SAVE THESE BOOKS: Robert Stone: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones By Stanley Booth Diane Johnson: A House in Order By Nigel Dennis Luc Sante: The Big Con By David M. Maurer Maryanne Vollers Mindfuckers By David Felton P. J. O'Rourke: My Talks with Dean Spanley By Lord Dunsany David J. Garrow: The Making of an Assassin By George McMillan Jane and Michael Stern: The Sears Catalogue bell hooks: The Raft is not the Shore By Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh Caroline Knapp: My Dog Tulip By J.R. Ackerley Madison Smartt Bell: The African Witch By Joyce Cary Ira Berkow: This was Racing By Joe H. Palmer Roz Chast: Dear Dead Days By Charles Addams Jim Lewis: To Absent Friends By Red Smith Scott Rosenberg: Lord of Light By Roger Zelazny Laura Miller: The Medusa Frequency By Russell Hoban Kate Moses: Blue Boy By Jean Giono Charles Taylor: Alma By Gordon Burn Patric Kuh: The Cooking of Vienna's Empire By Joseph Wechsberg Cynthia Joyce: Life is Elsewhere By Milan Kundera Staphanie Zacharek: Steps in Time By Fred Astaire Dwight Garner: The Gospel Singer By Harry Crews - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K John le Carré and Salman Rushdie are duking it out in a public fight over freedom of speech and religious respect. Should Rushdie have expected the threats on his life when he published the Satanic Verses? Join the fray in the Books section of Table Talk. R E V I E W S Circumnavigation By Steve Lattimore (12/04/97) R E C E N T L Y The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) The man who took sex out of the closet By Scott McLemee (11/05/97) Reckless genius By Galway Kinnell (11/03/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the BOOKS ARCHIVE		save these books! PUBLISHING'S TRASH CANS ARE FILLED WITH GARBAGE -- BUT ALSO WITH LITERARY GEMS, DOOMED BY CHANCE AND THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR. HEREWITH, SOME WELL-KNOWN WRITERS CELEBRATE AND MOURN THEIR FAVORITE OUT-OF-PRINT BOOKS. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY DWIGHT GARNER | It's easy to compile a list of complaints about today's publishing scene. Small houses are being gobbled up by conglomerates; the chains are crowding out indie booksellers; the mid-list book is under siege. Ask most writers, however, and they'll tell you that the biggest bummer is none of the above -- it's the simple fact that the life of a book has never been so short. Once a new title reaches bookstores, it has perhaps a week or two to get review and interview attention before a groaning truckload of new books arrives to take its place in the magazines and shop windows. If you blink, last month's books are gone. The lit world is caught up in a never-ending production of short attention-span theater. Individual books do have other chances at survival, of course. Word of mouth can fan the sales of paperback editions. Book group attention can boost readership and increase a title's longevity. And some newish books climb their way onto college reading lists. Yet every year dozens of worthy books are allowed to slip from print -- many of them permanently. This special issue of Salon is dedicated to out-of-print books. A few weeks ago we asked a dozen or so well-known writers, as well as a few of Salon's editors and regular contributors, to write us an elegy -- to tell us about a favorite book that has fallen out of print. The results both surprised and charmed us. Some of these essays introduced us to books we'd scarcely heard of (see Diane Johnson on Nigel Dennis' "A House in Order," Luc Sante on David Maurer's "The Big Con" or P.J. O'Rourke on Lord Dunsany's "My Talks with Dean Spanley"). Others reminded us of wonderful writers we've neglected for too long (see Roz Chast on Charles Addams' "Dear Dead Days," Robert Stone on Stanley Booth's "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" or Madison Smartt Bell on Joyce Cary's "The African Witch"). Many others had us rushing out to scan the shelves at our local used bookshop, hoping to capture the sublime buzz in the writer's cranium. Each of the books written about here is indeed out of print, but don't despair of ever finding copies. They're around, and with a bit of effort and patience (and sometimes a bit of luck) they can be found. The first step is to check with your local library or used bookseller. If that fails, there are several ways to search for out-of-print books on the Internet. One site that's well worth visiting is maintained by Advanced Book Exchange Inc., which features a simple and useful search engine. Enter a title and you'll be directed to used booksellers across the country who have copies of the book you're after -- often in various editions and price ranges. Wherever possible, in the essays below, we've provided information about each book's first American publication. (Many of these books also exist in a variety of paperback editions.) We hope that you will be inspired to seek out some of these books. Our more fervent hope is to see many of these titles off the endangered list, and back in bookstores, as soon as possible. