Dave Wood

How many of you readers out there used Cliff Notes when you were in school? C’mon now! Fess up! The pamphlets were everywhere back in the 1960’s. Yellow and black. The bane of English teachers who called them “Trots” and told their students to use them at the risk of death or something worse.

Even before Cliff polluted academe, students always tried to get around having to read the whole book. For instance, when I began teaching at Bowling Green Ohio University in 1958, I wandered into a newsstand on the edge of town and was surprised to see not only stacks of Time, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Wall St. Journal, but also stack after stack of colorfully illustrated Classic Comics that condensed stories like those of Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, and Nathanial Hawthorne, getting picked up by the scores of sophomores who I found out later were enrolled in Professor Giles Floyd’s Eng 201, intro to fiction.

I know about Classic comics. When I was a wee lad my rich cousin Bill had a treasure trove of Classic comics. Most of Bill’s books were for excitement-starved kids, with the titles, “The Sea Wolf,” “Lion Trainer,” Frank Buck’s “Bring ‘em Back Alive” stories, and “Swiss Family Robinson.” My personal favorite back then was “The Corsican Brothers,” a gruesome tale of Siamese twins who were sliced apart at birth but managed to feel the stab of a dueling sword even when the brothers were continents apart. My only contribution to Bill’s massive collection was a very thick comic of the Holy Bible in which I could actually see the colors in Joseph’s famous coat.

Miraculously the newsstand offerings matched to a T the required readings in Prof Giles Floy’s sophomore lit class! Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

But let me tell you what I’ve discovered about the value of those old-fashioned “trots”—much as the former English teacher in me doesn’t like for students to miss out on some very good reading. When I recently returned from Florida, the same mysterious person who sent me a copy of Edgar Guest’s poems had struck again. This time with a tattered but genuine copy of Classics Illustrated No. 6, which many years ago sold for 15 cents, none other than “A Tale of Two Cities”—a touching tale of the sacrifice made by one Sidney Carton, the drunk who went to the gallows in order that his virtual twin, a nobler and better man in Sidney’s mind, would be spared that fate. Just before the Guillotine lopped off his head, Sidney declared: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

That dramatic ending was followed by this enducement: “Don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading this great story in the original book form.” And on the back cover was an ad for the 149 other classics offered by the Gilbertson Co, 15 cents for each copy plus 15 cents for postage and handling. You could order the whole batch—“endorsed by the editors”—for only $43.50.

Perhaps my mysterious donor of “A Tale of Two Cities” had sent out that check for all 149, skipped college, read all of them and fashioned her own belletristic degree, basking in the sheer beauty of not just words, but pictures on a page. Come to think of it, for all my “by the book education,” I never realized that Lucy Manette was a blonde bombshell!