Finding Corky Normart.

The story of books starts with the book itself, before you even get into its pages.

::The first blog post, “Where Is Corky Normart?” ran on my blog on January 3, 2008. The second blog post, “A Mystery Solved” ran on my blog on March 26, 2008. I later combined both blog posts into one story for an essay in my first book from 2016. It’s a blog post people remember and often comment about, so I wanted to share it with additional photos.::

In my grandparents’ basement were many books. If it were not so, I wouldn’t have told you as much.

I say were because they’ve been moved out of the basement to everyone’s joy but my own.

“When we moved the books,” my mom said, “the musty smell left the house.”

I suppose that’s good for the people that live there, but I’m a less practical person and would have lived with the musty smell and a perpetual sinus infection in order to keep the books. When the musty smell left, so did the spirit I found in those books.

Thinking of the books in boxes in the damp and mouse-infested missile base, moldering and probably now beyond saving, breaks my heart. After my grandparents were both gone, I’d spent many months in the basement room where Grandpa had built shelves for his home library. I put the non-fiction books on the south wall, organized by category in a crude version of the Dewey Decimal System. I put the fiction books on the west and north walls, alphabetized by author.

Inside the books, I discovered documents, old dollar bills, and other paper ephemera, evidence that people have, for generations, used whatever was handy as a bookmark instead of my horrible childhood habit of dog-earing the pages. A 1930s book on animal husbandry, for example, contained a letter and a completed application from my great-aunt, indicating that she was considering taking a job as a train stewardess. Instead of taking those documents out, though, I left them in the books on the pages I found them. I had some silly ideas about preserving history in the place it went to rest, and at least twice a week, I’d go to my grandparent’s empty house across the road and run my hands over the shelves of books and pull out papers and letters from the books.

My grandpa was a reader.

The cost of purchasing these books and having them shipped from a New York publishing house to North Dakota was no small thing.

Several books, with notations written inside the front covers, indicated the date he’d received them as well as where he’d ordered them. Ads in newspapers or articles that announced an upcoming book had caught his eye. Westerns and spy novels were his favorite bits of fiction. His leather Louis L’Amour collection had been safely moved over to our house because my dad loved to read them, but there were still plenty of Zane Grey books left in the basement.

History abounded in the nonfiction section, as well as atlases, which, I decided, must be a genetic proclivity since my father has always enjoyed pouring over road maps and atlases. We often gave him Christmas gifts of topographic atlases of various states in the Great Plains region of the country. One year, on a stop at a gas station along the interstate, I bought him a detailed map showing the oil wells of western North Dakota. Most people don’t want a gas station Christmas gift, but I knew he’d enjoy the maps.

My grandparents also had many school books which would have made today’s kids pass out in terror with their unillustrated level of difficulty, agricultural guides, horticulture tomes, cookbooks, and a stack of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which no used bookseller wants these days and seem to have become the go-to source for crafters who are looking for books to cut up for whatever knick-knack is currently en vogue. I imagine those pariah books brought my grandparents much pleasure back in their day, a kind of paper version of today’s e-reader, perfect for when you wanted to have a collection of novels in a single, portable format.

In the winter of 2008, during my usual weekly retreat to the book room to fondle the books, one book caught my attention. At first glance, the book was unremarkable.

A Writer’s Manual And Workbook, it said in dark blue across a worn light blue cloth cover. Its publication date was in the 1940s.

My grandma, from a generation that made note of such things, had jotted inside the cover that she’d purchased it at a Fresno flea market in 1972. Above that notation was the name of the student who had once used it:

Corky Normart
9:00 – 10:00 A.M.
N-14
All Days

Tucked inside the book was a tiny slip of paper, a “summons to pupil” for Normart to go and see Mr. Beauman “at once.”

Grandma was like me, I realized joyfully, leaving the bits of paper and makeshift bookmarks inside books for the purity of history.

What made the book noteworthy was the inclination Normart clearly had for doodling, particularly on the inside back cover. Normart was quite the artist, with no fewer than five caricatures of Hitler, along with several other humorous doodles involving outhouses and football players.

There were also multiple purple-inked stamps that said:

Normart’s Furs
1230 Fulton St. – Fresno, California

I took the book home with me and went straight to my blog. I titled my January 3rd post, “Where Is Corky Normart?” with the hope of finding him or someone who knew him. One reader wanted to buy the book, but I waited.

Instead, I did a bit of research on Corky Normart and was thrilled to discover an extremely accomplished professional artist whose paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows, and furniture designs can be found all around the world.¹

But nothing seemed to come from it after that. I put the book back on its shelf and went on with life.

Two months later, on March 25, a man named Chris left a comment on that blog post. “Corky is my cousin. He indeed lives in Fresno and my dad just called him and told him about this site.”

The next day Corky’s granddaughter left a comment. “I'm Corky's granddaughter and the second I laid eyes on the drawings I cracked up! All of those pictures are totally something he would do. I admire the creativity and passion he uses in all of his work and love my grandpa so, so much.”

That same day I received an email from Corky himself.

