by Bruce McCall
Big Somerset Maugham fan? Here’s a way to memorialize The Razor’s Edge: glue an actual razor blade to the page of a book so that just the sharp sliver of the edge sticks out. The unwary finger trailing over the pages should get a real feel for the title and its poetic intent!
If you’re a bookish person of deep faith, lay your library of precious religious tomes in two long parallel lines about three feet apart—then gather family and friends and make a run for it through the channel thus created. You and the gang will feel what Moses & Co. felt as the Red Sea parted in their flight from Egypt. For best results, stage outdoors.
“Kill a Mockingbird” by hiding in the bushes and flinging a copy of this famous book at the first mouthy little avian to appear. A stuffed bird does just as well. A badminton bird is a last resort.
History buff? Stage a “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in your own bedroom: pile the whole of Gibbon’s monumental work atop the bookcase, then gently shove one volume against the next. The resulting domino effect should trigger a true decline and fall, with the books cascading into a heap on the floor.
Calling all military hobbyists! The front cover of any large-format art or interior-decoration book, laid flat and spread with a thick layer of peanut butter to resemble battlefield mud and dotted with realistic-looking ¼2nd-scale artillery and tanks and with scattered dead soldier figures laid on their sides (or for even greater realism, chopped in half), can be a stirring diorama dramatizing your hatred of war and its terrible costs. Be patient: the peanut butter will turn rancid, of course—but only for a few days, tops, before it hardens into a perfectly odorless permanent landscape of hideous carnage.
Build a miniature backyard Thornfield Manor out of your old Jane Eyre and other Charlotte Brontë novels, pour gasoline on one corner of the “building” when it gets dark, and then light it with a match. See who comes running as the flames rise higher; you could make new friends and later take turns immolating The Fall of the House of Usher and other classics featuring the destruction of buildings by fire.
Who’s better, Updike or Roth? Finally settle the matter before it doesn’t matter anymore with…Fightin’ Writer Kites! Tie an Updike novel to the tail of one kite while a friend ties a Roth masterpiece to another—or vice versa, depending on tastes—then let ’em soar and start battling. The first kite to have its tether severed will nosedive earthward, and the dangling book attached will crash with a thud, the loser! Updike versus Roth is just one example: Sartre versus Camus, Mary McCarthy versus Lillian Hellman—the list of competitors can be as long as your personal literary hit list!
Build a tabletop model of the Himalayas with your own supply of books and those of neighbors, too, if needed. Don’t be afraid of a jumble of slabs and sharp edges—Himalayan mountaineers aren’t! The Rand-McNally World Atlas makes a great Everest. Then sprinkle confectioners’ sugar over the “peaks” to create the effect of snow and, for a final meteorological touch, aim a high-powered fan at your mini-mountain range to duplicate those fierce Himalayan winds. Some hobbyists like to catch and sedate a mouse to simulate oxygen deprivation and have the mouse try climbing to the top like a rich American dilettante. Don’t worry if it expires on the way: that’s Everest!
As with deconsecrating a church, decommissioning books deserves a formal act or ceremony for the serious former book fan. Find a nice empty patch of grass on the lawn of an abandoned library and conduct a funeral. Have all attendees dress as their favorite author, for both verisimilitude and just plain fun. If those authors were funny, like S. J. Perelman or Saki, the funeral doesn’t have to be morbid at all! Reading a eulogy would be illogical in view of what you’re burying, so get a portable DVD player and run a graveside service plucked from a movie, with the sound turned off while you vamp your eulogy, karaoke-style. There are lots of such movie burial ceremonies to choose from.
Here’s an educational exercise: grab one or two books on Arctic exploration and stick them in the freezer compartment of your fridge, leaving them there to frost up for a week or so. Remove the books and immediately press them hard against the cheeks of friends who drop by. Keep pressing until their cheeks are numb. Your friends won’t soon forget their firsthand feel of the agony of frostbite as suffered by those heroic Arctic explorers.
Get a biography of Leni Riefenstahl and another of Adolf Hitler and rub them briskly together. Do they burst into flame? If so, you may have just proved a long-standing historian’s theory!
Submerge yourself in calm, clear water with a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Does it read more vividly underwater? Can you better identify with the story line? After you resurface, decide if specially waterproofed copies would sell, and if so, contact the Verne estate, suggesting a fifty-fifty copublishing deal.
The notorious early-twentieth-century British Yellow Book makes a spectacular and natural Yellow Brick Road for the Wizard of Oz fan. But considering that the Yellow Book came out a hundred or so years back and was relatively scarce even then, you may have some trouble rounding up the two hundred to four hundred copies needed to pave the way. Be sure to seek out flat ground for your road to ease construction; Kansas, Iowa, and sections of Nebraska are ideal.
Send any recent book on African geography over Victoria Falls and have a quick-witted surveyor friend establish (a) how far it falls, (b) how fast it reaches the bottom, and (c) the condition it’s in. Then have a certified expert calculate the replacement cost, because it will have already vanished downriver in a swirling whirl of foam.
Build a sturdy catapult outdoors and load its capacious ammunition cradle with, instead of rocks, a collection of dim-bulb celebrity bios, ghostwritten political memoirs, and stupid cookbooks—all the crappy books you can find that greedy publishers have foisted on the buying public over the decades. Calculate the exact location and distance of the nearest strip mall and aim your catapult load accordingly. Cut the restraining ropes and run.
Make a mattress by duct-taping a bunch of old coats and other sturdy outerwear into a solid, roughly rectangular shape. Cut a hole in one end and stuff in fistfuls of shredded paper from now-useless books until the mattress is a fat, fabric-clad moonscape of lumpy bulges. Important: before you shred the books, make sure you’ve jotted down their titles, then add up to a hundred bogus titles. Next morning, hand your overnight guests who just used the mattress the complete list and have them check off the titles of the book contents that they feel they slept on. Every correct answer earns five points—but a score of less than a thousand points means your literary-dunce guests have to miss breakfast and make all the beds in the house.
Paint the front cover of a Kindle-sized book to look exactly like a Kindle, pasting a piece of celluloid in place to look like a screen and using the buttons off the sleeve of any good men’s suit jacket to imitate the controls. Attend a literary event of great magnitude—say, the Nobel Prize awards for literature—and place your fake Kindle on a chair seat before the proceedings begin. When the occupant discovers the “Kindle” and picks it up, point him out to the crowd and jump up and down while bellowing a hysterical denunciation of this traitor to the immortal tradition of the clothbound printed book.
About the Author
Bruce McCall’s written and illustrated satire is a familiar part of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other major publications, and he has published two books of collected humor, Zany Afternoons and All Meat Looks like South America, as well as a memoir of growing up Canadian, Thin Ice. McCall has also just published his first children’s book, Marveltown. He lives in New York City.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
ALSO BY BRUCE MCCALL
All Meat Looks like South America
The Last Dream-o-Rama
Thin Ice
Sit! The Dog Portraits of Thierry Poncelet
(with Thierry Poncelet)
Zany Afternoons
Credits
J
acket design by Milan Bozic
Jacket illustration courtesy of the author
Copyright
50 THINGS TO DO WITH A BOOK. Copyright © 2009 by Bruce McCall. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195910-3
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