the
READER'S ALMANAC

Being a compendium of stories about literature and the men and women who create it, of turning points, tragedies and triumphs, of writers behaving badly, of the greats and one-hit wonders alike, compiled, annotated and commented upon by Bill Peschel

A list of the essays published thus far

Introduction

Blame George Bernard Shaw's condoms.

In the mid-90s, I was reading a massive biography on the man, one of those container-ship sized books that chronicled nearly every day the guy lived, and since the cheerful old socialist thrived well into his 90s, the volume was part of a multi-volume set. If you ever decide to look into him, I heartily endorse his collected letters. It's four volumes, but full of damn fine writing, heartfelt emotion, and plenty of good advice. Shaw had a belief that no one's life was so perfect that he couldn't help it along, and he did so at length. There would be a long dissertation on how to eat a vegetarian diet in London that required your beliefs to be accompanied by a cast-iron stomach, and it would be followed by a cheerful description of watching his mother's body consigned to the flames at the crematorium, a love letter to Ellen Terry that would melt any woman's heart, and rage at the carnage of World War I. Shaw could be a forbidding figure, but he let it hang loose in his correspondence.

Anyway, in the biography, Shaw was living in London, fresh from Ireland. He was poor, a nobody, trying to write novels and yet so full of vigor and charm that women would forget his shabbiness and hang on his every word. And he knew it, because the biographer noted that Shaw carefully kept track of every half-farthing, including the money he spent on "French letters."

Meaning, condoms.

Pause. Reflect. Shaw bought rubbers? He had sex? I had a vague memory of reading in "The People's Almanac" that he was a virgin, or hated sex (he certainly didn't have any with the woman he married, Charlotte Payne Townsend, and she was quite happy about it, too).

But before that, it seems he was quite the fan of the fairer sex, because shortly after this revelation, he met Jenny Patterson. She was a friend of his mother, in her 40s, and Shaw swept her off her feet and into his bed.

Alas, the good times were brief. There are hints that despite Shaw's careful purchases, Jenny got pregnant. She had an abortion. Shaw grew distant and moved on. Jenny did not. You can guess the rest. Jenny pursued Shaw, barged into his rooms, stole his letters from another woman. Shaw would try to break it off. He retrieved the letters and spent many a long night with Jenny. What they talked about you'll have to imagine. There's even one sad scene, recounted in his diary, that he was at his mother's house when she came for a visit, and had to sneak out to avoid meeting her.

As you can imagine, I began to see Shaw in a different light. I took down some notes on this part of his life, not quite knowing what I was going to do with them, and filed it.

Thereafter, whenever I came across an anecdote about a writer, I hung onto it. I began to compile a list of quotations from writers from news stories. I worked at a newspaper at the time, so there were plenty of profiles to root through. Some were about the writing process, some about books in general. Some were good pieces of advice, or words that made the click go off in my head.

"You're nobody until you've been booed." Bob Dylan said that in an interview.

Eventually, the idea arose of creating an almanac, tying these events to a specific date. But I wanted more information, so I found birth and death dates of writers (and also discovered that making sure I had the correct information was an incredible task. I began to suspect that some writers had recycled other books for their books, and never actually confirmed whether their information was right. Of the hundreds of dates I compiled, about a tenth of them were wrong).

The file folders grew. Now, they're up to two file boxes, and Gates knows how many files on my hard drive.

And now, I've decided to let some of this material trickle out. While all of the entries are tagged on the blog as belonging to the Reader's Almanac, so are all the birth and death dates. Suspecting that you might not want to troll through all of them, I'm including a list here of the essays only that have been published so far.

At some point, these might be compiled and printed between covers, but for now, here they are. For your amusement and edification.

I hope you like them.