Introduction (Part 1 of 3): Books Are Hot

I started gathering books in college. Before that, only a few scattered titles lined my shelves: John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, never returned to a class set in San Diego; John Bly’s Iron John, a gift from a well-intentioned aunt in New Mexico; and a rotating series of Stephen King stories, precisely which ones depending on what I had sold back to or picked up from the Book Barn at any given time.

Strange to think of shelves as something to be appreciated or not, but the shelves in that room I most definitely did not. They came with the house, were built into it, and started about the height of a bar stool from the ground. In width, they extended 16 of the room’s 20 feet, the other four filled by a window that looked down at the neighbor’s fenced yard. In height, they rose to the top of the 10-foot high ceiling. I’m serious when I say that they were sturdy enough for me to scale, like those idiots who climb the Times building or Malibu on The Wall on American Gladiators.

This was in the obscenely spacious house in which I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, though at the time I didn’t think it obscene at all. At the time it was just where we lived, its size more an indication of exchange rate than wealth: California dollars stretched farther in the Midwest. Bulky intercoms sat next to the light switches in each room, but the sound was so fuzzy you had to holler down the steps anyway. The driveway was big enough to turn around in. Afraid to back into traffic? Don’t worry. Just engage in a five-point turn in the safety of your own side yard, and we’ll have you facing the right direction in no time. I’m embarrassed to even type the number of bedrooms. (Six, though I can diminish the ostentatiousness if only slightly by talking one down to a sewing room and one down to a den.)  The second floor alone could have accommodated a whole wing of the building I’m living in now.

Where I lived growing up.

Now, my wife, Leuinda, my two-year old son, Jonah, and I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, on the other side of Broadway, which qualifies as “the tracks” anywhere else. In Richard Price’s novel Lush Life, two characters travel all the way from upstate to two blocks away from our apartment to buy some real primo dope with the intent to distribute. Last Friday, Leu ran across the street to Rite Aid to buy a new battery for her watch. On her way home, she saw a guy swinging a bat at another guy.

“Give me my money,” the guy with the bat said.

Something small and plastic fell out of the other guy’s pocket. He scrambled to pick it up. By this time a crowd had gathered.

“There were 100 people within seconds,” Leu said. “The traffic on St. Nick totally stopped.”

Apparently spooked by all of the attention, both guys—the bat-wielder and the bat-ducker—jumped into the same car and sped off down a side street together. And here I always thought that the term “partners in crime” meant that the partners were on the same side.

“Where was this?” I ask.

“Right on 186^th,” she says. “A block away.” If I step out of our building, I could hit the corner on the fly with a well-thrown baseball.

“They jumped in the same car?”

“Weird, huh?”

This is where we have chosen to raise our son. Try that five-point turn in our neighborhood, and someone else is liable to be driving by point three.

Is it any wonder that Leu is obsessed with other New York apartments?

“That place looks nice,” I say, as we pass a complex that I had never noticed before.

“It’s a walk-up,” she replies, with the expertise of a city inspector.

She attends yoga classes, birthday parties, she monitors local message boards for free stuff like the guys on The Wire, all to find ways to get a look at other neighborhood apartments. When I leave to pick up a corner table for her sewing or a box of clothes for the boy, she says, “Make sure you get a good look at their apartment.” When I get home, “So?” If she were to walk into a New York apartment and see the shelves that lined my room when I was growing up, she would offer the tenant $400 more per month on the spot. Maybe even five. She keeps cash on hand in anticipation of such an opportunity.

The view from where I live now.

Then, however, the shelves were just a wall that I couldn’t plaster with still more posters of Christie Brinkley. They held team photos, participation ribbons, a foam tomahawk commemorating the Braves’ appearance in the 1991 World Series, a gift my dad had brought home from a trip to Atlanta, the reason for him going never clear to me then and even less so now.

This all changed in college. The small state college I attended had to be one of the last to insist that students rent rather than buy the textbooks for their core classes, which prevented us from being saddled with entry-level World History, Music Appreciation, or Psychology texts that were as heavy as the coffee tables they barely fit on. Most students appreciated what I’m sure they considered a kindness on behalf of the college. In fairness, the school benefited from a large contingent of non-traditional students—working mothers who wanted to become LPN’s, twentysomething teenage boys who wanted to parlay their passion for Cops into a career in criminal justice—and this rental policy kept money in their pockets for Similac or Taco Bell.

When it came to the rentals, though, I sided with the professor who would begin each semester by announcing, “Call me crazy, but I believe you should leave college with some books.” He’d go out of his way to order titles that the bookstore didn’t have among its stacks. The black market that cropped up as a result astounded me. Second- and third-year English majors would say, “Don’t buy A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I had that class. You can borrow mine. I have Greasy Lake, too.” Students would get pissed—like, really pissed—when one book was substituted for another. Sula for Tar Baby. Lost in the Funhouse rather than In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. This meant that the required text couldn’t be borrowed; rather, it had to be—horror of horrors—bought! And if the replacement happened to be new enough to only be available in hardback, watch out. If his office had been a house, it would have been egged. And these were the students with scholarships, stipends.

