Yesterday we were having lunch at La Bottega Marino, on the Westside. It is an intimate place, with small round marble-topped tables grouped close together, perfect for overhearing conversations. At a table in the corner two young women sat finishing their dessert while they waited for someone to arrive. “I’m having a ‘cakegasm,’” one of two announced happily to the waitress as the other excused herself to use the bathroom. The friend arrived, a young man. He spoke in a soft tone—a bedroom voice. The girl at the table started talking about the book she was reading, which she said was incredible. At that, naturally, my ears swiveled in her direction. “Don’t get me started on this book,” she warned the young man, “I won’t stop talking about it.”

“I love reading,” the soft-voiced young man said.

She couldn’t resist. Minutes later, she started describing what I quickly realized was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand—the immensely long novel about a driven and unyielding architect named Howard Roark, based on a heroic Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mistress of the Universe, Ms. Rand

I am reminded of the wickedly funny incident in Tobias Wolff’s Old School, in which Ayn Rand comes to the campus of the prep-school-aged protagonist. She sweeps in, adorned with a pin in the shape of a dollar sign, with a coterie of followers. She sneers at the protagonist for sneezing. She cites the greatest works America has produced as being her two books (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) and the works of Mickey Spillane (who runs a distant third place). Rand exits with a superior and sardonic air, just as she swept in. After her visit, the protagonist does not feel the same about Ayn Rand. The spell has been broken.

Rand, perhaps perturbed by a second rater

Rand espoused the virtue of selfishness, which she termed “the morality of rational self-interest.” Tied, as the theory was, to stunningly attractive supermen and women, with have scoundrels that are truly contemptible arrayed against them, it was a blast of ideas. Lacking in money, and feeling that my talents were unappreciated in a world that too easily accepted mediocrity, I bought into it myself at about the same age as the young woman in the Bottega.To believe oneself a superman, even or 600 quickly-read pages, is to lessen the sting of poverty and hunger, especially if one can feel scorn for the “second-raters,” with their soft layers of flab, who always seem positioned above you, through no virtue of their own.

I remained somewhat in thrall to the uncompromising Rand—at least her fabulous portrayal of the virtues of the “purpose-driven” life—until I was laughed at by my mentor, Elisa Fitzgerald, at the start of my tenure at Vermont Magazine. On my resume, I’d let on I was part of The Objectivist Club (Rand’s philosophy) at the university I had just graduated from. Okay, so I didn’t have much to pad the resume with. I don’t think Rand helped me get the job. 

Just as Harry Potter has been an entry point into reading for many children, I think the tomes of Ayn Rand, which seem impossibly lengthy at first, encourage readers at a certain age, and a certain level of suggestibility, to take on more challenging works. One finishes the Rand books in a surge, wanting to read more, hungry for ideas.

And then…shades of the working world start to close around the working stiff. Time for reading becomes a luxury. And after high school or college we slowly start setting about forgetting most of what we learned. That is why it is so important to read as much as one can in those high school and college years, when the mind is a field ready to be sown.

The trick is simply to get A Journey Through Literary America into the hands of that little group at the Bottega. The blond woman had just had the literary equivalent of a cakegasm. The young man sounded just as enthusiastic as she. The doors to their reading habits are standing open. TRH

The interior pages of the book have now been approved for printing. What remain to be approved are only the jacket and the sample of the foil stamping on the cover. We are almost there!

What happens next? Well, the plant starts printing, of course. The plant can produce millions of books per month. But whenever I have visited Toppan Shenzhen, I have been astounded at how one book can take up so much space for a little while. The printed sheets come out of the machine and are stacked on pallets. Many pallets. Men and women–mostly women–in the light blue Toppan uniform drive forklifts around the factory, moving pallets. Sometimes they are just moved into the cavernous hallways in order to make room for other books. The same thing happens with the completed case stamping samples. They are stacked somewhere in uniform piles. Everything is coordinated. But it all seems a blur when you are there. When I have visited, and seen a book that Toppan Los Angeles was working on, it has always given me a thrill. I would love to see our book in the factory that I have worked with for so long,  occupying pallets alongside other books, labeled with some Chinese characters that are a translation of the concept of “A Journey Through Literary America.” It would be something to see our printed sheets being driven around by a woman with a kerchief on her head, sitting “sidesaddle” on a forklift, completely oblivious (probably) about the subject of the book she is shuttling around.   

Now that it has been given the green light for printing, our book will disappear beyond our reach for a while. When reading the latter half of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, I was reminded of the book’s current status in his description of the Snake River:

“A few miles south of the highway, the Snake River came out of five-thousand-foot-deep Hells Canyon, a place as inaccessible as any in the country. North of the road, the river, called by the voyageurs La Maudite Riviére Enragée, “The Accursed Mad River,” went back into a canyon two thousand miles deep and almost as inaccessible. It was as if the Snake, which travels such difficult terrain that explorers proved its true source only in 1970, crawled from underground to see sky before disappearing again.” (p. 244)

Our book will resurface long enough for us to check the printed sheets, and then disappear again until the book is completed. We cannot do much more to affect the outcome of the book now. It’s up to the skill and dedication of the Toppan Shenzhen pressmen and bindery. TRH