If you're interested at all in why there was no blog on Monday (I know you wept all morning), I was off doing my duly-do, answering a summons to jury duty. In the end, it was decided that justice would be best served if I went back to the Newberry and sorted books, but at least it took them all day to make up their minds about that.

One of the things stressed during the choosing of the jury was that we were going to be asked to judge only facts. I am completely unsuited for this due to my profession, because the facts are the last thing I want to be working with.

Well, let's backpedal. There are facts and there are facts. If the valuable edition of this book has a big dot like a period in the middle of a sentence on page 88, that's a fact I need to know. It's the facts presented in the text that don't concern me.

"Don't you know that book is a pack of lies?" I get asked, in various stages of outrage and decorum. "How can you put it in nonfiction?"

Well, one reason is that it says "Nonfiction" here on the cover.

"But every fact in there has been disproven in the last ten years!"

Yeah, but I've been working this line now for twenty-five years. And I find if a book is totally discredited in ten years, it'll be proven correct again ten years after that, and will be pronounced completely fraudulent five years after THAT. I can't spend my time evaluating the truthfulness of each book. Not only would it take up time, but I'd need twice as much space. Right next to a small "Political Science" section, I'd have to add a huge "Political Opinion" section. The table for "History" would have to sit next to "Conjecture". And "Art" would be tiny compared to "I Don't Know What It Is But I Know I Don't Like It".

It works the other way, too: "You should put that novel in Biography; it's based on her life."

There are whole weeks when I wonder why we didn't just sort 'em by "Red Books", "Blue Books", "Brown Books", and such. Ten to one I'd hear from some volunteer who wants to make sure the crimson books don't get mixed with the maroon ones.*

*Maroon Books: Books you'd take with you to a desert island.

When the Book Fair was started, way, way back in the last century, it had three missions, and one of those was to heighten awareness of the Newberry Library in its own neighborhood, just sort of saying "Hey there! We're a library and if you like books, you're our kind of people!"

You might not think that would be necessary. But I was reminded recently of a longtime volunteer who was picking up books for the first or second Book Fair and taking them down in an elevator. Another person on the elevator asked what was going on, and the volunteer explained about getting books for the Book Fair at the Newberry Library. "Over on Walton Street, across from the park."

"Oh, is that what that place is!" exclaimed the fellow traveler. "I always thought that was a private club, because they just built those squash courts out back." (The parking lot was new at the time.)

I actually get a lot of that, from the member of city government who thought this was the (defunct) John Crerar Library to the cab driver who told me, "Newberry Library? I thought it was the Spertus Museum!" That's better than the people who drop off their library books, thinking we're a branch of the Chicago Public Library. (This is tough, since these are invariably brought to me on the assumption that they are Book Fair donations. Honest, there is no shuttle between here and the CPL.)

We have fielded questions from people who thought this was the Ogden School (vacant lot now, across the street), the Scottish Rite Temple (across the street kittycorner), and the John J. Glessner House or the Excalibur Nightclub (similar architecture, different buildings.) I even, honest and for truly, once answered a knock on the loading dock door and found a timid young woman who asked if this was really Oprah's house.

"No," I said. "That's an entirely different Book Club."

I haven't saluted the cast and crew in a while. But the Book fair has not yet run out of celebrity volunteers. These are just the celebrities who admit to their notoriety, of course. I'm still trying to track down the one who taught her cat to say "rhodomontade".

One of our volunteers has been very active in pun conservation

One of our volunteers wrote the American Medical Association's guide to poisonous plants

One of our volunteers knows the names of all the Popes in chronological order

At least one of our volunteers went through debutante training

One of our volunteers once exclaimed to me "You have to leave room in Book fair set-up for personal expression!"

One of our volunteers broke his nose tossing peanuts up in the air to catch them in his mouth.

One of our volunteers claimed to own the tackiest aluminum Christmas tree in north America

One of our volunteers had worked security at Chicago Place for so many years he claimed to be on first name terms with many entertainers who performed there, especially Frank, Dean, and Sammy

The grandmother-in-law of one of our volunteers was seriously wounded in the crossfire when John Dillinger was killed

One of our volunteers was in Washington D.C. when the sniper was at large

One of our volunteers dutifully reported to her supervisor on her first job that she thought a lot of the people she was supervising were undocumented immigrants...and was promptly fired.

One of our volunteers, on her first day of her first job after college, had to deal with a report that her supervisor was a sexual predator.

One of our volunteers got his bachelor's degree when he was 20 and his master's when he was 21, but couldn't get a job until he was 36.

