Author Topic: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29  (Read 7777 times)

Offline Meryl

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Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« on: February 04, 2009, 05:03:39 pm »
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, 15 Christopher Street, will close on March 29, according to an announcement by the owners:



"There is no truth comparable to Sorrow.
There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be the only truth."
Oscar Wilde

It is with a sorrowful heart that after 41 years in business the Oscar Wilde Bookshop will close its doors for the final time on March 29, 2009. We want to thank all of our customers for their love and loyalty to the store over the years. You have helped make this store a world wide destination and all of us at the store have enjoyed welcoming our neighbors whether they are next door or half way around the world.

In 1967 Craig Rodwell started this landmark store that not only sold Gay and Lesbian literature but also became a meeting place for the LGBT community. Over the years it grew into a first-rate bookshop thanks to the loyal, smart and dedicated staff. There are not enough words to thank these dedicated booksellers for making the OWB one of the world's finest LGBT bookstores. I feel very honored to have gotten to work with them.

Unfortunately we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day. So thanks to all who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of a great global community.

With all best wishes for brighter times,
Kim Brinster

We will continue to take online orders and any email orders that come into the store until mid-March. 

http://www.oscarwildebooks.com/

Teary Shutter Signage: Oscar Wilde Bookshop Packs Up on Christopher Street

Tuesday, February 3, 2009, by Leslie Price

The West Village is set to lose a another historic gay and lesbian stomping ground. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop at 15 Christopher Street will shut down at the end of March, a victim of the economy. The fact that people aren't reading as many books as they used to, and that "regular" bookstores now also carry gay and lesbian literature can't have helped either. The sad letter you see above appears on the store's website; City Room has a teary email that owner Kim Brinster sent out to customers today. She told Times reporter Sewell Chan that, "sales had declined by double-digit percentages, compared to a year, each month since August" and that on Tuesday, "the store had only two paid customers."

http://racked.com/archives/2009/02/03/teary_shutter_signage_oscar_wilde_bookshop_packs_up.php
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Online southendmd

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #1 on: February 04, 2009, 09:58:56 pm »
How sad,  Meryl.  Where have all the independent bookstores gone?  I remember when Boston's Glad Day Bookstore closed, but, rose from the ashes, as Calamus

I found the Calamus mission statement, which mentions the Oscar Wilde, and nails the significance of these great spaces.




Our Mission
November 10, 2000

A neighborhood woman dropped into Calamus today to buy a book I’m selling by one of the local residents (the book is THE BIG DIG, about the famously expensive project whereby a surface highway is being put underground). She runs a hair salon across the street. She looked at me as she bought the book and said: “So, who was it who came up with the idea of a gay and lesbian bookshop?”



I didn’t miss a beat. “It was [the late] Craig Rodwell who opened Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village in New York in 1967. Since then, many cities feature bookstores based on his model serving our communities.” She liked the answer. People like satisfying answers.

In the many years I have been a bookseller, for 16 years at Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, and now at Calamus Bookstore, I get this question all the time. Why a GLBT bookstore? Even my dear friend, the novelist David Plante, once posed this question: What was the need for a gay bookstore?

For those of us who have created these spaces, the answer is self-evident. Early on, most of the gay bookstores were founded by gay activists, just as, in the women’s community, community activists founded most feminist bookstores. A bookstore serving the community was simply seen as an extension of our developing cultures, just as with publications, theatre groups, publishers, and on.

It comes down to the business of custodianship. Someone must be the vendor, archivist, warehouser, etc. of our community’s efforts. I hear horror stories all the time of people in situations wherein they must remove their collections of gay literature and erotica. One guy told me, that in cleaning out his house after he sold it, he—who had been an early Colt model, and possessed a fabulous collection of Colt photos from decades back—just chucked them in the trash before a friend recommended he bring them to the bookshop to find some new owner for them.

Think of the problems over the past three decades that prospective donors have found in trying to set up archives for our community’s literature. There are notable exceptions, and some university libraries are now collecting. A lot of stuff just disappears. And it’s not coming back. For many years, there was the issue of “gay invisibility.” Well, of course, a community will be “invisible” if you it has no document stream. Think of all the letters burned, journals destroyed, paintings trashed when the gay man dies and his relatives come to clean up his estate. Either the family members don’t understand or are embarrassed by it all. This was the situation when the generation of gay activists, to which I belong, came on the scene.

