Interview with Pam, Berkeley, 6/18

Do you remember Up Haste?

Not every well. I vaguely remember the space -- the alley it was in, around the corner from People’s Park, and the kids room, and sitting on the floor reading. I remember there was grownup stuff going on next door that I didn’t bother about. I remember getting snacks at the little food store a block up Telegraph. I remember stuff nearby, Hedge --

What was Hedge?

That was the Free school Shelley and I went to when we first came to Berkeley. It was just a block down Haste Street…Oh, and I remember the day there was a naked man on the roof of a car in People’s Park. And I remember seeing the Berkeley Barb for sale and wondering if it was a dirty newspaper. That’s about all I remember from the Avenue. I wasn’t very old.

Do you remember Moes?

I remember going downstairs to the used record room. I don’t think they had kid’s books. I didn’t go in there by myself, even when I was older. It was intimidating, there always seemed to be a horde of men behind the counter arguing. But I don’t remember much.

You had a busy reading life.

Yes, and a busy playing life. Playing, reading, stuff.

What do you remember most vividly?

From that era? Books, playing with Shelley, my parents arguing about politics, kittens….

Kittens?

The wild kittens at our grandparents’ house in Orinda. We would try to tame them. I would sit still for hours trying to make them trust me. I really loved kittens. I once ripped a whole bunch of kitten pictures out of a library book. I felt horrible doing it, but I couldn’t help it. I remember this sick feeling in my stomach as I went through the book ripping out pages, but I just had to have these pictures! I also stole one of my favorite kid’s books from the school library. That’s not a kitten story, that’s just another example of my shady past in libraries. I also ripped the corners off pages of library books while I was reading them and chewed them like gum.

Do you still do that? Did you do that when you worked at the rare book library?

Of course not! Although I’ve often wondered what it would be like to chew 17th century paper. It was very good paper, you know. They made it from rags. I’d be chewing 17th century underwear.

Tell me about Little Funny People by Pam.

That was my first book. The original is in a tiny spiral notebook with illustrations in colored pencil. The first couple pages of the text are in my handwriting, then my mom transcribed the rest because the story was getting away from me – I was telling it on the spot, and I couldn’t write well enough to keep up. It was a birthday present for my little brother. I wrote it in 1971, when I was six.

Then, because Up Haste was opening a children’s section, my mom and Uncle Smed decided to print up some copies to sell in the store. My mom traced all the original drawings in black marker, and typed up the text and we printed a bunch of copies on our little printing press and collated them. I hand colored the cover with a yellow marker, and I think I colored the illustrations too, on a few of the copies, but those are long gone.

How many copies sold?

I don’t know. My mom doesn’t remember. I know we sold some. I think they were priced at 50 cents. We still have a whole box of uncollated pages, so they couldn’t have really been flying out the door. I was proud, though. I had published my first book and I was only six!

There was another Jackson Children publication distributed by Up Haste, wasn’t there?

Oh yeah, the Monster Coloring Book. It had line drawings of monsters and dragons by me and Shelley and Anthony. You know the great story about that is that much later – we must have been in high school – we stopped in at Shakespeares and they had a stack of Monster Coloring Books on their sale table! They must have bought some from us back in the day. Probably found them in some dark corner somewhere and dusted them off – so that was my first book to get remaindered!

Did you keep writing after Little Funny People?

Oh I wrote tons of stories. But I never had a publisher again, or a distributor, since Up Haste closed. I usually gave them to my parents for Christmas.

Were you sad when Up Haste closed?

I don’t remember being sad. A lot of the books ended up at our house, so it wasn’t a great loss for me, at least I don’t remember it that way -- I don’t think I ever had a clear idea of where our house ended and the bookstore began anyway…or the library, for that matter.You could read any place, and there were books everywhere, you could take them home, bring them back…I did think it was something very special to own a book, though, to have it be my very own.

Did you steal books?

No. Well only that one time at the school library. But I did covet books often, and the great thing about the public library was that every year they would have a giant book sale, and often we could find our favorite books, discarded from the library. Probably with chewed corners, too, that’s probably why they threw them out! So at these sales we could buy them for 25 cents or 50 cents. We didn’t get enough allowance to buy books for ourselves much – I remember ordering one once from Cody’s, that was a big deal – but the library sales meant we could get our hands on these books that we coveted. We would go to the Berkeley Public Library sale in June, and the Oakland Public Library sale…Sometimes afterwards I would take the Mylar jacket off the book and try to make it look like it wasn’t a library discard, but you couldn’t always do that. The library would sometimes cut the cover into pieces and glue it to the book, or some awful thing – glue the Mylar to the book cover…ugh. Ruined. And of course they’d have the pocket glued in to hold the card…

Did you chew on the corners of books you owned?

No, I never did. I feel bad about that. It shows I didn’t really respect library books. I mean I really liked chewing on pages, it’s true, but if it had been an uncontrollable urge I’d have done it to my own books, too. So clearly it was just disrespect. Maybe it was that I thought they were already kind of ruined. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking ahead to when I’d buy this copy at the library sale and all the corners of the pages would be chewed off and I’d be really pissed! Damn! Who did that?!