Seattle Blogger Posts Satirical Essay Making Fun of Treasure Hunters

Poking fun at treasure hunters who go to garage sales, yard sales, and self storage sales looking for rare antiques, Seattle blogger Stephen Gertz mocked the literary establishment with a post at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this month. Gertz’ August 24 post claims that Baltimore bookstore clerk Kelvin Johnson, while hunting for treasure at a self storage sale, discovered a cache of rare cookbooks by authors not known for their culinary skills, such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“I’m not much of a vanilla-book person,” Gertz quotes Johnson as having said, “but I do know that none of these authors were known for their work in the kitchen. They’re all cookbooks.”

Among the books that Gertz claims Johnson found in the self storage unit were:

• A Tramp, A Broad, and Huckleberry Pie, by Mark Twain
• Barnaby Fudge, by Charles Dickens
• The Tell-Tale Calves Liver, by Edgar Allen Poe
• Sophie’s Choice Brisket, by William Styron
• Portrait of a Lady Finger, by Henry James
• The Beautiful and the Damned Angel Cake, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Silent Spring Chicken, by Rachel Carson
• Finnegan’s Cake, by James Joyce
• Several works by William Faulkner, including: The Sound and the Fricasee, As I Lay Frying, Intruder in the Crust, Requiem for a Bun, and Albacore, Albacore!
• Wide Sargasso Sea Bass: 20 Lite N’ Easy Meals, by Jean Rhys
• War on Pizza, by Leo Tolstoy

Gertz describes a literary establishment rocked by these discoveries. He quotes Marilyn Bagley (who may or may not be a real person), Professor of English Literature at West Covina Community College (which apparently does not exist or has a very small Internet footprint) in southern California: “We all feel like we’ve been kneaded, and flattened with a rolling pin...All our bubbles have been squooshed.” If readers were not alerted to the fact that they were reading something that might have been published in The Onion, they may have been tipped off by Bagley’s vita, which included the title Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop Motifs in Victorian Novels 1840-1860: The Foreshadow of Ozzie Osborne, Original 50 Cent, and the Quest for Bling within the Works of William Thackeray and George Eliot.

According to his biography at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer website, Gertz himself is a lifelong book collector who currently directs David Brass Rare Books and is vice-chair of the southern California chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. That may be true.

Sources used:

Gertz, Stephen. “The aprocryphal cookbooks of famous novelists.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reader Blogs. Aug. 24, 2010.