Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates - Mary Mapes Dodge

"On a bright December morning long ago, two thinly clad children were kneeling upon the bank of a frozen canal in Holland."

It is rare that I find myself willing to write about a book that I haven't even finished. In fact it is one of the cardinal sins of English Departments around the world (despite the fact that it happens daily by students and faculty alike). But this book holds a bit of a different significance for me than a great many in my collection. In fact this is one of those instances where the story within the book is overshadowed by the story of how I acquired it.

A great deal of the story you can glean from the quote below. The book is about children in Holland and they are cold. The main character's story, the story of Hans Brinker, is a classic bildungsroman told in the mode of a children's story. Hans is a poor child who skates around the canals of Holland on a poor boy's wooden skates. But eventually he is able to prove his worth in a skating contest in which he wins a pair of silver skates. This is as far as I ever got in the book and may not even be that entirely accurate. I stopped reading it mostly because my second semester of college was looming and the tale itself didn't carry quite as much appeal for a lad of nineteen than it might for a boy of ten.

But as I said, it was the acquisition of this volume that makes it a valuable piece in The Eastin Collection. When I was young my grandfather had a close friend named Addee. To this day I can't quite recall how we managed to gain her acquaintance but she was an elderly woman with a bright spirit. If I recall right she didn't have a great deal of family of her own and may, in fact, have never married at all. As a result she would often join my family during events or holidays. Each Christmas my sisters and I would receive a gift certificate from Addee (she had no other title than her first name). And my mother would always emphasize the importance of Thank You cards. Each year after Christmas we would faithfully write our Thank Yous to Addee, an act which, at that point, we did not understand the significance.

One year, instead of a gift certificate, Addee brought over this book. It was an old and yellowed volume even then but she handed it to me with a little sparkle in the corner of her wrinkled eye saying that she thought I might enjoy this book and that she had searched for it specifically. Looking back I feel slightly guilty for filling my childhood brain with Goosebumps instead of moral tales like this one but, so it goes.

Some years later Addee passed away suddenly and while we were sad that she would no longer be joining us for Christmas we soon learned the importance of common courtesies. I don't know many of the details but it had apparently been stipulated in Addee's will that a certain amount of her estate would be split between my sisters and I. It was by no means a large estate but it was the gesture that impacted us much more than the gift. To this day this little book, faded and musty as it may be, is a reminder of the importance of a simple Thank You even for simple gifts.
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Dodge, Mary Mapes. Hans Brinker or, The Silver Skates. Illus. Hilda Van Stockum. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Co., 1946.

New Digs

I know, I know. It has been far too long. Lesson plans for college courses do, in fact, take a great deal of time and energy, including the brainpower normally in reserve for the blog. I hope to re-regularize my postings and I expect to be held to this goal by you, my ambiguous cloud of readers. Next week I will talk about Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge but I have reserved today's posting to introduce you to the new home (physical, not electronic) of The Eastin Collection.

You may recall the howling mess of stacks depicted in my inagural blog. As you can see I had been horrendously taxed for space, what with a bookshelf full to the brim; a bibliophilic sin since, as you know, bookshelves should always have room for expansion. Not to mention the disarray with which my various anthologies and lesser-bound tomes were strewn about the floor. Well, back in March my wife and I bought a house and this meant that I got my own office space. I've since painted it blue (the rest of the house is beige. For some reason I feel like blue promotes a scholarly/artistic environment) and acquired a nice big wooden-slab-of-a-desk. But the bookshelves took some time.

Ever since our offer wen through I had been scouring craigslist, thrift stores, even Ikea and World Market for the perfect shelves. I was beginning to despair and became willing to simply grab a cheap particle-board set which is all too easy to find in the online classifieds when finally THE shelves appeared. Some may call me an old soul; I enjoy tweed, medieval books, old maps, and even have a quill pen sitting ready on my desk. So I was not about to fill my office with any of this modern Swedish junk, no. I was waiting for shelves of monolithic mahogany with beveled feet and crowns. This is precisely what appeared, and then some. Long story short, I picked them up and have only recently managed to organize the entirety of my book collection in the massive, tripartite book-castle (for it is hardly 'shelves') that looms behind me as I type.

 You may not be able to tell, but the center unit is nearly 7 feet tall! Also, the right side of the image may be a bit cut off because I had to stand in the closet in order to get the whole bookcase in the shot!

As you can see, I'm getting closer to that distant ideal. I, of course, have yet to have either the volume of books, the estate, or the time to construct the gigantic laddered affair that's been waiting in the attic of my imagination but this is good enough for now.