Book Club: The perfect trailer park for Trump’s presidential library may get a little help from Vanilla Ice

Spiegel & Grau

Just six months after the inauguration, Trevor Noah opened the Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library in New York. But once again, satire has been outstripped by real life. James Arena, a broker in Palm Beach County, Fla., has unveiled his dream to help build the Trump Presidential Library on a trailer park called Briny Breezes. Like Trump, Arena thinks big. Briny Breezes is a 43-acre community about 12 miles from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home. Arena proposes selling the entire town for the future library for $1 billion. Adding Vanilla Ice to this story feels like gilding the lily, but Arena counts the rapper as a friend. He tells me that Ice also loves the idea of transforming Briny Breezes into a presidential library — and might help promote the plan: “I'm not sure how well or how good he does know the Trump family, but I know he has visited Mar-a-Lago, and he is someone who's well connected.” So true. Arena, who has clearly studied "The Art of the Deal," describes himself as a “certified negotiations expert and multimedia marketing specialist.” He envisions a half-moon marina with restaurants, a park, a hotel and, yes, a library — all subsumed within “the first presidential township.” Water taxis would ferry scholars to the vast repository of Trump’s trenchant writings and speeches. “The project makes a lot of sense,” Arena tells me. “I'm hoping that the president gets it in front of him and shows some interest because this would be a great opportunity for him.”

Robert M. Pirsig’s 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)

“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.” If you recognize that wisdom from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” start your road trip to Washington now. Pirsig’s widow, Wendy, has donated the world’s most famous motorcycle — a 1966 Honda Super Hawk -- to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. Yes, this is the very bike that Pirsig used for the 5,700-mile ride he took with his 11-year-old son in 1968. That experience inspired his first inspirational book, published in 1974 with the subtitle “An Inquiry Into Values.” The Smithsonian has also acquired Pirsig’s leather jacket, his mechanics tools and maps from his trip. “Pirsig was a trailblazer in motorcycle touring and documenting its celebration of freedom and the open road,” said Paul Johnston, curator of transportation at the Museum of American History. A statement from the museum notes that “Zen” was also “a testament to Pirsig’s patience and perseverance.” The manuscript was rejected by more than 120 publishers before it finally found a buyer. It has since sold 5 million copies. I’m pretty sure half of them were purchased by guys in my high school class.

Vintage; Riverhead; Anchor; Triangle Square; Random House Audio; Center Street

This was the decade that ebooks were supposed to kill off bound books. But it turns out the death of paper was greatly exaggerated. After years of rapid growth, ebooks plateaued, and physical books continue to hold the bulk of the market. Still, this was a decade of surprising developments for readers and the publishing industry. Here are 11 trends that changed the way we read (full story):

Chains crumbled as indie bookstores rebuilt.
Everybody started listening to audiobooks.
Books with “Girl” in their title took over.
Graphic novels became the superheroes of publishing.
Kids books got very political.
EL James brought erotica out of the back room.
Instant-printing arrived for real.
Children’s publishers finally took diversity seriously.
Political books became political badges.
TV producers gorged on novels.
Libraries and publishers clashed over e-book borrowing.

“History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America,” by William Gordon (Photo courtesy of Whitmore Rare Books); "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," by Charles Darwin (Photo courtesy of Bonhams); Harry Potter series, by JK Rowling (Photo courtesy of AbeBooks); a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible (Photo courtesy of Honey & Wax).

The stock market wasn’t the only market that soared in 2019. Rare book dealers are celebrating, too. “We had a great year,” says Darren Sutherland, a senior specialist at Bonhams international auction house. “The market generally is super healthy, particularly at the top end with truly rare books and manuscripts. We're seeing prices that are higher than ever.” Sutherland tells me that one of the factors pushing up prices is a newly globalized market that’s bringing new buyers into the field. One of Bonhams’s biggest book sales this year was a first edition of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” that went for $500,000.
Dan Whitmore, founder and president of Whitmore Rare Books in Pasadena, Calif., tells me that his biggest sale this year was a four-volume set of William Gordon’s “History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America” (1788). The value of this set was considerably enhanced by the fact that it once belonged to George Washington, who signed each volume. (Whitmore declined to reveal the exact sale price but said it was “in the seven figures,” which is four figures beyond my budget so it really doesn’t matter.)
Heather O’Donnell, founder of Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn, tells me that one of her biggest sales this year was a single page from the Gutenberg Bible, which sold for $115,000.
AbeBooks, the online marketplace owned by Amazon, has a broad scope of the rare book market. This year marked its most expensive J.K. Rowling sale ever: $38,560 for a deluxe set of the Harry Potter series, each signed by Rowling. (Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) Richard Davies, a spokesperson for AbeBooks, tells me there was also strong demand for first editions and signed books by Toni Morrison, who died in August. And he continues to see a healthy market for signed copies of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and her new sequel, “The Testaments.” You don’t have to be a millionaire to start collecting. “Atwood is one of the most generous signers in literature,” Davies notes, “so signed copies are affordable and easy to find.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; BJ Fogg (Photo by Stephanie Weldy); Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The arrival of a new year inspires a fit of anxious resolutions for personal improvement. We can trace this classic American impulse back to Ben Franklin’s wry autobiography. (My favorite line: “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.”) Every year brings a fresh crop of self-help bibles to solve every problem. The fact that we’re not all billionaire underwear models by now can only be attributed to a shameless lack of effort. But publishers are always sniffing around the compost heap of American guilt. Martha Stewart has a new book coming in January called “Martha Stewart's Organizing: The Manual for Bringing Order to Your Life, Home & Routines.” That sounds like an author eager to clean up on Marie Kondo's clutter-free empire, but the key to a bestselling self-help book is a dramatic claim to revolutionary insight. New Year’s resolutions don't give Stanford professor BJ Fogg any sparks of joy. Instead, Fogg's new book, “Tiny Habits,” outlines a formula of little actions and self-conscious celebrations: (B)ehavior = (M)otivation + (A)bility + (P)rompt. Across 300 pages of advice, aphorisms and anecdotes, the professor describes a method based on his conviction that “when it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones.” And when he says “small,” he means downright Lilliputian. For instance, if you want to start flossing, he advises beginning with one tooth. Preternaturally upbeat, Fogg splits his time between Palo Alto and Maui, so immediately I want to hate him, but it’s hard. He’s warm and personable, like something cooked up in Dale Carnegie’s laboratory. “I was just fundamentally wired to try to help other people,” he tells me, and in that moment I believe him — I believe him so much. Tomorrow, God help me, I will floss a tooth, I will eat a blueberry, and I will smile at myself in the mirror knowing that a new me is just around the corner.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaste; Sentinel

