How would you like to be the first on your block to read books nobody else does?  I can introduce you to a genre of literature that has been ignored by everyone except the creators of it since the art form was created. These are entertaining, informative books that offer hours of good, clean fun (or the other kind, if your eyes are good and you have that kind of mind.) Confuse your friends at a party by citing an article that they not only have not read but are going to have a stack of trouble finding.  I don't think most of this is even available ONLINE, to show you how obscure it is.

     What you want, of course, is an encyclopedia yearbook. You've never seen one?  Yeah, they're invisible, too; the eye sweeps past 'em.  But it is only you young’uns of today who think the encyclopedia was once an Infallible Source of Knowledge. "Nowadays, it’s obsolete the day it’s printed," you say.

     Whaddya mean, "nowadays"?  I have a revelation for you, chocolate chowder: we knew that then. The people who sold encyclopedias knew we knew it, too. So when they sold a set they pushed the fact that it could be updated annually. "We publish a yearbook," they said, "So every year, each article is really updated. You’ll be able to check the newest data available."

     Okay, old-timers. Yeah, you. Remember doing reports for school and looking stuff up in the encyclopedia? Did you EVER go look up updated material in the yearbooks? Did you ever SEE anybody look for new data in the yearbooks?

     We were a Collier’s family. Collier’s Encyclopedia was a dignified black in those days, but the yearbooks were a bright brownish red. I remember when they’d arrive, we’d look through them, mainly at the pictures, recalling the year gone by. The smell of those yearbooks, fresh out of the box, was like nothing else on earth. (Look, French-fried cheese stick, this was before Worlds of Warcraft; we got our excitement where we could find it.)

     Read them again? I’ve had customers at the Book Fair cheerfully buy a forty year-old set of encyclopedias and say to me, "But can we leave the yearbooks behind?" I’ve had donors keep their encyclopedias for future use, but bring me the yearbooks. I firmly believe that an encyclopedia yearbook is read once…if that.

     But I hold in my hand here a pristine (obviously unread) copy of the 1970 yearbook for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, still in dust jacket, which proudly proclaims a lead article on Africa by Jomo Kenyatta. The editors of the yearbook are agog over the year they have to cover (1969, always the year before the date on the cover, to make it look even more up to date). Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon and the Mets won the World Series: how can you cover such a year? Conor Cruise O’Brien has written an article on strife in Northern Ireland, the secretary of the British Board of Film Censors discusses the new morality in motion pictures, and you can see John Lennon and Yoko Ono stage a bed-in for peace. The material was written especially for this book, hundreds of pages of it.  And it has waited unread, for a knowledge-seeker like you.

     So pick up an encyclopedia yearbook: if nothing else, it’s soothing to look back on all the half-forgotten crises we thought meant the end of civilization. Just don't try to buy one from me.  I sell them only with their original sets of encyclopedias.  When somebody donates loose ones, I sell 'em to a man who builds computer tables out of them.  Somebody has to support those Worlds of Warcraft habits.

     Say, I hope it doesn’t seem that I’m trying to control every last little thing you do. I AM, of course; I just hope it doesn’t seem that way. I promise to use this power only for good.

    But I am worried anew about you folks and your receipts. See, this Book Fair helps support the Newberry Library, which is a fully operational 501(c)3 outfit—that means if you give us something you can claim it on your income taxes. So we give out receipts. And, as I have mentioned before, this seems to confuse people.

     No, you don’t HAVE to take one. I have actually had donors complain a receipt was forced on them. You need take a receipt only if you want one more piece of paper for Uncle Sam. Yeah, if you misplace it between now and April 15, we keep a carbon. But it’s not required. (Last time I saw a bill, I realized those forms cost about a nickel apiece, so I don’t throw ‘em at people.)

     It’s not that difficult to manage if you do want one. We hand you the receipt book and you fill in the name and address so the IRS will recognize them, and describe the donation. One of us then signs and dates the form, gives you your copy (the white topsheet), and all is right and tight

     For some reason, that bit about describing the donation gives some people conniptions. "Do I list the number of bags or the number of books? Do I have to list every single book? Should I put down a value for the books?"

