In case you missed all the hoopla about THE BOOK....
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7 of 2151 DOCUMENTS
Belfast Telegraph
May 9, 2009
Main Edition
Brought to book over a (very) late library return
BYLINE: Carlo Gebler featureseditor@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 62
LENGTH: 358 words
My father Ernest Gébler was born in Ireland in 1914. He sat World War II out
in Dublin. He meant to join the RAF but never did, and in 1945 he needed money.
As the USA was the world's richest nation, a friend suggested he write a novel
about the Mayflower sailing in 1620 to Massachusetts with the puritans who
founded Plymouth, America's first English-speaking colony. The Yanks were bound
to love it - after all, it was their founding myth.
He went to the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) library to research the subject
and, as he later told me, as he was cruising the shelves a book literally fell
at his feet - The Story of The Pilgrim Fathers, 1606-1623 AD as told by
Themselves, their Friends, and their Enemies, edited from the original texts by
Edward Arber.
He borrowed the Arber and used it as the basis for a novel, The Plymouth
Adventure. His book sold four million copies, was made into a movie by Metro
Goldwyn Meyer starring Spencer Tracy, picked up an Oscar for Best Special
Effects and made him rich.
Now he still had the Arber that Providence had flung at his feet and, unable
to part with it, he told the RDS librarian he'd lost it and paid £1 10/- for a
new one. The librarian scoured second-hand bookshops looking to replace it but,
as he told my father in a later letter, he couldn't find one.
When my father died the Arber came to me, with the correspondence between him
and the librarian tucked inside. I put it onto my shelves and looked at it
thereafter only occasionally. I knew I shouldn't keep it but I persuaded myself
that really it was so overdue the RDS wouldn't want it back now.
Or so I thought until I learnt that Volume 1 of History of the War in the
Peninsula and in the South of France From 1807 to 1814, looted on June 11, 1864,
by C S Bates of the Army of West Virginia from what was then Washington College,
had just been returned to the Washington and Lee University library by one of
Gates' descendents.
If that was possible 145 years on, then surely my father's book, a mere 62
years overdue, really should be returned. But if I'm to beat the American record
I don't have to do anything for another 83 years. Phew.
LOAD-DATE: May 9, 2009
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
JOURNAL-CODE: UN
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