This is where I spent much of my preadolescence--the
Waynesboro Public Library:
Fun Facts to Know and Tell:
"Founded in 1912 by the Philathea* Class of the First Baptist Church (pic)
, Waynesboro's library was the third Virginia Library to take advantage of the state law permitting the establishment of tax-supported public libraries. The first librarian was Virginia Leftwich, the mother of Ruth Graham (Mrs. Billy Graham)." For a
small Southern factory town we had a surprisingly good library (and it became even better over the years). The basement was devoted to children's books and ran the gamut from the old (as in early 20th Century) and
forgotten series of our
parent's time to the most recent
Caldecott and
Newbery Medal winners plus some slightly trashier stuff:
The Hardy Boys,
Nancy Drew,
Heinlein's
juveniles, the
"Lucky Starr" series by
Isaac Asimov (writing as Paul French), and so forth and so on.
But the
Good Stuff was upstairs where the adult books were shelved (no, not
those kinds of adult books, you guttersnipes) and I, being a typical
Monster Kid of the Sixties, ran around looking for anything that might tie in with whatever I knew from
Shock Theater and
Famous Monsters of Filmland.**
I was not disappointed.
One example stands out:
The Phantom of the Opera by
Gaston Leroux.
That's the 1920 French edition which our library did not have, but is so
unspeakably cool I had to include it. What the WPL had was the 1911 1st edition (!) English printing:
Yeah, a pretty boring cover except for the "Phantom at the Masquerade as the 'Red Death'" embossing. Inside, however, were five color plates by (almost forgotten) illustrator
Andre Castaigne:
Stolen... uh... I mean... appropriated--yeah, that's it--
appropriated from
here.
According to long-time pal JSaM the book, for whatever reason, theft or otherwise, is no longer on the shelves.*** I've thought about buying myself a copy for nostalgia's sake but to date the lowest price I've seen for a nice one is $1500.
Yeah, this is why I love the Intarwebs--no matter how dim or obscure my memory I can usually track down
something to revive it for no more than the cost of a monthly connection.
*Defined by the 1913
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary as "an international, interdenominational organization of Bible classes of young women," sort of a Ladies' Auxiliary to the church or, as my mother affectionately referred to such groups, "the Baptist Mafia" (not to be confused with
this).
**When I wasn't gobbling up everything in the Science, Nature, and Technology sections. Which reminds me--recent epiphany--the WPL had an
astounding number of hardcore science books, especially the various
Scientific American offprint collections, and what I later realized was an
immense science fiction collection. I took this for granted at the time, but years later I realized exactly how unusual this was for a small town library. My guess is that since Waynesboro was home to a number of industrial plants (DuPont, General Electric, Crompton/Shenandoah, Virginia Metalcrafters,
etc.) and, therefore, had a sizable population of engineers and Ph.D.s, the library made sure these people would be happy, especially when donation time came around.
***Nor is the 1st edition of of
Ray Bradbury's first published book,
Dark Carnival. If this was stolen and sold someone made a small fortune.
"Well, who the hell messed up the bricks?" I wondered. But they weren't messed up; these were reflections caused by the setting sun. "That is so cool!" I thought. "Camera time!"
(solar Jeebus fish?)
WTF? There was nothing, nothing in any of the windows to explain the patterns I was seeing.
