Little Paper Time Machines
I had a moment this morning that thrilled me down to my boots. It happened at the library.
When I was a kid, probably about ten or eleven, someone gave me a book. This wasn't such a big deal in and of itself – I read constantly when I was younger, and people gave me books all the time – what made it special was the effect this particular book had on me.
The book was "The Curse of the Blue Figurine," by John Bellairs. A lonely boy gets caught up in an epic magical adventure, involving a magical ring, a cursed statue, and the possible end of the world. Awesome stuff, fantastically written – funny, dramatic, adventurous, and terrifying. I remember quite clearly that it scared the shit out of me – in a good way. It certainly didn't scare me enough to keep me from devouring it – I re-read it so many times that the cover eventually fell off.
It was a cover, incidentally, that had it's own special appeal – illustrated and designed by the fantastic Edward Gorey.
This was the kind of stuff I lived for. Gothic adventures that I could easily imagine myself getting caught up in.
At the time, the only libraries I had access to in my rural town were the small (albeit well curated) one at school, and a bookmobile that came to town once every month or so. Neither one of them carried any of other Bellair books. In those dark, pre-internet days, you couldn't just boot up your computer and order a book at whim, let alone download one onto your iPad the minute you finished the previous one. A year or so later I found another Bellair adventure, "The Dark Secret of Weatherend" at a bookstore in Halifax, and my mom let me buy it. It definitely didn't disappoint.
That was it for me and John Bellair. I didn't come across any more of his fantastic quirky adventures, and I ultimately grew up and moved on to other things.
Recently, however, I found myself thinking about those two books again. I've been working on a project that has some atmospheric similarities to the Bellairs stuff, and I began to wrack my brain trying to remember the name of the author. Today, at the main branch of the Victoria public library, it popped into my head out of nowhere, and I hustled up to the kids section, to see if there were any Bellairs books.
Oh. My. God. Fifteen of them. FIFTEEN! Old, hardbound, and well-used, just the way I like my library books. Each one with an amazing Edward Gorey illustration on the cover. Best of all, though, I learned for the first time that the two books I used to own – "the Blue Figurine," and "Secret of Weatherend," were parts of two different series, when I'd always thought they were stand-alones. I know this makes me sound like a nerd, but I almost peed in my pants right there. It's like reading the first Harry Potter book and thinking the story ends there, and then learning that there are six more, each fatter than the last!
There's no real moral to this story except that the library is awesome, books are like little paper time machines, and there's nothing better than coming home to a chilly house in October with a bagful of creepy page-turners and turning on the fire.