We came out of a time when the active opposition to gay publishing was still strong. The case of ONE MAGAZINE versus the US Mail loomed very large. The Sixties provided an opening, and the 70s saw an explosion of publishing for our community. Only a bookstore with a commitment to our community, its diversity, and the significance of it all, could fully serve its purpose. It is all important—from that little poetry chapbook published back in the 70s, to today’s famous author’s first book of short stories published by a small, and now defunct, gay press—to...well all the rest of it. Each book, each pamphlet, each and every publishing effort is that one small step along the way. In totality, we have created a critical mass.  A bookstore like Calamus takes as its mission the task of cherishing what has come before, celebrating the continuing strength of the writers and the publishers, and doing what booksellers should do best: getting the material into the hands of the readers, most intended, some first-timers, for whom, at least some of them, new doors open.

I will end on a personal note. So much of our history has developed because individual men and women could no longer tolerate a society of injustice and lack of access. I was born in 1948. In the 60s, as a teen, I was a devoted shopper of bookstores. I was aware of titles of “controversy,” the nascent gay literature. Looking back, I can only imagine how useful a  bookstore like Glad Day, Giovanni’s Room, Different Light and, now, Calamus, would have been to me. Gay friendly, stuffed with books—which, admittedly, would have been a little thin in 1967, though, somehow Craig Rodwell made it work as a successful shop back then—and the development of the culture to which we are creating every day. We cannot trust our culture to “the marketplace.” Selling itself is not everything, but to “the marketplace” it is the only thing.

George Orwell once wrote: “People write the books they can’t find on library shelves.” I’ll take that further. People create the bookstores not available to them when they were young.

This is our mission.

John Mitzel, Proprietor
[email protected]

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #2 on: February 04, 2009, 10:13:42 pm »
A bit OT, a little tangential, but what the hey.  For anyone curious about the name "Calamus", here's the answer:


Why Calamus?
Where does the “Calamus” in Calamus Bookstore come from?

Let’s start with the ancient Greeks. The following is from SEXUAL LIFE IN ANCIENT GREECE, written by Hans Licht (pseudonym of Paul Brandt), translated from the German by J.H. Freese, first published in England in 1932 by The Abbey Library, London:

“Calamus (Kalamos). A son of the river-god Maeander, was united in tenderest love with Carpus (Karpos), the son of Zephyrus and one of the Horae, a youth of surpassing beauty. When both were bathing in the Maeander and swimming for a wager, Carpus was drowned. In his grief, Calamus is changed into a reed, and when it rustled in the wind the ancients heard in the sound a song of lamentations…”

The calamus plant is native to the northeast region on the U.S., where, among many other names, it is called sweet flag. It is found along river banks and in swampy areas. It was a favorite of Henry David Thoreau (who called it sweet flag) and of Walt Whitman.



Whitman, in his third edition of LEAVES OF GRASS, printed here in Boston in 1860, included new poems in a section called “The Calamus Poems.” (As he also added “The Children of Adam” poems—which Emerson advised against including, finding them a little too blatant for the time: Emerson had no objections to the Calamus Poems.)



Walt Whitman
Frontispiece, Leaves of Grass 1855 Edition

Whitman’s Calamus Poems celebrate manly-manly love.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes,
and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

The image of the calamus plant is repeatedly used throughout as a symbol of male love, lust and affection. Many have noted that the flower of the calamus reed suggests the image of the erect human penis. Late in life, Whitman saw a stand of the calamus reed on a trip to Delaware. He said: “Leaves of Grass! The largest leaves of grass known! Calamus! Yes, that is Calamus! Profuse, rich, noble, upright, emotional!”

(Thanks to WALT WHITMAN: A GAY LIFE by Gary Schmidgall, Plume, 1998)

Offline Meryl

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #3 on: February 04, 2009, 10:28:06 pm »
Thanks for that article, Paul.  I love the story of Calamus and Carpus.  I really hope the bookstore in Boston stays prosperous.  8)

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Offline delalluvia

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2009, 08:43:40 pm »
Didn't realize there was such a thing as 'gay bookstores'.

