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94 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine Words Doctor who could see and hear nothing in the crystal Kelly used. Kelly came to a bad end. My wife and I saw Dr. Dees crystal ball itwasegg-shapedreallyintheBritishMuse- um while we were in England in 1993. I wrote to the Cornell University Library which hasagreatoccultcollectionandasked them to send me photocopies of the missing pages. I then restored it and hand-bound it in studded leather-covered wooden boards in 1971. Many years later after Id finished my own book begun the Mathom Bookshop in Dresden and gone online I sold that book to someone in Australia for 1000. During our summers in Maine Id go out on bookfinding trips sometimes alone sometimes with Jean. Sometimes her sis- ter Nathalie would come along. One of the places wed go was Frank McQuaids Book Barn in Edgecomb. Hed been a World War II bomber pilot and Id been a sailor dur- ing and after the Korean War. Another character who roped me into the booksell- ing business was Charlie Davis still legend- ary in Oswego New York and in the worlds of folklore and jazz as well. He turned from music to business to poetry and fiction writing and editing. We crossed paths when he took a course in poetry writing with the late Roger Dickin- son-Brown then a member of the staff of my Program in Writing Arts at SUNY Oswego. DavishadgrownupinIndiana.Hisfather had been a close friend of a neighbor James Whitcomb Riley the Hoosier Poet and Charlie early came under Rileys benevolent influence. Later on Charlie graduated from Notre Dame University and upon his gradu- ation organized a group of musicians during the heyday of the Big Bandshe wrote about it in his book That Band from Indianaand was very successful on the swing and hot jazz circuits. Those of you who watched Ken Burnss history of jazz on PBS may have no- ticed a marquee at the Brooklyn Theatre that read Charlie Davis and His Joy Gang which shared the billing with a young singer named Ethel Merman. Charlies band singer was another young person named Dick Pow- ell. One of his compositions of the period was Copenhagen a jazz classic that has been performed by nearly all the famous swing and jazz artists since it was introduced. The composer drew royalties from it twice a year until his death in his nineties. The first course Davis took was titled The Nature of Poetry. It was a beginners course but stringent and technical. In it the student must write verse exercises in every prosody schema and genre imaginable. Davis did well for Dickinson-Brown and he began to involve himself in the extensive literary scene on campus. He gave readings with other students and his work was always popular because it wasquaint is the only word to describe it. The Riley influence was clear at least to the faculty if not to the stu- dentswhodneverheardoftheHoosierPoet. D aviss next course was a graduate seminar titled Conference Course in Writing Poetry. I taught it. The project involved writing a long poem some- thing hed never done and he was atypically for the class given a proscription He was not to write a single rhymed couplet. Instead he was going to do something difficultfor him that is. But what he asked baffled. Well have you ever heard of William Carlos Williams No should I have Yes since hes a famous contemporary of yours. Your first assignment is to read Wil- liamss Paterson. Davis did so. No sooner had he digested the book than he began to write. Daviss And So the Irish Built a Church is a story about Oswego written like Paterson in prose and verse with diary entries newspaper clip- pings songs and what-have-you it is im- possible for the reader to identify what Davis invented and what he researched tossed to- gether in a seemingly random but for all that highly wrought melange of lore and charac- ter and incident. Davis was so carried away he even composed a pseudo-19th-century musical piece and copied it out on aged paper suitablycharredtolookasthoughithadbeen saved from the conflagration that consumed the original church. It turned out to be 120 pages in length and popular. Everyone was interested in reading the next installment though Char- lie doing something totally new and exper- imental for him except where he managed to sneak in a rhymed song against orders couldnt believe his classmates were serious when they applauded him. Since the publication of Charlies book there have been people who know W. C. Wil- liams who claim that And So the Irish is more readable than its model. Since Paterson is a modern classic this opinion is heretical. The main criticism of the Davis opus may be that it begins to a degree shakily. Riley is rec- ognizable in the sentiment and Williams in the form the two do not mix well early on. But as the book progresses Riley and Wil- liams disappear and Davis rises above his sources to become one of the most engaging literary personalities of the late 20th century just as the man himself was larger than life. Well when Charlie had finished he told me he was too old to start sending his book around to publishers and wait for them to ac- cept it. He thought hed publish it himself. So he gave himself with my kibitzing a short course in book publishing. When The Irish appeared it soon sold out inspiring Charlie to launch his final career as a publisher. He asked me for a name for the press. I suggest- ed Mathom. I told him it was a word out of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that de- scribes the sort of things that fill the burrow homes of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins things onehas noearthlyusefor but simplycouldnt bear to throw away. Charlie thought that ac- curately described the sorts of things he and I would publish without asking he assigned me as Editor-in-Chief of Mathom. Two years later in 1979 I established my summer project the Mathom Bookshop and Bindery of Dresden Mills Maine which would be the North American outlet for the books we published. As though hearing about the shop books from everywhere be- gan to fly in. Among the Mathom titles were Oswego Charlie Daviss The Lake Trout and Legend Societys Cookbook 1980 and the sto- ry of Charlies career as a musical director ThatBandfromIndiana1982.Morerecently theres my The Green Maces of Autumn Voic- es in an Old Maine House issued in 2002. Its a series of monologues by the people who live in the 1754 house built by Sylvester Gardin- er onthepropertywheremywifesfamilyhas lived for a century or two. I opened my shop in the tractor garage of thefarmonBlinnHillRoadputahandmade sign out on the road and began to sell some of the books. I started out with one short shelf of books. Pretty soon I added a shelf and then another and another and then I was building permanent bookshelves. One day the Maine State D.O.T. stopped by to tell me I needed to register my business with the sales tax office and my signs had to conform to rules and regulations. Things were begin- ning to get expensive. Isoldmybookscheaply.Customerswould stop by and when theyd bought what they