Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels
Everybody’s aesthetic is set by the time you’re eight years old. At its deepest level, the most intrinsic and elemental aspects of the self—within the basement of your soul—the stories you were told, the songs you heard, the pictures you looked at that are pressed into the service of constructing a person. My own aesthetic owes everything to the much beloved and much missed Pinocchio’s Bookstore for children, run by Marilyn Hollinshead from 1985 to 2002, opening the year after I was born and closing the year that I moved away for college. Pinocchio’s was located on Aiken at the terminus of narrow and dense shop-lined Walnut Street in the bougie Pittsburgh neighborhood of wood-paneled Victorians and brick Tudors known as Shadyside, uncharacteristically flat of terrain and gridded of street in the hilly city. Unassuming, the street-level entrance to the bookstore was at the end of a line of shops, the inventory only accessible through a staircase from the front door to the dimly lit treasures beneath, the entrance advertised with a vaguely unsettling drawing of the titular Italian puppet himself, all oak plank and joist with his nose not yet to prodigious growth. The subterranean locale meant that your descent smelled slightly of earth and rain, and the overall effect of entering the surprisingly large store was that you’d happened upon a magical cave that was filled top-to-bottom with books. Specializing in the gauntlet of children’s literature from board-books for babies all the way to Young Adult novels for those in high school, and Pinocchio’s made true for me Francis Spufford‘s beautiful recollection in The Child That Books Built about “readings that acted like transformations… when a particular book, like a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed.”
Spending an hour on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in the dim lighting of Pinocchio’s with its burgundy wall paper and its toy pit, it’s racks of stuffed toy turtles and hedgehogs, its rows of paperbacks, and I came across many of Spufford’s transformations. There was Klutz Publishing’s by , which had an aluminumfrom Usborne Books, which terrified younger members of Generation X and older millennials, its violet cover showing a picture of an ethereal, monkish specter, while inside there were maps of hauntings in isolated Cotswold villages and accounts of a Manx poltergeist named Giff who took the form of a talking mongoose. That title is where my sense of the macabre comes from, which was strengthened when I discovered the gothic novels of the great , such as with its classic cover by . Finally, there was an anthology of ‘s plays retold for children, as I recall a green-covered book illustrated with vines and roses, and haunting drawings of the witches from and whimsical ones of Bottom from , but I can’t remember the title, and I may have imagined it (though if I haven’t, please let me know). If in adulthood my aesthetic tends towards the eccentric, the twee, the idiosyncratic, an attraction toward fairy gardens and Medieval stone labyrinths covered in ivy, toward chill rain and overcast skies while listening to , then it’s because of Pinocchio’s. A title in that regard which stands out in my mind—a “seed crystal” as Spufford would call it—is the uncanny and beautiful picture book by .
