking for. They did not seem to specialize in anything in particular. They did not keep a large stock of old books.

The clientele also skewed younger than the other downtown shops, probably due to its proximity to the University of Nebraska’s main campus. So, it was a better place to find pretty, smart hippy girls who wore tank tops without bras and sometimes didn’t shave their armpits. If you were looking for such people in the ‘90s.

One of the other things I recall was that the older books were kept in the very low-ceilinged basement, and I can remember bumping my head pretty hard down there once. I may have even done it more than once. Also, the basement’s cement floor must be one of the waviest ever poured. I had worked on some paving crews around then and never could quite figure out what would make it like that.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

18 April 202218 April 2022

Bookshop Memories: Bluestem Books, Lincoln, Nebraska

Bluestem Books – Lincoln, NE

Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1980s and ’90s, there was a bookshop in the scuzzier part of downtown in an old brick building, under a towering overpass that took you out to the interstate on the east side of town. It was a tiny corner of our modest town that felt like a much bigger city. There were pigeons.

Bluestem Books was an institution by then. There were always cats around, and no one cared if you stayed and browsed or just sat and read for hours on end. Even as a teen doing his best grunge impression day in and out browsing the history, essays, and mystery sections. There was an old green chair in a little nook that was a coveted spot. People would circulate through the store, accidentally sneaking up on one another because there were virtually no open lines of sight because of the tight, full shelves.

The building was also ancient, for Lincoln. The wavy glass in the drafty windows and crumbly brick gave the building a charming derelict feel it may have deserved. Doorways had been knocked through brick walls, giving the shop a rambling layout. The wood floors creaked dreadfully, though muffled under threadbare, faded rugs. Old cast iron pipes passed through here and there, their purposes unclear. Strange metal fittings studded the concrete vault ceilings in places. I wondered if portions of the bookshop had once served as a meat locker or some other weigh-station for once-living things headed out on the nearby rail lines.

It was always warm in there. It probably had more to do with an old boiler heating system, but that was my recollection of it. Going there on an intensely cold day, howling winds that wanted to slam the door on you as you wrenched it open. The door may have been kept attached to the building with a long, old storm door spring to help it eventually snap shut. The spring sang a stretched-out springy twang and thwack back into the door as it closed. There was a faded, soiled note taped to the door with instructions on how to use the door. “Hold on tight on windy days,” or “Don’t let the door slam,” or something like that.

Near that old green chair were a couple of short shelves dedicated to series like Everyman’s Library and The Modern Library — small vintage uniform editions of classics and some contemporary fiction, “contemporary” meaning 1920-1965 or so, arguably the heyday of such series. It was there that I saw the Modern Library series as a series — the recognizable books were a great size and affordable, and they looked cool on the shelf. Looking cool on the shelf is a virtue we don’t admit often enough as book lovers.

I don’t remember if I bought any Modern Library books there that early … I may have. I never had a lot of money, but I sometimes had a job after school, so I had a little spending money in my teens. I don’t remember buying much there in my teenage years, really. But it felt good to be somewhere where I could buy books.

After leaving Lincoln for college, I would try to come back whenever I was back in town. I’d bring friends sometimes but usually come alone. It was the kind of bookshop that in some ways was better to go alone.

Reading one of the John Dunning biblio-mystery novels featuring his rare bookseller/ detective, Cliff Janeway, which takes place mostly around Denver, I sat upright one night where toward the end they mention Bluestem Books in Lincoln by name. My book world had been so insular, so much part of my niner life that it was strange to think this author had been there too and wrote about it, and it came into my hands. I took my battered paperback down to Scott at Bluestem and had him autograph it. He laughed and told me he’d had a few others, but not in a long time.

Around 2000, they added a bookshop dog, who was a delightful addition, and quite a departure from the cats they had. A floofy friendly thing a little less broad than an ottoman and about as tall named Don Diego. I’m not a cat person, but I remember one cat named Thurber who had been awarded employee of the month for several months (and years) running. But then Diego was different. He was eventually awarded the title of Director of Customer Relations, a role to which he was perfectly suited. He was a Havanese, a breed of dog I had to look up later after I’d asked the owners about him. “He’s hypoallergenic!” they claimed. Don Diego’s grand-niece Maribel is now filling in since his retirement.

Bluestem Books magnet featuring Havanese dog, Don Diego — Don Diego de la Bluestem. And the old address under the overpass.

Even by the mid-1990s, things were changing in downtown Lincoln’s western district, soon to be ubiquitously known as “The Haymarket.” The thrift stores and vacant storefronts that were home to the homeless and pigeons were beginning to change. Fresh brown paper went over the windows, and work trucks began to fill the alleyways. Eventually, it became Lincoln’s hotspot, to the betterment of local tax revenues, no doubt, but losing its seedy charm.

