True or False?

Me on the phone: “Tell me about the library you’re offering for sale. How would you describe it?

Him on the phone: “Oh, Fiction, non-Fiction.” Well, that about covers it.

My employee: “Where should I shelve these Bibles you just bought? Do they belong in Fiction?”

Well, that’s a good question.

Another employee catalogues an Old Testament for the first time: “What do I write in the ‘Author’ Field?” Well, that, too, is a good question. “Some old dude?”

Last week I introduced you, Dear Reader, to a lovely book, Grass, by Merian C. Cooper and that had been augmented by 64 of Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack’s finest black-and-white photographs. The book followed the Haidar clan and their Bakhtiari company of 50,000 Persian transhumant pastoralists as they traversed up and over mountain passes and forded icy-cold, snow melt-fed rivers in search of water and pasturage for their animal herds of camels and goats, sheep and donkeys. It was “True,” right?, because Cooper “covered” the migration and simply “reported” what Schoedsack had “photographed” and “filmed.” The film was so bracing, the reportage so authentic, the eventual “silent” film-documentary so popular in 1925 that it led to the filmmaker and photographer getting the King Kong gig in 1933. Okay, that one’s False.

Whether one sells books in on-line fashion only (as I do) or in an open shop, from within a bricks-and-mortar location (as I used to), bookselling raises important questions every day. Questions arise as to how Labor relates to Capital. There are ethics to learn about buying and selling “used” books. A given book might be “new” from the publisher and maybe even still in shrink-wrap, but if you bought it from a distributor or another dealer, is it still “new?” If it’s signed by the author but still sealed, must one call Schrodinger?

Bookselling raises questions every day about ontology, too, the scientific study of being, of what actually is. The only truthful answers to the question, for example, of “who” “wrote” “the Bible,” are “we don’t know” and “we can’t know.” But documentaries are True, right?

Take Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, for example, a film built upon the eponymously titled book, My Eskimo Friends: Nanook of the North. It’s rumored that Orson Welles chose Nanook of the North as his favorite documentary. Surely you (or your parents or grandparents) grew up with Nanook, the man, the book, the film. Perhaps it is the first documentary ever made (in 1922), a work that captured an Inuit Eskimo’s harsh life in the Canadian Arctic. One epic scene follows another, for example, as Nanook rassles a harpooned seal through a cut-open hole in the Arctic ice. Off-screen, however, behind the camera, Flaherty has stationed another Inuit man at another hole cut through the ice. He, too, tugs fulsomely on the rope . . . True or False?

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