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The Reward
of It All
by
Annye B.
Burbank
The download
is 630 kilobytes in PDF format
Review of
Annye B. Burbank’s The Reward of It All
by
Jim Michie
This book
was a joy. It washed me in nostalgia by vividly
recalling the better parts of my high school academic
years, of which there were few, and it made me recall my
own awakening to the power of the written word during my
college years.
It is not an
autobiography, though it contains many biographical
sketches. It is not a memoir, though it is adorned with
obviously treasured remembrances. It is not a statement
of personal philosophy, though it is filled with strong
statements of personal values. It is first and foremost
a statement of intellectual passion, but it is also a
statement of commitment and self-realization. As far as
the reader can tell, Annye Burbank was a rock in the
stream of Twentieth Century turmoil.
For all its
beauty, the book also has its warts. It appears to have
been put together over many years, since the quality of
the writing is uneven, but the text itself reveals that
she was beyond her eightieth birthday when it was
completed. It also appears that she tried to put the
book together without editorial help (which it always
is) and certainly she tried to proof the copy from the
printer herself, which is always a disaster, since the
author tends to read right over his or her common
mistakes and the word processor with its spelling
checker wasn’t even dreamed of in 1972 when the book was
published.
I highly
recommend that all Newport News High School students
that had Miss Burbank as a teacher read this book—warts
and all.
Burbank
Book Electronic Conversion Notes
of
Jim Michie
Anne Morris
Gordon discovered this book when doing research for the
NNHS Class of 1955 Reunion Book Club that she had agreed
to tackle as the Activity Coordinator. She acquired a
copy, read it, and made it available to me and Nancy
Willey Small. Nancy passed the book on to me after
reading it, and I asked Anne if I could make it
available for other class members. She agreed, and I
went through my existing list of NNHS ’55 email
addresses to identify those I thought might be
immediately interested. I was also planning to put
something on the Web site to encourage others to read
the book.
I got an
almost immediate response from Lawrence Moss, who
expressed a desire to read the book, offered the idea
that we have the book scanned instead of sending around
an already worn copy, and offered to chip in on the cost
of getting it scanned. At first, I resisted because of
my strong feelings about intellectual rights, but when I
looked more carefully at the book still in my
possession, I found that it was not copyright
protected. Miss Burbank obviously felt no need to
restrict the book’s distribution, and on reflection, I
decided that she would be pleased for her book to get
the widest possible distribution, particularly to her
former students. After a couple of electronic back-and-forths
with Lawrence, I agreed to scan it myself, if I could
find a copy I could break apart to speed the scanning
process.
I emailed
Anne to get her ideas about the scanning of the book,
the appropriateness of making it available, and for help
in finding another copy. She gave me permission to use
hers. I proceeded to remove the cover from the
browning, letter-sized book and found the 1972 glue so
hardened and crusted that I had to trim the glue away so
the pages would feed properly in the document feeder of
my scanner. However, this turned out to be the least of
my worries.
My original
plan was to produce an exact copy of each page that
would preserve the format of the numerous poems and
insert material in the book. This would be accomplished
by using a photographic file format to store the
electronic information, just like a scanned photograph.
With the large page format, however, this proved
impractical, as the size of the whole document would
have been about 50 megabytes, even after conversion to
the compressing PDF file format used by most Web sites
for downloads. The only option to provide a file sized
for download by the ordinary Web user was to utilize the
optical character reading function of PDF, which puts
the text into RTF (can be manipulated in Microsoft Word)
format. (Sorry for the technical jargon.)
However,
while I was able to keep the final file size reasonable
(630 kilobytes), I created a formatting nightmare with
the book’s scattering of photos and innumerable, oddly
formatted poems. Being a poet myself, I knew how
important formatting was to the poems, so I vowed to
take the time to make my OCR copy as accurate a
reproduction of the original as possible. After more
than fifty hours of clicking and keying, I have produced
what I think is a very accurate electronic replication
of Miss Burbank’s book.