     What makes this hard to answer is that, basically, it’s YOUR receipt. You can write any old thing you want: it’s between you and the IRS (that’s what the fine print at the bottom is all about; it says we just took the stuff in. We don’t evaluate; we don’t recount.) If you give me ten bags of books and claim that’s 1,000 volumes, I may sign someone else’s name at the bottom (If you believe I’m the ex-governor of Illinois, that’s YOUR business.) but within reason, you can write whatever you want about the donation.

     But gee whiz, some of you…. What good, exactly, does it do any of us for you to write "BOOKS"? Even I know the IRS would like a little more detail than that. On the other hand, those of you who write "1 audiocassette, country and western, 1 audiocassette, pop music, 2 audiocassettes, classics: 1 Debussy, 1 Saint-Saens, 2 movies on DVD (PBS documentaries), 1 economics book, 3 art books…." The elegant way some of you manage to fill every inch of space on the form is inspiring, but it is a noncarbon form, so "continued on back" just confuses matters.

     And some of you get into editorial comment. "8 novels and 7 useful books’" tells me something about you that maybe the IRS doesn’t need to know. One lady always brings me "Books Of Antiquarian or Collectible Interest" which she then lists by title and date, with the names of the previous owners. (Sir Frederick Stock owned one of her books, she told me. Since he didn’t bother to write his name in it, this does me no good whatsoever, but it’s nice of her to keep me informed.)

     It is okay with me if you say "10 bags of books". It is okay with me if you say "45 hardcover books, 12 paperbacks, and 3 Blu-Ray discs." I don’t mind "52 books, assorted paperback and hardcover", and I don’t mind "17 hardcover books, 8 laminated placemats, 1 working microphone, 1 signed Matisse lithograph". But to write, as one man did, "Stuff from my mother’s estate" is a little silly. (He thought so too. After I gave him his copy he looked it over, said "Oh, forget it", and tore it up. Mom would have been proud.)

     If all else fails, there’s a certain beauty in "See attached sheet". As long as you bring a copy I can staple to the carbon, you can really go to town on it. (Some of these spreadsheets people bring, with columns for "Original Price", "Depreciation of Value", "Language", "City and State Location of Publisher" and even, I swear, "Number of Times Read" need to be framed.  NO!  Forget I wrote that.  If some people hear the receipts might be on exhibit one day, they'll never finish filling them in.)

     I should like, if possible, to keep this column down to one obituary per decade, but people are going to have to cooperate.

     Many years ago, the Book Fair had a volunteer who flew from South Carolina every year to work here. She was a scrappy one, famous for glaring at book dealers who dared approach the Collectibles. She'd been a book dealer herself, and didn’t trust ‘em. She was large and imposing, and her glare was a serious thing. She could not, however, face a diagnosis of lung cancer, and gave up the fight early on, on the eve, in fact, of one of the Newberry Library volunteer luncheons.

     At that luncheon, Karen Skubish, the Newberry’s Events Director, Mistress of Ceremonies, and Volunteer Coordinator, announced the death of our veteran with the words, "A little bird has flown away from us." I was touched, if a bit boggled at the tought of this particular volunteer as a little bird.

     Well, a little bird has flown from us, friends, because Karen Skubish, after an unbelievable 43 years at the Newberry Library, lost her own struggle with cancer this week. She came to the Newberry fresh from grad school and did a bit of everything, from supervising security to playing the harp at Newberry weddings. Her current position, as Major General of the Events Department, started when Tennessee Williams was coming for a visit and the President of the Newberry asked her to "put something together". She did it so well that she was asked to do it again, and then another time, and then deal with someone who wanted to get married at the Newberry. And eventually an entire Events Department came into existence.

     The department was her passion, and is her monument. She used to regret that she couldn’t spend more time practicing the harp (she played professionally all over northern Illinois and did a brief tour of southern France as well) but there was always something interesting to take care of at the Newberry. Even as the cancer worsened, she would fight her way to the library to put up tulle or provide harp music. (Did I mention the bride who asked whether Karen could play Metallica on the harp for the reception? She could. She did.) It was work she needed, and wanted, to do. The best of weddings can be hectic, the worst could be epic. But they were seldom dull.

     Action energized Karen. Once, when she moved, she complained about all the realtors who insisted on showing her apartments that had lovely lake views. She wanted a view of the city, where people were doing things. "The lake does the same things over and over," she said. "That’s dull."