Bluestem had to move too, eventually but managed to find a larger location not too far away, but it’ll always be the old building in the shade of an overpass I used to think was a meat-locker by the railroad tracks on the bad side of downtown that I’ll hold in my heart.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

15 April 202222 April 2022

Bookshop Memories: Barnes & Noble – Lincoln, Nebraska

Barnes & Noble – Lincoln, NE

When Barnes and Noble arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the spring of 1994, they staked out a huge chunk of prime real estate right on “O” Street. It cleared a fiefdom from the car dealership that ran nearly uninterrupted for eight blocks on both sides of Lincoln’s main street. This giant new store was a big deal. Not only did they bring easy access to a cosmopolitan newsstand, but of course, that hallmark and highmark of modern western culture: Starbucks coffee. Finally, we could buy fancy, expensive coffee drinks and not have to go all the way downtown for the pleasure. And it was from a brand we had heard of on television.

My Dad, who owns a small business, had rented a pleasant office nearby several years earlier on a bank building’s fourth floor. He was thrilled. Who knows how many hours he killed there during the week looking through car magazines, bringing home the occasional Hemmings Motor News or the aspirational DuPont Registry for us to get a glimpse into how wealthy people live. “This house has its own waterpark!” One night he came home with an espresso machine. It wasn’t one sold by Starbucks, I’m sure. However, we cannot doubt the inspiration for buying the contraption. This strange, exotic machine stayed in its box in the pantry for some time, though I don’t know why. Perhaps we were intimidated by it.

One day I was home playing hooky, sometime in the seventh grade, and I dug the machine out and plugged it in for the first time. By then, I was regularly drinking sweet milky coffee concoctions. It was time to learn about the real thing. I read the manual, opened the little packet of pre-ground, measured coffee pods, and let it rip. Soon, I was dissolving Werther’s Original candies to mix in. Italian branded flavored syrups had already appeared in our home to make Italian sodas, so the idea to sweeten it up wasn’t a new one. I had one waiting for Dad when he came home. I was lucky my head didn’t explode with what was probably a near-lethal amount of caffeine in my young body.

When Barnes & Noble came to town, going to the bookshop became less remarkable. In those years, the store was clean, cool, and bright—a respite in a hectic day, not a dive into some subject, writer, or experience. We were just going to grab a coffee, maybe browse a little and go.

Festooned with holiday decorations and a table of ladies ready to wrap gifts, I quickly made it my preferred place to buy gifts during the holidays. The big wood double doors, with the little panes of glass, swung easy and offered a warm welcome in the winter. The ladies were from some good society doing good works. Their wrapping paper was thick and subdued, and it was only a donation to have them quickly wrap up all these rectangles. I’ve never been great at wrapping gifts, so it was an easy choice.

It was the ’90s, I was in high school, and I didn’t have much money to spend. So, another thing I loved at Barnes & Noble was that they carried Dover Thrift Editions. If you’re not familiar with this series of books, they are the absolute most cheaply produced paperback books of all time. And with our annual 14-hour drive each way to Michigan for Christmas at my Grandparents’ ahead of me and a weeklong stay with virtually no television and early bedtimes — it was a reading paradise. Yes, I could read our assigned books for school, but I already wanted to read other stuff. And the Dover Thrift copies of Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and The Hound of the Baskervilles fit easily in my bookbag and only cost a dollar or maybe two each, at the most. B&N would even put them on sale for half-price, so $10 would buy a lot. It was almost as good as the used book sale in the mall’s basement each summer, but these books were *new*.

The wallpaper graphic covers today give me a warm, Christmassy feeling, awakening memories of laying in the rollaway bed in my grandparents’ basement in northwestern Michigan, the little basement well-windows filled with snow diffusing morning daylight bright enough to read by. Grandma cooking a full breakfast upstairs and a few murmured Good Mornings meant the coffee pot was already on its second run.

I didn’t own a lot of new books. Most of the books on my shelves were claimed from my parents’ shelves or bought at the used book sales put on by the retired teachers association. They had books as cheap as 10 cents back then. I could come away with a grocery stack about to split for a few dollars, stuffed with wonderful old Modern Library editions, the solid colored Penguin paperbacks, and anything else that struck my fancy. Writing that memory, in particular, makes me feel like when my grandfather would reminisce about going to the movies, buying a candy bar, taking the streetcar home, and leftover change still clanking in his pocket from the quarter his mother gave him for his outing.

It feels strange to feel nostalgia for Barnes & Noble in the 1990s. Having the behemoth come to town felt like a declaration of war against the small independent shops. However, many of them were just fine in the end. The bookshops at the mall took the brunt of the blow — places like Walden Books and B. Dalton. At least that’s how it looked to a teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

11 April 202217 April 2024

Keith Haring’s trap

“It’s easy to fall into a trap of making things that are in the manner of previous “successful” endeavors — is it a trap?” — Keith Haring, Journals Nov. 1979, page 85.

