Consider this a thematic follow-up to my earlier discussion of the book Gaming the Vote, in which we addressed the niche movement to revamp our voting practices by phasing out single winner plurality voting.

Obama surges in book sales [read story]
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
Fri Feb 29, 3:02 PM ET

NEW YORK – Maybe it’s the prose, or the charisma, or the novelty. But if voter excitement were measured by book sales, then Sen. Barack Obama would be the clear front-runner.

Sales have exploded in 2008 for the works of Obama, the Illinois Democrat who has steadily climbed in the polls all year. Sales have stayed flat for the works of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who quickly and surprisingly became his party’s presumptive nominee after he seemed finished last summer.

[...]

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, combined sales for Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope” were averaging more than 35,000 a week in late February, more than triple the pace of early January, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was still favored to be the Democrat nominee.

“Dreams From My Father,” a memoir, first came out in 1995; “The Audacity of Hope,” a political book, in 2006.

Meanwhile, McCain’s sudden prominence has had no discernible impact on “Faith of My Fathers,” a highly praised, best-selling memoir released in 1999, and on “Hard Call,” a book about character in public life first released last August and out in paperback with a printing of 50,000. [...]

Weekly sales for Clinton’s memoir, “Living History,” have also averaged 1,000 or less throughout 2008. The book was a near-instant million seller when published in 2003.

Thankfully, nobody is seriously proposing to gauge voter preference in this way, otherwise Stephen Colbert [check catalog] would surely own the Democratic front-runner position¹ instead of a failed candidacy (his Presidential aspirations were painfully dashed in South Carolina last November). So clearly, the entire notion is thoroughly farcical.

Measuring voter preference according to a candidate’s Yahoo! Buzz index, however…well, it’s only a matter of time. Those who resist will be the first against the wall when the Yahoo! Revolution happens.

No, not these guys, or even this guy, but rather this woman.

This comes from The Telegraph:

‘Wolf woman’ invents Holocaust survival tale
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels

A woman’s best-selling account of how she lost her parents to the Holocaust and survived by living with wolves in the forests of Europe has been exposed as a fabrication.

“Surviving with Wolves” [alternately: Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years], first published 11 years ago, has been translated into 18 languages and was recently turned into a film.

But in a statement issued by her lawyers, Misha Defonseca, who was born Monique De Wael, confessed that while her parents, members of Belgium’s resistance, were killed by the Nazis her family was not Jewish and most of the events of the book were made up.

[...]

After crossing Belgium, Germany and Poland alone on foot, close to starvation in a vast forest, she was adopted by a family of wolves.

[...]

But suspicions were aroused in Belgium’s Jewish community and some of her old school friends from the Anderlecht district of Brussels recognised her.

They insisted that she was born and raised a Catholic by the De Wael family and lived with her grandfather after her parents were deported.

[...]

Despite growing evidence in recent weeks of inconsistencies in her story, including a birth certificate showing she was not Jewish, Mrs Donfonseca insisted she was telling the truth until she released her statement.

And that thunderous crack you just heard like the firecrackers of the gods is actually the racket produced by thousands of palms meeting forehead as it occurs to technical services librarians around the world that Surviving with Wolves will need to be reclassified on Monday (breathe easy, FPL staff—it isn’t in our collection).

Look, I don’t mean to suggest that my b.s. detector is particularly acute, but when you claim that you were taken in by a benevolent wolf pack with no designs whatsoever on rending your soft, juicy flesh from your delicious, marrow-filled bones…well, the burden of proof is just on you, I’m sorry.

Here’s a novel business model: how do you sell more books when the market for them has been slowly contracting for decades while competition has grown and product awareness remains in the toilet despite the fact that we’re living in the information age?

I’ll give you a moment to meditate upon that problem.

…

All right—give it up. You aren’t going to figure it out and you don’t have to prove anything to me. I’m not your business professor. The answer, for the curious, is that you’ve got to disperse your product at a net profit per unit moved of zero (dollars, pounds, rupees, pieces of eight, etc.). For free.

