It was Bennett Cerf—founder of Random House, conscience of What’s My Line—who gazed over the bestseller lists of his day and invented the can’t-miss title for a book-publishing smash hit. Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, he reasoned, would compel three groups of customers to rush to the bookstore: animal-lovers, Civil War buffs, and hypochondriacs. Taken together, and allowing for overlap, these groups accounted for the entire literate population of mid-century America.
The country has undergone profound changes since Cerf’s day, of course, but the bestseller lists still show a nation of book-buyers in love with their pets and consumed by their ailments, real or imaginary. The big difference is in Lincoln books. While publishers continue to produce them with wild abandon, they sell rather less energetically than product with “M.D.” or “Marley” on the cover. That may be about to change.
Earlier this month, Grand Central Publishing released Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a book that ingeniously combines two proven genres, one of them very hot, the other overdue for reheating. Not since the darkest days in 15th-century Transylvania has a nation been so enamored of vampires as Americans are in 2010. If you won’t take The Scrapbook’s word for it (you won’t?), ask the parents of our great nation’s teenage girls, every one of whom is at this very moment either reading one of the books in the Twilight series (vampire meets girl, vampire loses girl, vampire tries to decide whether to phlebotomize girl) or watching one of the spectacularly successful movie knockoffs. In an era when book publishers struggle to survive, only vampires offer glimmers of hope. Vampires move units.
But what of the second genre, that of Lincoln? The author of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith, has seen his way around Lincoln’s diminished commercial appeal by taking certain liberties with the historical record. Lincoln, for one thing, hunts vampires, and John Wilkes Booth, for another, appears as a leader of vampires, who are themselves the secret cause of the Civil War. Lincoln, though frumpy in his black frock coat, is ferocious and impressively dexterous, able to scuttle up walls and stop bullets, this time without getting killed. He’s a Ninja-in-chief. As for his favorite method of combat—well, let’s just say this rail-splitter knows how to substitute vampires for rails.
A mark of the publisher’s confidence in the book’s box office potential is the expensive, highly polished movie trailer that’s been made for promotional purposes. You can see it for yourself all over the Internet, but we recommend watching it at the sci-fi fan site, scifiwire.com, if only for the comments. Fury161 summed up the general reaction: “PURE AWESOMENESS!!!” Hearken to the voice of the next generation of Lincoln book buyers. ♦
A Real Prize of a Pundit
The next time you hear a journalist refer to journalism as a “profession,” The Scrapbook suggests (after the laughter dies down) that you tell him about the Washington Post’s recent contest to find “America’s Next Great Pundit.” Yes, it’s true: A distinguished American newspaper was so desperate in the current economic climate that it actually debased itself—and insulted its own resident columnists/reporters—by conducting a jokey sweepstakes to reveal an undiscovered Walter Lippmann somewhere out there among the great unwashed.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Post failed to find the reincarnation of Lippmann, but instead unveiled a hitherto undiscovered Bob Herbert, a “former lawyer and first-grade teacher” and professional fundraiser for Teach for America named Kevin Huffman. Mr. Huffman is now pundificating twice weekly for the Post—where he is literally identified as the winner of “the Post’s Next Great Pundit contest”—and based on the evidence thus far, The Scrapbook predicts he should prosper in the company of Richard Cohen, Ruth Marcus, -Eugene Robinson, and Harold Meyerson.
Last month, for example, the Next Great Pundit offered some hard-hitting support for Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity with any number of time-honored techniques, including a gratuitous swipe at conservatives (“If there is anything that upsets right-wingers more than Michelle Obama, it’s people messing with our right to live the fat life”), incessant self-praise (“I felt the same foreboding sense I had watching tech stocks 10 years ago and housing prices five years ago”), and even a touch of Thomas L. Friedman (“America may not be able to create ‘green’ jobs or provide health insurance to poor people, but doggone it, we can make sure we don’t have to roll our kids to school”).
This was followed by a teary tribute to President Obama’s rhetorical performance at the Health Care Summit (“This is America. We are the kind of country that doesn’t let a man go bankrupt because his wife or kids get sick. We believe everyone deserves a doctor. That’s who we are”) and then, a few days later, the tried-and-true formula of lampooning a Republican fundraising appeal (“We have fun peddling fear to Luddites”).
Post readers should be on the lookout for future columns from America’s Next Great Pundit on the Republicans as the Party of No, a lamentation that Americans are obsessed with celebrities when they should be working to end economic inequality, some reference to Mitt Romney’s hair and George W. Bush’s IQ, a sarcastic allusion to Ronald Reagan as “the Great Communicator,” a timely tribute to the Washington Post’s vital role as public watchdog in the Watergate scandal, a more-in-sorrow-than-anger analysis of Sarah Palin’s popularity, and if we’re lucky, a fearless exposure of conservative hypocrisy on any given topic in the very same column with a quotation from John F. Kennedy’s call to public service.
Followed, after a suitable interval, by the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. ♦
The $215,000 Sheriff
Kevin Larkin is the (Democratic) sheriff of Mercer County, New Jersey, and Kevin Larkin does not tolerate disrespect from the citizens he serves and protects.
On February 1, associate professor Michael Glass was teaching a class on state and local politics at Mercer County Community College. The topic was New Jersey’s expected $2 billion budget shortfall. Some students pointed out that part of the state’s problem might be the generous salaries paid to state employees and suggested that the state consider cutting some of these salaries. The discussion then turned to “double-dippers”—state employees who collect pensions for one government job while performing another. As it happens, Sheriff Larkin had made news in the local press when it was reported that on January 1, he began collecting an $85,000-a-year “chief sheriff’s officer” pension to go along with his $129,634 sheriff’s salary. Not bad for a humble civil servant.
The students were aghast. Even for today’s kids, $215,000 is a lot of money. One student asked Glass what Sheriff Larkin could possibly do with all that money. Glass responded, “In the case of the sheriff, it’s not much. He has child support and alimonies.”
Another student in the back of the class was friendly with the sheriff because she also works as the county clerk. She text-messaged Larkin to alert him to the unsavory discussion. A short while later Larkin appeared outside the classroom. Here is how the Trentonian described the scene:
Other accounts of the incident noted that Larkin was still unsatisfied and that as he made his exit he declared, “This isn’t over,” while his aide added, “You’re a terrible teacher, you should get your facts from a book.”
It’s like the old Tom Kean line about New Jersey: bad cops and overpaid government workers—perfect together. ♦
The Mystery Caption
The Scrapbook confesses to a weakness for the comic side of book publishing—acknowledgments where authors list their impressive Rolodex, this week’s dust jacket blurb from Doris Kearns Goodwin—and so is pleased to introduce a new category: The Mystery Caption.
Here’s an example. The photograph to the right is taken from the illustrations section in Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court by Jeff Shesol, just published by Norton—“A stunning work of history” (Doris -Kearns Goodwin). The caption reads: “Franklin Roosevelt on the eve of his second term, January 1937, showing no sign of the urgency he felt.” Some conscientious editor at W.W. Norton must have felt that, for the reader’s benefit, every picture in the book required a descriptive sentence.
This is, quite obviously, an official portrait of FDR as president; but what on earth does it mean to point out that it shows “no sign of the urgency he felt”? Does Jeff Shesol know what Roosevelt was feeling when the photograph was taken? And if so, was Roosevelt feeling urgency about the pending Supreme Court crisis, or urgency because he was thirsty or wanted to rub his itching eye? Imagine, if you will, a presidential portrait in which FDR shows signs of “the urgency he felt.” Would it resemble Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream, or perhaps the famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue at the photographer? ♦
