One Book In . . .

 

 

Valero Doval 

By TERRY EICHER - The New York Times

          Last year in the pages of the Book Review, Drew Gilpin Faust described her elation at finding her favorite childhood book in a rare-book store in London, after she had searched for it for decades. In the old days, devotion to such a quest would often fail, filed in a card catalog under “Unrequited Love.” But just as the Internet reunites old lovers, so too can it reunite readers with other fugitive objects of love, like the books of childhood, usually with happier outcomes. The Internet’s shared secrets, though, may also keep some grails tantalizingly out of reach, even as they are in sight.       
    

Google “Giles of the Star,” a children’s book you’ve probably never heard of. Today I find three copies offered at $400, $800 and $1,200. Why is it so valuable? Its author is unknown. It hasn’t been promoted or made into a movie. Its price can only be explained by the hold its story has on the memories of its readers. And, perhaps, my inadvertent assistance.

      

The best part of sixth grade at Grady Elementary School in Houston, in 1960, was after lunch when Mrs. Wise stood at the front of the classroom and opened a red book and read a few pages aloud. The story was about a peasant boy in medieval England. He pined to be a knight. There was a hermit and a girl in a castle (whom I imagined, speaking of unrequited longing, as the girl who sat in front of me), wicked knights, secret passages and a great deal of suspense. No spoilers here, but suffice to say that it was a story about yearning, maybe even one that taught yearning. Mrs. Wise always stopped reading at the height of excitement, making a small indentation in the margins with her fingernail to mark the spot. We groaned.

      

I knew what it was to be utterly absorbed in a book, sometimes to the exasperation of my family and friends. But this was the best story I had ever heard. The right story at the right time for students on the edge of pubescence. I daydreamed about organizing the boys in my neighborhood for chivalric games of the sort that the castle’s young squires played. At home each evening, as we lay in our beds in the dark, I retold the day’s reading to my younger brother. Every night he groaned like my classmates when I stopped the story where Mrs. Wise had left off. My most sublime moments and memories of a year that was replete with splendid moments are about a book and events in a story, as I heard and imagined and retold it.

      

For many years afterward, far from Houston, long before the Internet, I searched for a copy of “Giles of the Star.” I did not remember the author’s name. I went straight for the card catalog at any library, large or small, always unavailingly. In college, shelving books at my library job, I discovered huge annuals that seemed to list every book published. Guessing that Mrs. Wise’s well-worn volume might be from the 1930s or ’40s, I pored through those volumes. No luck. In hundreds of used-book stores or at book sales, I searched for “Giles.” For 20 years, it became a ritual to scan the shelves of children’s books, neck craned, before I browsed or searched for anything else. I learned that there were many series of books about boys and knights published at about the time I reckoned. Could “Giles” have been part of such a series? Might it have been a British book that had not appeared in America? I searched in England when I lived there. No reference, no recognition.

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