p-books persist

["James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

I still prowl the aisles of planes and trains counting p- vs. e- 
books, with p- well ahead.  Today I had a DC cab driver of 
interest. He was, as they all are, a gentleman of mature years 
driving a vehicle General Motors has forgotten why it made; I 
forgot to check to see if the "service engine soon" light was lit 
as DC taxi practice requires that it be.  But when I got in, he 
was on the phone with his favorite daughter, and I perked up at 
the comment that he'd look for something at home tonight, but 
they gave away the VCR they weren't using and moved things around 
and there's such a lot of books he's not sure where the something 
was, but he'd find it tonight.  So when he got off the phone, I 
said, I'm a professor and couldn't help noticing you said you had 
a lot of books.  What kind of books do you have and do you like? 
Oh, he said, smiling broadly, well, for me, really, Shakespeare 
is the best, just the best, and then I have books of all kinds, 
some by Caribbean authors.  Ah, I said, so do you have things by 
C.L.R. James?  OH, YES!, he said, see, I am Guyanan, just like 
him.  So his book about cricket, I said, the one called *Beyond a 
Boundary*?  Yes, yes, he said, laughing with delight and pounding 
his hands on the steering wheel.  We were just getting to 
destination, and I left him saying, I wish I had known you were 
interested, yes, so delightful.

Score one for the literary tradition and the working man's 
commitment to it.

(Small digression:  if you *don't* know James and *Beyond a 
Boundary*, it definitely gets a Michelin third star.  It's 
notionally about cricket, but it's really about being a colonized 
British subject who buys into the British empire as 
enthusiastically as any but with ambivalences.  Just a gorgeous 
book:  I must have read it three times so far.  James grew up 
actually in Trinidad playing cricket and obsessively reading and 
rereading Thackeray, then went to the UK to ghost-write a 
cricketer's autobiography, fell in with Jomo Kenyatta, came to 
the States and got deported for general Trotskyite mopery, and 
wrote many splendid books, including The Black Jacobins (history 
of the Haitian revolution) and Mariners, Renegades, Castaways, 
and Thieves (his take on Moby-Dick, written on Ellis Island in 
detention while fighting deportation).  Patriotic enthusiasm or 
not, a taste that embraces Shakespeare and James is pretty 
commendable in any reader.)

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown