Postcards in the Air : WHAT TO DO WITH MONSTERS

by Martha Slavin

Did you ever imagine that there were monsters under your bed? As a child, did you have that creepy feeling late at night as if a monstrous creature could be lurking near you? I remember listening to our neighbors' rooster crowing in the morning, leaving me with the chilled feeling that something mysterious was going to happen. One afternoon, while our parents went to the market, my sister and I put on the record player Sibelius' "Finlandia", with its sections that sound like ponderous bears rumbling through the woods. The music scared us silly. We ran to our neighbors and waited for our folks to come home. Our imaginations run wild.

Before a meeting at the San Francisco Main Library, I rode the elevator to the 6th floor where the Rare Books Room is located. The sixth floor is a quiet place, perfect as a place to study old maps, rare books, and calligraphy from the Richard Harrison Collection. As I stepped out of the elevator, I found a surprise, an exhibit called "Under the Bed," featuring the work of artists who have written children's books about the monsters we imagine residing under our beds. What a delight for me to look again at the work of Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, William Steig, Graham Wilson, and Japanese artists from the 19th century who protrayed monsters battling with each other.

Libraries represent one of our best places. In smaller towns, they are often of the hubs of the community, places where children can safely come after school hours to study, read, and receive tutoring. My family would make a trip to the library a special event. We all would come home laden with books. My mom, germ-phobe that she was, placed our books out in the sun before we could take them to read. My parents allowed me in elementary school to check out adult history books. My dad and I would talk about those books, which helped me develop my opinions about what I had read. As parents, Bill and I did the same with our son. Librarians have been in the news since groups who wish to ban books and censor what we can read have grown across the country. Librarians, once again, have had to confront new monsters, those people who fear the unknown and think that by banning books they will be able to control our thoughts.

In San Francisco, the main library on Larkin Street offers many opportunities besides finding a quiet place to study. The children's book area is lively when kids are there for story hour. The library has an extensive collection of historical photos of the city. On the ground floor level along with community meeting rooms is an exhibit area, which right now displays the modern photography of Hamburger Eyes magazine. The Robert Grahorn Collection, housed in the Rare Books Room, contains many books about the history of printing, which show the progression of type design from the early days of printing to the modern era.

Two pages from
The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman

We think of books from past centuries as formal, with pages of nothing but type and perhaps an illustration or map at the front, but I had a chance recently to look at one of the first English novels, Tristam Shandy, on display at Letterform Archive, a small gallery, class/workroom, and archive of type and graphic design. The exhibit showed the original version of the book, printed in 1759, as well as numerous copies printed since then into the 20th century, which is when I read a version in college. The latest edition is available through Project Gutenberg, an online library of 75,000 free eBooks, which has digitized the original. The writing is a stream-of-consciousness novel about one character from birth to death and his views of the world. The book is filled not only with pages of print and humor, but Shandy also plays with the pages. He turns a page black to mourn a friend, pastes a marbled paper across another and doodles throughout -- an unexpected precursor to book arts artists like me and an example of how the imagination can devise stories and images of even monsters under the bed.