Yes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were right when they said:

Give it away, give it away, give it away now
Give it away, give it away, give it away now
Give it away, give it away, give it away now
I cant tell if I’m a kingpin or a pauper

Greedy little people in a sea of distress
Keep your more to receive your less
Unimpressed by material excess
Love is free, love me, say, “Hell yes!”

So it’s clear that they were talking about the book publishing industry there, but I’m still not quite certain what they meant by “Come and drink it up from my fertility / Blessed with a bucket of lucky mobility.” Probably, I don’t want to know. That sounds kinda dirty.

What am I talking about? This recent Associated Press article, “Novel offered for free online” by Hillel Italie, that’s what!

Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children [check catalog], a best-selling debut novel about characters adrift in Las Vegas, is the latest book to be offered for free online.

Starting Wednesday, Bock’s novel can be downloaded from the Web site http://www.beautifulchildren.net/read. The free electronic edition will also be available from such leading retailers as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

[...]

“The book really struck a chord with readers as bookstore sales have demonstrated,” Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for Random House, said in a statement. “We believe it has even more potential readers out there, and the best way to reach them is online, with this unrestricted access.”

Publishers have worried about Internet piracy and whether online text could hurt traditional sales. But lately the trend has been to make more books available on the Internet and hope that interest in all formats will be increased.

[...]

“We’re willing to sacrifice a few sales in the expectation that a wider sampling opportunity will build consumer awareness and more business for our booksellers and our authors,” said Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House, Inc., [...]

“Historically, book publishers have relied on sampling and giveaways. Previously, we’ve had printouts of first chapters or sections of a book available. This takes the sample to a larger and more technologically sophisticated form.”

Another large publisher has been playing in this conceptual pool as well, lately. HarperCollins presently has made available a pretty nifty “Browse Inside” feature, providing full access to such new releases as The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho [check catalog] and Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld [check catalog].

Come get some!

This is a prize that, had it not already been invented, I would have had to invent it, myself.

The UK trade publication The Bookseller announced its shortlist on February 8 for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. This year’s selections:

• I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen by Jasper McCutcheon
• How to Write a How to Write Book by Brian Piddock
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues by Catharine A MacKinnon
• Cheese Problems Solved by P. L. H. McSweeney
• If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs by Big Boom
• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood by Dee Gordon

You may notice that I didn’t bother to provide catalog links for any of those titles. Don’t get your fingers cramped searching; I’m not being difficult or lazy—FPL simply doesn’t own any of these books. Shockingly, possessing a bizarre title isn’t a relevant criterion in our collection development procedures.

In addition to that, there hasn’t yet been a full-scale community clamor for the $250 Cheese Problems Solved. Our fanatical cheese enthusiast contingent in Fayetteville has been oddly muted.

In any event, voting has gone live over at The Bookseller website, so by all means, feel free to make your voice heard.

I’ll buck the protection of the secret ballot and tell you that I cast my e-vote for I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen. Here’s the description as clipped from the shortlist announcement:

I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen
By Jasper McCutcheon (The Nazca Plains Corporation)
This is a rare fictional entry for the Diagram Prize. The novel stars Captain Henry Mitchell, a US Navy fighter pilot who is forced to abandon his Grumman after battling Japanese Zeros over the Pacific. “Parachuting into rainforest canopy, Mitchell is greeted by a lost tribe of pygmies and their insanely cruel leader, a female; a Caucasian westerner like himself who subjects him to unholy tortures both painful and erotic . . . One strong man, stripped naked, bound and helpless, versus one female tyrant and her legion of little devils—who will win this battle?” Mr McCutcheon’s follow-up novel is just out: Go Ahead, Woman, Do Your Worst! Erotic Tales of Heroes Chained.
Spotted by Emma Jepson of Borders UK

The title to the follow-up may be as perfectly stupid as the current nominee.

It feels as though I see these sorts of idiosyncratic book titles all the time, but in concertedly thinking back upon it, only two from recent orders came to mind, and I’m not certain they are odd so much as they are merely amusing. Or in any case, they make me laugh.

• Skinny Bitch: A No-Nonsense, Tough-Love Guide for Savvy Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap and Start Looking Fabulous! by Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman [check catalog].

