Library Booklet

Sometimes I’m ‘sore amazed’ at what I don’t know anything about. I’m not just talking world affairs or cutting edge research discoveries here. I’m speaking of things that are happening in my immediate sphere of interest. Like our local library’s participation in the annual Timberland Reads Together program. Where in the world have I been for the last eight years?

We are inveterate library users and great proponents of the Timberland Library system which serves five Southwest Washington counties. The closest library to us is only five miles away in Ocean Park and we go there frequently. So how did this Reads Together program go right by us? And thank goodness for our House Concerts and Wes Weddell or we still would have blinders firmly in place.

When he was here last month, Wes mentioned that he was involved with Timberland’s Read Together program through the Bushwick Book Club of Seattle. He and three fellow musicians will sing original songs inspired by this year’s Timberland selection, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. We plan to attend the performance in Ilwaco from 1:00 to 2:00 on Thursday, October 24th.

Edward Curtis

Meanwhile, having been made aware of the book (even though through ‘the back door’) I am reading the paperback copy that we checked out from the Ocean Park Library. I’m at once enthralled and annoyed. I’m loving Egan’s text; I am totally frustrated by the poor reproduction quality of his photographs in this paperback edition.

It seems absurd to me that the subject of the book is of one of the iconic photographers of the twentieth century, yet the illustrations of his work are muddy and unclear on the matt-finished paper of the book. Only the photograph of Curtis, himself, is printed on a satin-finished paper and is tucked inside the cover as a frontispiece. My online search reveals that the book was also published in hardback and I look forward to seeing that version eventually.

I first learned something of Edward Curtis at Stanford where I minored in Cultural Anthropology. His photographs documenting the disappearing culture of the North American Indian were subjects of great interest even back in the 1950s. And, over the years, I’ve seen several exhibitions and many, many reproductions of his work. I’m so sorry that Egan and his publishers didn’t hold themselves to a higher standard when it came to using Curtis’s work to illustrate this ‘popular’ edition of their book.

Nevertheless, I am greatly enjoying learning more about Curtis and his 30-year struggle to fulfill his dream. Egan has drawn me right into the conditions and attitudes of the first half of the twentieth century – Curtis’s world which stretched between the urban settings of Seattle and Washington D.C. and took in “the customs, cultures, lifestyles, social habits, diet, myths, creation stories… of about 80 Native American tribes.”

Curtis even picked oysters here in Shoalwater Bay while he was searching for the remnants of Chinookan culture! Given my track record for noticing things, I wonder if I’d have seen him even if he was gathering those oysters within sight of Oysterville. Highly doubtful.