'Visited by the Bookstore Angel'

“Such places are not merely shops. They are glorious strongholds of true civilisation. They refuse to flatter the customer, to congratulate him for being there, to ‘educate,’ ‘affirm,’ or ‘challenge’ him with the unctuous do-goodery tone favoured by the Anglo-American retail class. They simply present the books—magnificent, absurd, profound, forgotten, indispensable—and trust that an adult may sort through them with whatever discernment God has seen fit to bestow.” 

The author is J.J. Kimche, proprietor of the newsletter “The Jew from Nowhere,” writing in “A Land Flowing with Books and Paradoxes,” his celebration of Israel as “a country of bookstores.” I read it before my middle son and I visited Kaboom Books here in Houston on Saturday. “I have long resigned myself,” Kimche writes, “to the tragic deracination of the book-purchasing experience in the English-speaking world. Bluntly put, bookstores these days are a disgrace.” Kaboom is a happy exception. I have never left the shop without having purchased at least one book I would be unlikely to find in any other bookstore in the city.

 

This visit I found The Rash Act (1933) by Ford Madox Ford, a novel reprinted in 1982 by Carcanet with an introduction by C.H. Sisson, who calls the book “a technical masterpiece” and “a piece of contemplation under the guise of fiction.” I remember it as a first-rate novel I plan to reread. The owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, told me the book was among the 14,000 volumes he recently purchased from a dying man who wished to leave the money to his widow. Not a title I would find at Barnes & Noble. Kaboom is an affirmation of what Kimche writes about Israel’s bookstores:

 

“Only in such establishments may one still hope to be visited by the Bookstore Angel: that benevolent, impish daemon who nudges the hand towards volumes one did not know one needed, or perhaps did not know existed. After a brush with such a creature, one finds oneself departing not with a modest paperback but with an armful of medieval theology, deranged memoirs, seditious polemics, and other long-forgotten treasures. Entire cultures have been perpetuated on less.”