Skinny Bitch may, in fact, be the best title ever, though it faces stiff competition from its successor title, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kick-Ass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!) by the same authors. That one kicks it up a notch, though at this point, they’re being derivative of themselves, so I’ve got to knock off a few points on originality, though I realize it’s a branding thing.

• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton [check catalog].

Okay, I realize that it looks as though I’ll laugh at any title that contains profanity…and that’s probably true, though both of these titles also happen to be pretty darn clever. This latter book also benefits from containing a sort of elegantly distilled truth about workplace politics that more companies should really take to heart.

What titles would you nominate?

Everything old is new again.

We seem to have a retrospective theme happening retrospectively here. In January we skulked about the shadow-filled streets of 1930s San Francisco for The Maltese Falcon [check catalog], and in February we filled our lungs with the black dust storms of the Depression-era High Plains for The Worst Hard Time [check catalog].

On March 3—in order to jibe with our larger In Focus series on American Indian culture—we once again step into the Wayback Machine and immerse ourselves in another bygone cultural landscape. Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt, is a telling of the life of the eponymous medicine man Nicholas Black Elk. The book grew out of a series of conversations held, coincidentally, in the early 1930s between the author and Black Elk, the latter’s son functioning as interpreter between the two men.

Published originally in 1932, the book, though well-received, fell into neglect for years until it gained a second wind of sorts when taken up by 1960s counterculture. From the book jacket:

Black Elk Speaks is the story of the Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during the momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. Black Elk met the distinguished poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt (1881-1973) in 1930 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and chose Neihardt to tell his story. Neihardt understood and conveyed Black Elk’s experiences in this powerful and inspirational message for all humankind.

When Black Elk received his great vision, white settlers were invading the Lakotas’ homeland, decimating buffalo herds, and threatening to extinguish the Lakotas’ way of life. The Lakotas fought fiercely to retain their freedom and way of life, a dogged resistance that resulted in a remarkable victory at the Little Bighorn and an unspeakable tragedy at Wounded Knee. Black Elk Speaks offers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time, however. As related by Neihardt, Black Elk’s searing visions of the unity of humanity and the earth have made this book a venerated spiritual classic. Whether appreciated as the poignant tale of a Lakota life, a history of a Native nation, or an enduring spiritual testament, Black Elk Speaks is unforgettable.

We’ve still got a handful of copies left of Black Elk Speaks, so if you’d like to attend, be sure to come in and claim a book sometime soon. I’d appreciate an R.S.V.P., though it isn’t strictly necessary. Please use the e-mail address at the bottom of the page or call 571-2222 x. 4450 for the adult reference desk.

For a list of other upcoming and past book club selections, visit our book club page.

Lincoln…Abe Lincoln

If you can imagine a book award, chances are that somebody else thought of it first.

The Lincoln Prize at Gettysburg College shall be awarded annually by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, or the American Civil War soldier, or a subject relating to their era…

The Prize is intended chiefly to encourage outstanding new scholarship, but a lifetime contribution to the study of Lincoln, or the American Civil War soldier, may qualify for the award.

From the Gettysburg College Lincoln Prize page.

In the interest of total disclosure, I will tell you that you might find the winning book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters [check catalog], to be sorely lacking in its “About Lincoln” to “Not about Lincoln” content ratio.

But you can relax, Lincolnamaniacs—no need to commence another online petition, because Lincoln took the other half of the prize with The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics by James Oakes [check catalog].

That’s right—in 2008, if I am understanding this article correctly, the world witnessed a stunning draw for top prize. And nothing was ever the same afterward…

Facetiousness aside, it strikes me that one hundred forty-three years post mortem, readers still can’t get quite enough Lincoln. One would think that after all this time, the well of Lincoln scholarship might have dried, or at least gone stagnant—and yet 2007 birthed a virtual glut of Lincoln-related books, and the following list contains only the titles that FPL acquired.