“Dear Julie,

You found me. I kind of recognize the book but can’t recall the teacher. I think it was a Junior College class because the drawing of the football player being kicked has my number (50) and we did play Vallejo that year. But it’s not my signature and some of the drawings are not my style, even back then. You’re right, my family had a fur store that was established in 1895 and lasted over 100 years. But my interest has always been art as you can see from my web site at cnormart.com. I might even update it one of these days.

I’m not certain that all of the drawings are mine. The car is my style, the outhouses might be, players maybe but the signature and the comments I just don’t recognize. I’m sure I did the rubber stamping.”

I asked if he wanted the book, and he said he did not need it. But then, several days later, he changed his mind and said that his granddaughter would like it and would I be interested in selling it?

“I’m not going to sell it to you,” I replied. “I’m going to give it to you. Just tell me the address and I’ll get it in the mail.”

I was secretly thrilled, as if I were part of some literary homecoming. After 60 years, Normart had his book back, and I trust that it made a wonderful treasure for his granddaughter.

I thought that was it, but a month later a carefully wrapped package arrived in the mail. I opened it to discover a print of one of Normart’s beautiful paintings. I showed Dad, who had brought the mail home and had been curious about the package.

Normart’s print now hangs on my wall.

“Look!” I said, holding up the print. “Isn’t this beautiful! I now have a Corky Normart print, signed and everything.” I paused. “All of this, just from finding an old book in a musty basement.”

“Very good, dear,” he said, a standard response to a chatterbox daughter, something he might say whether I burned the toast or traveled to the moon.

But see, dad gets it, I think.

In 2012, during our Daily Dad Call, he mentioned that he was reading a book about the Red Baron. Manfred von Richthofen is of only mild interest to me, but my dad has always had a fascination with him, even building miniature red triplanes out of metal scraps and airplane spark plugs. In random moments while watching movies where the good guys were getting beaten by the bad guys, Dad would pretend to be the Red Baron by making machine gun sounds with his mouth and then making comments such as, “And then the Red Baron flies up over the hill and wipes them all out!”

“What’s the book about?” I asked.

“It’s about missing chalices and the mysteries surrounding Baron von Richthofen,” he said.

Chalices? I had never heard of anything like that. The conversation then wandered around, each of us asking if the other had any other news, picking our brains until we were both sure the news was covered from both ends of the phone.

A few weeks later, Dad came to Bismarck for a visit, loaded down with the usual things that Mom and I send to and fro with him as our unofficial courier. But he also had a book for me.

It was the book about the Red Baron.

It was old. There was a slight mustiness about it (the spirit of the books!) but not too much.

"This is for you, for your birthday," he said, handing it to me out in the parking lot behind my apartment building as he was preparing to go home. It was a windy afternoon, and he told me to be careful in keeping the book closed until I got back inside. "There's something inside. Don't let it blow away."

I held onto the black book without opening it, said goodbye to my dad, wondering, as usual, if this were going to be the last time, and headed back to my apartment with the book held tightly to my chest.

The cover wasn't much if you were prone to judging books by them (which most of us are). Black cloth, red writing. Bland cloth covers were the norm, dust jackets rarely surviving on these old books. It takes a genuinely curious reader to assume there’s something of value between the cloth-covered chipboard. But Dad gave it to me, and so I was determined to at least check it out. I opened it up to find an old letter in it, and an inscription.

The letter was from my grandfather, who was, at the time of its writing, still courting my grandmother. It was filled with direct and non-flowery language on local Hampden and farm news, as well as a description of his purchase of two books through the mail. The letter was dated December 1929.

"I sent for two new books. Red Knight of Germany and Now It Can Be Told. They are non-fiction books. Are best sellers. I got them thru the Review of Reviews from New York. Cost $1 plus 10 cents postage. There are 100 titles all for $1 apiece. Some sold for as high as $5 – $6. I am planning on sending for more."

I was inwardly cheering him on to get more books, the privilege of looking back over time and knowing he did, indeed, make the purchase. Now It Can Be Told was one I’d found during my book organization. It had a blue cover, and I put it on the third shelf on the west wall of the basement.

My heart warmed at the thought of sending away for books, that they would be so precious. How easy it is to get books now. How adventurous to be spending such money on books in 1929!

I went back to reading the letter, savoring the directness and almost Hemingway-like quality of my grandfather's writing. When I finished, I slid it back into the envelope and looked more closely at the inscription inside the front cover. In his bold script, my grandfather had signed his name with a fountain pen and noted the date he bought the book down in the corner. My dad had taken a pen of his own and added, in his own beautiful cursive, to that original inscription:

To Julie
From Dad
January 2012

A fine birthday gift indeed.

I continue to grow enamored of these old books, the ones purchased by a North Dakota farmer at the start of the Depression, ordered all the way from New York, for the love of learning and reading.

Each old book is a story of the book itself, as an object, long before I get to what the author wrote. They tell of who had it, who read it, who wrote in it, and what letter they left behind.

1. Visit Corky Normart’s website: https://cnormart.com/