One of our volunteers is the son of an Icelandic war bride.

One of our volunteers sports sunglasses which, if viewed from the correct angle, show skulls in the lenses. We liked to have her work the opening night crowd.

Still, on Veteran's Day, the first person I think of is cartoonist Walt Kelly, who once objected, in his comic strip Pogo, to the Veteran's Day moment of silence. He suggested that we had it all backwards. Maybe, he said, we should all of us shut up for the rest of the year so that we could think of something worthwhile to say on the Eleventh of November.

This blog has been running for about six months now, and if no Internet Authroity has presented me with a gold watch, at least I haven't been run out of town for practicing literature without a license, either. Anyway, I thought I should take the opportunity to issue a few updates and addenda to my previous thoughts.

1. Banana boxes still strike people as excellent things to pack books in. the power of the Internet to change lives would seem to have been exaggerated. And I would just like to add a word to those of you who use egg crates as a substitute.

Don't.

Egg crates, if you've never encountered them (I never saw one before coming to the Big City, myself) are extremely large boxes designed to carry large numbers of cartons filled with eggs. They're roughly, oh, a mile long and half a mile high and some people think they can pack lots of books in them. You CAN pack lots of books in them. Just don't expect me to pick one up for you after you've packed it. (If filled with small paperbacks only, they are relatively liftable, and very impressive, too, if you are inclined to show off by picking up big boxes of books. Wouldn't know about that, myself.)

2. One of the Mrs. Mallowmars came in with three boxes of books just after I had written about the late Mr. Mallowmar. None of his books seem to have been included, so maybe her collection of his books, at least, has been cleaned away.

3. In my list of books I'm rather apathetic about receiving, I did not mention books that have been mouse-chewed, but I think I will now, having run into four boxes where there were mistakeable signs that someone thought Les Brown's motivational book would make good nesting material. I know, I know: if the books have been sitting in the garage for ten years, you don't want to check right down to the bottom and see if the box is swollen with mold or has been sub-let. But I do not intend to argue ownership of a box of books with a mouse, and bringing me any collections where one user of the collection has taken up residence is just a waste of your time. (For the record, no one has ever brought me a box of books with a mouse in it, living or dead. I'm still getting over the box of books that hissed at me, though. That one had been in the attic for a while, and a bat had curled up in it for the winter. I quietly carried the box of books outside and left it there for 24 hours. The bat was gone in the morning. I always assumed he flew away to warmer quarters, but someone has since suggested that a miscreant could have come along and STOLEN my bat. It is indeed a wicked, wicked world.)

4. Thank you for asking but no, rather to my surprise, I have not run out of stories about books yet. I don't think I've even found all the old Book Fair songs yet. And as I recall, somewhere in the eighties there was a story about Bookman and Pamphlet, who rode around Chicagio in the Bookmobile rescuing unloved books. When you see that one here, you'll know I've reached the bottom of the barrel and have started scraping through.

Yeah, we've had plenty of things come through the Book fair with the signatures of Chicago and Illinois celebrities on 'em. In fact, I think we've had representatives of just about everything Chicago is famous for.

The literary world is well represented, of course: Andrew Greeley, Ben Hecht, Bill Kurtis, Bill Granger, Sara Paretsky, Christie Hefner, Eugene Kennedy, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and many others (Didn't know Minnie was from Chicago, did you?). And scads of politicians: Burton Natarus, Ed Burke, Carter Harrison Jr., George Ryan.... In fact, we once had a book inscribed by Royko to Natarus, which the library decided to keep, what with the historic nature of THAT conjunction. And once, only once, Richard J. Daley. (Sold it to a member of the county government, as it happens.)

We haven't done so well in Chicago sports, probably because nobody gives those souvenirs away: a Bear or two, a White Sock...we did get Leo Durocher, though his Cubs period is not exactly the high point of his biography. Even worse, we have never had a single gangster autograph (that I know about,, though there was the estate of a lawyer once whose collection made me a bit uneasy.)

Architects, though: we've had architects: Bertrand Goldberg, Eliel Saarinen, Morrell Shoemaker, George Danforth. And we're pretty good on autographs of Chicago scholars: Hannah Gray, Paul F. Gehl, Theodore W. Schulz, and Robert W. Karrow. Books have come in signed by businessmen like Phillip Klutznick, Leo G. Burnett, Fairfax Cone, Joy Morton, and Philip D. Block III. Ramsey Lewis has to pretty much cover the Chicago music scene solo (though we almost had Daniel Barenboim and we did have Vivian Solti.) And in classes by themselves, we can boast great Chicago chef Louis Szathmary, and an 8x10 glossy signed by Kukla, Fran, AND Ollie.