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones By Stanley Booth. Random House, 1984. BY ROBERT STONE | How Stanley Booth's "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" became, largely, a lost treasure is one of the literary mysteries of the last 15 years. No work on the popular arts so faithfully serves its subject while unpretentiously succeeding in being about so much more. Undertaking to write a book on the group, Booth was witness to the early days of the Stones' transatlantic success, a period that marked their ascent to nearly unparalleled fame and fortune. He was also onstage with them during the violent concert at Altamont, Calif., an event that many students of the era look back on as the moral catastrophe of the '60s hopes and ideals. Booth knows the secrets of the heart as well as he knows rock music. Like Hunter Thompson's, his writing conveys in its style a whole mode of life. But his sense of irony and tragedy is usually keener than Thompson's and the examination of his subject penetrates more deeply. It seems to me that "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" takes on a dimension similar to that of Michael Herr's "Dispatches." What "Dispatches" did to render the Vietnam War, "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" does for '60s rock. The anarchy, the ecstasy and the fear of those days are all reflected -- together with the experiences of a Dionysian generation learning the old lesson that nothing is free. Booth's strong, sound prose brings to life the out-of-control process through which an age intoxicated by its own passions found a hard-driving music to live hard by. In all the annals of the '60s, there is nothing on paper that so evokes those days and nights. Robert Stone's new novel, "Damascus Gate," will be published by Houghton Mifflin in May. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A House in Order By Nigel Dennis. Vanguard, 1966. BY DIANE JOHNSON | People did not seem to like Nigel Dennis' "A House in Order" as much as his earlier "Cards of Identity," a novel much admired in the '60s but now, perhaps, nearly as obscure as the strange little parable that followed, which I have loved since I read it when it came out, in 1966, but have lived without, unable until now to find a copy in libraries or second-hand bookshops. I had even begun to think I had invented this novel in the ensuing 30 years. My remembered novel is a soothing allegory of order and serenity, concerning a man who isolates himself from the chaos and terror of the actual world when he is confined during a war to a greenhouse, and occupies himself with cleaning it up and growing a garden of flourishing plants. I understand now what attracted me then -- it was the making of order out of chaos that, as the mother of young children, I envied. At the time, I saw no way out of personal household chaos, no way to achieve the single-minded and solitary pleasures of a grand project. Now that Salon has found me a copy, of only four tracked down on the Internet, I have reread it with all the old pleasure, and much greater admiration for a work more complex and subtle than I had remembered, more slyly satiric about human intentions and public character. The narrator, who emerges from his ordeal as a great hero, tells us nothing, from the beginning, but of his mortal terror and craven impulses of self-preservation. There is less about gardening than I had remembered, and more about passing the time, and just getting through. There are interrogations with the blandly sinister equability of Pinter or Kafka, there is the nameless enemy, and descriptions of panic. And of heroism, that quality the protagonist disclaims but which the reader finds him to have, leading his life in a greenhouse in frozen winter and sweltering summer, surviving with stoic resourcefulness, a lesson to us all. Diane Johnson's most recent novel, "Le Divorce," was a National Book Award finalist. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Game By David M. Maurer. Bobbs-Merrill, 1940. BY LUC SANTE | The big con was an elaborate scenario, with brilliantly improvisatory lead actors, meticulously appointed sets and dozens of supernumeraries, as thoroughly scripted and rehearsed as any Hollywood production, set up with the single purpose of fleecing one well-heeled, naive and fatally greedy mark. Its golden age was the era of the railroad and the telegraph, when provincials were more provincial, communication more sluggish and entire police departments could be tamed with one convenient payment. It was an elegant, prankish and poetically just type of skin game, a sort of flimflam jujitsu in which the depth of the victim's fall was determined by his own cupidity. David Maurer was a linguist who specialized in underworld and subcultural slang, but this is no dry academic study. Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, most of them at large, and obtained their reminiscences as an insider. The result is a bonanza of wild but credible stories, told concisely and with deadpan humor, as sly and rich in atmosphere as anything this side of Mark Twain (it served as the chief source for the 1973 movie "The Sting"). It is also a small masterpiece of the American language, veined with grifter lingo and populated by such characters as the High Ass Kid, the Seldom Seen Kid and the Narrow Gage Kid, whose "height was just the distance between the rails of a narrow gage railway." It should immediately be restored to print and kept there. Luc Sante is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, New York magazine and Slate. His memoir, "The Factory of Facts," will be published by Pantheon in February. