'I Used to Stand in Front of the Windows'

In my dream I was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would bleach the color from the cover of a book. At the center of a display that seemed to be made of cotton gauze was not just any book but a first edition of Ulysses. In the rare books collection of the Schaffer Library at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., I once held and leafed through the pages of a Ulysses first edition, after the librarian had me put on a pair of white gloves as though I were going to the opera. It was fatter than I had imagined. Joyce demanded that it be bound in the colors of the Greek flag – white lettering on a background the blue of the Aegean, at least as I imagined it. 

The real surprise in the dream was the absurd price being asked for Joyce’s masterpiece: $22, handwritten on a white card perhaps because, according to dream-logic, Ulysses was published in 1922. I stepped toward the door of the bookstore and found it locked. End of dream.

 

On January 14, 1959, William Maxwell, in a letter to Eudora Welty, wrote about the bookstores he had patronized in Cambridge while a graduate student at Harvard. One was the Dunster House Book Shop. He tells Welty he had been dreaming of it:

 

“It has long been extinct, but I used to stand in front of the windows, and be in a kind of seizure. The books were all folio, and more often odd-sized folio, longer than a line drawn on the diagonal of a quarto and extended to folio size would have produced. They were always printed in England and usually dark blue or plum colored. I never bought a single one of them, for a very good reason, but in my dreams I go there as to any other book store and discuss, with the proprietor, why he isn’t in business any more.”

 

[The letter is found in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (ed. Suzanne Marrs, 2011).]