Now, of course, there are more and better autographs upstairs, from Abraham Lincoln to Al Capone. (No, not s letter from Abraham Lincoln to Al Capone; haven't you had your morning coffee yet?) The Newberry, though, does not collect autographs per se: these are just items in larger research collections. We at the Book Fair are the ones who go in for single autographs: YOURS, for example. (No, I was NOT going to say "on a check". I was going to say "on two or three checks". Make no small plans.)

It is November, now, and time to start talking about the things we talk about in this country when we approach the last two months of the year. These two months are a time of tradition, joy, and light, so we make it a point of honor to grumble loudly about them. Featuring highly in any such grumble is fruitcake.

Now I like fruitcake, myself. I come of a fruitcake family, and you may take that any way you wish. In fact, I have a greater tolerance for fruitcake than for fruitcake jokes: there's just one fruitcake, and it keeps getting circulated every year, a fruitcake is a useful gift because you can use it to bash anyone who tries to bring you more fruitcake, etc. But even I will admit that I have been served some pretty unappetizing fruitcake.

The fruitcake of stereotype is thick, heavy, indigestible. This stereotype is so widespread that there are people who have never eaten fruitcake and never intend to, simply because of the stories. That the steretype is sometimes true adds to the problem.

Fruitcake books affect people the same way, often for the same reason. They were forced to try these in childhood, when anything more complicated than fudge or the Smurfs was beyond their tastes. You know which books I mean: thick, heavy, and famous. I did an informal survey once on the books you'd wish on your worst enemy, if stuck on desert isle, and lots of these books came up: political or philosophical tomes, 600-page classics of western literature, and so forth.

The funny thing about the survey was that just about every book listed was somebody else's favorite. (In fact, I was asked not to divulge the name of the person who picked Boswell's Life of Johnson to a handy Johnson fan we both knew.) Tristram Shandy made the list right away, a book I always considered a perfect fruitcake, just chock full of nuts. Somebody out there DOES read the fruitcake books, just as some of us do eat the fruitcake.

So when considering your holiday gift list this year, you really ought to consider throwing in a fruitcake book or two, one of those books you actually liked but won't admit it lest your friends think you're intellectual, or something. Or get one for yourself, and leave it lying around. It's the same theory that keeps fruitcake fans sending out that heavy holiday foodstuff. If it sits around long enough, there's a chance someone out there will sample it and like it.

(Okay, or they can regift the book to their nearest Book Fair. MUST you keep discovering my fiendish plots?)

Somebody asked me if his first edition of a book by a Really Big Name was worth much. "Well," says I, "A lot can depend on how early it is."

He broke in, "It's really old. It goes back to the 1970s!"

After burying the body, I realized I could have been a bit clearer. What frequently matters when pricing a first edition by a famous author is how early it came in the author's career. See, after an author hits it big, the publisher will print a couple million copies, but for a first timer, 20,000 may well do. Thus the book published when Nobel Laureate Jan Doe was a Hamburger Hotel hostess with literary dreams winds up being 100 times harder to get than the one from twenty years later, when she was on the Bestseller Lists month after month and owned controlling stock in Hamburger Hotel. The prices is often (not always) correspondingly higher as well.

Famously, the British publisher of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone printed only 5,000 copies. That, as much as the fact that the book set off a worldwide phenomenon, is what makes the price so high. The same goes for other phenoms. The Stephen King market has its ups and downs, as do Anne Rice sales. But for their first books, Carrie and Interview With a Vampire, the price will always run high.

What's even better is if the author's first book is something completely different from what brought fame and (one hopes) fortune. Nobel winner William Faulkner, known for his tales of a grim, steamy south, started off with a couple of books of (reportedly fairly sentimental) poetry. Jim Thompson, whose books were steamier and darker yet, began with uncredited works on Oklahoma for the WPA. And E. Annie Proulx, Pulitzer winner for The Shipping News, and author of the story which became the movie Brokeback Mountain, got her start with the Rodale Press, writing How To books. Her first book was on the making of cider, and her second was a dairy cookbook.

Of course, it's the prom picture syndrome. We all want to know what our icons were like when they were starting out, when fame and perhaps even skill were still something to be reached for, but youth and determination were trying to make up for that. Whether the reaction is "Wow, even then!" or "Who would've guessed?", one likes to see those trial efforts.

And the appeal for booksellers is that it gives us an excuse to say, "No, for Hemingway, 1973 is way too recent."