"Booking in the Heartland"

"Booking in the Heartland"
Jack Matthews
Johns Hopkins University Press, $16.95




Jack Matthews tales his joy of collecting rare books in this book of essays that will be most enjoyed by a bibliophile — more specifically, a bibliophile from Ohio.

If you are neither of those, it is not likely you will derive the same sort of joy from this book that Matthews surely got from writing it.

I picked up this book because I had written down the title after a professor mentioned it in a class I took a year ago. And in it I found the same sort of treasure that I'm sure Matthews finds when he is out booking. There are interesting stories that I otherwise never would have heard. And although they aren't always interesting, I feel enlightened, maybe even educated for now knowing them.

I've also always been interested in the not textbook version of history — the personalities, the interactions, the conversations that made things the way they are. And I have particular interest in Ohio, being that it is the only place I have ever lived.

Matthews seems to share this same passion, sharing the locations he found books or their characters' ties to different areas of Ohio. He writes with a high level of intellect, subtlely injecting humor, sometimes about the authors of the books he has found.

Perhaps that is the weakness of the book. Although it is short, it was a more difficult read because of the prose. But then again, considering the targeted audience for this book, I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem for most readers.

And perhaps the only other weakness is Matthews does not give full details about the books he discusses, probably to keep the book on the topic at hand — the booking, not necessarily the topics of the books obtained through the booking — and it might only be ignorance on my part that I don't know more about these books or the historical events mentioned.

Matthews' books are rare, special. People who otherwise would have disappeared in the pages of history come alive.

That's the main point: There is a story behind everything. You might think that artifacts from a past life are meaningless, but they are the only things that tie the future to the past — what gives our society and culture some sort of explanation. Books are the very glue that holds everything together. A man may have just scrawled details in a journal about a trek by a wagon train, but his stories make those adventures and his life real to the person who picks up the faded, torn leather at a used book sale.

Matthews book will inspire his targeted audience to find rarities in their own collections, to share them, to search for more, to find characters forgotten as their years have passed, to write their own journals in hopes that someday other bibliophiles will drive hours to find them.