Nora Raleigh Baskin has written seven novels, including: What Every Girl (except me) Knows a PW Flying Start in 2001, a Booklist Top Ten first Youth Novel, and a Booksense Choice, along with many more recognitions; Almost Home; Basketball (or something like it); In the Company of Crazies (2006); The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah; her latest, a YA novel published this year, All We Know of Love (see Appreciation below); and Anything But Typical, forthcoming in Spring from Simon & Schuster. Nora’s a quiet writer, widely read, deeply thought, an artist of story and character and language. Here is her essay conjuring the place where she writes….

I love my office…it is the one room in the house where I get to display all my books, and all my tchotchkes, and toys I’ve been collecting all my life. So when I am in my office I am surrounded, literally surrounded by my history. Nothing is in any order or any category or arranged with any thought at all. So when I have to look for something, a book, or the bottle of my grandmother’s perfume from thirty years ago, I have to look through everything. Everything. Every time. Every book. It takes forever and that’s exactly why I like it that way.

I have a basket of Star Trek action figures on top of my file cabinet and a model of the Enterprise is hanging from the ceiling. My father’s art work is on every wall. I have a whole bookshelf of reference books I never look at. And hanging on the door are canvas bags, one for every class I teach, waiting.

There are even more tchotchkes on my desk, even on top of my computer (a miniature replica of a 1969 Volkswagon Beetle). I have two cork bulletin boards behind my desk, crowded with memorabilia from my life, articles from the newspaper, old photographs, pictures my kids drew, cards, unusually good fortunes from fortune cookies.

And best of all there is a bed in my office, the wrought iron bed my father bought me at a tag sale when I went to live with him in 1973. I try never to lie down on it during the day when I am supposed to be writing, because I would fall asleep immediately and never get anything done.

But I like that it is there. My doggie can sleep there while I am thinking about writing.

Christmas at the Grandparents’ Table

Every day at noon and supper our collation
was a kind of silent service. They sat there
giving and giving and finally giving way
to all they felt about our fine situation at home.

It wasn’t easy. There were tears
and the lesson of separation to be learned —
parting the confusion of opposites —
but every word of it dead-end proper Catholic.

A dark romantic wash of the Agony
tipped down from the wall over the table. The kitchen
was a shrine-dark blue-black place
where the only light was cheeks
and knuckles drained white in supplication.

After meals it might seem cozy, as I read story after story
feverishly conjuring Christmas; but enigmatic,
like mother and child divided how on three ships.

In today’s installment in our ongoing series about writers’ workspaces, we happily slide past the door of her Connecticut home and visit Elise Broach, author of this year’s acclaimed Masterpiece (Henry Holt); the ALA Notable Book, Shakespeare’s Secret (Holt, 2006); Desert Crossing, a 2006 YA from Holt; and, among other picture books, When Dinosaurs Came with Everything, a Junior Library Guild Selection and winner of the E. B. White Read Aloud Award.

Here are her words . . .

I don’t have an office, I have an alcove. Do you hear that, people? An
alcove! I know, it’s so sad. But let this be a lesson to you: if you want
to write, don’t let a lack of space stand in your way.

We live in an old cape with lots of nooks and crannies. My desk is an
antique library table shoved in one of the nooks in the master bedroom, with
a shelf full of my favorite children’s books at my knees. It has one drawer
that holds my idea notebook, the congratulations card I got from a close
friend when my first book was accepted for publication, and assorted
clippings. My favorite is an advertising photo of a beach with words
written in the sand, in the path of the encroaching tide: I AM YOUR IDEA.
ONE DAY YOU’LL LOOK FOR ME AND I’LL BE GONE.

On top of the desk are: a bobble-headed Shakespeare doll that my editor
gave me after we worked on Shakespeare’s Secret; a stuffed wire-haired fox
terrier, in memory of my beloved childhood dog; some colorful rocks I
collected on a hike in New Mexico; a pottery lizard from Acoma Pueblo,
symbolizing perseverance and good luck; and a gruesome ceramic car with a
hand on it that my daughter made (apparently to represent the car in Desert
Crossing…).

There’s a window over the desk, with a pretty view of the woods. I know
some writers prefer a blank wall in front of them, with no distractions, but
I need a window. It helps me to see the real world — in all its loveliness
and mystery — while I’m busy making up worlds of my own.

When last we saw our bibliographic victim, he was anxiously awaiting the delivery (from France) of an 1846 edition of A Christmas Carol. Here is his story.

