the literary life MY LIFE IN BOOKSJULY AUGUST 2019 28The top 50 entrants are
invited to the workshop, the
faculty for which is drawn
from the Festival’s presenters.
Past faculty includes
Ann Hood, Marilyn Chin,
Andre Dubus III, and
Luis Alberto Urrea.and Masters Workshop
Fiction, nonfiction and
poetry entries are now being
accepted for the eighth
annual writing competition,
offering more than $5,000
in prize money.In addition to cash prizes,
first- through third-place
winners in each category get
scholarships to the March
2020 Masters Workshop.Tucson Festival of BooksThis competition is the
avenue to two days of
hands-on workshopping
with a faculty of top U.S
authors following the
Tucson Festival of Books.Deadline for entries is 5 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019
To enter, go to
TucsonFestivalofBooks.orgCALL FOR ENTRIES
the book was published—that Gatsby
wanted to appear elegantly bookish
although in fact he had no interest in
reading. The alternative view is that
Gatsby was a canny collector who
didn’t want to spoil his books by tak-
ing a knife to them. That poses an
interesting question: If one purchased
Gatsby’s library, would one prefer the
valuable, uncut, mint-condition books
or the cut-open, well-read books with
Gatsby’s greasy fingerprints all over
the pages?
If I had the choice of buying an
old, cut book as a reading copy or a
newer, smooth-edged volume, I’d buy
the cut book every time. I like the look
of them and the smell of the old, dusty
paper, which has a texture to it. Often
they’re illustrated, which adds to their
charm. The translation of Balzac’s
The Thirteen that I own, published in
1899, has cut pages that are admirably
ragged, as if the reader had haggled
them apart with a rusty pruning saw.
The book reads especially well. It was
an Acres of Books bargain at 95 cents.
I was a sucker for the central notion of
the book: a secret society made up of
thirteen rich and powerful men who
controlled the workings of France in
the early nineteenth century. In the
years that followed my first reading
of the book, I used The Thirteen as the
working title for three different nov-
els. In the back of my mind hovered
the notion that if my anticipated plot
failed, I could shoehorn a thirteen-
member secret society into the book
to jazz it up.
In another of my books the pages
are cut until page 49, where the reader
had apparently run out of patience
and made a critical statement about
the book simply by putting down the
knife. My all-around favorite is a vol-
ume given by my great-aunt Esther to
my uncle Paul when he was a boy—the
1926 Scribner edition of Kidnapped,
illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. The book
was passed down to my cousin Tom
when he was a boy and then on to me.
All the pages are cut except the final
two, which are blank, something Icould ascertain only by pulling them
carefully away from each other and
peering into the mysterious, eye-
shaped void between. Why hadn’t
Uncle Paul simply slit them apart, if
only to finish the job? Why not make
that final cut? I’m tempted to believe
it was some variety of superstition,
which prevents me from picking up
a knife and cutting open the pages
myself.M
Y FAVORITE b o o k s
are kept in my study,
under the stairs in my
house. I’m looking at
them now. There’s a copy of Between
Pacific Tides by Ed Ricketts and Jack
Calvin, the 1962 edition revised by
Joel Hedgpeth, whose last name I
gave to two different characters in
two different books. In my youth I
kept aquariums and badly wanted
to be a marine biologist and spend
my life poking around in tide pools.
Every creature that has ever crawled
or walked or swum in a tide pool or
lived in near-shore waters along the
California coast is pictured in Between
Pacific Tides. The foreword was written
by John Steinbeck, my first “favorite
writer” out of what has become scores
of favorites, just as I have scores of
favorite books, including Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row. Ed Ricketts puts in
an appearance as Doc, the owner of
Western Biological Laboratories,
the inspiration for which still stands
in Monterey. The original building,
where Ricketts worked and later lived,
burned in a cannery fire in 1936, only
a short time after the manuscript of
Between Pacific Tides had fortuitously
been sent to Stanford University for
publication.
I first read Cannery Row when I was
twelve or thirteen years old, and I can
still remember how the place looked
in the old days, before Monterey was
modernized. I came close to buying
the mummy of an “Indian princess” in
a junk store on Cannery Row in 1972.
The colorful, old cannery buildings
were being knocked down and hauled