Curculio – Michael Hendry

She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at their command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines–not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

(Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost, Chapter 6)

I’ve been in Staunton, Virginia, for some Shakespeare at the Blackfriars Playhouse — more on that later. For now, I’ll just post about some interesting signs seen along the way:

• Sign that looks like it’s missing a letter: Grim Realty.
• Sign overtaken by events to produce an unfortunate ambiguity: (on the back of an ambulance) S.A.R.S. Ambulance. I imagine that stands for Staunton Area Rescue Service, or something like that, but the tinfoil-hat crowd might think we now have special ambulances for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the deadly flu which killed over 700 people in China, Canada, and other countries four years ago.
• Surprisingly accurate sign: Every city in America seems to have an ‘Oak Grove Road’, and I’ve never seen an oak grove anywhere near any of them. I’m no dendrologist, and I passed rather quickly, but it looked to me like the Oak Grove Baptist Church near Farmville is located in an actual grove of oak trees. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
• Least expected message on a sign: Goat Milk Soap, next right.

One of the great ironies of the Internet age is that traditional ephemera, such as newspaper articles and diary entries, now live on forever in indexes and blogs. Meanwhile, given the short shelf life of modern books — basically, six weeks nowadays — and the decline of traditional library stacks, modern books only live on for a few years at most. Indeed, if you really want your prose to survive this century, you might be better off writing a successful blog that enjoys a lot of technorati links.

— Michael S. Malone (here)