That happened to me last Saturday on a visit to
Manhattan. I was walking down Third Avenue
on my way to the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory when I stopped
in at an Anthropologie store on 71st Street. I went in because Anthropologie sells books
as well as clothes, often on quirky subjects, and I wanted to see what they
had.
In front of me was a round table piled with a pyramid of carefully
stacked books but, on inspection, I realized they were not meant to be read. They
had been sliced into the shape of letters of the alphabet. You could pick one up, read the titles on the
spine and fan through the pages, but because huge gobbets had been cut out, it
was impossible to make sense of the text.
These books had been stripped of their original purpose—to tell a
story—and turned into decorative objects with no meaning beyond a single letter
of the alphabet.
Looking closer, I realized that all these “alphabet letters”
were originally Reader’s Digest condensed books, printed between 1950 and 1997,
and bound attractively in fake leather and cloth, with four book titles on each
spine. Clearly these were books that had
not been sold and someone had the clever idea (and the right slicing machine)
to carve them into capital letters. You
would buy one of these books in the shape
of your initial and set it on your desk or in your library to advertise your
name and stroke your ego. They cost $20 each.
In 1983 my husband, Nicholas Gage, published the book
“Eleni”, recounting the story of his mother’s life and death in their mountaintop
Greek village during the civil war, when the communist guerillas occupied much
of northern Greece. Nick’s mother, Eleni
Gatzoyiannis, was tortured and executed because she had engineered the escape
of Nick and three of his four sisters after learning that the guerrillas were
going to collect all the village children and send them to “re-education camps”
behind the Iron Curtain.
“Eleni” was eventually published in 32 languages and made
into a film. Excerpts and articles about
the book appeared in “The New York Times”, and “People”. And it was published as a Reader’s Digest
Condensed book.
Those were the days when magazines had fact checkers. In March of 1983, the Digest sent a young man to Worcester,
Massachusetts, where Nick’s family lived.
After their nighttime escape on foot from their village, the children
had been found in a refugee camp on the Ionian Sea and brought to live with
their father, Christos Ngagoyeanes, a chef in various Worcester restaurants. Nine-year-old Nick had never known his father,
who was prevented from visiting Greece after 1939 by the outbreak of war.
As Nick and his sisters gathered in the basement
kitchen/living room of the third sister, Glykeria, the young man from “Reader’s
Digest” proceeded to read the condensation of the book to the assembled family,
stopping to confirm every detail. The
sisters wept and nodded. Their father Christos, 92, lay on a couch, and, in his
mind, he relived the experiences of the war: “My sweet wife! Why they do that to her?”
With trepidation I approached the display of letter-books at
Anthropologie and examined every one of them, fearing that one of the spines
bore the title “Eleni”. But, to my
relief, it wasn’t among them.
God is an ironist, as Nick likes to say. From Anthropologie I walked to the Winter
Antique Show at the Armory on Park and 67th, and one of the first
booths I came to was devoted to selling the rarest and most expensive books on
paper—illuminated books from the Renaissance.
You could admire opened books, protected in individual cases, which
monks had devoted their entire lives to illustrating, embellishing the
religious texts with gold leaf, jewels and exquisite art in the colors of
stained glass.
These books were created to educate and inform the one
percent of the population who were literate in medieval times—and to share their
religious stories with those who were not.
They have been cherished and protected for centuries. It’s a good thing
no one cut out the text of these books to turn them into decorative objects that
no longer have a story to tell.
