I grew up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was the kind of place where an emergency ambulance call could take thirty minutes if the crew was sitting in the fire station, or significantly more after five o’clock in the evening.
My parents were educated people who loved the written word and taught me to love it, too. As a young boy my father kept his study in a small room above the kitchen, where the ceiling was sharply gabled from the roof and a small window gave a breathtaking view of a couple of hundred acres. The walls were all bookshelves and I don’t remember a wasted inch. He was eclectic, keeping the Time-Life series on home repair he purchased as a newlywed sitting alongside meaty things like William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Neither my brother nor I were allowed into the study, usually. Given all the important papers Dad had on his desk I can’t fault him for keeping us out when he wasn’t sitting there to watch us. After a while we just accepted that it was for grown-ups and stopped looking to get in, even when he was there. Usually. Except for sometimes.
But sometimes I’d be walking past his study on my way downstairs to the kitchen, and I’d hear him call out inviting me to come in and stay a while. I wouldn’t—I’d learned that room was for grown-ups, not me. Again, usually. Again, except for sometimes.
But sometimes upon sometimes I was wise enough to accept the invitation and walk into that small room that smelled of old paper and the traces of Dad’s long-ago experiments with smoking a pipe. I’d run my fingers over the spines of his le Carré collection and ask who Hannah Arendt was. Sometimes he’d read me a few pages of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but more often he’d teach me show tunes from 1776 or barbershop numbers from The Most Happy Fellows’ repertoire. More than forty years later I can still belt out “Sit Down, John!” and “Slippery Sal.”
That’s the mood I wish to evoke here. Welcome to the Study, the online (gentle)man cave of Robert Henry Auerbach. It’s never Hank, but you can call me Rob if you wish. The cigar humidor is by the door to the virtual balcony, no smoking indoors please; there are flats of bottled water atop the minifridge and cold ones within, replace the cold ones as you take them out.
As Lewis Carroll wrote, the time has come: to talk of many things: of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—of cabbages—and kings—and why the sea is boiling hot—and whether pigs have wings.
And to quote the inestimable Lord Dunsany’s preface to The Book of Wonder:
“Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.”