'Nothing Ever Vanishes'

For the first time in fourteen months, Kaboom Books is open for business seven days a week. On Friday, the shop was almost crowded. Everyone wore masks but the shot of hand sanitizer from a squirt gun is now optional. We did well, as usual. My middle son, home briefly from the Naval Academy, picked up Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind (1994), a sort of sequel to The Emperor's New Mind (1989). 

I was pleased to find the Everyman’s Library edition of Swift’s Journal to Stella, the 1948 printing. These compact hardcover volumes, smaller than mass-market paperbacks, have a nice heft and are a pleasure to hold. The yellow dust jacket is ragged along the edges but otherwise the book is solid. A previous owner pressed his seal on the frontispiece: “Library of Harry Goldgar.”

 

Another small volume – a Robert Louis Stevenson travel omnibus including An Inland Voyage, Travels with a Donkey and The Amateur Emigrant (1956). The publishers are Collins and W.W. Norton. On the title page in ink, so close to the binding as to be nearly illegible, is written “Paul Elder, SF 1959.” On the frontend paper are two address labels, both in Houston, one for Mary Elizabeth Gillette, the other for Mrs. J.M. Gillette. I see that Mrs. Gillette died in 2005.

 

And a novel I bought more than fifty years ago when it was first published – Nabokov’s Mary (1970), translated by the author and Michael Glenny. It first appeared in Russian in 1926. Nabokov’s protagonist, Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré in Berlin, muses:

   

“’Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again -- never.’”