Well, I just don’t know.
It’s about time for me to do my annual summary of book stuff celebrating a centennial in 2024. But besides the fact that 1928 has been grabbing all the media attention (since works published in that year are not officially in the public domain) I am struck by the fact that so many books od the year have become foregone conclusions. A lot of these will be celebrated this year whether I draw attention to them or not.
See, in 1924, we were well into an era that produced literary works touted as high points in the literature of the West: the roaring twenties were so well-celebrated by the time I was old enough to read them that they were available in just about every library I encountered, and of course flooded into the Book Fair once I advanced to THAT stage of appreciating literature.
So what business do I have discussing such centenarians as A Passage to India, Juno and the Paycock, or The Magic Mountain? (This atter, with other books by the author, was so omnipresent at the Book Fair, that a despairing wail of “Thomas Mann!” would go up whenever a new box filled with lovely (and largely inexpensive) hardcovers was opened. Lowell Thomas launched his own fame, and ensured fame to his subject, with a volume called With Lawrence in Arabia, and a popular British humorist tried his hand at humorous poetry for children called When We Were Very Young, which A.A. Milne may or may not have guessed would change his fame forever.
Other people were busy producing books which hit pop culture with such an impact that the sheer number of movies and comic book adaptations and TV shows has not yet ended: Agatha Christie gave us Poirot Investigates, Edgar Rice Burroughs bestowed upon us The Land That Time Forgot, P.C. Wren made a gift of Beau Geste, while a young woman named Gertrude Chandler Warner, who had wanted to be an author since she was five years old, produced a little book called The Box Car Children (aka The Boxcar Children), which is the source of controversy among writers on the Interwebs who cannot decide whether this work now has 160, 180, or 190 sequels.
Some books HAVE lost some luster, but I haven’t read them, so there’s not much I can say. The Book Fair could count, every year, on five or six paperback editions of We by Yevgeny Zamyalin, but what with one thing and another, I never got around to reading it to find out why. Precious Bane, by Mary Webb, was such a pop phenomenon that when a British Prime Minister announced it was the best book he’d ever read, his critics announced that was all you really needed to know about Stanley Baldwin’s brain. What Price Glory? Is still considered a fine wartime drama, but I’m afraid what made it newsy—its attempt to make soldiers talk the way soldiers really talk, obscenities and all—has faded with time. (When it was made into a movie, the screen was still silent, so the producers at least thought they were safe from THAT controversy, only to hear from a national association of lip readers.)
Plenty of important authors turn 100 this year, with a range running from Margaret Truman to William H. Gass, Leon Uris to Harvey Kurtzman, Rosamund Pilcher to Truman Capote, all of whom had their impact on Book Fair offerings (not forgetting Lloyd Alexander, who, with Uris and Truman, must have had a few dozen books in the Fair every year. Mind you, I got in more trouble for one book, Willie Masters’ Lonely Wife, by Gass: that cover, displayed proudly at our Very Merry Bazaar, provoked several members of the administration to tell me to put it away. I think somebody bought it before I could run full tilt into a battle over censorship.)
But aside from rather pointless personal anecdotes like that (I read all the Boxcar Children books available in my day, and at the moment can remember very little about them except for the time one main character received comeuppance from another character for repeating a popular racial stereotype) I can’t find much to say about literature in 1924. So we may have to do without that traditional column this year.
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