     So wherever she’s flown off to, I hope they have something for her to do. (I understand they have harps aplenty.) And a balcony overlooking Earth

     One of the things to which I attribute the success of the Second Annual 25^th Book fair is the number of focused collections we had. We are seeing some collections come in already, and among these is a collection of series fiction.

     Oh, did I mention that already? Let me check Monday's column. No, no: that was about children’s series books. I also received, entirely independently, someone’s collection of TV series books.

     In the trade, these are known as tie-ins. These are not novels that were turned into movies or TV series, like Martin Caidin’s Cyborg, which became The Six Million Dollar Man, or Thorne Smith’s The Passionate Witch, which someone turned into Bewitched. No, these are TV series which became novels: stories commissioned by the owners of the series, either based on episodes or just brand new rales featuring the characters.  This kept up excitement about the series when you couldn't watch it.  (This was before YouTube or NetFlix or even before videocassettes, kids.)

     This collection doesn’t have EVERY series ever novelized, but it has plenty of ‘em, both memorable and forgotten: I Spy, Bonanza, Mission Impossible, The Man from UNCLE, Lucan, The Invisible Man, Marcus Welby M.D., The Young Rebels, Time Tunnel, Star Trek, Star Trek: the Animated Voyages, Rat Patrol, Garrison’s Guerillas, The Twilight Zone, Hawk, Get Smart, The Flying Nun, The Facts of Life and so on and so on.

     Collectible? What do you collect, friend? If you’re a Burt Reynolds fan, don’t you need novels from his cop show, Hawk? If you’re interested in how the Old West was portrayed in popular culture, you need these Bonanza novels, don’t you?

     Oh, you meant collectible AND worth money? Well, that all depends. Some of these series were brief, both on screen and on the page, but others went on and on: Dark Shadows and Man from Uncle ran to a couple of dozen volumes each. And it is a peculiarity of the buying public that Man from UNCLE #1 sold hundreds of thousands of copies, whereas #23 in the series didn’t get quite so much attention. So sometimes the higher numbers are the ones worth money, as opposed to the trend in, say, comic books, where for a time the industry concentrated on publishing ONLY first issues of comics.

     You need to check the author as well. There were men who specialized in novelizations, whose names you’ll see over and over: William Johnston, one of the kings of the novelization (Get Smart, Happy Days, F Troop, Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Michael Avallone, one of the great fiction machines (Boris Karloff Presents, The Patridge Family, Cannonball Run, A Woman Named Golda), Robert Weverka, Marilyn Ross, etc. But if you hunt, and do a little research behind the house names, you can find people who are famous for other work, and their escapades in TV tie-in fiction has a little added value. If you collect science fiction writers of note, you’ll want Fred Saberhagen’s Star Trek and E.C. Tubbs’s Space: 1999 books. Mystery writer Walter Wager, under the name John Tiger, wrote seven I Spy novels, while Richard Deming, under his own name, did both Mod Squad and Dragnet. The highly collectible hardboiled paperback veteran Harry Whittington did one of The Man from UNCLE books. And even the wildly collectible Jim Thompson, famous for his psychopaths and sociopaths, indulged toward the end of his career, turning out a novel for Ironside.

    Their best stuff? Maybe not, but surely worth a look. (Every now and then, by the way, I hear that Michael Avallone’s books about private eye Ed Noon might be turned into a series, which begs the question of who will write the novelizations. Michael Avallone also wrote gothic romances under the name Edwina Noone. Really, once you start looking into this stuff, you can’t stop. But that’s what the Book Fair is here for: to feed your addictions.)

     One thing to which I attribute the success of the second annual 25^th anniversary Book Fair is the number of  focused collections we had. The art donations were notable, of course, but so were the two donations of African-American history and the massive donation of sheet music.

