Taking a Welcome Page From Book TV

“Librarians are the gatekeepers to knowledge,” says Librarian of Congress James Billington. If so, then what of cable gatekeepers who deny viewers access to a TV channel that celebrates knowledge through exposure to books?

When it comes to choice beyond the usual meat-and-potatoes channels, viewers are largely at the mercy of what their local cable systems choose to make available.

This column is being written, for example, in an area of Los Angeles County where giant cable operator TCI offers channels devoted to golf, food, home decorating, weather, cartoons and so on and so on in the increasingly splayed universe of options ticketed for specific audiences.

But not to C-SPAN2 and its 48 hours of all books, all the time.

Just as its older sister channel C-SPAN covers the U.S. House and other public events, C-SPAN2’s primary function is gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. Senate, which these days means President Clinton’s impeachment trial. In 1996, though, it initiated a five-hour literary bloc on weekends titled “About Books.”

On Sept. 12, it extended that dramatically by launching Book TV, airing 5 a.m. Saturdays to 5 a.m. Mondays and offering a much wider array of author interviews and readings, tours of unique bookstores and other publishing-related fare.

No how-to tomes, coffee-table glossies or ghost-written celebrity books here. The emphasis is serious nonfiction.

How exhilarating.

And how sad that a two-day chunk of TV that promotes books should be revolutionary.

Yet Book TV is just that. Nothing on TV is remotely like it. Not C-SPAN’s own 10-year-old “Booknotes” program from which C-SPAN2’s expanded books discourse sprang, and which is rerun on Book TV. Not the spasmodic bookishness of the History Channel. Not occasional PBS chats with authors on “The Jim Lehrer NewsHour” and Charlie Rose’s interview show. Not Oprah Winfrey’s periodic book circle that has blossomed into a full-fledged book club.

Book TV is different, and helping to make it so are C-SPAN-style call-ins from viewers and the usual astute but unpretentious C-SPAN interviewers--including Chairman Brian P. Lamb and Chief Operating Officer Susan Swain--who leave their egos behind and never compete with interviewees.

Some tapes of early Book TV segments have come in, and here’s what they show.

Far from the vast reading rooms of Barnes and Noble and the Internet cosmos of Amazon.com is Baldwin’s Book Barn in picturesque West Chester, Pa., a former dairy barn thriving as a dealer in old and rare works at a time when independent booksellers everywhere are being flattened by super chains.

There is owner Tom Baldwin, who took over from his father in 1983, with his dog, Pip, sleeping on his desk oblivious to the camera. As a clock ticks stereophonically from across the room, Baldwin relates to viewers the book etiquette (how to tenderly open and handle an old book) passed down to him from his father, this dark-wooded, thoughtful, quiet sanctuary’s connection of present to past a striking contrast to the breathless, revved-up immediacy that drives so much of television today.

Elsewhere, Mark Dimunation, who heads the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is white-gloved while gingerly handling a copy of Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” that transports you back to 1743. And Librarian of Congress Billington recalls that his boyhood reading of “War and Peace”--set during the Napoleonic wars--taught him more about the Soviets’ wintry defeat of frozen German invaders in World War II than did newspapers of the day.

Book TV’s schedule is split into categories that include history, biography, the business of books and children’s books, as in Peter and Cheryl Barnes reading their “House Mouse, Senate Mouse” for a bright fifth-grader, who also interviews them. As she listens, her face is as radiant as any child’s could be, making it clear that the author and his illustrator wife are her Michael Jordans.

In addition to books for the younger set, other fiction is sometimes featured here, too. At the Miami Book Fair is Tom Wolfe vamping in vanilla, wearing his customary white three-piece suit with a breast pocket full of white handkerchief, his white reading glasses resting on the pinched tip of his nose as he reads from his new novel, “A Man in Full,” set in Atlanta.

Wolfe slips into a broad Southernese: “Glory me, I got the HIV!” Cut to his listeners, eyes locked on the flamboyant author with as much fascination as TV slaves of the Super Bowl. This is their Super Bowl.

Another segment originates from the “New York Is Book Country” book fair in Manhattan, where inside the traveling C-SPAN School Bus, Atlanta-based New York Times reporter Rick Bragg is discussing his memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” a homage to his mother who reared her family in rural Alabama by picking cotton and “washin’ other people’s floors.”

Bragg still sounds ‘Baman through and through, as if he’d never left the homestead, his speech a testament to the richness of regionalism that survives in the U.S. despite efforts to culturally assimilate square pegs and round holes.

Calling Bragg on the C-SPAN line--and hardly on the same planet as Wolfe’s real estate-developer protagonist, Charlie Coker--are other bubbas and bubbettes from the deep South who have read “All Over but the Shoutin’.” And who love it, they say, because it’s about them.

What they are doing quite persuasively, in effect, is touting reading.

When a sour-sounding woman with a thick “Joisey” accent calls and also applauds Bragg and his book, it occurs to you that what Book TV does most is what most other TV does least: locate common denominators and bring Americans together in dialogue instead of tearing them apart.

Bragg says that his next book may be about other Alabamans he’s known. “There is a man in my home county who was the best front-porch geetar picker who ever lived. He was fine. He could play anything and sang anything. And he lost his arm in a cotton mill accident. But he still knows those words from those songs. And I’d like to sit and talk with him before it’s too late.”

Like much on this channel, it would be a book worth reading.

* Book TV appears on C-SPAN2 weekends, from 5 a.m. Saturdays to 5 a.m. Monday.