My test scores were good enough to earn me the former but not the latter. Still, I never squabbled about buying books. That professor who insisted on making his students leave school with a library? I enrolled in six of his classes. Six. Had they been in another department, I would have had a minor. On the last day of the semester, when everyone was returning their rented books and drinking their returned deposits by way of cold pitchers of beer, I would loiter in the Student Union and see which books would make their way to the “discontinued” table. They would sell these for three dollars each. I stocked up on Intro to Sociology, Macro-Economics, and as many Norton Anthologies as I could sardine into my backpack: World Literature Volumes 1 and 2, American Literature Volumes 1 and 2, Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Drama. I was the model Liberal Arts student. Pound for pound, I was determined to take home with me that which I should have been carrying all along.

The space on my shelves dwindled.

This was around the time that I started seriously frequenting used bookstores, treating them as destinations rather than diversions. I have written elsewhere about the significance in my life of one particular store, and, indeed, had I not discovered the Book Barn when I did, whatever I would have discovered in its stead was bound to be a poor substitute, but the Book Barn was as important for what it represented as it was for what it actually had. In a town in which the final scene of Easy Rider is considered not only comedy but sophisticated comedy, the Book Barn was a counterculture bastion, a haven for those of us who valued words and tunes more than hunting and chaw. But visit the Book Barn three times in a week—three times in a month—and you’ve picked over everything that’s there to be picked. The Book Barn depended on the community for its stock, and that stock disappeared with the college kids over the summer. You weren’t going to drop by one July afternoon and suddenly find a shiny new section that included the Riverside Shakespeare, the Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg, or the compact OED, magnifying glass or not. They didn’t even have a shelf reserved for “New Arrivals.” Not even half a shelf. In the summer, they were a dealer whose distributor had been pinched.

So on those unbearably hot Midwest days when “hot” didn’t even begin to capture it, we would abandon the Book Barn for other lovers. We’d leave her in her nightgown and curlers at the kitchen table, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, while we engaged in a weekend rendezvous with stores in Springfield, Tulsa, Fayetteville, Kansas City, occasionally a nooner with this strange bookstore/bar combination on the back way out to Carthage, the exit for which I never did find the first time and that ended up having a surprisingly smart collection. Those weekends. Those lost weekends. Their sole purpose to accrue more books. The offerings even 50 miles away somehow more exotic. Look at this cover of Nine Stories. Does your copy of The Awakening have short stories in the back? Don’t get that. It’s a Dover Thrift. It’ll take you six minutes a page. On the drive home, the trunk so weighed down, the muffler would drag over bumps, casting sparks in our wake, the third-hand Audi now a comet in the night.

obvious

The dirty little secret about used bookstores—the one that could get me kicked out of the club for its telling—is that they’re really all the same. Individually so quaint and unique, but as a genre one hardly distinguishable from the next. All some version of: The heavy metal door that won’t shut all the way is pocked with fliers announcing Open Mic Night, Volunteers Still Needed for This Year’s Fall Festival, and Please Please Please Let Me Feed Your Cat While You Are Away. The first editions and/or signed copies are either under the counter or behind it, if the shop is lucky enough to have any first editions and/or signed copies. If not, this section is reserved for tote bags and T-shirts with the name of the store in Old Tyme font: The Dusty Bookshelf, Dickson Street Books, Bound to Please. Order a shirt, and the woman behind the counter will say, “I’m sorry, all we have left are women’s small.” She’s nice enough, the woman behind the counter, but you can tell that she’d rather not be talking to you, rather not be talking to anybody, actually, which is why she’s here rather than, say, a bank or a restaurant or an amusement park. The place is inherently hushed, your voice disruptive, a scratch in a song or a crinkling wrapper a minute after curtain. She’s standing among stacks of books that still need to be tagged and shelved. She’s a college student, most likely, a creative writing or English major, and a third sexier inside the store than out, because, well, because books are hot.

The computer seems out of place, though it’s as ubiquitous now as the inert cat. That it’s dialed in to Alibris or Amazon or Borders.com somehow making it even worse. I’m here, aren’t I? Why must you be there? I don’t want to know their inventory. I want to know yours. It’s too plugged in, too bright. The rest of the store is dim, dingy, but charmingly so, un-obstructively cluttered, the aisles narrow enough that you have to turn sideways when someone else walks by. A nod, a slight smile to the passing party. One of Melville’s gams. “It’s cool.”