     What can we do about this for next year? Well, we have just received a large collection of children’s series books, covering, in a spotty way, the period from the 1860s through the 1970s. We don’t have original editions of all the books, but it’s amazing to me how some of them, written for kids of the 1860s, could be reprinted for kids of the 1890s, and then re-reprinted for kids in the 1920’s. We have one book—Randy Starr Leading the Air Circus—in two editions, one in which Randy is leading his men in a Sopwith Camel, and a later edition in which he’s flying a good, solid Spitfire. I wonder if they updated the text as well, or left that alone

     I could list the series for you, but my notes run to six pages, and outside of marveling at, say Rob Ranger, the Young Ranchman or wondering how much The Timber Trail Riders differ from The Range and Grange Hustlers or Grace Harlowe’s Overland Riders, what would it do for you? If I could post pictures, I’d show you some of the jackets, with art that throws you at once into the bygone worlds of 1930s comic books and pulp magazines and movie serials. The writing does much the same, and shows that if you get the details right, you don’t NEED to update much for a new generation. I am certain that when I was 9 I would have read with a shiver The Case of the Missing Eyebrows, in which Renfro Harr (the hero of the Newspaper Boys series) discovers a pair of eyebrows frozen to a window.

     The dashing heroes and heroines of these sagas were reporters, spies, G-Men, pilots, engineers, football players, scientists, explorers, Cub Scouts, Campfire Girls, sailors, whalers, soldiers…but at least one occupation has been omitted. Perhaps it’s not too late. I submit for your approval the first few paragraphs of my next non-selling novel, The Book Fair Volunteers and the Clue of the Missing Title Page:

    "Purring Pamphlets!" Evan exclaimed. "Who would tear out a title page?"

    Clean-cut Evan Lamplighter stared at the book he held in his firm, clean hand, thoroughly washed as it was every day before he investigated the boxes of rare books left at the Newberry Library for its highly successful Book Fair.

    "Maybe there was an inscription," said his twin sister, the lovely and athletic Lynn Lamplighter. She came to look over his shoulder. "It could have been something from his mother that he wanted to put in a scrap-book."

     "Maybe he’s a title page collector!" called their friend, jolly, fun-loving Polly Singer, as she stooped to pick up another box from the clean, grey concrete floor.

    "Do you have the receipt?" asked Lynn, hurrying to help with the box, which was filled to the brim with ten year-old encyclopedia yearbooks.

    "I remember the donor," Polly said. "He didn’t want a receipt. I offered to write one out for him twice."

     Evan looked up from the book. "He didn’t want a receipt? Galloping Galsworthys! That’s suspicious for a start! What did he look like?"

    "I didn't notice especially. He was just an average book donor," said Polly. "About five feet seven and a half inches tall, with brown shoes and a tan trenchcoat. He had blue eyes, red hair and a red mustache, and he wore a black leather glove on his right hand and a white leather glove on his left hand." She and Lynn set the box of encyclopedias on a sorting bench. She stood up and pursed her lips. "But there was something unusual about him. What was it? Oh, yes! He had a hook in place of his left ear."

    "Burn the Bridges of Madison County!" exclaimed Lynn. "He sounds sinister! We must consult Uncle Blogsy!"

    Any publisher looking for the Next Big Thing can call and find out what happened next. In the meantime, please don’t email me and ask if our latest donation included Book 3 of the Far Star Patrol series (The Far Star Patrol and the Pecatonica Pirates.) I have missing title pages to worry about.

     One of the passing comments that caused me concern at this year’s Book Fair was "Look! This book was published in oh-ten!" I haven’t decided yet how I feel about that.

     The decade in which the third digit in the year was a zero is over. It started with an oh-oh, and that kind of set the tone for the whole decade. I, for one, am keeping my Y2K kit on hand just in case. You never know.

     Of course, it’s not really wrong. 2010 could be pronounced "two-oh-ten". So people who have gotten used to saying oh-seven, oh-eight, and oh-nine just naturally went on to oh-ten. I’m just worried about whether we ought to encourage this.

     What if it goes on? Oh-eleven?  Oh-twenty-nine? Oh-fifty-eight? Oh, sure. You don’t see what difference it makes. But if we let this oh-year become the pattern for the whole century, look at the effect on the economy. Car dealerships that used to put up big signs to announce that the ’97 Yugos were in stock will now have to pay for one extra digit to announce that the ‘015 Mustangs have arrived. Every bistro with a wine list will have to pay for extra printing to show off their ’035 Fireside Pinot or ‘059 Zinfandel. Colleges and high schools with budgets already tight will have to spring for extra embroidery on those patches for letter sweaters for the Women’s Volleyball Team of ‘028.

