Even the Library of Congress makes a mistake now and then.

Last week, while driving home from a show, I happened to hear a radio spot for the Library of Congress extolling the joys of reading.

“Open a book, and you enter a whole new world,” the announcer intoned.

And to prove that, the ad included a few snippets of dialogue from a recently released film version of a classic book. A film on which its creators had lavished funds equal to the gross national product of a couple of Third World nations. A film that had been released to great fanfare. A film that was expected to dominate the box office and be the subject of continued fascination by the public for weeks to come.

The only problem with this plan was that the film upon which the Library of Congress had based its efforts to encourage people to read more books was “John Carter.”

We will pause for a moment to allow the murmurs of “John WHO?” to subside.

Yes, “John Carter.” The $350 million Disney production about an American soldier from the 1860s magically transported to Mars, where he becomes embroiled in war and romance on a planet filled with the sort of globular monsters and architecturally impressive females that might appear in a Frank Frazetta wet dream.

Frazetta. Frank Frazetta. Illustrator who created thousands of covers for science fiction novels and – oh, never mind.

“John Carter” died a swift and not-so-merciful death at the box office (at least in America – supposedly it set box-office records when it was released in Russia). People who keep track of these things believe that Disney could lose as much as $200 million on this project. The two sequels that were originally planned will likely never see the dark of a movie theater.

As for the Library of Congress, it might seem that hitching its advertising wagon to this particular star was horribly misguided. But there is some logic to it.

“John Carter” the movie is an adaptation of “Under the Moons of Mars,” a serial that first appeared in print in 1912 and was published in book form five years later as “A Princess of Mars.”

It was the first published work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who that same year would create what is his most famous character, Tarzan. “Tarzan of the Apes” would make it into hardcover first, published in 1914, but the character of John Carter was Burroughs’ first – and his own personal favorite – creation. Burroughs would go on to write 10 more novels about Carter and his adventures on the Red Planet.

With 2012 being the centennial of Burroughs’ two best-known characters – characters who appear in dozens of novels, not to mention scores of films and TV programs – it’s only logical for the Library of Congress to want to use these characters and their adventures to encourage reading.

It’s also why the Library of America has come out with new facsimile editions of “Tarzan of the Apes” and “A Princess of Mars.”

Burroughs was a pulp writer who aspired to greatness – or at least the respectability of being published in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which was one of the premier showcases for American popular and literary fiction.

Yet the lure of relatively easy money by feeding the public’s demand for more Tarzan adventures was too much of a temptation. Burroughs wrote in all sorts of genres – Westerns, historical, science fiction like the series that began with the books “The Land That Time Forgot” and “At the Earth’s Core” – but it was Tarzan that the public wanted.

Still, as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz writes in his introduction to the Library of America re-issue of “A Princess of Mars,” Burroughs “is important … to the readers and writers he inspired, the genres he helped shape. At a fundamental level Burroughs is vital to our understanding of what is called the American Century. Situated at a key juncture in the U.S.’s development – the precise instant that the America we know was first a-birthing – his work both protoypically embodies and prototypically unravels primal American fantasies about race, masculinity, history, humanness, coloniality and civilization.”

Thomas Mallon, in his introduction to “Tarzan of the Apes,” acknowledges that Burroughs’ prose may not be the most felicitous one might encounter in a lifetime of reading, but “a hundred years later what remains gripping are dozens of the story’s pictorial elements and incidents.”

And besides, “A Princess of Mars” and “Tarzan of the Apes” contain such sentences as, “I turned to meet the charge of the infuriated bull ape,” and “Looking full in the wicked, red eyes of Kerchak, the young Lord Greystoke beat upon his mighty breast and screamed out once more his shrill cry of defiance.”

How can you not want to know what happened next?

Original Print Headline: Burroughs’ worlds come alive on page

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