ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 18, 1996 TAG: 9609180029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM HORTON THE BALTIMORE SUN
Oyster season has begun, if only literarily.
First to arrive in the mail recently was ``The Eastern Oyster,'' a new, definitive work on the Chesapeake Bay's famed mollusk, which actually ranges from Brazil to Canada, the book says.
Not for the casual reader, this 41/2-pound volume from the Maryland Sea Grant Program devotes chapters to the likes of ``Adductor and Mantle Musculature.''
But it has excellent, readable sections on oyster disease and the history of attempts to establish Crassostrea virginica in far-flung places. The species has flourished in Pearl Harbor.
The book, which supplants Paul Galtsoff's 32-year-old ``The American Oyster,'' is a fine reference for teachers or others who need in-depth knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay.
Then there's Johns Hopkins Press' reprint of W.K. Brooks' ``The Oyster,'' first published by Hopkins more than a century ago.
Brooks was the original Chesapeake scientist, a great authority on oysters and what was happening to decimate them even in the 1880s. He proposed solutions that ring fresh in the 1990s.
He was also a fine writer. I hesitate to say that this book will sell like hot cakes, but the printing is only 1,750, and no respectable oyster library will be complete without this classic.
I was surprised to find my own bookshelves now include more than a dozen works on, or related to, the humble bivalve.
They range from Gilbert Byron's novel, ``The Lord's Oysters,'' and Pat Vojtech's ``Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks,'' to M.F.K. Fisher's gastronomical ``Consider the Oyster'' and John Wennersten's ``Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay.''
Also, some of the best literature constructed around a mollusk, Eleanor Clark's ``Oysters of Locmariaquer,'' was written after she and her husband, Robert Penn Warren, resided on the Brittany seacoast in the 1950s.
My favorite is the less lofty ``Oyster Cans'' by Jim and Vivian Karsnitz, collectors of oyster memorabilia who live in Lancaster County, Pa.
More later on that book, whose fascination for me has to do with a larger oyster question: Whence our abiding interest in such a humble invertebrate?
Indeed, eight of my oyster books have been issued (or reissued) in the last decade, and four of them since 1993. Interest in oysters seems healthier than the oysters themselves.
The fact is, we go back a long and happy way with oysters, never mind Jonathan Swift's overquoted observation that, ``He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.''
Humans have been intrepidly slurping oysters since they figured how to crack them open.
Oysters exist on every continent but Antarctica and are creatures of the near coastal edges and tidal river mouths - as are we, with about half our population on 5 percent of the Earth's surface, mostly near the land-water margins.
Perhaps easy access to tasty, abundant oysters was, early on, a draw toward the shoreline. Such access got many an early American colonist through a hard winter.
From pre-Christian Roman poets to Jack London, an erstwhile oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay, writers have extolled the taste of the oyster, shared by emperors and commoners.
For a thousand years or more, France's Bordeaux region was as known for the savor of its oysters as for its wines: ``So high an order of taste it is like smelling violets to eat them,'' wrote Montaigne in 1581.
In appearance the oyster is ``a nondescript mass of protoplasm living between two calcareous shells,'' writes Robert Hedeen in his otherwise accurate 1986 book, ``The Oyster.''
I say otherwise: Freshly opened, its color closer to cream than gray, resplendent on the lustrous surface of the half shell, agleam with its salty liquor, an oyster is voluptuously splendid to both eye and palate.
In Chesapeake Bay history, of course, the oyster has been a political force.
Maryland has legislated over it copiously since the 1820s, and to protect it formed an Oyster Navy (now marine police) in 1868.
Virginia's coveting of oyster beds accounts for the odd zig-zags in the state line across the bay.
The oyster, which stays in one place all its adult life and filters its environment by the hundreds of gallons a day to feed, is as literal a ``taste'' of region and place as anything we eat. (This is also the charm of wine).
Bring him an oyster from any coastline of the vast Roman Empire, the emperor Nero said, and his taste buds would tell you its origin.
And so it is I love the Karsnitz book's extensive color illustrations of hundreds of oyster cans, which evoke the days when every town and cove and river laid claim to its own tasty brand of oyster.
From the Chesapeake region there were Tred Avons, Tilghmans, Hongas, Seasides, Rappahannocks, Patuxents, Tangiers, Tom's Coves, even Bay Bridge Brands.
There were Daufuskies from the Georgia sea islands and Hilton Heads from South Carolina, Cape May Salts, Montauks from New York, Pelicans from Texas and Apalachicola Bays from Florida.
The oyster now - at least in Chesapeake Bay - is at low ebb, and the bulk of world production is from Asian aquaculture mega-enterprises that produce mollusks as indistinctive as soybeans.
Following is a list of books on the subject:
``The Eastern Oyster,'' edited by Victor S. Kennedy, Roger I. E. Newell and Albert F. Eble, Maryland Sea Grant College, University of Maryland System, 1996.
``The Oyster,'' W.K. Brooks, with a forward by Kennedy Paynter, Johns Hopkins Press, 1996 (reprint).
``Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks,'' Pat Vojtech, Tidewater Publishers, 1993.
``Oyster Cans,'' Jim and Vivian Karsnitz, Schiffer Publishing, 1993.
``Chesapeake Gold, Man and Oyster on the Bay,'' Susan Brait, University of Kentucky Press, 1990.
``Consider the Oyster,'' M.F.K. Fisher, North Point Press, 1988.
``The Lord's Oysters,'' Gilbert Byron, Johns Hopkins Press, 1986.
``The Oyster,'' Robert Hedeen, Tidewater Publishers, 1986.
``The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay,'' John Wennersten, Tidewater Publishers, 1981.
``The Oysters of Locmariaquer,'' Eleanor Clark, Pantheon Books, 1964.
LENGTH: Long : 115 linesby CNB