March 10, 2008
Great obscurities from the shelves of Statesville libraries
By Gene Krider
Great credit goes to the person who picked the books to put on the Statesville Senior High School library shelves. It was probably the librarian, Julia Fowler, who bought all the books.
Now, they are purchased through a broker who sends appropriate books to a library with call numbers on the spine and card catalog file cards filled out (or on a CD) to be merged with the library’s master catalog. I feel sure that in 1950 all books for libraries were personally ordered and cataloged.
Both the Statesville Public Library and the high school library had some very unusual books that were not general reading types but were on obscure subjects. These books appealed to me when I was a student because I was always interested in books on music, art, history (especially ancient) and offbeat humor. A book in the last two categories was “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody” by Will Cuppy.
As I look back on it now, I think it was written for flippant teenagers and college students bored with the dull textbooks they had to read. Everything Cuppy wrote was factual but he put a certain zing on history. When I read the following paragraph I was hooked.
“Some of the Egyptians were brighter than others. They invented mosquito netting, astrology, and a calendar that wouldn’t work, so that New Year’s Day finally fell on the Fourth of July. They believed that the sun went sailing around Egypt all day on a boat and a pig ate the moon every two weeks.” This paragraph was footnoted as follows: “This was called the wisdom of the ancients.”
I have just checked with the Iredell Public Library and they still have this book and it is checked in if you like this type of insane sanity. It is a first edition. I looked it up on the Internet at the Alibris site and found you can buy a used copy for $1.98 or a new copy for $6. All are first editions. Fortunately I have a first edition copy that I bought at the N.C. State College book store in 1952. This is probably the only book that if you have a second edition you have a real rarity.
The first book Will Cuppy wrote was “How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes” published in 1931. He died in 1949 after 16 years, off and on, working on “The Decline and Fall.”
His publisher, Henry Holt and Company, went through his massive writings and boxes of 3 by 5 index cards and managed to put this book together within a year after his death.
We who like offbeat authors and books are forever grateful to them.
I keep all the books I read before I went to college in a hanging Chippendale bookcase in my central hall.
I also have my first windup phonograph and a collection of 78 rpm record albums. There is a statue of the Muse of Music, a bust of Shakespeare and my very first bookends in the shape of miniature bookcases filled with tiny books.
Hanging over the bookcase is a large framed photo of the Biltmore House taken when it was finished in 1895. Under the bookcase is a drawing of the Steinway grand piano on the Mac Gray Auditorium stage. I sketched it during a dull chapel program at Senior High School.
Among all these momentos, the Cuppy book resides with my other valued possessions, even if it is only worth $1.98.