You’ll recall (or if you don’t, see below) the situation regarding the purchase of a Bradbury & Evans 1846 printing of the Dickens book, which the French-based bookdealer Vladimir Komar cited as, perhaps, an eighth edition.

A few days after sending the order, a small package turned up in my mailbox with an origin address in France, customs stickers all over it. You cannot imagine how carefully I removed the many layers of packaging, tape, and bubble wrap, until the only thing left was the small volume, wrapped in newspaper, inside a tight cardboard sleeve. I sniffed it before opening. It smelled slightly chemical, as if there were some preservative. An unsettling sign. The aura dissipated when I removed the newspaper and held in my hand one of the most exquisite copies of the book I had ever seen. Even without looking inside, I knew it was without doubt an early edition and not a fraud.

But the exceptional condition of it! First of all, the binding was tight, with no cracks or chips on the outside cloth. It was slightly cocked, which is the term used to describe what happens over time to make the pages slant to the right so that the front cover is farther right than the back cover. This is a common problem with the Carol and to me another indication of this book’s age. The gold edges were bright. The cloth itself was of the bright red (not the dun or salmon or even brown of the very first bindings), which told me it was indeed a later printing. I turned to the title page.

Ah . . . one mystery solved. Not an eighth at all, but an eleventh edition. Still, a Bradbury & Evans eleventh? Osborne comes to the rescue again. Inexplicably, Chapman & Hall and Bradbury both produced eleventh and twelfth editions. C&H’s eleventh appeared in 1845, B&E’s the following year. My book was the latter edition. Osborne notes in his indispensable “Chart of the Textual Variations of the Carol” that the B&E eleventh “is the cleanest and freshest printed of all the editions.” Lucky me. I had purchased sight-unseen a very fine example (en bon etat) of what the catalog of the Gimbel collection at Yale calls its “forty-first copy.”

I’ll describe the inside state of the volume in more detail in another post, except to note here an oddity that I believe no one has yet catalogued, at least not in the bibliographic studies of this book with which I’m familiar.

On the verso of the title page — which in other printings states, in blue ink, in what must be 4pt type:

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS

— in my B&E eleventh edition appears, also in blue ink:

LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRARSI

WHITEFRARSI is such a bizarre error in itself, but it points to other particulars of this book, like the relative positioning of certain type, which may prove that this edition had more type reset than is commonly noted.

Another tiny point: the text blocks of both the Preface and the Contents pages are set oddly low on the page, a fault which had been corrected by the B&E twelfth edition three years later. I know this because Dickens unbound a B&E twelfth to prepare his so-called “Prompt-Copy,” the version he used as his aide-memoire when he performed the work in public. This has been reproduced in facsimile and published by the New York Public Library (1971).

The 1846 B&E is indeed a bright and clean printing and mine is the prize of my tiny collection. Since it came into my house, I have added a very early edition of The Chimes (1845) and a beat-up, back-cover-less 1846 (first?) copy of the third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth.

Ah . . . Christmas!

In print!

The Friday Book Report is . . . what’s the opposite of taking a holiday? For the first time ever, there is a surfeit of material to post, and we’ve decided to give, give, give as the spirit moves us. Not merely on Fridays. But other days. At least in December. The celebratory impulse of holiday season may have something to do with it; indulging the spirit of giving and all that.

As part of our series on children’s writer’s work spaces, today we feature David Levithan. By day, David is a book editor in New York; by night, on weekends, on vacation, and possibly at lunch, he is a writer with quite a number of successful YA volumes to his name, including Boy Meets Boy (2004), Wide Awake (new in paper this fall), How They Met and Other Stories (January 2008), and with fellow author Rachel Cohn, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2006) and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (2007).

What we love in writer’s words about their places is the tone of casual reverence. Some combination of the homey and the sacred. Here is David’s portrait.

___

To be honest, my office is my bedroom.

I know, I know — we’re all supposed to want a room of our own, to line with books and talismans, a place to capture all the creative energy. But when I write, the back of my desk chair often touches the foot of my bed. And I’m okay with that.

The wall I face is covered with postcards people have sent me from travels around the world. Everything from the Australian outback to a lovely postcard from an airport in Kansas. And there’s a poster of Snoopy sitting at his typewriter. The first caption is “The…” and then two panels pass with him trying to write, until the fourth panel says “…heck with it.” This is not, mercifully, an accurate portrayal of my process. Because I don’t actually sit down in my desk chair unless I’m in the mood to write. So the minute I commit to that seat, I commit to some writing. (A note about that chair: It’s actually a remnant from a dining room set my parents bought in the 70s. Recently, they redid their basement and reassembled the set again, with my chair missing. They want it back. They’re not getting it quite yet.)

