The Wizard of Books

Last night I had no crashing-plane dreams...but I awoke shivering partway through the night and had to haul out a comforter from the storage locker. This morning I woke up to find Gertie's inside temperature in the mid forties F.—pretty chilly for early September! From past experience I had expected mild temperatures on the Cape, where the sea normally has a moderating influence. Around 6:45 I got up and turned on both the furnace and the catalytic heater...then I slipped into bed for another fifteen or twenty minutes until the temperature rose from about 45° F. to a more tolerable 55°. One good thing about Gertie's size is that it doesn't take long to heat a small interior.

After a rather chilly shower (the water was hot, but the air was not!), I dressed and went inside. I had a pleasant breakfast with Gen and Pat: orange juice and English muffins with blackberry-apple jam from Ireland. We talked about Gen's "Dunes Studio" business that sells used books via the internet. Gen is retired...sort of...but the book business keeps her busy and brings in some extra money. An inveterate reader, she's perfect for this occupation. She buys books at yard sales, estate sales, library sales...wherever they can be had cheaply. She stores them on row upon close-packed row of metal shelving in a basement that is so full of books that as Gen says, "If I gain any weight, I won't be able to get to the washing machine any more." And she resells them at a profit through an Amazon.com zShop.

The way this works is that if you go to Amazon's search page and look for a book that isn't in print, if Gen (or another zShop) has it, you'll be directed there. You can even order with a single click, just like any regular Amazon book. Customers get books that would be hard to find any other way; Gen gets the benefit of Amazon's enormous traffic and easy-to-use online ordering (the best in the business)...and Amazon gets a small cut of the profits. Everybody is happy. Gen has more than 1,500 titles for sale at any given time, and many times that in the basement waiting to be listed. Each title gets its own page on Amazon's site.

Especially Gen is happy, because it gives her both an excuse to buy all kinds of books (she's free to read them before she sells them, naturally!)...and she takes delight in finding for her customers the obscure, out-of-print books that they thought they'd never be able to locate. Sitting at the breakfast table, she asked me, "Was there a book that made a great impression on you when you were young, but that you no longer have?" I thought of a few books that had made a difference in my early life—"American Science & Invention," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Mysterious Island"—but I have all those still. But...ah, yes, there was one book I had learned a lot from, but had somehow lost over the years: I remembered the title as "Rip Foster, Space Patrol."

Assignment in Space

I can still remember spotting this book alongside the Tom Swifts and Nancy Drews in the juvenile-books display at the back of the Kresge's store in Princeton. I was eight, and the brightly colored cover with its sleek rockets and violent explosions was irresistable. But what I discovered when I got the book home and began to read it was far more than a cheap sci-fi potboiler. The author, Blake Savage, not only spun a riveting yarn of battles in space—he knew his science. Orbital mechanics, chemistry and nuclear physics all played vital roles in the story, and as I read and reread the book I learned much that tied in with what I'd already learned from the excellent Disney book "Our Friend the Atom." This was plausibly extrapolated technology, not fantasy. Tom Swift would have located a thorium asteroid with his Electro-Metalloscope or some equally implausible gadget; Rip Foster identified it by its albedo, just as a geologist would. (I knew this because my father is a paleontologist, and many of the people my parents hung out with were geologists.)

The truth is that the Tom Swift books, despite their fame and popularity, are lousy science fiction. Even as a child I preferred Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein to Victor Appleton. And when as an adult I picked up a few Tom Swift, Jr. titles at a yard sale, I was appalled at how faulty the science was, and how completely implausible the technology. Victor Appleton didn't know a gamma ray from a manta ray when it came to science. Blake Savage did, and "Rip Foster" proved it. Every detail of the story was thoroughly believable and based on sound physics; that's why the book made such a lasting impression on me. The author was clearly writing for juvenile readers, yet he refused to talk down or oversimplify.

Gen listened to all this and then, while I was tidying up after breakfast, she disappeared into her computer lair. She emerged awhile later to announce that she had located the book (its actual title was "Assignment in Space with Rip Foster," though it was also published as "Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet") and was tracking down a used copy for me. A week after I got back from this trip, a package arrived from Dunes Studio. I tore it open with trembling hands and inside was that well-remembered chunky volume with the spectacular cover. What a thrill! And it made just as good reading at age 51 as it had at age 8.

Some research on the web produced the information that "Blake Savage" had in reality been Harold L. Goodwin. Goodwin, it turned out, had been a combat correspondent, a civil defense director at the Nevada nuclear tests, a science advisor to the USIA and an information officer with NASA. No wonder he knew his stuff! He had also written dozens of other science-oriented youth adventure books—though not about Rip Foster—in the "Rick Brant" series, extending over a forty-year period. But I digress...

On the road to Skowhegan

After breakfast, Pat helped me work out a route to Skowhegan, where Tom Ensminger lives, using the Street Atlas USA software on my PowerBook. Oh, how I wish I could throttle the idiots who wrote this wretchedly designed program! They should be put in user interface prison for life. (It's ported from Windows, needless to say.) But it's the only comprehensive mapping software for the Mac, so I'm stuck with it. I pulled Gertie out of Gen's driveway around 10:00 and headed up toward Maine.

Along the way I saw many warlike slogans...the mood is shifting from "God bless America" to "Bomb the bastards." One self-styled "anti-terrorism expert" interviewed on TV advocated using nuclear weapons! I'm appalled that people are so crazed with revenge lust that they would contemplate such a futile and disastrous gesture. What are we supposed to do—sterilize all of Afghanistan with H-bombs in hopes that evil mastermind Osama bin Laden will wait around for us to come get him? How stupid do they think he is?

Here's an example of what I mean. Yet the same young service station attendant whose car was plastered with "LET THE BOMB OUT" slogans did a painstakingly careful job of cleaning my windshield—I've never seen such attention to detail. Truth is, most places I get gas from don't clean my windshield at all. It's a rare and heartwarming thing these days to find somebody who's really trying to do their work well. I made a point of thanking him for doing such a good job.

It set me to thinking about the old question of whether people are basically good or evil. Not that I bother my head with such generalities ordinarily...but I found myself musing that people are generally good if you're not too different from them. As long as you're the same color and religion as they are, they'll generally smile and say howdy and give you the shirt off their back if you need it. But if you're black...or wear a turban...or worship at a different church (or worse, no church)...you're likely to see a very different face. There are people in this world who are good to others regardless of these things...but they are few and far between. And in today's climate of hatred, I'm afraid their decency and common sense are increasingly being drowned out.

Thoughts like this ran through my head as I drove through the lovely Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine countryside. The day that had started off so chilly quickly warmed up, so that at around 11:00 I stopped and exchanged my knee socks and long-sleeved shirt for lighter attire. It really was a picturebook day. The blue skies were dotted with puffy white cumulus clouds that looked like something from a Disney cartoon. It was about 270 miles from Cape Cod to Skowhegan—a leisurely six hours' drive—and I pretty easily found Tom Ensminger's big old house in the golden late-afternoon sunshine.