Encyclopedia Feldenstein

 

In the process of considering this collection, I briefly flirted with the idea of adding "The Encyclopedia Brown" book series to my collection of favorite books, featured in a post on the right side of this page. My list is a pretty ramshackle list to begin with, full of erratic, unsavory books that are occasionally of questionable literary merit. So why not add a stupid children's series that always fascinated me and is full of seemingly unearned and mysterious charm?

I don't know.

I just couldn't quite get myself to do it.

I loved the "The Encyclopedia Brown" books growing up with their primal nostalgic view of childhood (and the world), their tiny simple stories hardly bigger in narrative than a comic strip, and, most of all, their knotty little mysteries of absurd simplicity (once you look in the back!). "The Encyclopedia Brown" books taught me that I like mysteries, but also that I am not particularly gifted at solving them (you cannot put a small child with bare feet on the hood of a car that has been driving for hours! The man is lying!). Indeed, to this day I am not the sort of person to read a mystery and suss out the clues and divine their meaning. No, I know the way to figure out who is guilty of the crime and why and how they did it, is to read faster. The end will tell me! 

This is the beauty of books: They are written.

But there is one canon element of "The Encyclopedia Brown" books that is too pointedly at odd with human reality to embrace. I am all for rewriting the rules of humanity and the universe for our pleasure and edification in fiction.  But this is so absurd in its contradiction of human behavior that I fear it may  even have had a deleterious effect on the world itself. I speak of the device in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books wherein a character (or criminal) is caught irrefutably in a lie and so promptly gives up. This instead of simply lying more. The horrible petty criminal and bully Bugs Meaney cannot refute reality and logic itself!

Ha!

May I present the theory to you that the inability to bring down Trumpism in this nation, despite his being every bit as stupid as Bugs Meaney, has its source in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books? All these old democrats, these Reddit social commentators, these lawyers and journalists across the nation, they all read Encyclopedia Brown. Or at the least they were close enough to absorb its insane fantasy: That villains blush. That the evil doer caught in his web of lies will stop spinning. That if like in Encyclopedia Brown we can just come up with the perfect, distilled, most logical and unmistakable gotcha moment, the criminal, crushed and exposed, will be defeated.

How's that working out for you America?

Although come to think of it, I'm not sure it stopped Bugs Meaney's neighborhood reign of terror either.

This is quite an introduction to how I changed the cover on these four books on National Book Day. So who am I to complain about justice, being hardly better than a vandal. 

Alas, who will stop me?

I know!

We'll put Encyclopedia Feldenstein on the case!