Don't be afraid, it's just a book...

     We can take living in Illinois for granted, as an oasis from the revanchist madness gripping parts of the nation. For instance, on Monday, the state banned book bans.
     "Book bans are about censorship; marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts," Gov. J. B. Pritzker said, stating the quiet part out loud. "Regimes ban books, not democracies."
     Illinois was the first state in the country to pass a law cutting funding to any library that restricts books because of "partisanal or doctrinal" disapproval. And while the devil is in the details, it means that any censorious individual can't count on the state as an eager partner if they get bent out of shape because a book acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people, or goes into America's racist past in detail that makes them uncomfortable. They'll just have to be satisfied with not checking out books they don't like, instead of pretending those books are dangerous for everybody, and forcing their narrow outlook on the entire community, a common practice in the red-tinted regions of the country.
     Books help, not hurt, as I was reminded Wednesday, when I introduced readers to Sara Bader's newest book on pet love and grief, mentioning a column, gulp, nearly 20 years ago, when I wrote about her first book.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW

     History once meant the lives of kings, which grew old before somebody had the bright idea to also look at the lives of common people: laborers and farmers and artisans. Suddenly we understood the past a little better.  

       Researcher Sara Bader has had a similar insight, realizing that she could learn an awful lot about the past through old classified ads, and her lovely new book, Strange Red Cow, is an illuminating delight. She uses classifieds, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, to riff from the whimsical to the heartbreaking, from ads for lost livestock (the title comes from a plea, beginning, "Came to my plantation . . . A STRANGE RED COW . . .") to ads for runaway slaves ("RUN away from the Subscriber, on Saturday the 1st Instant, a Negro Woman named JUDITH, who carried her Child with her. . . .").
     Bader discovered that if you, for instance, are wondering what people kept in their saddlebags in 1777, you could find out by consulting the advertisement of someone who lost two between Worcester and Hardwick ("Lost . . . a pair of SADDLE BAGS containing a Cheese, some pulled Sheeps Wool, a number of Apples, a striped small Apron, and a small pair of blue Stockings . . ."). She writes well, too.

     "We can untie the twine that once wrapped up their parcels, rifle through satchels, empty out coat pockets," she writes, in the lucid commentary surrounding the old ads. "That our collective ancestors forgot their books in carriages, left their capes on battlefields, and dropped their keys and their cash is oddly reassuring."
     Like classifieds, the book is divided into subject headings "Help Wanted," "Lost and Found," "Swap." You'll learn things you never thought of before -- how after the Civil War, former slaves took out poignant ads in the black press, searching for their lost children -- and you will never look at the classified section of the newspaper in the same way again.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 26, 2005