Offline Kd5000

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #5 on: February 06, 2009, 11:44:58 am »
In Austin, Tx, there is Lobo Books. In New Orleans, LA there is Faubourg Marigny Art & Books . F.A.B. is the oldest gay bookstore in the South. It opened in 1977.

Atlanta and Raleigh have gay bookstores. In Raleigh, NC it's called the White Rabbit Bookstore.
.

Offline Lynne

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #6 on: February 06, 2009, 12:11:52 pm »
Atlanta's gay bookstore is called Outwrite.  It is located at 991 Piedmont Ave NE.

That is where I bought my hardback copy of Brokeback Mountain that so many of you have autographed.

www.outwritebooks.com

I hate to see independent booksellers going out of business.   :-\
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Offline Lynne

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #7 on: February 06, 2009, 12:14:36 pm »
The independent bookstore in Orlando is called Urban Think, and although there is a LGBT section, I wouldn't classify it as a 'gay bookstore' exclusively.  It is located at 625 East Central Blvd.

www.urbanthinkorlando.com

To my knowledge, Jacksonville does not have one.
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Offline HerrKaiser

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #8 on: February 06, 2009, 12:47:36 pm »
Most bookstores are in serious financial trouble. Even the giants like Borders may not survive much longer. The evolution of how most people obtain reading material is simply changed to a point where bookstores, especially the smaller, undiversifed stores, no longer have a viable consumer base.

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #9 on: February 06, 2009, 12:49:13 pm »
We have Giovanni's Room here in Philadelphia.

Last time I checked, GR had a nice selection of titles useful to gay parents raising children.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline delalluvia

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #10 on: February 06, 2009, 07:27:15 pm »
I remember a store called "Bookwoman" in Austin.  I gathered that it was run by lesbians, but I didn't consider it a 'gay bookstore'.  Hmm.  Never thought about it much.

Offline Lynne

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #11 on: February 15, 2009, 02:00:09 am »
Along the same lines, while lumbering back to the hotel from Meryl's tonight, we ran across this:


I am so saddened by this.  Murder Ink was a big name for mystery book-lovers.  Some of my favorite authors made a point of having book signings there - I'm thinking of Lawrence Block and Michael Connelly, but I'm sure the list is long and distinguished.

So I did a little research and found this article.  I guess it's old news, but still... :-\

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/books/20murd.html

Many Suspects Seen in the Death of a Mystery Bookstore

Case closed.

Murder Ink, the mystery bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is going out of business after 34 years, along with its younger sister store, Ivy’s Books and Curiosities. On Monday the owner, Jay Pearsall, posted a sign in the window announcing that Dec. 31 would be the final day.

“We’ve been having a hard time keeping up,” Mr. Pearsall said.

The list of suspects is long. The rent has been increasing by 5 percent a year and currently runs $18,000 a month, Mr. Pearsall said. A Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway has been chipping away at business for years. Amazon and eBay killed off mail-order business and sales of rare books.

And at some point in the mid-1990s, Mr. Pearsall said, he realized something even more troubling.

“I used to do apartment buys,” he said. “Children of people in the neighborhood who had died would sell their parents’ books; lots of them immigrants, lots of them Jewish, educated, liberal, and they just had all these great books. I realized that our clientele was dying.”

For the last few years, he said, the store has depended on sales from nonbook items that yield larger profit margins, like greeting cards, journals and action figures of Carl Jung and Rosie the Riveter.

The original Murder Ink opened in 1972 on West 87th Street as perhaps the first bookstore devoted to crime and detective fiction. Its founder, Dilys Winn, sold the store after three years to Carol Brener, who owned it for 14 years. In 1989 Mr. Pearsall bought it, and three years later moved to 92nd Street and Broadway.

There are currently about 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States, not counting stores that deal only in used books, said Meg Smith, a spokeswoman for the American Booksellers Association. In 1993 the number stood at about 4,700.

Dyana Kimball, a 31-year-old theater director, noticed the sign at Murder Ink on her way to the subway Tuesday morning. “I’m so sad,” she said. “I feel like they curate books more than just sell all of the best sellers.”

As the New Year’s Eve closing approaches, Mr. Pearsall said his thoughts had turned to his 10-year-old son, Riley, who practically grew up in the store, and to Gus, the 11-year-old wire-haired pointing griffon who spends his days there.

