Dostoyevsky at the Garage Sale

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Dostoyevsky at the Garage Sale

Commerce in used goods has lost its aura of shame and has become acceptable in our culture, and possibly constitutes a significant part of our declining economy. We are told by the propagandists that American manufacturing is on the rise, but the displays of shoddy foreign manufactures suggests to the consumer that this might not be so. Can an economy really be based on selling insurance, snakefingers, drugs, and questionable information to each other?

After World War II this nation was the world’s greatest manufacturer, and in the late 1950s one only with difficulty found a product made anywhere else. In our time, though, if one wants an American-made hammer, shirt, camera, dinner service, pocket knife, or toy train, he no longer shops downtown (which no longer exists) or from the Montgomery Ward catalogue (which no longer exists), but probably at that modern American custom, the Saturday morning garage sale (which seldom features a garage).

In the past year y’r ‘umble scrivener has found: two wagon wrenches (aka monkey wrenches), a Kodak 33mm Pony camera, a made-in-Chicago metal pencil sharpener, several pocket knives, a cast-iron rope pulley for a water well, a handsaw, and any number of hand tools and power tools, all American made, not as investments but mostly for their immediate utility (the camera is on a shelf and the handsaw is Miz Bee-ish fence art).

At a recent Friends of the Kirbyville Public Library book sale I found a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, published in 1938 by The Heritage Press. The book is hardbound in boards and linen, measures about seven by ten inches, is translated by Constance Garnett, and features engravings by a refugee German, Fritz Eichenberg. The paper is not particularly heavy but it is well-made (after all, it’s into its eighth decade) and cream-colored, which, with the large text, is easy on the eyes.

This book was not manufactured as an objet d’art; it was meant to be read, and I’m reading it. Most good stories are about redemption, and thus civilization, and with Dostoyevsky the concept of redemption can be cubed and squared. After all, who among us has ever faced a firing squad? Happily, the Czar sent a just-in-time reprieve (which no Communist would ever do), and Dostoyevsky spent the following ten years in a penal colony (which, again, is not a common experience among us). The man definitely had something to say, unlike our modern I, I, I, me, me, me writers whose focus is upon their hurt feelings and their scripted outrage.

And George Macy had something to say too: in the middle of a terrible economic Depression (we’ll never know how many died in those grim times), with the ascendancy of Communism, National Socialism, and whatever ism one might apply to Japan (who once again has begun coveting Chinese land), Mr. Macy chose to say that civilization will go on, even under food rationing and air-raids. Mr. Macy commissioned the printing of books, farming out the acquisition of papers and boards and cloth, typesetting, printing, and binding to various small companies throughout the country, and selling them under the imprint of The Heritage Club. These books sold for a dollar or so, a fabulous sum at the time, and anyone who bought a book had to think, plan, and save for such a rare event. Mr. Macy said that civilization should go on, and whoever bought this particular volume in 1938 probably skipped some meals so that civilization would indeed continue.

The Easton Press (http://www.eastonpress.com/) is the successor to the several Macy companies and other publishers, and continues to publish books, some to be read and some apparently merely for display.

Their edition of Crime and Punishment is bound in leather, and is available for $64.90. In terms of purchasing power, that is much, much less than the dollar edition of 1938.

Even so, one is not sure that the sellers know what the book is. The advertisement reads: “Impoverished and desperate, a young man is driven to the murder of a loathsome pawnbroker - and finds himself trapped in a hell of paranoia and terror. Dostoevsky's enthralling novel is, at once, an extraordinary psychological study, a harrowing mystery and a brilliant detective thriller.” The first sentence is good, a brief synopsis, but while details in the second sentence are correct, overall, the point of the story is missed, and that is the theme of redemption. Dostoyevsky is a Christian writer, not Agatha Christie or a scriptwriter for the BBC, and he is always about salvation.
Curiously, the “Sandglass” insert of 1938 makes the same mistake, referring to Crime and Punishment as “one of the great psychological studies.”

Well, Dostoyevsky knew his own book was about salvation, not about psychology, and certainly not about sustainability and greenness.

I wonder if someone will come across Dostoyevsky’s pocket knife at a garage sale.

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