I write on a MacBook I got this year, and it’s kept company by my old iBook and even older iMac. So my desk has three computers on it, and usually a steadily growing pile of music magazines, CDs, and (every now and then) scribbles about whatever it is I am working on. The way the desk is set up, there is a window to my left, looking out over a Hoboken street. I always write with music playing (no surprise there), but there’s the undertone of buses and traffic, conversations and bursts (at night) from the bar below me. The liquor store across the street from me closes on weeknights at precisely 11:00, and on weekends at precisely midnight. I can tell time by the sound of his gate coming down.

When people see where I work, I am often asked: Don’t you always want to just lean over and take a nap in your bed instead of writing? The answer is: When I’m in the writing zone, it doesn’t occur to me. Other times, I nap. (On the plus side, the kitchen is all the way across the apartment.)

I’ve lived in my apartment long enough that every book I’ve written has been at least in part written at my desk. (The same desk, I should add, I had in high school — the “computer desk,” meant to hold my Apple IIe.) So I guess it suits me. I like that I live in my office, because in my head, the place where I deal with life and the place where I deal with stories are not divided into separate rooms.

NATIVITY
after a poem by Antione Favre (1557-1624)

Retreat into the heart, its straits of blood
and anguish, for a proper meditation
on the introit of the lord
into flesh: is it our devotion

to these cold houses, our cool martyrdom,
staunch in white frost and snow, that mutes
our cries for his love, that seeks no bedlam
of rapture at his birthplace-set-in-filth?

Frozen heart, if not for love
or sorrow, I pray that fear will make you weep
true tears of blood, to show him as I stoop

at his bed, one heart in number with them,
the weeping pageant of his retinue,
crazed sinners jutting on the scene of him.

PUER NATUS EST

Light now well-gone, white ash flakes
whirl under the sash, dampening the laced
cloth on the bed table; the mattress creaks
and quiets to begin our pious feast —

that grail romance, the lost room in the fir wood,
its old ordeal-to-death and Christian riddle-dream —
the somnium coeleste of the child
as he would have it, darkening the time

round Christmas. But see right here!
Civility is hosting its own delights
at the foot of the stair —

a comic extravagance, all dazzling toys
beneath the tree, and small bright wares,
and balsam scentings, and the ruddy light.

For a long time I have been “most occupied” with the first edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and have yearned to own one. Of course, with only some 6,000 copies of the true first, and far fewer of the so-called “test printings,” having been produced, prices have always been far too dear to make it practical.

One extreme joy in a December a few years ago, while researching an essay I’ve still to finish, was to consult some half dozen first editions at the Beinecke Library at Yale. These included one of the very scarce volumes signed by Dickens and dated with its official publication day of December 19, 1843. Holding these books was like cradling history in my hands. To touch a thing once held by a great man! And such a glow leaving the Library to walk through the cold, bricky streets of New Haven! The acquisitive sense is a strong one (a symptom of the addictive personality?), but I contented myself with collecting several of the far cheaper facsimiles that had been produced over the years and now have four or five excellent ones from 1920 on.

Then, four years ago, while I was writing Kringle and in full Christmas mode, the part of my brain that governs bibliography was whipped into a frenzy by the appearance on the Internet of a sketchily described volume from a French bookseller. This was their abe.com entry:

Description:
London BRADBURY and EVANS 1846 with the Title-Page Printed in Red and blue Small octavo. [8], 166, [2, ads] pp. Four hand-colored steel-engraved plates by and after Leech and four wood-engraved text illustrations by W.J. Linton after Leech,good copy original red cased binding,front cover decorated,gold edges,cartonnage percaline rouge,1er plat decore,dos lisse orne,tranches dorees;bon etat

Bon etat. So, the volume was in a good state? I emailed the vendor the following:

Hello. I am interested in this book. Can you tell me what the number of the edition is cited on the title page?
Thank you.

To which the reply was:

not clear write,perhaps eight ?
cordialy
V.Komar

My heart stopped. Common knowledge has it that no eighth edition was ever produced. In his 1937 The Facts about A Christmas Carol (and some conjectures), E. Allen Osborne states: “None of the people most occupied with this book has ever seen the eighth edition.”

