'I Think About Books and Their Authors'

It’s good to have friends who know how to swap stories, an art I used to take for granted. Now it seems rare. The ritual has two parts. First, the ability to tell a good story, one that is more than a punchline. This requires a well-stocked memory and some gift for narrative – pacing, brevity, knowing what to leave out, and a knack for accents and other voices. Nothing’s worse than a story burdened with excessive detail. Second, the give and take of exchanging anecdotes. These swap sessions have an architecture and etiquette of their own. No one can dominate nor appear too eager to jump in with the next story.

On Sunday I visited Kaboom books here in Houston. After browsing for an hour I spent another hour at the counter chatting with the owner, John Dillman. The subjects were books, bookshops and their owners, with an emphasis on the eccentricity of book people. John has been in the business for more than forty years and, like me, has haunted bookshops since he was a kid. I told him about the time I was working as a clerk in a Cleveland bookstore and had Tiny Tim as a customer. He was in the market for old sheet music and agreed to autograph the wall before he left. John told me about a bookshop owner in New Orleans who fell down the steel staircase in his shop and suffered a compound fracture of the leg. He crawled back up the stairs to his apartment above the shop, fell into bed and died a few days later of the subsequent untreated infection. Not every story in a swap session is amusing, but a good storyteller knows when to vary the mood.

I bought three books in John’s shop, all of which I have read before. Henry Green’s Blindness (1926) was the first novel he wrote. This is the reissue from 1978. John mentioned he had read all of Green’s books except his rather peculiar memoir Pack My Bag (1940), which I recommended. I found a 1991 hardcover reissue of Evelyn Waugh’s second travel book, Remote People (1931), an account of his travels in East and West Africa. This prompted wonder at that extraordinary generation of English writes born around the first decade of the twentieth century. Along with Green and Waugh, there is Pritchett, Powell and Auden, and such lesser figures as Cyril Connolly and Orwell. Finally, I bought a pristine hardcover of Adam Zagajewski’s Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination (1995). In a brief essay titled “In the Library,” Zagajewski writes:

“I think about books and their authors. I am free.”