`An Almost Sacred Quality'

When I reached the age of 12 my parents deemed me mature enough to ride the bus into downtown Cleveland unaccompanied. This ranks among their minor acts of misjudgment but I was a timid boy, less likely to instigate trouble than to walk into it schlimazel-fashion. My most vivid memory of riding alone occurred one summer before city buses were equipped with air conditioning. I was seated next to the front door, on one of the long bench-like seats. The driver stopped for passengers and in walked a spherical, middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and unbuttoned shirt. His gut was ample and, to use Huck’s description of his father’s skin, “a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.” The matronly black woman seated across from me stared at this vision of unself-conscious corpulence and said the most tactful thing imaginable: “Dat man coolin’ his self.”

I went downtown looking for books, less interested in independence for its own sake than in finding the volumes I was unable to locate in libraries. On Public Square was Schroeder’s, a stationary/magazine/candy shop that stocked cheap paperbacks (where I bought Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and Clancy Sigal’s Going Away). The block is long gone, replaced by the BP building. In the Old Arcade was Keisogloff’s, usually too pricey for my adolescent budget. The best shops were Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue, where I was to work as a clerk 10 years later, and Publix Bookmart on Huron Street. Both disappeared in the nineteen-eighties. I still own a dozen volumes I found in those stores, 35 years ago or more, including three volumes of Emerson’s journals.

Such pleasures have disappeared from Cleveland and elsewhere. The travails of small, owner-operated bookshops, with their character and characters, and deep, uncataloged stocks of old books, are well known. In “Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm,” Theodore Dalrymple compares his experience with George Orwell’s in the 1936 essay “Bookshop Memories.” Dalrymple is a true book lover (he has patronized one shop, with one owner, for 40 years), not a poseur or “first edition snob” (Orwell’s phrase). Inevitably, Dalrymple resorts to an elegiac tone:

“But the pleasure of second-hand bookshops is not only in finding what you want: it is in leafing through many volumes and alighting upon something that you never knew existed, that fascinates you and therefore widens your horizons in a completely unanticipated way, helping you to make the most unexpected connections.”

The joy of a first-rate bookshop is in serendipity. I always enter a shop with a mental list of titles and authors. If I find what I wanted, I’m pleased. If I find what I didn’t know I wanted, I’m jubilant. Today in Cleveland only one shop remotely resembling the sort I’m describing remains in business. It has no posted hours. It’s in a storefront at street level but might as well be on the 47th floor. As it happens, the owner and I graduated the same year from the same high school but never suspected the other existed until several years ago.

I’ve visited his shop only once and probably never will again. I had telephoned in advance and made certain he had the two-volume edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria I wanted. It’s the Oxford University Press reprint from 1958 of the 1907 edition edited by J. Shawcross – no dust jacket, no foxing or underlining, somewhat overpriced but I wanted it, especially when he couldn’t find the Ruskin titles I sought. I soon concluded the owner and I had nothing in common, not even the reading of books (even first-rate book dealers are seldom first-rate book readers). My brother came with me but almost immediately walked out when the owner’s wife sharply told him not to touch a stack of art-history volumes. I felt as though we had entered a speakeasy run by a tyrant bent on eliminating any possibility of pleasure. The shop was crowded but obsessively clean and well organized – itself a symptom of neurosis in the typically cluttered, dusty world of booksellers. The jackets of most volumes were covered with plastic, as in a library. It reminded of the living room of a woman I once knew who laminated her furniture.

Dalrymple notes that booksellers often hold customers in contempt. That’s how I felt with my former classmate. Browsing the stock without interruption was impossible. I felt disproportionately disappointed and saddened. Here was another reminder that the downtown book-hunting expeditions of my youth were gone forever. The irony was bitter: A bookseller who took anally fastidious care of his volumes but by his presence made them unapproachable. And what will happen to his stock when he dies or decides to give it up? The thought of so many books -- probably the last such collection in downtown Cleveland – randomly, unlovingly dispersed, was chilling. Dalrymple would understand my anxiety:

“Books, even without association with anyone known, have an almost sacred quality in any case: it is necessary only to imagine someone ripping the pages out of a cheap and trashy airport novel one by one to prove to oneself that this is so. If we saw someone doing it, we should be shudder, and think him a barbarian, no matter the nature of the book. The horror aroused by book burnings is independent of the quality of the books actually burnt.”