Please welcome Beth Djalali, who will be helping me with BookEndBabe posts for awhile. Beth is a Minnesota writer who has just started querying agents with her first novel. Oh, and by the way, this is NOT a picture of Beth in 1972.
Where were you in ’72?
This is a question I recently asked when gathering research for a book set in the year 1972. At the time I happened to be a hormonal teenager blithely unconcerned with anything in life besides books and boys and grades (in that order). Especially books. Lunch was eaten in the school library in the midst of Encyclopedia Britannica. Entire evenings were spent lingering in the public library writing research papers and mastering the dewy decimal system. There was no Google at your fingertips for fast and accurate factoids. Or personal computers with ‘delete’ keys and ‘save as’ folders. High School graduates set off for College with an IBM Selectric in one hand and reams of ribbon and white out in the other. Telephone calls were made and received from one central location, most likely, the kitchen. Phones were anchored to walls and if you were expecting a call you waited. By the phone. For hours. And a text referred to a book. Those delicious books (okay not the text variety) housed on shelves that soared twelve feet high in the air.
I spent hours walking up and down row upon row of books. The smell of fresh ink hung in the air and sometimes stained the tips of your fingers. With great care I would pull one after book after another off the shelf and lovingly cradle the spine in my hand, waiting with bated breath to read the title, before I flipped it over to peruse the back cover. This was an exercise repeated daily for years. I have to admit there were times I was attracted to a book just by its cover. Ah, yes, even in the literary world a fancy façade can fool you. But after the book was opened, and the first paragraph read, all pretenses were immediately dispelled. You either fell in love or you didn’t. Which only proves the old adage “you can’t judge a book by its cover” stands the test of time. Adding insurmountable pressure for old and new writers alike to ‘hook’ their reader in the opening pages. But to this day, some forty years later, every time I set foot inside a bookstore with thousand of books and millions of words relegated inside four walls a thrill slams down my spine.
So my burning question for all of you Book End Babes today is this: How will we browse for books when everything has gone digital and our beloved bookstores have been relegated to the sidelines like typewriters and princess phones? How will we discover the next Margaret Atwood, Michael Crichton, Kathleen Woodiwiss or Pat Conroy? Who, by the way, were all notable authors, penned and published, in 1972. What pleasure will we find in an ebook and more importantly in an ebookstore?
On a side not you might be interested to know that 1972 was a leap year, and two leap seconds were added during the 366- day year making it the longest year ever. Average Income was $11,800. Cost of gas was 55 cents. Atari kicked off first video game PONG. President Nixon made unprecedented trip to People Republic of China meeting Mao Zedong. Watergate. First female FBI Agents hired. ERA passed. Dow Jones closed above 1000. Led Zeppelin. ABBA. Moody Blues. Eleven Israeli athletes murdered by terrorist group Black September.
So where were you in ’72?
