The Story of Harold: What the Hell, Part I (I assume there'll be a Part II when I finish with this one...)

I think it was maybe two years ago that I discovered that one of my favorite children's book writers, George Selden (Cricket in Times Square, Genie of Sutton Place) had written, in the 1970s, a novel for adults entitled The Story of Harold.

How I'd reached my thirties without knowing this was beyond me; it was precisely the sort of thing I should have known already. But Miss Edith has flaws, and she admits them.

Naturally, upon discovering the existence of this novel -- published under a pseudonym, Terry Andrews -- I began to hunt for a copy to read. Copies for sale online, of which there were very few, cost more money than I was prepared to pay, and so I tried libraries. To my astonishment, there were so few copies of this thing around -- but one of them, to my considerable luck, was here in New Haven at the Yale University Library, in Sterling.

The hitch was, I didn't have library privileges, and I wasn't about to jump through Yale's hoops to get my paws on it.

Well: through a set of circumstances that Miss Edith doesn't want to go into right now, I now have library privileges at Yale, and the very first thing I did after getting said privileges was to go to Sterling and find their copy of The Story of Harold.

This is not a book for children.

This is not a book for people who want to maintain some kind of sweet image of George Selden.

I am only on page 55 of this thing, but I am floored by the experience of reading it.

One thing that surprises me, in poking around online looking for information on the novel, is just how little there is written about this book. Perhaps I am naive? Perhaps I expect too much of my fellow readers? Perhaps I'm just more obsessive than I realize? I don't know; but I really would have thought that there would be, I don't know, entire websites devoted to this book. Yet I found none. Scattered references here and there, yes -- and, to my pleased surprise, some reviews of it on Amazon.com, which were sort of interesting to scan -- but nothing like what I would have expected for a book like this, a book with a history and background like this.

More as more, darlings.