• Lincoln Revisited : New Insights from the Lincoln Forum by John Y. Simon [check catalog]
• President Lincoln : The Duty of a Statesman by William Lee Miller [check catalog]
• Land of Lincoln : Adventures in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson [check catalog]
• One man great enough : Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War by John C. Waugh [check catalog]
• Case of Abraham Lincoln : A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President by J. M. Fenster [check catalog]
• House of Abraham : Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War by Stephen William Berry [check catalog]
• Stealing Lincoln’s Body by Thomas J. Craughwell [check catalog]
• The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton [check catalog]
• Lincoln Legends : Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President by Edward Steers [check catalog]
• Lincoln the Lawyer by Brian R. Dirck [check catalog]
• Americanism : The Fourth Great Western Religion by David Hillel Gelernter [check catalog]

See? This is what happens when you award prize money for something!

Well, that last one is only tangentially a Lincoln book, but you get the idea. I didn’t even include the youth titles.

I’m not totally certain why Abraham Lincoln still rates a continuous stream of scholarship more than seven score years later, but I can almost guarantee you that we won’t see the end of this trend any time soon. There seems to be a sort of ongoing tug of war between the faction of authors attempting to dymythologize our sixteenth president and the faction whose interests reside primarily in placing him back upon the pedestal each time he slips.

Both a man and an icon, Lincoln seems to lend himself to dichotomy. A great man, surely, but in many ways, an even greater enigma. It will be a while yet before anybody willingly gives up the last word on the topic.

That all being said, I’d like to see more future Lincoln scholarship delve into finally investigating the Abe who fought alongside Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek episode “The Savage Curtain”. That’s a real untapped well.

I mean, who was he? Was that the actual Lincoln, or just some alien who took his form after scanning Kirk’s mind and discovering that Lincoln was the Captain’s historical hero? I want to know, and I am absolutely positive that I can’t be the only one. Right?

University of Arkansas English professor Emily A. Bernhard Jackson will be on hand Tuesday, February 19 (tomorrow!) at noon in order to ply eager attendees with her expert’s grasp of romantic literature.

Those of you whose familiarity with the notion of the romance begins and ends with Harlequin and its ilk, get ready to have your minds blown. As a colleague helpfully described this in an internal e-mail promoting this program: “This is about the real deal—19th century poets drank absinthe and had tortured souls and stuff like that.” (And I’m sure the employee responsible for that statement will love that I repeated it on the blog.)

Dr. Bernhard Jackson is a scholar of English Romantic literature who will discuss such jolly, unconventional historical characters as the scandalous Lord Byron, who was so wildly lascivious that only the Greeks could tolerate him,¹ and the ever-so-sensitive Percy Shelley…who fought like a girl.²

We hope to see you there!

Shawna Thorup, the Fayetteville Public Library’s director of operations, recently participated in the Notable Books Council, which is responsible for compiling a list of the year’s 25 best books.The 12 council members, representing areas throughout the country, were invited to participate because of their professional knowledge.

Thorup read more than 170 books in 2007¹ to prepare for her work on the council.
The group selected 25 books for their significant contribution to the expansion of knowledge and for the pleasure they can provide to adult readers.

The group has selected the top 25 books each year since 1944. The complete 2008 list is:

FICTION

• Bloom, Amy, Away [check catalog]
• Carlson, Ron, Five Skies [check catalog]
• Chabon, Michael, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union [check catalog]
• Clarke, Brock, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England [check catalog]
• Clinch, Jon, Finn: a novel [check catalog]
• Crace, Jim, The Pesthouse [check catalog]
• Englander, Nathan, The Ministry of Special Cases [check catalog]
• Holthe, Tess Uriza, The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes [check catalog]
• Jones, Lloyd, Mister Pip [check catalog]
• McEwan, Ian, On Chesil Beach [check catalog]
• Malouf, David, Complete Stories [check catalog]
• Petterson, Per, Out Stealing Horses [check catalog]
• Trevor, William, Cheating at Canasta [check catalog]

NONFICTION

• Ackerman, Diane, The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story [check catalog]
• Angier, Natalie, The Canon [check catalog]
• Ayres, Ian, Super Crunchers [check catalog]
• Godwin, Peter, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun [check catalog]
• Groopman, Jerome, How Doctors Think [check catalog]
• Howell, Georgina, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert [check catalog]
• Isaacson, Walter, Einstein: His Life and Universe [check catalog]
• Kingsolver, Barbara, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life [check catalog]
• Margonelli, Lisa, Oil on the Brain [check catalog]
• Weisman, Alan, The World Without Us [check catalog]

