Gregory Maguire on the First Book He Ever Bought (and still owns!)

by | Aug 28, 2020 | Love Your Library

The first book I ever bought for myself was at a library book sale on the sidewalk in front of the Harmanus Bleecker Library… It was E. Nesbit’s THE WOULD-BE-GOODS.

We received this story, a reminder of the importance of library book sales, from Gregory Maguire. In case his story incites your curiosity for these children’s classics that he mentions, we have included links to find free electronic versions of these books, written around the last turn of the century by the English author E. (Edith) Nesbit. Enjoy the rest of the story!

The first book I ever bought for myself was at a library book sale on the sidewalk in front of the Harmanus Bleecker Library. Probably about 1966. I still have it.  It was E. Nesbit’s follow up to the THE TREASURE SEEKERS, called THE WOULD-BE-GOODS. Originally published in 1901, this edition was a Coward McCann hardcover printed in Great Britain. Due to wear-and-tear, the copy had been recovered in those hardy plastic-impregnated boards, colored a violent carmine red that hasn’t faded with the years. A black-and-white illustration from the text had been slapped rather muddily on the cover. The last date stamped on the glued-in slip is August 1965, when the volume was withdrawn from circulation, presumably. I must have been about 10 or 11 at the time of the book sale. I see also this copy had been taken out eight times in the previous 16 months, so once every two months roughly.  That seems like vigorous circulation to a non-library-professional like me, even now. I wonder why it was selected for weeding. The pocket glued into the back of the book says “cop. 3” on it. It seems at one point E. Nesbit had quite the following among Albany Public Library clientele. 

E. Nesbit would have remained unknown to me but that the children in the popular Edward Eager novels, HALF MAGIC and the like, were always gushing about how she as a writer of magic books was the Master of Them All. So, a fantasist in training even back then, I fell up on the book on a trestle out on Dove Street, and I suspect I bullied my two buddies to chip in about a quarter each so we could own it together. (All three of our names are in the fly-leaf but you see in whose permanent collection it has remained.) 

Sadly, it turned out not actually to be a magic book, only a family story more in the comic than sentimental mode. Though still rewarding. The Bastables owe a little to the Louisa May Alcott school of family stories, though the children, being British, are less prone to improvement. Their descendants are the Moffats, the Melendys, Ramona Quimby, and probably the family in that film, HOME ALONE.  A poem by one of the kids in the book:

We are the Wouldbegood Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try,
And if we try, and if we don’t succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.

It is through such lessons of moral fatalism that children like me learned my place. I for instance never shared the book with the other boys who owned stock in it. So I am very bad indeed, but as I still have hopes of improvement, I still use the public library searching for guidance in matters great and small.

Gregory Maguire

We are the Wouldbegood Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try,
And if we try, and if we don’t succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.

E. Nesbit, The Would-Be Goods