'This Bright Brute Is the Gayest'

John Dillman, owner of Kaboom Books in Houston, told me the story about the excitable fellow who entered his shop and asked for a specific title. John led him to the proper shelf and handed him the book. The guy was pleased and said he had been looking for it for ten years. He handed the book back to John and walked out of the store. I countered with the time a customer approached me in the Cleveland bookstore where I was working in 1975 and asked for “that blue book.” Did he know the title? No. Author? No. Subject matter? Forget it. The first edition of Ulysses? The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous? I’ll never know. Bookshop owners are reputedly eccentric but their customers aren’t always paragons of mental health. 

Early in the lockdown, John closed his shop entirely. Then he started accepting orders by telephone or email, and you could pay for the desired volumes at the back door, an arrangement that recalled a speakeasy. In October he reopened three days a week, noon to 6 p.m. John greets you with a hand sanitizer-loaded squirt gun. Around the shop he has distributed plastic bins in which you place the books you handle but don’t wish to purchase. While my middle son and I were there, we saw only two other customers and a cat.   

 

Michael took home three volumes. I picked up a book I owned and first read fifty years ago – Nabokov’s translation of his second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928; trans., 1968). The prize of our visit to Kaboom, however, was a first printing of A.J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a book I covet but the price is a little steep. Maybe I’ll change my mind next visit. It’s probably the funniest book you’ll ever read about an American political figure. In his foreword, Nabokov says of King, Queen, Knave: “Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.” The same is true of Liebling’s early masterpiece.