Posted March 4, 2003 Reposted February 8, 2005

I played Authors with my folks all through grade school. Daddy was terrible at it. He was bad at all card games, as a matter of fact, but he'd play them to make it more interesting for me and Momma.

In case you've never played Authors, I guess you could say it's a glorified "Fish." There are 4 "books" by each author in the deck, and when a player collects all 4, they get to take those 4 out of the game. You ask for a particular book, and you have to have at least 1 card by that author in your hand to ask for it.

I almost tried to get a game of it up once with a conventional deck, but "Give me... the four of Diamonds!" just doesn't have the same elan as "Give me A Cask of Amontillado!" And of course there were the jokes. "An Old Fashioned Girl - like your mother." "I'm ravin' for The Raven!" There must have been more. I bet I'd remember them if I ran across that deck.

When I was a child I used to dream that someday I'd read all those books. The names alone seemed to tempt me into realms of wonder and into the paradoxical kingdom of thought, that world that seems so private as we pore over our books, alone, but which we share with generations of readers who drink from the same dipper, if I may mix my metaphors.

I've read a few of them, and the ones I liked have special foil stars next to them in the figurative ledger of my reading. But after "Otto of the Silver Hand" turned out to be a dud - who would have imagined a book with a title like that could be boring? I stopped seeking them out, waiting for them to drift by me, or content to never experience more than their titles.

I wonder if the game's still around, and how many of the old gang are still in it if it is?

Surely Poe's still there, and Twain. Louisa Mae Alcott? James Barrie? Longfellow? I see their faces as illustrated on the cards, even though Little Women left me cold, and I never picked up The Little Minister, and Longfellow's sonorous verse is more dear to me for the parodies it inspired than on its own merits. I have think hard indeed to remember a line from The Song of Hiawatha or even The Skeleton in Armor. But the parody about the hunter making mittens comes back to me every winter. "That's why he turned the fur side inside, turned the warm side fur side inside, why he made them inside outside."

If the deck's been updated, I wonder whether I've even heard of the authors who made it into this generation's pantheon of the greats that we want to share with our kids.

It occurred to me that I could check that out on the net. Sure enough, a search for "Authors" refined by "Card game" turned up sources. I checked the first one out. There's an "American Authors" now, but the old standby is still around, "based on" a deck that's been in use for 130 years. They showed a picture of a few cards, which weren't laid out exactly the same as mine, but which used the same pictures, one of which was Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'd been thinking the other day, I've liked everything of his I ever read, why haven't I read more?

Looking at the serene face of Hawthorne on my computer screen, I found myself thinking, what were his cards?

The House of the Seven Gables - I read that in highschool and can't remember a thing about it, except that I liked it. The Scarlet Letter - I bet I'd get a lot more out of that at 48 than at 16. The Marble Faun... there's an unlikely title if ever I heard one. And... what? It's escaped me a quarter hour and now it snaps into my memory. Twice Told Tales.

Maybe I'll fall for the clever trick behind the game, and actually read a few more of the books.

Copyright © 2005 Ruby Jung. I made the background and you're welcome to copy and use it.