'All in the Order of Nature'

“Everywhere secondhand bookshops are disappearing in favour of undertakings which can afford to pay better rents.”

This was written long before every human vice, from pornography to the enthusiastic embrace of illiteracy, was blamed on the internet. Behind every technological scapegoat breathes the sweaty, errant presence of human nature. C.H. Sisson published On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography (Carcanet) in 1989, though the passage quoted above dates from the nineteen-seventies. Someone ought to assemble a Remembrance of Bookstores Past, an anthology written less by owners than patrons and clerks. From the earliest days of Anecdotal Evidence, beginning with this post more than fourteen years ago (see the comments), I’ve incrementally written bookstore reminiscences. Sisson continues:

“The shop in Bideford [in about 1938] was remarkable, even for those days, for its stock of leather bound books of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. I say even for those days because a shop in Charing Cross Road might then put an old folio that was not merely junk among the books on display outside the shop. This is how I bought The Anatomy of Melancholy in the same year.”

Sisson was the sort of bookstore patron who remembered when and where he bought many of his books. I’m the same. On a shelf to my left sits The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne (Anchor Books, 1967), purchased July 11, 1975 from Kay’s Books in Cleveland. Born thirty-eight years before me, Sisson’s finds are more impressive bibliophilically, if no less relied upon:

“At Bideford I was in an agony of doubt, not knowing what to buy with the small amount of money I thought I could afford—though I should have done better to have gone broke and bought of the shop. However I bought a copy of The Worthy Communicant of Jeremy Taylor, 1671, and a neat and handy edition of Swift, 1747, in thirteen volumes, a Cowley, 1681—nothing exotic, but books, for a few shillings, which are now kept for the antiquarian booksellers’ special shelves.”

That’s another aspect of the experience of bookshops across a lifetime – regrets, missed opportunities, mistaken judgments, poverty. Sisson is never sentimental. His aversion to  nostalgia is violent. He concludes his paragraph with this:

“Of course the disappearance of old books from the shops is all in the order of nature, one should not complain. The process has just been speeded up, like everything else in this mobile age.”