As part of my literary life, I launched an online bookstore at Biblio.com. You can find it at the address at the end of this article. My strategy is to take a chance with old hardbacks I find at yard sales and library events in the hope that they will be worth something after I research them online.
The most recent addition to my inventory is a book titled Morceau: From the Tales of the Old French West by George M. Peckinpaugh. My copy is a fine burgundy hardcover with illustrated endpieces signed by a Suzie Wagner. It is a fascinating tale of a eighteenth century adventure by the French to operate a thriving trading presence in the then far west of the new American continent. Far from being a “dry” history, it is told as a narrative poem of rhyming verse covering 350 pages. Here is a sample from how it begins:
Gone was the cold cold blast:
The gay Springtime came on at last.
Icy creak and windy roar
Were parted form the Erie Shore.
And high the morning mists had raised
On one fair morn in early May
The year — 1702 —
Near Fort Miami’s western gate,
Glared scribed advice from slab of state:
BEWARE:
List ye wonders and friends
Here distance vast and drear begins —
Who journeys further in new France
Death o’er life hath greater chance.
Let those words soak in for a moment.
I discovered that the book is worth far more than what I paid for it (yea!). Then I looked up the author to get acquainted with the person who penned such an intriguing book in such an intriguing way.
I found nothing more than an entry on Amazon (whose price you can beat at my online bookstore!). Whoever George M. Peckinpaugh was (deceased most likely, since the book is sixty-seven years old), I now hold one of the few physical evidences of his time on earth.
What moved him to labor to create thousands of lines of narrative poetry in order to bring to life scenes far removed from the 21st century? What was his day job, or was writing his life’s work? This book is noted as “volume one.” It drew the attention of the Hudson Printing Company (about which I also learned nothing online), but no “volume two” followed.
I am grateful for the author’s own testimony in the preface:
We live in a beautiful world. There are many wonderful people in it. We can see and feel our advancement after we dig again among the memoirs of the past. Oftentimes, in the reading way, as we draw away from our busy lives and commune with the past, we are refreshed in spirit presently and the more realize our thankfulness for our own time and place. The one prayer each of us should make daily would be for the Good Lord to teach us how to love one another more dearly and with more affection.
I hope you will visit my online bookstore, but I hope you will not order this book quite yet, as I plan to feed my soul on its verse for a while. I want to walk the paths of Mr. Peckinpaugh’s imagination until I’m better for it. When I’m done — and for an agreed upon price — you can let it change your life. If you’re ready for the adventure.
https://www.biblio.com/bookstore/rjs-books-and-ephemera-wilkinson