Then there are the books.

“When I see ones that I can’t order again, it’s hard,” Mr. Pearsall said. “Whether it’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ or ‘Pat the Bunny,’ it seems impossible that we won’t order or sell those again.”


And I think it's another bad sign that 2+ years later that storefront is still empty.

 :-\ >:( :'(
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Offline delalluvia

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #12 on: February 15, 2009, 02:22:42 pm »
Along the same lines, while lumbering back to the hotel from Meryl's tonight, we ran across this:


I am so saddened by this.  Murder Ink was a big name for mystery book-lovers.  Some of my favorite authors made a point of having book signings there - I'm thinking of Lawrence Block and Michael Connelly, but I'm sure the list is long and distinguished.

So I did a little research and found this article.  I guess it's old news, but still... :-\

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/books/20murd.html

Many Suspects Seen in the Death of a Mystery Bookstore

Case closed.

Murder Ink, the mystery bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is going out of business after 34 years, along with its younger sister store, Ivy’s Books and Curiosities. On Monday the owner, Jay Pearsall, posted a sign in the window announcing that Dec. 31 would be the final day.

“We’ve been having a hard time keeping up,” Mr. Pearsall said.

The list of suspects is long. The rent has been increasing by 5 percent a year and currently runs $18,000 a month, Mr. Pearsall said. A Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway has been chipping away at business for years. Amazon and eBay killed off mail-order business and sales of rare books.

And at some point in the mid-1990s, Mr. Pearsall said, he realized something even more troubling.

“I used to do apartment buys,” he said. “Children of people in the neighborhood who had died would sell their parents’ books; lots of them immigrants, lots of them Jewish, educated, liberal, and they just had all these great books. I realized that our clientele was dying.”

For the last few years, he said, the store has depended on sales from nonbook items that yield larger profit margins, like greeting cards, journals and action figures of Carl Jung and Rosie the Riveter.

The original Murder Ink opened in 1972 on West 87th Street as perhaps the first bookstore devoted to crime and detective fiction. Its founder, Dilys Winn, sold the store after three years to Carol Brener, who owned it for 14 years. In 1989 Mr. Pearsall bought it, and three years later moved to 92nd Street and Broadway.

There are currently about 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States, not counting stores that deal only in used books, said Meg Smith, a spokeswoman for the American Booksellers Association. In 1993 the number stood at about 4,700.

Dyana Kimball, a 31-year-old theater director, noticed the sign at Murder Ink on her way to the subway Tuesday morning. “I’m so sad,” she said. “I feel like they curate books more than just sell all of the best sellers.”

As the New Year’s Eve closing approaches, Mr. Pearsall said his thoughts had turned to his 10-year-old son, Riley, who practically grew up in the store, and to Gus, the 11-year-old wire-haired pointing griffon who spends his days there.

Then there are the books.

“When I see ones that I can’t order again, it’s hard,” Mr. Pearsall said. “Whether it’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ or ‘Pat the Bunny,’ it seems impossible that we won’t order or sell those again.”


And I think it's another bad sign that 2+ years later that storefront is still empty.

 :-\ >:( :'(

Guess those owners who kept upping the rent shot themselves in the foot.  Instead of trying to negotiate to keep a long-time tenant, they decided to keep pace with already inflated rental prices and lost them.  Now, years later, they don't have anyone paying any amount of rent there.

Offline Lynne

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #13 on: February 15, 2009, 02:38:40 pm »
Here's a review of a book I really enjoyed by Lawrence Block - Small Town:

A review by Christopher Bolton

http://www.powells.com/review/2004_01_24.html

One doesn't ordinarily expect some of the most exciting moments of a crime novel to consist of a major character receiving constant, breathless updates from the literary agent who's selling his new novel to the highest-bidding publisher. But Lawrence Block's Small Town isn't strictly a crime novel — it's as much a character piece and a portrait of a community as Richard Russo's Empire Falls, albeit with a higher body count. Only the most stringent genre-phobe would insist on stranding Small Town in the "ghetto" of crime fiction.