POETRY

• Bosselaar, Laure-Anne, A New Hunger [check catalog]
• Kennedy, X.J., In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus [check catalog]

1. In case you were curious, that’s a rate of 3.3 books per week, or roughly a half a book a day. And no, Shawna doesn’t eat or sleep.

irony¹
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eironia, from eiron dissembler

3 a (1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2): an event or result marked by such incongruity

At this week’s staff meeting, the library collectively patted itself on the back for a 10% increase in items borrowed in 2007 over 2006. To quantify that for you, library customers checked out in total 951,872 items last year. Compare that with the number reported in FPL’s 1998 annual report: 299,085 (reported as “use of materials”). That’s a 218% increase, by the way, in fewer than ten years.

Now here’s the irony: the very day before the unveiling of these circulation numbers, I had come across a posting by John Markoff on the New York Times blog detailing the most recent musings—fresh from Macworld Expo—of all around trendy guy Steve Jobs (Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc).² As a long-time tech guru to computer nerds, Jobs has a tendency not only to possess an opinion on most things of electronic design, but to also espouse said opinion; and for reasons either good or bad, the media tend to take notice.

So when Steve Jobs decides to talk about the imminent death of reading for pleasure, it is worth commenting upon, perhaps regardless of whether or not you would know Steve Jobs from Adam. Here’s how Markoff reports it:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

My curiosity piqued, I went flying off to the Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent American Time Use Survey just to check out the current pie chart on what people are doing with their leisure time. Somewhat encouragingly, on average people still spend 22 minutes per day reading, which is only really meaningful once compared with the 19 minutes per day people spend playing games and using a computer for leisure. Soooo…yay! Reading still wins! (Oh, by the way, Americans spend over half of their leisure time watching TV, but that probably won’t surprise any of you.)

Look, I know this isn’t disproving or proving anything, but—though I love dearly what computers make possible—it still gives me somewhat of a warm, fuzzy feeling that reading edges them out for command of our collective attention.

For the record, Jobs’s proclamation had rung somewhat false to me just intuitively. Then again, working at the library I tend to see both sides of this discussion. For every Cover to Cover participant who fills up a 20-entry reading log in two weeks, there’s a person sitting in our computer lab for four hours a day hanging out on MySpace (the BLS ATUS could possibly define this as “socializing and communicating”, though given what I personally witness, that description is probably charitable at best—ye gads, now I really do sound old).

Anyway, one could effectively mount quite a strong defense for or offense against the health of the book industry at this point, and it doesn’t bear me getting fully into it here. I encourage you to visit The Media Guy Blog at Advertising Age if you are interested in the particulars of just why Steve Jobs may be offering up punditry on a subject about which he has only a shallow understanding. I’ll quote a snippet here for the sake of conversation:

As for Jobs’ stat, it seems he extrapolated it from an old National Endowment for the Arts study, which found that in 2002, just 57% of American adults reported reading a book. Then again, according to an Associated Press-Ipson [sic] poll released last August, 27% of American adults read no books last year — ergo, nearly three-quarters did. In fact, the poll revealed that the “typical American adult” read four books last year.

“Who are these ‘people’ to whom Steve Jobs is referring?” Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief Sara Nelson asked me last week. “Not the million-ish who are devouring Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ or the ones who line up for Harry Potter and/or James Patterson novels.” She added: “All I can say is that when I sat in restaurants and airports or on buses or trains and pulled out my Kindle, I got more attention than if I’d shown up naked — with an adorable puppy.”

If you would like to read more about the AP-Ipsos poll that Simon Dumenco mentions in the above post, you can follow this link to a USA Today story that discusses it. Among the highlights: of people who read at least one book, the median figure for women was nine, and for men, five; people age 50 or older read more than 49 and younger; people with college degrees read the most; Democrats and liberals read more than Republicans and Conservatives; Southerners read a lot of romance novels.

Food for thought. But what do you think?