Cover of Keith Harring's Journals — Cover of Keith Harring’s Journals

Could this be a thing? It’s certainly a thing, but is it on the level of Murphy’s Law? Around May 1st last year, I found a copy of Keith Haring’s Journals visiting a favorite local thrift store (for books). Of course, I had to take it home. I always love a good collection of journals or letters. In my copy, a large paperback by Penguin, there was supposed to be an introduction by Shephard Fairy, but it had been torn out of this copy for some reason. I didn’t notice when I found it. The previous owner otherwise kept it in good shape and tore it out pretty cleanly, so it’s not noticeable, and something tells me I’m not missing much. They also seem to have used white-out across the statement about Fairy’s intro.

So, what about this trap of success? I imagine it should have a name. The [something] Paradox. If there’s not yet a name for this, there should be. The curse of success? Many creators struggle with this and others seem to just roll along, evolving by creating and trying, but every creator is lured back, or at least tempted by what was successful in the past. Especially if that’s how you eat and shelter.

It’s not *my* problem — I don’t have the level of success solely by my own creation and work, but it’s an interesting question. But, as someone who does make things, I want the things I make to be fresh. For my own sake, I want to keep my work fresh, mostly, but also to have a sense of progress, of making and not simply re-making. So, now I must ask myself at various points in a project, “Am I falling into the Haring Trap?”

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

30 December 20213 January 2022

What is a Squib? A little newspaper history

Squib — That’s the word I spent a couple of days trying to find. So, what is a newspaper squib?

The word has a few meanings, and according to Webster’s I’m interested in the least meaningful meaning: “a short humorous or satiric writing or speech, a short news item; esp; FILLER.”

This week, while researching something else, I came upon a sort-of cartoon, but didn’t run as a cartoon as such, but was just … filler. What’s wonderful about being able to browse millions of pages of archival newspapers is the access, but there’s a downside — interpretation. I was curious if any scholarship or just collected thought had been put together around these smallest of memes (in the dictionary sense), but wasn’t sure what to call them to find anything. Often unsigned, there were many that seem to have been distributed by syndicates, and no doubt, some newspaper staff were capable of coming up with their own, as well.

A few examples:

MILITANT MARY — Arguably a single-panel comic, and not a squib, but the line of definition between them is hazy at best.

DAILY BIRTHDAY PARTY — “George Horton, the noted American diplomat, who has represented the interests of this country in Greece and Turkey for many years, and who is the author of a great number of very good books …”

“Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote his famous “Rasselas” in the evenings of a single week, to meet the expenses of his mother’s funeral.”

6 April 20216 April 2021

Michael Kupperman’s All the Answers and Child Performers in Monster Trucks

Small monster truck, Skull Krusher Mini, in static display, shown atop a crushed silver BMW sedan.

This weekend I read All the Answers by Michael Kupperman. It’s a fascinating graphic novel about Michael grappling with his father’s previous fame and pain. His father, Joel Kupperman, was a child celebrity in the 1940s and ’50s and the fallout thereafter, into Micheal’s life was not only painful but confusing. It’s wonderfully drawn, capturing the feel of the 1940s and the feeling of memory, of reconstructing from scant information. Parts of it look half-remembered, or places where a newspaper clipping stands though there is no personal memory. As a historian reading this, I recognized these sensations in the art.

Cover of the book All the Answers by Michael Kupperman. — All the Answers by Michael Kupperman

Micheal Kupperman‘s drawing is excellent (this has really never been a question). His own appearance throughout, of himself, is of a haunted man — at least to me. And that’s what this story is really about. The ghosts we live with, the ghosts that surround us, the ghosts of our own making. Ghosts that become ancient in our lives as generational pain passes on, reconfiguring itself into whatever form it needs to survive into the next generation.

Drawn in stark black-and-white, this story is quite gray. Gradations of memory, impression, and hunch. Kupperman has extracted the history as best he could, given his father’s refusal to talk about his experiences as a child star of the show Quiz Kids. And later, his father’s detachment from his past as he slipped into dementia.

The images Kupperman has drawn representing the promotional photographs of his father as a boy on Quiz Kids stand out in my mind. Laid into the context of his father’s experience and how it affected him and how that experience hurt him, and how his father passed down that pain generationally was fascinating and heartbreaking.

A really great conversation with Michael Kupperman and Noah Van Skiver is here for Kupperman’s reflections and observations by Van Skiver, who is someone in the know to ask good questions. I was cruising through Van Skiver’s channel (also recommended) and stumbled on Kupperman’s and immediately borrowed the book from my library.

Of course, the book was fresh in my mind when I went to see some monster trucks this weekend. Not that I expected them to connect, but a reader’s life is funny that way.

The Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa hosts monster truck events with some regularity. We had not yet been able to attend one, but with a free calendar for the Easter weekend, why not? Instead of the big stadium-style performance, it was a more subdued “drive-thru adventure.” We weren’t sure what that could mean, but the weather was nice and thought it may be a fun enough outing to give it a try. I’m glad we did. Our five-year-old loved it.

We drove through an out-and-back loop at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. Classic rock and revved recordings of monster truck rallies of yore throbbed through huge speakers along the road, drowning out the short audio clips prepared by the organizers to play from their event website through my phone over my car stereo.

We were awed by the monster truck made from an old firetruck, ate churros, and sipped strawberry lemonade with all the windows down and the sunroof open.

Then when we saw these cute, small monster trucks. They had information about each of them printed on banners hung by each truck. It took a moment to realize what I was reading fully. According to the banners, the drivers are children. The idea of child performers came crashing back down on me. I don’t know that these kids who drive monster trucks are child celebrities. Admittedly, I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of the subculture of monster trucking. Maybe these kids know they’re super lucky to get to do that work, to have that experience. And maybe it’s niched down enough not to draw the attention that becomes such a burden on young performers. At least, that’s what I’ll assume.

But if there’s a Joel Kupperman of the mini monster trucks, I hope they get some hugs and space to be a kid. More than a kid who gets to destroy stuff with a custom-built monster truck. I wish young Joel could have had a turn in one. Maybe we all should.

banner that reads Skull Krusher Mini — Skull Krusher Mini monster truck

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

15 May 202015 May 2020

Book Review: The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Cover of The Library Book by Susan Orlean

By Benjamin L. Clark

The Library Book by Susan Orlean — This book was on some great end-of-year lists last year and for good reason. I had it on my shelf for a while waiting for “someday,” and, well, someday came. It’s an amazing book. Is it very, very long-form journalism, is it popular history? A twist on True Crime? Where does that line even exist? It doesn’t matter. Deeply, passionately researched, this is a love story. Not simply to the beautiful Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, but to libraries everywhere, to the librarians who made and make them what they are, and most of all to the libraries of our hearts.

Burning the Library

Los Angeles Public Library, courtesy, California Historical Society, CHS2015.1897

The story of the 1986 fire that became one of the largest single-event losses of print culture in human history is the burning hoop that keeps this story together, fueled by the clear-eyed curiosity of Susan Orlean. Orlean is present in the story, but with so much uncertainty around the fire, and around the man who was arrested for it, her voice is the anchor readers need. Harry Peak was arrested for starting the fire, but not charged and eventually released has a slippery historical record, but a fascinating and in the end, sympathetic story. He died in 1993. Though the case remains unsolved, Orlean has done an incredible job taking the scraps and bits, talking to the right people who still remember important things, and puts it all together, not only cohesively and effectively, but in a touching and humane way.

I’ve liked the L.A. Library for a long time, too. I’ve never been there or anything, but I like the architect who designed it, Bertram Goodhue. He also designed the capitol building of my home state of Nebraska. He is an interesting person as well, and his role isn’t ignored either.

What Didn’t I Like?

Nothing. It was an incredible story well told. I’m sure Orlean could have filled four thick volumes of footnotes for all of it, but didn’t need to. I can see some readers may not see the point of going back to the L.A. Public Library’s very genesis, and down through the years along the way, but I found it fascinating! There are several other people who should have a lot more written about them! What we got was not enough! I kept hopping over to Wikipedia to look up more about individuals mentioned, looking for other connections.

Reading Such A Book “In Times Like These”

“Under our current circumstances,” “in these unprecedented times,” whatever your preferred euphemism for sheltering at home during a novel virus pandemic that has already taken 300,000 lives worldwide, it’s a strange time to review a book at all. Especially one about a disaster. But I found this book to be strangely calming. Orlean brings order from an avalanche of charred, damp, broken bits. I also miss my local library. Also, as curator of a museum, I couldn’t help but feel encouraged — we’re going to be OK too.

The book was also a balm for how open-ended our “current circumstances” are. The library fire burned for several hours, but the destruction and unanswered questions lasted for years. I can’t imagine working in the conditions the people there endured for so long. Would the library be rebuilt? Would the institution even survive? Could the city even afford to rebuild if there was political will to do so? Spoiler alert: In the end, the library was restored, expanded, and is thriving.

Who Should Read It?

Bibliophiles of any stripe, anyone interested in the history of Los Angeles. Creative people, people pushing nostalgia for the 1980s. People facing disasters. Survivors. Culture vultures, architecture nerds, the bookish, the lonely, the weird kids. Friends of the Library, Museum, Symphony, Theater, whatever. It’s a great book and you should read it too.

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About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.