The PDF file
offers excellent quality for both text and photos when
viewing the book in Adobe Acrobat Reader on the
computer. Almost everybody that has access to the
internet has this program on their computer, regardless
of the computer type, the operating system employed, or
the browser being used. If you do not, it can be
quickly downloaded free at Adobe.com. Should you want
to print the document rather than read it on the screen,
you will have to be content with a slight degradation of
the photos, but only slight. A slightly (they were old
when placed in the original publication) higher grade
photo version is available if you contact
staff@nnhs55.com.
So the
reader will not confuse any mistakes I might have made
in the conversion process with those in the original
book, I have included the notes I made while the process
was progressing. No style or formatting changes have
been purposely made.
First are
the general notes that refer to large-scale
peculiarities and problems with the original text:
1. Use
of the ellipsis throughout is inconsistent
2.
Formatting throughout is frequently a mystery,
particularly of the poems and other inserts into the
main body of the text. However, every effort has been
made to maintain the exact format of the original.
3.
Poems throughout the book are frequently un-attributed
4.
There are numerous widowed and orphaned lines throughout
the book that are acceptable on facing pages but not
pages that must be turned; these have been carefully
left as they were.
Next are the
specific mistakes I identified on the pages of the
original, many as a result of the ubiquitous spell
checker:
1. P1,
second column, “moment” is misspelled as “monent”
2. P4,
first column, capitalization of “Sharp” appears
incorrect and period out of place after “. . . Moses”
3. P6,
middle of the second column, “strict” misspelled as
“strick”
4. P8,
bottom of the first column, “disturbs” misspelled as “distrubs”;
second column, “interpretations” misspelled as
“intrepretations”
5. P10,
second column, “constitution” misspelled as
“constitition”
6. P11,
first column, “hesitated” misspelled as “hestitated”
7. P12,
second column, “living room” is misspelled as all one
word
8. P16,
top of the second column, “gypped” is misspelled as
“gipped”
9. P17,
second column, “misspent” misspelled as “mispent”
10. P21,
top of the first column, “inadvertently” is misspelled
as “inadvertantly”; second column, “unforeseen”
misspelled as “unforseen”
11. P23,
first column, “sanitarium” (or sanatorium) misspelled as
“sanitorium”
12. P27,
first column, “Aristophanes” misspelled as
“Aristophames”
13. P31,
second column, legible is improperly capitalized and
there is an extra period after “penniless”
14. P33,
second column, “reading” is misspelled as “readig”
15. P34,
bottom of the first column, the quotes following “them.”
appear unwarranted; bottom of the second column,
“disintegration” is misspelled as “distintegration;” the
poem at the bottom of the page is a repeat, having been
first used on P10
16. P36,
bottom of the second column, “Division” is misspelled as
“Divison”
17. P37,
near the bottom of the second column, “We” should have
preceding quotation marks
18. P38,
near the bottom of the first column, “Epilogue” is
missing an introductory quotation mark
19. P39,
first column, “grin” is without a trailing comma; middle
of the second column, there is a semi-colon following
“wish”
20. P40,
midway of the second column, “simultaneously” is
misspelled as “simutaneously”
21. P41,
first column, “Randolph” is misspelled as “Randloph” and
“Guadalcanal” is misspelled as “Guadacanal”; middle of
the second column, “turbulence” is misspelled as
“turbulance”
22. P43,
middle of the first column, “Sicily” is misspelled as
“Scily”
23. P44,
first column, “libelous” is misspelled as “libellous”
24. P45,
near the bottom of the second column, “perseverance” is
misspelled as “perserverance”
25. P46,
bottom of the first column, “radio” is followed by both
a semi-colon and an em dash; the poem at the bottom of
the page is a repeat of the one on page 23
26. P47,
middle of the first column, “amethyst” is misspelled as
“amythest”; second column at the bottom, “of” is
repeated
27. P50,
first poem of the second column, title word “walk” is
not capitalized; last poem, “The Thief,” the author
appears to have been inadvertently cut off
28. P51,
top of the first column, “ingenious” misspelled as
“ingenius”
29. P54,
second column, “stalwart” misspelled as “stalworth”
30. P57,
last full paragraph of the first column, the word “to”
is missing between “given” and “me”
  
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