1. From Merriam-Webster Online.
2. “The Passion of Steve Jobs”, January 15, 2008

While flipping through Chase’s Calendar of Events (today is National Inane Answering Message Day, by the way—the day when we’re all supposed to purge and replace our played out and overlong outgoing messages), I noticed that tomorrow, January 31, is Zane Grey’s [check catalog] birthday. Or at least…it would be if Zane Grey were not long dead. He would be 136 were he alive.

Grey is well known even today as a prolific author of (some would say, “disposable”) Western novels. A quick search of the library catalog finds us 105 results. Some of these, admittedly, are alternate format records (for example, the library owns a mammoth collection of large print titles by Grey), and it is worth mentioning that Grey seems to have made the leap to the 21st Century, as we have got five of his books available in downloadable audio through NetLibrary.

Zane Grey is largely appreciated historically—if he is appreciated at all—as a chronicler of the American West, since much of what he wrote about derived, at least in the setting, from his own travels through the American West during the early part of 20th Century. As a literary figure, critics have always been sparing with their kindness for the author. The Oxford Companion to American Literature [check catalog] places Grey’s oeuvre firmly into the realm of the dime novel, or at least the “20th-century heir to the dime novel”: massively popular at the time, though of a workmanlike design and style.

I am not in a position to offer an opinion on this one way or the other, having never opened a Zane Grey novel in my life. Perhaps somebody with some personal knowledge of the subject can weigh in within the comment section below. I was surprised, however, to discover that Zane Grey was originally a dentist by trade. I’d always pictured him as some sort of born-in-the-saddle cowboy, but it turns out he was from Ohio. Who knew?

Of the reference works at the library offering historical literary biographies, I found the best of the Zane Grey write-ups in Twentieth-Century Western Writers [check catalog]. I’ll recount a few of the highlights here:

During his prolific 30-year career as a western writer, Zane Grey wrote on just about every aspect of the American West—the railroad, the telegraph, the cattle drive, the mountains, the range, the canyons, the desert, cowboys, outlaws, gunmen, Indians, Mexicans, Mormons, buffaloes, wild horses, range wars between cattlemen, and the timeless feud between cattlemen and sheepherders. Much of his knowledge was gained first-hand through trips in the regions he wrote about; in addition, he performed diligent historical research…

Although he came by much of his material originally, his literary method was derivative… He is often and justly criticized for his use of language, for he adopted the idiom of 19th-century romance without rejuvenating it.

The mass audience, nevertheless, has continued to read his books…

Riders of the Purple Sage has been his best-known novel…distinguished by an urgent evocation of the landscape… It succeeds as entertainment fiction through strong suspense and mystery, application of moral relativity rather than absolute law, and vicarious wish-fulfillment through definite problem-solving and domestic happiness. Simultaneously, it is marred by frequent overly lavish landscape descriptions…unrefined bigotry in its anti-Mormon sentiment, and an uncertain and sometimes puerile depiction of erotic attraction.

The U.P. Trail has earned its fame by virtue of its sound historical detail about the building of the transcontinental railroad…

The Vanishing American was the novel Grey wished to be remembered by… It successfully elicits sympathy for the Indians’ mistreatment at the hands of government administrators, but it often degenerates into a bombastic panegyric to the noble and dispossessed savage…

Grey’s novels have enjoyed perpetual popularity because, like the most popular Westerns by any author, they articulate problems clearly (albeit simply and often verbosely) for the common reader, and they provide safe, comfortable, reassuring answers… In an obituary notice in the Saturday Review, Burton Rascoe…predicted that Grey would fade into obscurity because “each generation produces its own Zane Greys.” Although Grey has suffered at the hands of literary scholars, he has continued to find new readers in successive generations…

I’ve clipped much of this article, but if you wish to read the entire thing, just ask at the adult reference desk. The article author, John D. Nesbitt, mostly goes on in this vein of crediting Grey with some minor accomplishment and then savaging his work in all other respects. Maybe he has a point—again, I’m not the one to say. But it must be worth something that over 70 years after his final novel, we still remember who Zane Grey was, let alone celebrate his birthday.

For more information about Zane Grey, the library has in its collection the following biographical titles:

• Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women by Thomas H. Pauly [check catalog].
• Zane Grey: A Biography by Frank Gruber [check catalog].