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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation this week and some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by one of my mentors, and very good friend, William J. Duncan.
It was a very bad day, in fact it had been a tough couple of months when I first met William. We were strangers, but he came to my rescue. "Why don't you write your column on Saturday and Sunday, too?" he asked in the first email he sent to me.
What a nice, encouraging, thing to say. The very words I needed to hear to get me out of my funk and back into writing. And we've been friends ever since.
William's a complicated guy to describe, so I asked him to do it for me:
"I am a retired newspaper editor from California. I now edit The Senior Times, a magazine section that enfolds every first Monday in the daily News-Review in Roseburg, Oregon. I also write a weekly column on the News-Review's Opinion Page every Thursday. I write book reviews for the News-Review. I teach college level writing courses. Remember, I am retired."
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
http://www.DearReader.com
And so here he is, today's "retired" guest columnist, William J. Duncan...
When you write a guest column for Suzanne's DearReader.com you automatically know the audience, like you, are biblioholics. So you won't be surprised if my ramblings are about books. I have a sweatshirt with the saying "So Many Books, So Little Time." Each time I wear it, I get comments from complete strangers.
Thomas Carlyle said: "All that mankind has done, thought or been, is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books." Daniel J. Boorstein, the retired head librarian for the Library of Congress, said in a report to Congress in 1984: "Books are the main source of our knowledge, our reservoir of faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy and science."
I became a reader in my growing up years in Panama City, Fla. and found that the written word could take me anywhere I wanted to go. I quickly discovered I enjoyed non-fiction best, because I could learn about new places, new things, and new ideas. Even today I find pleasure in reading the encyclopedia. Even more so, I find hours of enjoyment reading dictionaries and discovering new words. Maybe that is because I am a writer.
Tony Hillerman in his autobiography, Seldom Disappointed, describes a writer "as a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff."
If you dug around in my work space, you would agree with Hillerman's analogy. I am a collector of bits and pieces of information, newspaper clippings, magazine clippings, scraps of paper on which I have scribbled notes, notebooks that I have filled with information. I am a notebook keeper and have hundreds of notebooks filled with miscellany.
To be truthful, I think I prefer shopping for books in a used bookstore rather than a new bookstore. It is not necessarily the price difference, but the selection. The more disorganized the store is, the better I like it because every aisle, every shelf becomes an adventure.
When I visit my daughter's home in Eugene, Oregon, I invariably slip away and walk a few blocks to a large Goodwill Store that has a separate room filled with books. The Goodwill is jokingly referred to by my daughter as dad's bookstore. One Christmas, as a gag gift, she gave me a $5 gift certificate to Goodwill. She made it out to the "frugal book buyer." I smiled, folded it neatly and placed it in my billfold. Five dollars goes a long way when you are paying an average of 50 cents a book.
Months later while visiting my daughter I walked to my favorite bookstore. I piled up $7.50 worth of books and presented the cashier the $5 gift certificate along with my cash. The cashier called the manager, a young woman who had just graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in management.
She examined the certificate and asked me where I got it. I told her it was a gag gift from my daughter. She wanted to see some identification and asked for my daughter's name and telephone number.
She called my daughter, who added to my problem by calling me "the book bandit." The manager took her seriously and called her headquarters for instructions. After a lengthy discussion, wiser heads considered that I was not a criminal and accepted the certificate as partial payment for the books, but with a reprimand that next time I have a proper name filled out, rather than "frugal book buyer."
Since I write a weekly newspaper column I wrote about the incident and I received a letter of apology from Goodwill with another $5 gift certificate. I framed the letter, the gift certificate and a wanted poster for the notorious book bandit that my daughter made for the next gag gift.
Please do email. I love to hear from readers because they feed me column material. You can reach me via email at:
[email protected]
William J. Duncan
AUTHORBUZZ: Amazing contests this week including a chance to be a character in a novel, and of course signed free books from these terrific authors: Will Staeger, Public Enemy; Brandon Massey, The Other Brother; Carolyn Haines, Bones to Pick; Gayle Lynds, The Last Sypmaster; and Robin Parrish, Relentless. Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
READ THE CLASSICS: The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, and enter the free Penguin Classic's Drawing. Go to: http://www.supportlibrary.com/nl/path_go.cfm?x=815&site=20
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