     And it could well become retroactive. Will our descendants speak of the Stock Market Crash of ‘929 or the Spirit of ‘776? Fogeys like me, sticking to the old double-digit version will have to add a second apostrophe to show two numbers omitted, as in Spirit of ‘’76. Some people say there’s a price to pay for all innovation; I say "Refuse to pay the apostro-fee!"

     What can we do about it? What should we do about it? I haven’t got a single idea. But by gummibears, let’s get out there and do it! Show all the world we’re not the sort of people to whom a zero means nothing!

     Both the Book Fair’s new categories for 2010--Blank and Fashion--did well. Fashion, you may recall, was added because so many people asked where it was in 2008 and 2009.

     Questions this year did not lend themselves to anything so constructive, though there was a modest surge in people asking where we kept our metaphysical books. On further inquiry, it seemed that some of these people meant yoga (Health), some meant astrology (Science Fiction), and some meant philosophy (Philosophy). I think we will not be adding a Metaphysical section any time soon: we might have to give up sixty other categories just to cover everything people want.

Other notable inquires included:

Do you have a section where all the books are fifty cents?

     Um, no

What a bother!

Where are the books that are inspirational, like chicken soup? (I knew what they meant.)

My husband is looking for a novel about the robber barons in the early days of the railroad, but we can’t think of the author or title. (This was maddening because I knew at once what book they wanted and could see the cover…but not the title or author.)

 Who was the 12^th president of the us? (Your sign says Ask Me)

     Two people came in and asked whether the books were divided up by subject in any way.  Why, um, yes, we have two categories: books for people who can read are in here, and the rest are in the park.  That door will take you to the park.

     Two other people, shuffling a bit, asked for some specific books of a delicate nature. No need to blush, friends. I know you need ‘em for your master’s thesis

     And two people asked for books on magic and its history, which led to further questioning on whether these people wanted stage magic of "practical" magic (the latter, in both cases.). .

     But I believe my favorite remark of the weekend was an answer, given by one customer to another, who had asked what the squirreling section might be. "Squirrelling," she said, "Is where they have these little takers who take and hold your books for you."

     We are now looking into the possibility of starting a Newberry Jazz Band called "The Squirrelling Section and the Little Takers."

     I’m glad so many of you read that beautiful article in the Tribune. No, I do not ALWAYS carry two milk crates on my head, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

     A customer came in and asked, "Hey, where are the books you priced too low that I can sell for hundreds of times the purchase price?" He said he was joking, but I could tell he had high hopes.

     And somebody else asked me, "Well, what DO you do when you find out you made a mistake and priced something too low?" Ignoring the suggestion that Uncle Blogsy ever makes mistake--I am sometimes right incorrectly, but never wrong—I do have a standard procedure for such cases.

     I cuss quietly to myself. Then I kick a cardboard box (used to kick walls, but cardboard’s softer). And then I sigh. And then I smile. Because even if a book does sell for less than I might have gotten otherwise, there is payback of a real and profitable kind.

     Let’s say that I failed to notice that I had one of the rare copies of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood which contained the microchip which, when triggered by the right brand of cell phone, gives you clues on where to find the Lost Ark of the Covenant. (Or is that The Da Vinci Code? I get confused on the points in modern first editions.) I put it out for $1 and a book dealer who is on the alert snatched it up, took it home, and sold it for $500. (There’s actually a book on how to detect and exploit the weaknesses of booksellers to find underpriced books and make lots of money. I didn’t put it out for sale this year. You can have it when I’m done reading it.)

     Let’s say, as well, that he might have cheerfully paid the Newberry up to $50 for that same book (dealers LOVE a 90% markup.) So he got a book for $1 that he was prepared to pay $50 for. This will stick in his mind for a long, long time.

     So he will mark his calendar every time the Newberry Library Book Fair rolls around. In the back of his mind the refrain will run "I was lucky there once. Maybe it'll happen again." Every year, without fail, hope will bring him back to our tables. And he will buy books, hoping. In the long run, that copy of The Divine Secrets will pay back the $49, and more.

     And that, cranberry cupcake, is one of the things that makes managing a Book Fair the perfect job for somebody like me. Even the occasional mistake pays dividends. If all of life were like that, we’d use emerald bookends on Preview Night.