“I think what makes my collection special is its breadth,” says Bretall. He is a mere 67 issues short of owning every Marvel superhero comic book and, though he is less of a DC completist, he owns the entire collections (that is, every single issue) of The Justice League of America, Teen Titans, Hawkman and more. A collection as vast and nearly complete as Bretall’s is perhaps best measured in terms of what he doesn’t have. As of six months ago, the official count rests at a heady 101,822 unique issues (no duplicates), but he’s certain that he has cracked 103,000 since then. The 2015 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records named Southern-California-native Bob Bretall as the owner of the largest comic-book collection in the world. That’s a daunting amount of history, but we’ve got just the guy to help you stay informed. Think five films in ten years is a lot? Consider the hundreds of thousands of pages printed since the heroes first hit the shelves back in the late 1930s. Within the past ten years we’ve seen five films featuring the caped heroes (two for Superman, and Nolan’s Batman triptych.) But even as these cutting-edge films rise, they’re dwarfed by a printed lineage reaching back decades. In the world of comics, Batman and Superman are both vanguard and elder statesmen. The story of the secret library, however, is preserved in this slim, vivid account, when so much else in Daraya has turned to dust.Zach Snyder’s Batman v Superman hits theaters today, but before you buy your ticket, you may want to take a minute to study up. In The Book Collectors, unlike these earlier accounts, the internet plays a key role in the rescue work, and not only by first alerting Minoui to the existence of the "secret library." Some of the resistance fighters become such avid readers that they download still more books on their cell phones, thus augmenting the holdings of their library.Īnyone who knows the history of current events in Syria won't be surprised to learn that the secret library doesn't survive, nor do all of those young men. I'm thinking of everything from Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization, about the remote libraries of monks in the so-called "Dark Ages," to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, to which Minoui's story is a kind of all-male companion piece. The Book Collectors is itself a charged addition to the library of literary survival tales involving, not only the preservation of books, but the rescuing of the ideas they contain. In this refuge, Minoui says, people could experience the sensation of: "A page opening to the world when every door is locked." The library quickly became a gathering place, a mini-university in a city where almost all the professors had either been exiled, jailed or killed. They built wooden shelves and cataloged the books. To preserve their find, the men carved out a library in the basement of an abandoned building. These men are from a suburb of Damascus called Daraya, which was the site of peaceful protests during the Arab Spring uprising of 2011.Īhmad and his comrades salvaged 6,000 books in one week a month later, bulked out by other scavenging missions, this disparate collection of literature, theology, science and, yes, self-help, stood at 15,000. Minoui understands that Covey's book affirms the power of the individual, something these young men, raised under the repressive regime of Bashar al Assad, are fighting for. "This book means so much to us," one young fighter tells Minoui. Their counterpart to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is Stephen Covey's best-selling pop-psych Bible, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The Syrian resistance fighters whom reporter Delphine Minoui profiles in her new book, The Book Collectors, surprisingly, favored self-help literature. And oftentimes, the most unexpected books have struck a chord in wartime.įor instance, who would've guessed that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith's 1943 semi-autobiographical novel, would become one of the most popular books among servicemen in World War II, who received it as part of a massive book distribution program? The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War, by Delphine Minouiīooks have always gone to war, serving as comfort and distraction.
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