Wooden puzzle box from Budapest, Hungary

This book is not actually a book at all, but it looks like one and while I may be stretching the definition of ‘book’ this particular item has always sat very inconspicuously on my bookshelf and has become just as much a part of my book collection its fellows that simply happen to contain pages instead of sliding panels and secret keys. The box itself is about seven inches tall and five inches wide, lacquered black with small carving features that expose the lighter wood in much the same way that gilding accentuates the spines of nice hardcovers. Rather than literary treasures, this box contains an interesting variety of coins from around the world that tell their own stories about the various departures and returns taken by myself or people that are close to me. The box itself was a gift from my mother who found it in a vendor’s stall in Budapest’s Great Market Hall while on a European trip with my grandfather in 2001. Almost a decade and a half later, on my own European trip, I would find this very same market and pass by what was probably the very same vendor selling the very same puzzle boxes (this item will be closely connected to a travel guide that I will be posting on later this year).

As an added update to this entry, I have just recently added some Jamaican coinage to this box which already contains currency from Austria, Spain (both have specific versions of the Euro), Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and the UK.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien

I have annotated these three books together partly because Tolkien originally wrote them as one work but also because their story deals with all three. This boxed set is particularly lovely, including Tolkien’s original drawings and maps. Though I don’t often see them because of the dust-jackets, I also love that the cloth hardcover of each book also bears Tolkien’s icon of the Eye of Sauron surrounded by the gilded script that covers the ring in the story itself.

I cannot say for certain when I acquired this set of books. My parents had given me the set for Christmas of 2001. This was especially exciting since, as already mentioned, Tolkien’s works were iconic in my family. My sisters asked to borrow the books sometime around 2002 and at the time I thought nothing of it. But some years later (I cannot remember when), upon visiting one of my sisters I noticed a similar set of books on her shelf. Upon examining them I saw that the dust jackets were ripped and the pages were smudged. When I noted this, my sister buttoned her lip and attempted to hide a coy expression and I immediately realized that these were MY books! Knowing how much I valued this set, my sisters had grown fearful of my wrath after having damaged my books and, rather than admit it, had simply bought me a brand-new set and replaced it on my shelf, hoping I wouldn’t notice. The tale of this book is similarly appropriate: in terms of Tolkien’s narrative, The Fellowship of the Ring easily represents ‘departure’ since it is in this volume that Frodo leaves his home to follow in the footsteps of his uncle Bilbo and partake in a grand adventure. Even more interesting in light of the above story, is The Return of the King, which is titled for its focus on the restoration of an old line of kingship in Tolkien’s Middle Earth; though the books that I now own are new and unsullied, my original books will never actually return to me.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993.

Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie (reprise)

As with Dante, I have written on Peter Pan before, but I will include the newer collection entry even though some of the content is the same:

I suppose my experience with this book was the clearest indication of the journey that literary study would inspire me to since, I read almost the entirety of it while I should have been paying attention in my high school chemistry class in 2000. I can’t say that I regretted departing from the mundane world of equations and chemical configurations to accompany Peter and Wendy to Neverland. It helped, of course, that the book itself was a wonderful hardcover with rough pages and artwork that has come to epitomize the wild freedom that Barrie’s boy-who-would-not-grow-up represents. Even more appropriately, this volume had been a gift from the very same grandmother whose TV cabinet we had looted for her copy of Hook.

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. Illus. Trina Schart Hyman. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1980.

The Divine Comedy (second posting) - Dante Alighieri

So I've posted about Dante's Divine Comedy before, but I've gone ahead and included my entry from the collection anyway since it offers a somewhat different treatment of the work:

This is the volume I would consider to have initiated my collection. While I might have acquired the books above much earlier, this was the first book that I saw as part of my own collection. I had first encountered Dante in 1999 in a high school English textbook alongside the classic Gustave Doré illustrations of The Divine Comedy. When my paternal grandfather asked me what I wanted for Christmas, Dante was at the top of the list, preferably a volume with the Doré illustrations inside. Always one to please, my grandfather probably searched farther and wider than I am aware even now. He had not managed to find the book that I had hoped would be out there (it exists now, published by Barnes and Noble) but he DID find this fine book as well as a separate book of the complete Doré illustrations. I got BOTH for Christmas that year and have since enjoyed that fact that my own divine journey of book collecting began with this fine green-covered and rough-paged antiquarian edition of the Medieval Italian poet’s literary journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
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My relationship with this text has recently grown as well since I just completed a graduate seminar on Dante and Italian Cinema. My paper for the course, which you can read here, dealt with affective piety and a specific scene in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita. Fun stuff. I've included pictures of the translation I worked with for this paper below since you can see the original entry here.

A three volume set, as you can see. Especially nice since it includes Gustave Doré's art on its covers.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno. Trans. John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatorio. Trans. John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 3: Paradiso. Trans. John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.

Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

Continuing a brief pirate theme, I first read Treasure Island on a weekend that I had been shipped off to my paternal grandmother’s house while my parents were away. I started and finished Stevenson’s novel about Jim Hawkins’ adventure to find buried gold and his encounter with the dreaded pirate Long John Silver when I should have been sleeping on the floor of her sewing room, a room also appropriately dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf inhabited by her own literary treasures. The volume, a beautiful illustrated hardcover with rough-cut pages, is unfortunately not the one I had read in 1997 during that stay at grandma’s house, but one given to me later as a Christmas present from my sister who had recalled our adventures with pirates.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Illus. N.C. Wyeth. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1911 (1981 reissue by Atheneum Books for Young Readers).

Hook - Steven Spielberg

While not a book, this videotape seems to have made its own interesting journey. Inspired by J.M. Barrie’s early 20th century children’s novel (also annotated in this collection), the film focuses on an older Peter Pan (Robin Williams), returning to Neverland to revisit his old identity and save his children from a revivified Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). Perhaps appropriately, this VHS was a pirated copy of the film that was always in the drawer and my paternal grandmother’s house (rest assured, I have since purchased the DVD). My sisters and I were usually only able to watch it when our parents were out-of-town on business trips or vacations, although at some point in 1996 we plundered this treasure and brought it back home with us.

Hook. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. Perf. Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Maggie Smith. Tri-Star, 1991. VHS.

Note: Yes, I am aware that the image above is a DVD and not a video tape. The tape itself, while I do consider it an important part of my collection, is in a basket somewhere at my parents house (not to mention the fact that rewatching the film is a much better experience on disc). If I think of it, I will try to get around to taking a picture of it (although anyone of my generation would not be hard pressed to imagine a nondescript black VHS tape with a white label marked with black Sharpie).

As another musing sidenote, I still don't exactly understand why Spielberg has all but disowned this film. Perhaps he measures his successes in box office proceeds only but it holds a special place in my heart as it does for many children of the 90's.

The Hobbit (Rankin and Bass movie edition) - J.R.R. Tolkien

This book represents the first act of reading over which I felt I had personal ownership; strangely enough, it was an act of conservation. This version of The Hobbit contains full-color illustrations from the 1977 Rankin and Bass cartoon version of Tolkien’s novel. The book was technically my parents’ but I took possession of it in 1994 when, discovering it on a shelf full of classic rock records, I discovered that many of the pages had been torn free of the binding and needed to be rearranged. After a painstaking process of referencing page numbers (or simply the corresponding art on pages that did not have numbers) I finally reconstituted the book and was able to discover for the first time the tale of Bilbo Baggins’ fascinating adventure from which the title of this collection is derived.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. Illus. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977.