'Interior Decoration Doesn't Count"

Just last week, and not for the first time, I had a dream set in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, where I visited often as a kid and worked in 1975. I was in the basement in the general hardback fiction section where I saw the copy of Under the Volcano I bought there forty-nine years ago. No cognitive dissonance. I wasn’t puzzled to see the volume that is shelved 10 feet from where I am writing. I seldom dream and seldom have reruns but Kay’s is the exception. Customers and fellow bookstore employees, some of them dead forty years, make cameo appearances. I dream more often about Kay’s than I do about the house I grew up in. 

Michael Dirda’s column this week is headlined “How to shop in used-book stores: 14 tips from a bibliophile,” and his advice is useful and pragmatic: “[Y]ou’ll be bending down to peer at shadowy bottom shelves, possibly going through boxes and probably getting dirty. Think of yourself as a prospector. Carry a small flashlight.” That describes the conditions in Kay’s basement precisely. The floor was unfinished concrete – seldom swept -- and the shelves were made of unfinished, undusted lumber. Everything was dusty. The late Tiny Tim once visited to look at the room where the old sheet music was piled. He complained that his hands were getting dirty, though before leaving he agreed to autograph the wall for us.

 

Dirda suggests that we “be ready for anything, whether it’s discovering a new author or pouncing on an undervalued gem. You’ll only know what you need when you see it.’ Though I’m always carrying a mental list of sought-after books and authors, I seldom arrive at a bookstore looking for some specific title. My compass is serendipity.

 

Much of Dirda’s list of suggestions is simple courtesy, respecting books, clerks and fellow patrons. Thus far, I have no cell phone horror stories. And I have never complained (aloud) about the cost of books, though I can think of one bookstore in Houston I no longer visit because of the inflated prices. Each time I visit Kaboom Books, I check on two volumes I’ve had my eye on for years – a first edition of Thomas Berger’s first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958), and a first of Guy Davenport’s Flowers and Leaves (1966), with front and rear cover photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. No changes in price since I’ve been monitoring them, and neither is overpriced. Just by my standards a little expensive. I like Dirda’s final observations:

 

“[T]he most interesting books are seldom the obvious ones — that’s why ‘hitting the shops’ is so much serendipitous fun. But don’t forget that collecting books should lead to reading and using them, whether we do so for instruction, research or delight. Interior decoration doesn’t count."