Another puzzle was that the publisher and date of the volume for sale was listed as Bradbury & Evans 1846, although Chapman & Hall was well known as publisher of the first twelve editions (although B&E were the printers). Then again, the book’s early printing history is fraught with bibliographical oddities (partly the reason it is so coveted), and a surreptitious eighth published by B&E could be just the reason it has escaped notice for 165 years. Add to this that the edition statement on the title page was printed in a tiny Gothic font perhaps unfamiliar to a French (or Russian?) bookdealer with sketchy English. Or, perhaps, the edition identification was somehow obscured (either accidentally or intentionally to fool a buyer). Did the dealer honestly not comprehend the extreme rarity of such a volume? Or was I being taken? Though I couldn’t explain the Bradbury & Evans imprint, the price was irresistable, a few hundred dollars, and I could not possibly dally or someone else would scoop it up. So I took the plunge and bought it.

As I waited for its delivery, the question devoured me — is the single eighth edition in the entire world its way to me?

To be continued…

The room betrays its origin as a summer porch stuck off the back of the house. It has seven windows; one on either end, a glassed door, a corner window, and a connected bank of three along the back wall where the desk is. To work the shades of those three windows, you have to stand at the desk, reach over it, and tug or release the pulls. This is a daily, sometimes hourly, business for me. Unless the skies are overcast, the window shades are drawn all winter since the sun is so low in the sky its light slants obliquely onto the desk and tans the books. I don’t like tanned books. The result? My workshop is a place of darkness on sunny days and of light on gray days. But O, on winter days to watch the snowfall from those windows, whiting the air all the way up.

The desk isn’t one, really; it’s a cheap folding table. But you don’t change what works. Over eighty books have been written on it, and perspiration and wear have peeled its paper woodgrain veneer along the front edge. These tears have been repaired with strips of matte-finish cellophane tape now several layers deep.

The chair is old and weak, and its seat is likewise worn. The upholstery and padding have gone down to the wood on the front right corner, which has the effect of scratching either the inside knee of the right leg or the outside ankle of the left, if I fold it under the right. The pain of creation.

Until very recently, four towers of books sat on the desk at my right hand, in a four-square arrangement, each between twenty and forty volumes high. The ones at the bottom, under maybe fifty pounds of pressure, are inaccessible and exist as spines only, alluring, filled with treasure, but distant. To get to them, the top books have to be lifted away in chunks, cranelike, and set aside. Still, the combined footprint of those towers is small, some ten inches by eighteen, an acreage of less than 200 square inches for 200 books; not bad. These have been temporarily relocated to allow me to notice when other people enter the room during the holiday season. I think constantly of putting them back.

On any given day to the immediate left of those towers sits a flat stack of thirty or more sheets of blank paper; blank, that is, on one side. Often a story is drafted on the back sides of printed page proofs, an ever more valuable commodity as electronic copyediting replaces the use of paper. The very beginnings of each new story go on these pages. They start with pencil scratches, and I use the sort of mechanical pencil (Bic, fine point), that was used to draft this essay. After scribbling up some fifty pages like this, the story is input on my laptop.

Directly in front of me and set against the window-edge of the desk are another hundred or so books, spine out and in some places two deep. All the books on and by the desk are those most immediately relevant to the current writing. After a project has passed, these titles are demobbed to the bookcases, and I call up fresh replacements to serve on the front lines.

More about those bookcases. They are floor to ceiling built-ins and contain in all about a hundred linear feet of flat space. These cases were entirely filled within days of their creation, and I’ve had to find other surfaces to accommodate the overflow. Dickens alone takes up two shelves; I’ll tell you about some of those volumes as we get closer to Christmas.

One of these extra surfaces is a broad coffee table snitched from my daughter in a moment of frantic room redecorating. It is positioned at the end of the desk and is laid out with another hundred and fifty books, for the most part the result of trying to “collect the nineteenth century.” The nineteenth century! To writers of a certain age, this will always be the “previous” century, sadly growing more emotionally and spiritually distant by the day.

Continuing the themes of too many books and the previous century — and set neatly against the room’s west wall between two more built-in shelves (adding another fifty feet of books) — is Grandma’s desk.

I don’t know its vintage, but I’m guessing it followed her most of her life (in this country) from Scranton to Youngstown to Ellwood City to St. Petersburg; and from there at her death to my mother’s house and then to mine. It’s cramped, short, dark brown, and it sits under the sunset window, whose shade is perpetually drawn. Dostoevsky, Bronte, John Brown, Gogol, Nerval, and Stevenson grumble and lurk there. It has a small drawer in the center top. This desk and drawer were featured in a book; it is the same desk where an all-important postcard was discovered. Sitting now on the sliding panel that serves as the writing area is my wife’s college typewriter, a mustard Smith Corona from the 1970s.

A shrine, this desk.

Well, both.