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and their Followers By David Felton. Straight Arrow Books, 1972. BY MARYANNE VOLLERS | Like Chinese diplomats, the people at Amazon.com never say "no" when you request a book. They just tell you to wait. But you know that a book is seriously out of print when they inform you that it may take three months or longer to track down a used copy. Frankly, I was surprised that Amazon.com even listed the book I was trying to find. I hadn't seen a copy of it in more than 20 years. It's called "Mindfuckers," edited by David Felton and published in paperback in 1972 by Straight Arrow Books, the long-defunct publishing arm of Rolling Stone magazine, where Felton and I both worked many years ago. You may have guessed that "Mindfuckers" was not a bestseller. In fact, as I recall, most bookstores wouldn't display it, even though the title was rendered in some sort of Middle German font that made it look like "Mindfucters." The subtitle sealed its fate. Books that weren't kicked under the bargain table probably ended up in the occult section. But if you do happen upon a used copy, as I recently did, you'll find that "Mindfuckers" is a scary and instructive book, a collection of articles written by Felton, David Dalton and Robin Green about cults and "growth movements" in the late '60s and early '70s. What's most scary about these pieces is how contemporary they sound (if you ignore the occasional interjection "dig it"). You can ponder how the long-forgotten personal-growth guru Victor Baranco would have profited from cable TV infomercials (or wonder if he hasn't changed his name and opened a psychic hot line). A fresh read on the Manson Family can be useful when fathoming the appeal of David Koresh or the zeal of prosecutors following the recent Pearl High School "satanic-cult" massacre in Mississippi. The story of how folk-musician and self-appointed savior Mel Lyman controlled a group of very smart and talented devotees would have come in handy when Marshall Applewhite led his Heaven's Gate followers in a mass Nestea Plunge into oblivion last year. Personally, I'm glad to have the book around again. It might help me understand my neighbors. I've recently moved to a small town in Montana's Paradise Valley, where middle-class members of the Church Universal and Triumphant await the apocalypse in a pleasant suburban development (bomb shelters now optional). In fact, "Mindfuckers" might just be the handbook we all need tucked under our arms as we lean into the cold winds of the next millennium. Maryanne Vollers wrote the book "Ghosts of Mississippi" -- a National Book Award finalist in 1995 -- but had nothing to do with the movie. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My Talks with Dean Spanley By Lord Dunsany. Putnam, 1936. BY P.J. O'ROURKE | Always remembering that most books are out of print for good reason, I nominate a sad exception: "My Talks with Dean Spanley" by Lord Dunsany. The nearly forgotten Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 1878-1957) was a member of the Abbey Theatre crowd in Dublin and a prolific writer of short stories. Most of his works were of the elf-and-goblin Celtic-pish neo-gothic horror type, "Silence of the Lambs" with Hobbits. But "Talks" is the story of an Anglican dean who, under the influence of exactly the right amount of Tokay wine, recalls his previous incarnation as a spaniel. It is a brilliant excursion into canine consciousness. It puts that silly Elizabeth Marshall Thomas woman and her "Hidden Life of Dogs" into a kennel. "Talks" explains the perfidy of rabbits on the lawn, the economics of burying bones when you can't remember where they are and why to urinate on vehicle wheels. The dean holds forth on dog cuisine (water should have a fine, ripe flavor; meat gets better and better until it disappears) and philosophizes about his owners, "the great ones." They are so good, so wise and yet so foolishly complacent about the enormous fat, yellow stranger sneaking up in the night sky. "My Talks with Dean Spanley" is also a practical book. Knowledge of canine reincarnation provides important insights when dealing with spouses and teenage children, albeit spouses are not as loyal and teens are not as useful as most breeds. "Talks" could even help us understand our own dogs, although what our dog thinks of us is not, perhaps, something we'd care to know. Lord Dunsany didn't, however, write any sequels to "Talks" -- no "Conversations with Professor Squirrelle" or "My Chats with Madame deClaude." And, tragically, he never tried to get inside the mind of a congressman. P.J. O'Rourke is the author most recently of "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut." N E X T+P A G E+| Roz Chast, bell hooks, Caroline Knapp and many more writers celebrate their favorite out-of-print books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL ELROD