Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 26, 1995 TAG: 9504260029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Discounts at the Holiday Inn and articles about Medicare are fine, but we need a stern warning here to keep some of our people from ending up broke and on the street.
I know there are a lot of people who are as dumb about book clubs as I am. Give me three books for a dollar and I'd join a club that offered novels in Swahili.
Then, you have to deal with those little cards that come every month and if you don't send them back marked right, you really do get a couple of novels in Swahili in the mail.
Until the AARP does something in its newspaper, I have made up the following fictional, but chilling, account of a man ruined by excessive book-club joining:
Werner joined the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1946 and only once in all those years did he forget to send the form back. He received a copy of "Thunder Out Of China."
His wife put it on the coffee table and although Werner never read it, everybody saw it and thought Werner was pretty smart to be reading stuff like that.
Later in life, something snapped in Werner. In just a few hours one day, he joined a history book club, a paperback club, a novels-only club and a club devoted to horticulture and ancient Egyptian dietary practices.
Werner became obsessed. The neighbors could hear him chuckling eerily every time a shipment of three-books-for-a-dollar arrived.
He joined more and more clubs and paid $1,600 for a computer just to keep track of those little cards. The cost of postage for sending them back became overwhelming.
His wife left him when he joined the Uninhibited Book Club and she saw the pictures in the three books he got for a dollar.
Werner became decadent and he didn't bother with mailing any of the little cards back to the Uninhibited Book Club.
The stress of reading all the Uninhibited books and handling all the other clubs drove a penniless Werner - marked as a "dirty old man" by his neighbors - to a relatively early grave.
His wife, embittered by all she had been through, put the following on his tombstone:
"Do Not Send This Month's Selection."
by CNB