'One of Those Time-Warped Bunkers That's All Dark Wood and Bile'

In the last twenty-four hours I’ve succumbed to temptation and ordered four books from three online dealers, one in Indiana, another in Ohio and, of course, Amazon. In a week or so I expect two titles by Charles Gullans to be arriving from the Midwest – Arrivals & Departures (1962) and Letter from Los Angeles (1990). Landing even sooner in my mailbox will be Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (2018) by Józef Czapski and the latest by Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. There’s no theme expressed here except one reader’s wayward tastes. I’m grateful for the availability, ease of purchase, reasonable pricing and speed of delivery but plagued by a guilty sense of nostalgia. My mental model for buying books is still closer to what Orwell describes in “Bookshop Memories” (1936) than to my computer and a credit card.

Several essay contributors to Henry Hitchings’ Browse: The World in Bookshops (2016) share my conflicted sense of paradise lost. Second-hand bookstores are where I learned the value and thrill of serendipity. Enter with a reasonably open mind and a suppressed sense of expectation and leave, perhaps, with treasure. Most of my schooling was conducted in downtown Cleveland. Get off the bus at Public Square and enter Schroeder’s in the 1893 Cuyahoga Building. On sale were magazines and new paperbacks, including a good stock of Random House Vintage Books. That’s where I first bought The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Schroeder’s closed in 1979 after seventy-one years, and the building was torn down in 1982 to make way for the BP American Building, which Jacobs would have hated.

Next stop, after visiting the main Cleveland Public Library on Superior Avenue, was Kay’s Books on Prospect at East 6^th. This was heaven, three floors of bookish clutter housed in a former Chinese restaurant. Thirteen years ago I wrote about Kay’s, where I worked in 1975, and that post still attracts the occasional comment from a former patron or employee. I have dreams set in Kay’s, usually in the damp basement, and mourn the bargains I resisted for financial reasons. Like the other clerks I worked six days a week and cleared less than $100 after taxes. That’s where I first bought and read Mark Smith’s The Death of the Detective (1974), a novel I recall with guilty pleasure.      

After Kay’s came Publix Books, a classier joint all together, opened by Bob and Ann Levine in 1936. The books I recall buying there bring a blush of shame to my cheeks – Emerson’s journals and novels by John Hawkes and Michel Butor. The mood was hushed and the prices were pretty steep for a high school/college student, but the Levines gave off an old-fashioned sense of respect for learning and books, and Bob usually wore a bowtie.

I’ve read Hitchings’ two books devoted to Dr. Johnson, and trust that he’s a legitimate bookman. He opens his introduction to Browse with a series of vignettes of bookshop memories. One, from 2004, is especially amusing and describes an exchange with a clerk in a shop on Charing Cross Road – “One of those time-warped bunkers that’s all dark wood and bile.” On sale is a sixth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, published a year after his death. Hitchings asks its price and the clerk tells him he couldn’t afford it. “And then he says,” Hitchings writes, “that my big overcoat makes me look like a shoplifter and I’d better shove off or he’ll call the police.” That’s the personal touch I miss.