'Books One Never Knew One Must Have'

It’s easy to swoon over used bookstores, the way we might get mushy over former girlfriends. The tug of nostalgia is powerful. Once a common feature of big cities and small towns, perpetuating their own mythologies of bookshelf cats, dust and cranky proprietors, now they are nearly as rare as typewriter repair shops. Not quite extinct, they are in jeopardy, and I don’t know how some have managed to stay in business. Singing their praises is tough to resist. 

Matthew J. Franck speaks for many of us in his essay “The Bookshelf: The Joys of Used Bookstores.” Rather than lamenting the present state of such shops, he celebrates their past and, by implication, looks forward to their future. “I’ve always been a sucker for used bookstores,” Franck writes, “and for any venue that features used books—indie bookstores selling both new and used books, public library sale rooms, you name it.” Specifically, he celebrates his serendipitous discoveries of books by three twentieth-century masters – Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler, Willa Cather – thus, proving himself a reader, not a mere collector. The latter we associate with dilettantes and those who buy books as “investments” or interior decoration.

 

“Browsing the shelves leisurely,” Franck writes, “one discovers books one never knew one must have.” That’s a lot of one’s but Franck is recounting how he discovered previously unread titles by the three writers cited. He describes what I think of as bookstore serendipity – that sense of anticipation, a mingling of excitement and dread, each feeding off the other, that we experience when entering a used bookshop. (The dread comes from the fear we’ll find nothing worth buying.) Browsing with a specific volume in mind is dull, little different from a visit to the drugstore.

 

Some of us have the clandestine habit, when visiting someone’s home, of examining their shelves and drawing conclusions about their taste, intelligence and general moral standing. A corollary is ranking bookshops by their documented serendipity quotient. My Platonic Ideal of a bookstore is still the late lamented Kay’s Books in Cleveland, which I patronized starting the year I turned eleven. A decade later I went to work there as a clerk. In strictly non-financial terms, it was the best job I ever had. I kept a stash of books hidden in a box on the second floor – treasures I wanted to buy when I could afford them. I still remember most of its contents and regret leaving them behind when I quit the job.

 

If we could recall all the books we have ever read, and in particular all the books we have read at least twice, it would constitute a true and interesting autobiography. A nice supplement would be a tally of all the bookstores we have visited. Such an aesthetic/intellectual/moral accounting would be more revealing than any curriculum vitae. As Franck writes in conclusion:

 

“Each in his or her own way, come to think of it, Waugh, Koestler, and Cather represent this most precious impulse of twentieth-century literature: that every life that comes within our reach has its claim on us, and is not to be wasted or sacrificed to any cause, program, or system on which we have the conceit to place a higher value.”