Saturday morning in Vancouver, and Karli and I are sitting on the tarmac at YVR, waiting to start a one-week getaway in sunny Palm Springs, a welcome break from the uncertain weather of British Columbia in the spring.
Although I do a lot of casual travel reading on my iPhone, I like to have a paper book for planes - flight attendants seem to be happier if you're not using your phone at takeoff, airplane mode or not, and it's also a good opportunity to catch up on some reading.
My seatmate on the aisle side is perusing The Untethered Soul, a New York Times best seller from 2007 - not exactly current, but a far cry from my 1960 vintage Badger Books paperback copy of The Brain Stealers*, by Murray Leinster, which I pulled out of my tsundoku stack for the trip, along with a couple of other selections that caught my eye. By some standards, this might be a valued antique, although it's hardly in mint condition, and only cost me a pound or thereabouts last year at a used book store in London's Portobello Market.
As is common with books from this era, the cover has absolutely no relationship to the story:** I have no idea who the glowing woman is supposed to be, and the villains are globular pink bloodsucking alien mind parasites (think Wilson with little fangs). The hero of the story protects himself from their mind control powers with a cap made out of coiled iron wire while he builds a brain jamming machine to defeat them - tin foil has been available for hat creation since 1910, but you can't always depend on being in the kitchen when crunch time hits.
Looking casually around the plane, it occurs to me that you rarely see anyone reading a notably old book in public. I can't be the only person with a nostalgic affection for classic novels, but even being a bit of a collector aside, I don't think I've recently seen anyone on a plane flipping through The Godfather, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Hotel New Hampshire, or any of a hundred different best sellers from the past. It may just be that fame is fleeting, and that the general public will read a book once on vacation and then donate it to Goodwill or a book donation bin for hospital libraries, or maybe drop it off at a used bookstore, where someone like me brings it home to complete the circle twenty years later - or, in this case, 59.
- Sid
* Which, oddly, contains four pages of advertising, including a fascinating opportunity to purchase Joan the Wad, "Queen of the Lucky Cornish Pixies", and offers to both increase and reduce your bust using a "harmless vegetable cream" - well, two different creams, to be clear, it would be asking a lot for one product to provide both of those services.
** There's actually a sound economic reason for this. Pulp magazine and book publishers would often contact an artist and order generic paintings in bulk, then somewhat randomly assign them to covers.
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