Recently a friend and I conducted a session on asking for money from individuals and organizations and we built in a question about class.  We asked each person to share with us a snapshot of growing up and their experience of money when they were young.  We later asked them to share with us their attitude to money now.  What was obvious in this particular group was that those who came from relatively affluent families thought very little about money when they were growing up, and very little about money now.

Those who grew up in very poor countries or neighborhoods thought about money a great deal and devised ingenious ways to store and save money.  Today these people who came from poverty or working class conditions continued to think about money a lot and were creative in their ways of saving and investing money.

For years I was asked which school I went to as a barometer to measure my class status and therefore my level of acceptance. What is equally clear is that the rules of engagement are changing. Now instead of being asked what school you went to, you’re likely to be asked if you have a Facebook page as the class barometer – you’re gauged by the company you keep online rather than whose company you kept in the classroom.

Class is increasingly becoming an election issue in the US.  Mitt Romney has proved himself to be exceptionally out of touch with many people who would identify as working class or middle class.  He mentioned that his wife has a couple of Cadillacs in the economically depressed city of Detroit and earlier had said “I don’t care about the very poor because they have a safety net.” They don’t and why is it we continue to talk about ‘The Poor’ as if they are immovable rather than people who happen to be poor and would like to get some financial stability or may not always be poor?  All of this at a time when the 99% are assuming a collective power built on defining class – us and them, the 1%.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been contacted by companies that are providing intelligence on factories in developing countries to multinationals that use factories to produce these goods.  These same companies are providing factory workers with information on employers, labor conditions, recruiters, housing and childcare to assist them in their work and career progression.  They are now planning to add financial products and health insurance to this suite.   Factory workers are moving from being commodities to being valued.

It’s great to know the wheel is turning and that factory workers themselves can help drive new standards and conditions due to a fast changing global marketplace.  A future where there is increased pressure by online advocates on the companies that rely on factory workers to ensure they are getting a fair wage and fair working conditions.  A future where factory workers can individually and collectively expect decent working conditions.  A future where factory workers may even hope for new skills and different work that will propel them to higher wages while reducing their hard labor.

While a new world order is emerging, it’s still comforting to venture into an antique book fair in the West Village and to find it pretty well immune from the language of globalism and kindle fire.

Josh and I struggled against a fierce wind to find the door to the fair.  Once in, it was like entering Shangri -la.

A magic world where Nancy Drew, Julie Gordon, Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames Student Nurse came back to life for me or perhaps I regressed to childhood again for a short while.   Josh immersed himself in poetry and found so many books he’d read as a boy. Further along the room there was every kind of classic including a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, signed by the author herself.  I had to see the book and so the bookseller, knowing that he was as far from his $6,500 sale of the book as ever, still opened the glass casing for me to see Woolf’s signature. “She always signed in purple ink,” the bookseller told me helpfully.  It was such a small, neat signature and I had that buzzy sense of going back in time to the moment she signed the book.

Nearby a man set up tables laden with the most gorgeous food and wine for us all to eat.  “He does this every year, you know,” an owlish looking woman said to me. “Years ago I started with a $1.99 gallon of sherry,” the man boomed. “And now it costs me a hell of a lot more,” he laughed.

We spent over five hours in that small book fair, talking to booklovers, booksellers and book owners about our favorite books and the memories they evoked.  At one stage I found a green gilt hard back version of John Milton’s Comus illustrated by Arthur Rackham and I was so enchanted that I spent a long time looking at it. It was too expensive to buy and so I walked away in the end.  The bookseller, who was profoundly deaf, came running after me with book in hand and said in a wavering voice “My dear, you can have the book as the woman who owned it would have loved your style.” I beamed, so happy was I, and gave him a big hug.

In this space, time fell away, ideas about class fell away, I was content to be and to walk and sit and hang out with the booklovers.  We were in a precious Eden and I felt it akin to Lost Horizon, another book that had once upon a time spurred my trip to Tibet, my own lost Shangri-la.

Mortals that would follow me
Love vertue; she alone is free
She can teach ye how to clime
Higher than the Spheary chime;
Or, if Vertue feeble were,
Heav’n it self would stoop to her.

 THE END

Comus by John Milton

Jane Sloane