GK Chesterton

The talented and fabulous Nancy Brown has started a Yahoo Group to help us all get the works of the great G.K. Chesterton into our local libraries.

G.K.  Chesterton was, in my and many other opinions, the greatest writer of the twentieth century. He was certainly the most prolific.  From the American Chesterton Society website:

"He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly. (To put it into perspective, four thousand essays is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every day, for 11 years. If you’re not impressed, try it some time."

So the guy had some game. The fact that he has been largely ignored by colleges, universities and libraries is not only a disgrace it’s also very telling. See, Chesterton was unabashedly Catholic. He argued for Christianity (leading an atheist you may have heard of to become a Christian ~ C.S. Lewis), he argued for the poor, he argued for social justice, and anything else he regarded as important. To say he argued well is a vast understatement and the powers that be in our educational system in this country can’t win against Chesterton. So they pretend he never existed.

That says a lot about the intellectual integrity in our higher learning institutions, doesn’t it?

So Nancy Brown is trying to recitfy that and we should all help her. Here’s how it works…

"As taxpayers, we are already invested in our local libraries. Why not have our library work for us by helping it make good purchases? Our local libraries want our input, but hardly anyone actually gets as far as making a book purchase suggestion. With GKChestertonLibraryConnection, it’s easy.

I do all the work, and I am the only one who can post. I send out a book, DVD, audio work, novel, magazine, or non-fiction title about once a week, and the group members can suggest it if interested at their library. Most libraries need title, author, publisher, ISBN numbers, and they often purchase through amazon.com so the amazon page is also helpful. I gather all this information and send it out in one neat email." ~Nancy Brown