"Can" B. Worth - Feeding the Birds - Part Five - Curiosity One

"Can" B. Worth"

Feeding the Birds - Part Five

The Large Inside

Curiosity One

“…hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things that were valuable, not on account of being any account, because they warn’t, but on account of them being relics, you know, and we snaked her out, private…”

Mark Twain, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, NY, 1884, pg. 322

            “He was a very sweet man.  Most people wouldn’t know that.  Most people wouldn’t notice that.”.  She said.

            Gretchen Haverstraw was a graduate student in American Literature when she first encountered Dead Can and, slowly, “got to know him”, her words.  “Know him” was not as we, ourselves, have discovered and know Dead Can.  She “know him” the way SHE “know him” and… this was an academic-graduate student/professor-History/English department crossover-professionally and university based social… “know him”.  It was a light and casual “know him” that had no actual relations with her graduate work and actually featured them only chancing to “see each other” “here and there” “in town or on campus”.  Usually, either standing around at a social function or walking to or from campus, they “talked a lot” “about everything”.  Her words.

            Gretchen does not collect rare books.  She “do think I know what one looks like; it LOOKS like an OLD book.  But I don’t know them the way HE did.  He was obsessed with old books.”  (I am not sure it was “obsessed”.  I understand it as “came to rare books”).  “He did teach me how to use rare books and antiques; to include them as props and clues.  For making a point or demonstrating a meaning.  Visually they help the cause.  I like them.  And antiques too.”

            “It was so funny the way it happened.  We were walking back and just talking.  I was going to be making a presentation the next week and I was all caught up in its crafting.  So we were talking about THAT.  And he asked if I had everything covered.  I said pretty much but I still had the History Department’s display case to do.  I had the use of the large case to display materials in to promote attention to my presentation.  My presentation was about a study I was doing comparing Clemens’s literary use of objects to develop and direct the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  He’d been quite interested in that so I told him I had no idea what I could put in that case but that I was sure something would come to me as it always does.  He laughed and said that there was a lot to choose from but to find something that made students look at the display case and then actually GO TO the presentation was much harder.  I thanked him and didn’t think anymore about it.”

            “Well… the next morning Barbara Reynolds stopped me in the hall and said she LOVED my display.  What display I said and when she told me I went right to the case and sure enough Professor Worth had filled it!  And what a CURIOUS display but SO GOOD.  He’d taken an old WARMING PAN he had buried in his office and put it in the center of the case with two rare books; rare old copies of Sawyer and Finn.  These he showed open to where the two rascals had made off with the warming pan from the attic and used it to cook their WITCH PIE!.  There it was; RIGHT in the CASE and RIGHT in the BOOK.  It was PERFECT!  AND NO ONE at all had EVER NOTED that part of FINN but it was such an important part; that’s how they COOKED witch PIE.  I’ve never forgotten it and can’t think of Finn even now without thinking of that warming pan!”

“He’d even made LABELS for the pan that he’d written so they looked like I had written them!  He was SO sweet about it too.  No one KNEW and HE SAID he’d known about that part of the book for YEARS and never had a chance to use it till then.  He said he was DELIGHTED with the display even though it was HE that made it.  We talked about it for YEARS.  That warming pan was always around in his office.  Did you find it?  What a MESS his office was.  But no one ever said ANYTHING.  I certainly never did.  He was actually a very CURIOUS man.”

Both of the books; the Sawyer and Finn, were found buried together in a box.  Old, early, original and undisturbed copies they are.  They are NOT first editions, first issues, “with points”.  Dead Can just picked these off “for pennies” in his local travels.  They have everything a true first edition would have to the complete satisfaction of a lay rare booker.  Dead Can would have liked to have “firsts; first issue” but knew “it wasn’t going to happen”.  As he understood very well, very few people cared about the differences, including himself.  He was a very curious man?