On Christmas Eve, President Trump tweeted out a recommendation for what he called “a great new book” by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In fact, the senator’s memoir, appropriately titled “The Long Game,” was published more than three years ago. But the book did recently get a fresh garnish. The paperback version of “The Long Game,” released this month, contains a foreword “written” by President Trump. The ghostwriter makes no effort to imitate what we’ll charitably call the president’s style but does manage to capture the man's signature maneuver. Recalling Trump's promise during the 2016 campaign to remake the federal courts, the foreword claims, “The American people responded favorably; the issue of judges proved to be a major reason for my big win over Hillary Clinton.” Actually, three million more "American people" voted for Clinton than for Trump, but who cares? He and McConnell are playing the long game.

Why should the Hallmark channel get all the love? This month, Netflix debuted a new 10-episode TV show based on Robyn Carr’s “Virgin River” romance novels. Carr started that 20-book series back in 2007, and it’s since sold more than 13 million copies. Why TV waited so long to mine this devoted audience is a mystery (I’m guessing it has something to do with the industry’s condescension.) In any case, Carr is thrilled. "It’s so exciting to be a part of the romance genre movement taking place in Hollywood,” she tells me. “It’s beyond anything I could have imagined.” The Netflix show, about a grieving nurse who moves to a small town in Northern California, stars Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson. Fans of the novels will recognize the idyllic town, but the TV series isn’t a strict reenactment of the books. “I've been telling my readers to think of it as a brand new ‘Virgin River’ adventure with your favorite characters,” Carr says. The show immediately found an enthusiastic audience, and two weeks after its debut, Netflix announced it had ordered a second season for 2020.

Author John Irving (Photo by Nina Cochran)

Breaking: To err is human. When I make a mistake in a story (it happens), I fix it online and file a correction for the next day’s paper. But I don’t know how to handle corrections in a newsletter. You certainly don’t want to be bombarded with follow-up emails all week. (Or do you?) In any case, last week I joked that since John Irving now has dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, he’s eligible for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize. But as several Gentle Readers pointed out, Americans have been eligible for the Booker since 2014. (I knew this once — I’ve even complained about it in The Post!) I meant to say Canada’s Giller Prize. Apologies to our Northern friends.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, Mass. (Photo by Trey Powers/Orchard House)

When we lived in Boston, I loved to visit Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott’s well preserved home in Concord. The place held an aura of poignancy for me because I had once harbored plans to write my dissertation about her eccentric dad. But life intervened, as it so often did for Bronson Alcott, too. December was always a popular time at Orchard House — even more so this year because of Greta Gerwig’s new movie adaptation of “Little Women.” Here’s a poem by British writer Maura Dooley.
Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts
A mother, a fever,
a tattoo of feet on stairs
then round the banisters
down to a fire in the parlour
or out to the apple orchard
a plait of voices, laughter,
anger, always forgiveness in
a mother’s voice, reading
reading of one whose shoes
you stood in to be bold
or sensible or dreamy but not
the one who had you sob at night,
or was that the blazing star, soft muzzle
of Blackie or Jack or Beauty,
another time, another story,
or both times, now, entering here
just as you’d imagined,
buttoned boots in a sisterly row,
Marmee’s spice chest out on the table,
Baldwin trees bright with blossom
the trill and tang of remembered voices
each a braid in your own mother’s voice,
every room a new chapter
or, not at all as you’d imagined
desk, hearth, shelf of books,
planting of seeds, swell of ideas,
winter evenings of notions and plans,
but through an open door
how well you seem to know it
all that was sharp, then rosy, then ready
for the taking was there all the time
in your mother’s voice reading,
reading through fever and fear
and here now where a father lit
winter evenings with notions, plans
but no regard for the doctor’s bill
as the orchard turned from green to gold
it’s Louisa who gathered the fruit carefully—
so easy to harvest all that surrounds you,
harder to send it ripe and delicious down the years.
Excerpted from “Lives of Houses,” edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, forthcoming from Princeton Univ. Press in March, 2020.
Reprinted with permission.
My wife and I are celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary this Sunday. During a previous century, we fell in love in a college seminar on Ernest Hemingway. "But did thee feel the earth move?" Yes! Anyhow, happy New Year to all of you, and thanks for making this newsletter so much fun to write each week. If you have any questions or comments, contact me at ron.charles@washpost.com. And if you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. To subscribe, click here.