By Oliver B. Pollak
RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA –This was written on April 11, 2023, at 6,000 feet in the Jackson Hole Airport, 35,000 feet in flight, and 5000 feet in Denver’s new United “wing,” enroute from Jackson Hole to Richmond, California.
We spend the beginning of Passover in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and return to Richmond for the last Seder.
Public Library history in Teton County started in 1915. The spacious 35,952 square foot Teton County Library on Virginian Lane opened in 1997. I have been visiting Jackson Hole since 2010, but first visited the library in 2022. As you enter the building the children’s library is on the left and the main library on the right. The Book Nook between the two sections attracted my attention.
Bookish Jackson attracts readers and writers. The Valley Bookshop moved from a comfy arcade to a brasher structure. The Book Trader on Broadway has grown to include The Book Gallery in Wilson with a curated collection.
The Jackson Hole Airport has a bookshelf for travelers. In 2016 I acquired Turning the Page (2006) by Georgia Beers in which I wrote, “Read between Beijing and Xian and Xianto Lhasa, Tibet.” My best find was Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky. This time I plucked Fifty Years of Europe, An Album (1997) by Jan Morris. I first read Morris around 1967. I purchased Conundrum (1974) about his gender reassignment at Estuary Books in Lincoln.
Jan Morris’s 366 pages delivers 356 essays. Despite being non-fiction it lacks an Index and I found the Jewish section, pages 110-117 by chance. Reminiscences start in 1946 when he wore the British uniform in Trieste. The spotlight on LGBTQ, transgender and pronouns shows how identity, language and attitudes have evolved since 1997. Should I refer to James, Jan or “they.” Jan died in 2020 at the age of 94.
Back to the Nook. During the pandemic our hosts acquired a delightful 2½ lbs shiatzu. The Nook
provided a book about dogs. In this April 2023 Nook visit I found two author signed books, Lynne Cheney’s Madison, A Life Reconsidered (2014) and Them, Why We Hate Each Other – and How We Can Heal (2018) by Ben Sasse (Temptation, $2 each).
I became familiar with Lynne Cheney in the 1980s while serving on the Nebraska Committee for the Humanities board. President Reagan appointed her director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our political opinions were far apart, but it was a signed copy. She earned her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1970.
Ben Sasse is another story. Nebraska born, my home state for 42 years, he attended Harvard, St. John’s College and earned his doctoral degree in American history at Yale University, his 2004 dissertation title, “The Anti-Madalyn Majority: Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan’s America.” He was president of Midlands University in Fremont, Nebraska. Elected to the Senate in 2015 he resigned in 2023 to become president of the University of Florida. Our politics differ, but it was a signed copy.
I left both books. They were beyond my research parameters, signed by people so conservative my wife would ask me why they were in the house. I went home and priced them on eBay and abebooks. A signed Cheney/Madison sold for $24.99-44.50 on eBay and $20-100 on abebooks. Sasse was only on eBay, $39-57.50.
At UCLA graduate school in the late 1960s I exercised my entrepreneurial gene and started Britti Books, a discount mail order concierge and sold to classmates and some faculty, and off course, myself avoiding the publishers to retailer 20-40% mark up. Bookselling runs in my family. My mother’s Uncle, Eric Bonner, gave me my first inscribed book, Speed, in 1952. He ran Bonner Books out of his London home from the late 1940s to his death in 1970. His fine catalogues on British empire books, mailed to collectors, academics and libraries, are housed in the British Library and the Grolier Library in New York.
A Factotum in the Book Trade, A Memoir (2022) by Marius Kociejowski is extraordinary, thoughtful and entertaining. Did I so enjoy it because I harbored of romantic fantasy of being a book runner roaming thrift shops and garage sales, seeking antiquarian sleepers and gems. I found some treasured 1950s Doris Lessing books in early 1970s while teaching in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Salisbury/Harari. She was awarded the Novel Prize for literature in 2008.
I revisited the library on Monday, spent 20 minutes going through a couple of hundred or so volumes of politics, history, biography, adult fiction, and found another signed copy, Travel Light, Move Fast (2019) by Alexandra Fuller, who lived in Zimbabwe before moving to Jackson Hole.
Jackson Hole Book Trader, according to its website is the “only used bookstore in western Wyoming.” I thought I would drop by with my $4 to $6 investment, 2 or 3 books. I vacillated and decided against it. Then I changed my mind but decided to call first. I told the gentleman answering the phone that I had found three signed books at the library Book Nook, would they be interested? “No thank you, I think two of those came from us. Thank you for thinking of us.”
Credit to the Book Nook, since 2012 they have raised $144,000.
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Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D., J.D., professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, a lawyer, and a member of the Institute of Historical Study, is a correspondent based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted at oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com.