Small Town is an ensemble story about New York City in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. The characters are in the process of reassembling their lives, unable to shake off the changes wrought by that tragic day — and, in at least one instance, a shattered life is left in shards. Block's cast includes John Blair Creighton, a mid-list novelist who becomes the suspect in a murder and consequently sees his career skyrocket even as his freedom is less than assured; Frances Buckram, the former police commissioner of New York and an early favorite to run in the next mayoral election, if he can shake off his obsession with a serial killer called the Carpenter; and Susan Pomerance, the owner of an art gallery whose sexual awakening brings her into direct contact (in many, varied ways) with both men. There are other characters, among them a colorful defense attorney, an ex-addict who finds himself stumbling across one too many crime scenes, and a man who lost everything in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and has consequently fallen into a homicidal mission to "save" his beloved city. To Block's credit, each one emerges as a distinct and memorable individual, even if a couple of them wind up dropping off by the end (most notably the ex-addict, who disappears entirely about halfway through).

Block's strong rendering of his large cast doesn't quite have Russo's unerring skill at drawing a fully fleshed character in only a couple of paragraphs; however, his characters grow on the reader and are a pleasure to revisit. For a crime novel, Small Town is relatively uneventful; sure, there's a serial killer loose, and the bodies pile up, but Block's interest is primarily in the psychology of his cast. Some of the book's most riveting moments involve the unexpected revival of Creighton's faltering writing career. The auction of his novel contains the suspense of Block's finer crime writing, coupled with an exhilaration that can only be conveyed by an insider who's been there (or been close to other writers who have).

The murders in Small Town are graphic and intense, as such scenes ought to be. Far more repulsive is the notion that an act of unspeakable violation should be rendered quaintly — as in an Agatha Christie mystery, where the taking of life is a merely inconvenient affair to be tidied up before high tea. More to the point, the repercussions of these murders resonate throughout our cast, keeping the gruesome killings from feeling sensational or thrilling. Murder is an ugly business, especially as it's conducted in this novel, and one of Block's truly devious twists is to make his killer sympathetic even in the glare of his heinous crimes. Small Town ably demonstrates how violence begets violence, and one unspeakable act merely leads to another.

The sex is particularly noteworthy. Lawrence Block's reputation as a modern Grand Master of crime fiction is due primarily to several distinguished series, notably the Matthew Scudder mysteries and Bernie Rhodenbarr capers. But Block himself has admitted that he once paid the bills by writing pseudonymous erotic novels — much of which, he's said, would barely qualify as soft-core porn by today's standards. Be forewarned: the sex scenes in Small Town streak past NC-17 and plunge gleefully into the well of hardcore. I could only laugh to myself to read the customer reviews on a certain online bookseller's web site, in which various naysayers complained about the horrible dirty sex but seemed to have no problem with the crushing of human skulls by a claw hammer. I'll be up front: I liked the sex. I liked that it was explicit. Readers who complain that sex scenes are there only for titillation may as well gripe that jokes are only there to make you laugh. Is there an emotion besides lust that requires additional justification to tap into? Well, as it happens, the "deviant" sex explains an awful lot about the characters who engage in said practices — so there's justification, if any were required.

Small Town succeeds most admirably in my basic test of any writing. When I pick it up, am I drawn into it? And when I put it down, am I looking forward to my next opportunity to get into it again? More than a few relatively enjoyable books have gone unfinished because I put them down and never felt a compelling reason to pick them up again. Block gives us many compelling reasons to pick him up — from his characters to his vivid setting (New York City comes alive in his hands), to the irresistible thrust of his plot — and, very few reasons to put him down.
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Offline Clyde-B

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #14 on: February 15, 2009, 03:24:56 pm »
There's Unabridged Books in Chicago.  It is primarily gay and lesbian with mainstream books as well.  When I was growing up not understanding what my options were, I would have given anything for a place like this where I could find out.

We lost our Sci-Fi bookstore The Stars Our Destination a few years back.  That was a big loss because Alice stocked virtually almost everything you could imagine, new or used.

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Last Gay Bookstore in New York City Will Close March 29
« Reply #15 on: February 15, 2009, 05:42:11 pm »
We used to have a bookstore here in Philadelphia that specialized in mysteries. It's long gone.  :(

And there was once a shop in Provincetown that specialized in mysteries. It was called "Cape and Dagger." The store logo was an image of Cape Cod as an arm, with a "hand" at the end of the cape--where Provincetown is--clutching a dagger.  ;D
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.