Defining the Uses of Knowledge

Odds and ends today. For those of you who prefer that columns be of one related piece, you may stop reading. But, pleading my defense, there does come a time, and it has come to me, when, loath to dispose of the odds and ends in windrows of paper on my desk, I feel I must waste not and make a clean sweep of it. Here’s a start:

- Superior Court Judge Leonard Goldstein, forsaking judicial robe for a denim printer’s apron, was messing around with type and ink in my old-fashioned print shop, when he came up with a nugget of observation. We chat amiably when we set type and print, and our chatting led to the use of knowledge.

Goldstein, who publishes finely printed miniature books as a passionate hobby, remarked that he was essentially a teacher at heart. Therefore, he felt that knowledge should be used to enlighten. It should not be used as a weapon.

I admired that thought immensely. How many of us know of people who attempt to bludgeon others with a display of knowledge, of intellectual oneupmanship to assert their own questionable superiority.

- My wife has been immersed for more than two months, several days a week, with her part in the preparations for the 26th Annual Book Sale of the Friends of the Newport Beach Public Library to be held Thursday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., in the Newport Center Branch Library at 856 San Clemente Drive. There will be a silent auction, for members only, of particularly desirable books on May 1 at 7 p.m.

I suppose the nearest description of what my wife has been doing is to establish prices on rare and collectible books donated to the Friends for the sale. But that is misleading. I think no authentically rare books have passed through her hands. “Rare” is a highly misused appellation in the book business. Smallish press runs, the ravages of time--which diminish a book’s numbers to perhaps a hundred or so--and desirability owing to its fine condition, subject and author place a book in the rare category. Rare, therefore, should be applied to a book of which there are not many extant; it usually connotes great value.

Uncommon, unusual and scarce should be applied to most of the books that are usually called rare, and it is these kinds of books my wife has been laboring to identify and put a price on. And as any professional bookseller knows, this is a kind of art with problems of subjectivity over and above the available bibliographic reference material. This means she has been stewing over her pricing, which errs, reasonably, to the advantage of booksellers who might find the price attractive enough to buy and turn over at a profit.

Among the books she has carted home to study, look up and mull over was “A Raft Pilot’s Log, a History of the Great Rafting Industry on the Upper Mississippi 1840-1915” by Walter A. Blair, master and pilot of the Ten Broeck. It is a fascinating history of vanished Americana. “Rafting,” as they used to call it, was the transporting of logs on the Mississippi, mostly by those romantic, steam-powered paddle wheelers dear to the heart of Mark Twain. The book, filled with forgotten navigational techniques and lore, was published by The Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 1930. The book is sturdily bound and letterpress printed on fine, mould-made paper. It is, my wife has determined, scarce and desirable--but not necessarily rare.

At any rate it will be offered, I think, at the silent auction. There are many nautical books, cookbooks, books on hobbies and general fiction and nonfiction available to the public, more than in any previous year, I’m told.

- In that suspended condition between waking and sleeping, described by author Ray Bradbury as a “creative” time, four of the saddest and loneliest words came to me. They are “nobody noticed; nobody cared.”

- Bud Desenberg, who tells me he has sworn off many times going on another Newport Beach-to-Ensenada Race, is right now sailing on his 25th race--a record of passages, I think.

- Paul B. Zimmerman, a retired journalist living in Laguna Hills, calls my recent column about the 50th anniversary of the March 10 Long Beach earthquake a “fantasy.” Zimmerman claims that my quoted source, Vera Williams, a Long Beach newspaperwoman, was way off base on her story about the unknown drunk journalist who scooped the world on the quake.

It seems that Zimmerman, sober and hard-working, was the true “scooper.” “After sending the first flash on the quake from the Associated Press office in the Times Building, I jumped into my car and drove through Huntington Park and Compton to Long Beach. Was stopped by the Marines at Signal Hill and got through on my sheriff’s press badge. Arrived in Long Beach at 7:30 p.m. and stayed six days covering the quake,” he writes in a letter to me.

Zimmerman pays me a delightful backhanded compliment: “If there is one word of truth in it, beyond when and where, you have hidden it better than you ever palmed an ace during your attempts at legerdemain.” Gee, I didn’t know I was that adroit.