'Browsing Alongside the Antiquarians'

“In the bookshop, all was calm. You might have been far away, in some much older city, browsing alongside the antiquarians. The pace was intent and unhurried as the customers meandered among the works of Henry James and Rex Stout and Françoise Mallet-Joris and Ivan Turgenev and Agatha Christie and the rest, more and more names turning up in front of my eyes as I stood looking.” 

That was in 1963, on Forty-Eighth Steet near Sixth Avenue in New York City. I was in Kaboom Books on Houston Avenue in Houston in 2022. After almost sixty years, the mood was similar – “intent and unhurried,” the way pre-digital public libraries used to be. Almost crowded, everyone masked, much choreography and applied etiquette in the narrow aisles between shelves. I had even weighed volumes by James and Turgenev.

 

Irish-born Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), a protégé of William Maxwell, is best remembered as a writer of short stories for The New Yorker. In the sixties, in the persona of “the long-winded lady,” Brennan wrote feuilletons for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” department. A selection was published under the title The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (1969; rev. 1998). She was one of my models when I did street reporting and column-writing for newspapers. Go out cold, preferably on foot, and keep your eyes and ears open. If something looks topically important, ignore it. Talk to people and listen. Leave your precious hypotheses in the office. Forget muckraking. Nothing’s more interesting than most of our fellow humans.

 

Along with the Brennan collection I bought Osip Mandelstam’s The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks (trans. Richard and Elizabeth McKane, Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and Javier Marias’ essay collection, the Nabokovian-titled Between Eternities and Other Writings (Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage Books, 2017).

A toddler with long blonde hair followed me through the bookshop, peeking around corners and giggling when I pretended to be frightened. When I met his father I said, “That kid’s bold,” and he replied, “He doesn’t take shit from anyone.”