'People Who Just Love the Proximity of Books'

Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Booksellers in Chicago. More than forty years ago I visited that shop near the University of Chicago and purchased a partial set of Conrad for a decent price. They bundled the books and I carried them back to Ohio on the train. The card suggests a seriousness of purpose often missing from bookstores today:

 

“Chicago’s Oldest Bookstore

Established 1882

200,000 Titles in Stock

Used Books Bought & Sold

Small Collections or Complete Libraries

No Quantity Too Large – House Calls Made”

 

Smaller copy says O’Gara & Wilson carries books “in almost all fields, but we are especially interested in American history, art, Balkan and Central European history, English and American literature, Greek and Latin classics, medieval history and literature, military history, philosophy, religion & theology.” In other words, a serious bookstore for serious readers. This is not Harlequin Romance country.

 

Joseph Epstein’s great friend, the late sociologist Edward Shils, who taught at the University of Chicago, published “The Bookshop in America” in the winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. In it, Shils calls bookshops “an almost indispensable part of life. Like libraries, one goes to them for what one knows and wants and to discover books one did not know before.” He continues:

 

“I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”

 

He speaks for me. I have gone to bookstores I knew from prior sad experience were lousy, just to wander among the shelves, hopelessly hoping for treasure. In such places, I have been tempted to buy books I already owned just to salvage something tangible out of disappointment. Shils formulates a theory of good bookstores contrary to conventional economic sense:

  

“A bookshop, in order to be good, must have a large stock of books for which there is not likely to be a great demand but for which there will be an occasional demand. This means, unlike the retail trade in groceries, or the practice in industry to produce on order, a bookshop must render its capital inert by putting a lot of it into slow-moving lines.”

 

Shils is writing, of course, long before the Age of Amazon. I looked online to see if O’Gara & Wilson is still in business. It is, but relocated to Chesterton, Ind., fifty miles southeast of Chicago. I wish I could visit. More power to the new owners Doug and Jill Wilson. Shils writes:  

 

“The wonder is, given the unremunerativeness of the business, that bookshops exist at all. It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or who can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop, or put his money into the stock market? The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books.”