The New Arrivals are housed on those two-tiered rolling shelves (the Book Barn being the exception that proves the rule), but they have yet to be sorted, so they are more trouble to browse than they are worth. You walk right past, seek the store’s depths, where the true treasures lie, see how far back it goes, the best establishments like those rooms that have a full-size mirror reflecting them only there’s no mirror, no reflection, it’s all room, row after row of books, lining the floors like runway lights, the cheap paperbacks like breadcrumbs above, follow the Robert Ludlum, the Nora Roberts, the Wally Lamb if you can’t find your way home. She’s Come Undone alone should get you half way there. But beware the step stools and ladders, some built into those grooves, like that child’s toy where you flick your wrist and the top goes down one side and then back up.

The organization disappointingly influenced by that Liberal Arts curriculum from before, the sciences together, the –ologies, but all in the same condensed place like this rather than stretched across a campus the feeling more like neighborhoods, Fiction hoping to increase its property value living so close to Literature, New Age and Sci-Fi adding some much needed color to the block, and way in the back, the park after dark, Sexuality and Gay/Lesbian Studies. Venture deep enough and you half-expect to find a guy in a raincoat.

After taking the tour, settling on a section, squatting in a neighborhood. Scanning the shelves with soft eyes, a skill the Internet never understood. Running your fingers over the spines, like that scene in John Woo’s The Killers in which the guy searches for the book with the gun inside. Which one of these has what you need inside? Teetering one off the shelf. The back cover first, then the front. Cover art. Copyright page. When was it originally published? What is unique about this edition? Corrected text? A new translation? An introduction by a well-known author that reexamines its influence? A movie tie-in, perhaps? Most Forewords should be Afterwords. Font. Spacing. I didn’t re-read Crime and Punishment for years because the mass-market paperback I had left too little room between the lines. How do the pages feel in your hand? How durable the spine? Those spines that crack, that threaten to split the book in two, like a leviathan parting a seacraft, the majority of the crew on one side, the balance on the other, those cheap spines discarded immediately. Heartiness over convenience. Must sustain the tumble of backpacks, bleaching in a dashboard or a cracked vinyl seat, everything that diners and airports and beaches and trains and strollers can throw at it. Everything from before the movie begins to after the last pitch is thrown. It has to be able to go everywhere you go, do everything you do.

Darwinian, the selection process. First restricted to what you can fit into one hand, then two. Then, I bet they’ll give me a bag. Leaving a pile in an empty spot on the floor or the top of that step stool so you can fit more. Inevitably putting some back, price or I’ll find that one somewhere else or I don’t know, it’s just not live or die. Settling on a stack that fits comfortably in two hands, avoiding the need to cradle near your waist (or, worse, balance with your chin), staying on the right side of that line that separates bookstore from library.

Finally, checking out. The hours have passed like minutes but the girl at the counter doesn’t appear any farther along than she was when you arrived. You note the music for the first time, though it’s been playing all along. Light jazz or folk or This is NPR, National Public Radio News. She tallies up your total by noting the number in pencil on the inside cover. She punches the figures into a calculator, as Old Tyme as that font, adds the tax by hand. She’s two-thirds sexier now by virtue of raising her eyebrows in approval of your purchase of The Waves. For a second you wonder what she’d look like sitting across from you at dinner. Would she wear more make-up? Would she get her hair did? You hope not. You hope this is exactly who she is, the girl behind the counter at the used bookstore. But then, paying with cash, blinking your way back to the pavement, releasing the heat from your car, a moment in the front seat before keying the ignition, unrolling the top of the brown paper sack, lifting the books out one by one, taking stock of your haul. The back cover again, then the front.

One used bookstore or another.

I’ve visited used bookstores in Portland, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, Oxford (Mississippi and England), Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, and New York, to name but a few, and the experience has always been something close to this. I bet Bookworks is the pride of Albuquerque, but I also bet it’s not that much different than Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis or Haslam’s in Tampa Bay. One benefit of the Internet destroying bookstores is that they didn’t survive long enough to be commodified, a la coffee-shop culture and Starbucks. But really the only differences between these allegedly unique experiences are the names on the signs and the titles in the Local Interest section.

And, still, indistinguishable though they may be, choose a book from my shelf and ask me where I got it, and I can tell you exactly. Well, maybe not exactly, the names too often in the ether, but exactly enough. The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men? That place in Denver, off Colfax, I think, purchased for the cover that would be called “retro” were it not original, one of my only under-the-glass purchases, got on that road trip I took with Dana in ’95. The Risk Pool, Richard Russo? One of like four stores in a stretch in Ann Arbor that had me thinking, Damn, I could live here. I was there for a reading of a play. Jim telling me about it before. I had to call him to confirm the title. I had a copy of The Idiot too but put it back because I didn’t know when I would ever get to it. Black Swan Green, David Mitchell? Easy. The Strand Annex, Lower Manhattan, before it was shuttered and turned into something else. Not bought by me at all, actually; rather, a gift from a friend, a fan of Mitchell’s, who rescued multiple copies of the book from the remainder pile by buying every copy they had. He passed them out at work, eight or ten in all, not just to anyone, mind you, the limited quantity too precious to be indiscriminate, but only to those he knew would understand.