'Rider of Another World Informed By Paper'

I’ve had several friends among booksellers over the years. I once dreamed of becoming a bookseller myself, with a friend who was a poet from New York City. We had a name – Omega Books, shortened to O Books – but no business sense and no capital. I suppose every serious reader entertains such pipe dreams, until we grow up. Few of the booksellers I’ve known have been serious readers. Most valued books, and not just financially, and not merely as cultural bric-a-brac. But few were devoted readers. They were unlikely to know many books from the inside. Books were product, like lawnmowers. Such an understanding may be wise. To love books too much might make one reluctant to part with them. The Ur-text to consult is Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade (Biblioasis, 2022). 

In December I wrote about an essay by Catharine Savage Brosman, “Four Modes of Book Collecting,” in which she describes a London bookseller of her acquaintance who was blind. Some years earlier, Brosman had published a poem, “The Bookseller” (Passages, Louisiana State University Press, 1996), perhaps narrated by the same blind bookman:

 

“Until I die, I shall abide by books--

feeling the leather and the gilded spine,

running my thumb along the rippled edge,

sensing the musty cloth, the wormy page,

the odor of a chest or rooms untended

where a distant heir one day divined

a windfall for his bank account, and called

on me. Here, watch your step; I cannot

 

“see, but my companion says that books

have almost filled the hallway, overflowed

the bedroom, where I feel their presence

in the night among my dreams.--Would you have

some tea and scones, or else a hot cross

bun, to mark the season? Yes, all London

bustles here on Oxford Street, and I suppose

I need the sense that others are about;

 

“but what we know most keenly is desire,

and in desire I know the darkness, not

the life I hear but that which I imagine--

the way you, reading of the Trojan War

or the Crusades, perhaps, are startled

by the telephone, thinking of Helen’s face

instead, of Hector’s body pulled behind

the wheels of arrogance. Tamer of horses

 

“I can never be -- but rider of another world

informed by paper -- and, for me, in tongues

beneath my fingertips. To sell, of course,

is necessary, and I thank you; but I need

to feel beside me, too, this field of words

aflame, where blinded poets make the sirens

sing, and I can almost glimpse the light,

the dazzling seascape that Odysseus sailed.”

 

The first line stands as a dedicated reader’s mantra. And in the third stanza we think of Borges, the blind librarian: “but what we know most keenly is desire, / and in desire I know the darkness, not / the life I hear but that which I imagine--.” And then we think of ourselves: “rider of another world / informed by paper.”