I suppose it has to do with connecting to someone else, in the end. Why else would you go to the trouble today of an hour, two hours, or the better part of an afternoon in a store selling the books and music of someone who didn’t want them? Or had that decision made for them, to be morbid. The internet is a gold mine, supposedly, with treasures mere fingerstrokes away. There’s dust on the long-playing records, mildew in the air from the books, the clientele is not going to portrayed by Jennifer Aniston or Hugh Grant should someone set a movie here, and yet, I’ll gladly rummage through untold numbers of boxes and behind shelves for that one book or LP that justifies all the time. That the book is likely to be $3 and the record $1 is simply the sauce that ends up giving the goose its flavor.
Starting with a warehouse-sized space in Muncie, Indiana, and another tinier one called White Rabbit Books, used bookstores in whatever city I’ve lived have found a reliable customer in me. I have a few things I always look for, but usually the entire point is to find something relatively rare, and see if it’s good or if someone else showed keen discernment in getting rid of it. Bloomington had Caveat Emptor used books, and that seems about as appropriate a name for a used bookstore as can be imagined.
The secret to navigating that store, as I recall, was that the really good books were actually behind the books whose spines were visible. An effort had to be made, most often in a crouch, to haul books off the shelf by the handful in front of you to get to what was behind. Back there, you’d find what probably should have been brought out after another copy sold. Instead, the owner or an owlish employee had simply set other books in the vacant space, effectively sealing up the space as well as did the malevolent tippler of “The Cask of Amontillado.” I found a several collections of the great theater critic Kenneth Tynan this way, along with novels by Mario Vargas Llosa and several continentals. The task then became getting to the front of the store without tripping on boxes of unshelved books placed in front of the shelves, in order to pay the owner, Janis Starcks, at the cash register. The irony of his being named Janis Starcks, and being an enormous classical-music aficionado, in the same town that Janos Starker taught the cello was not lost on many of his customers.
I bought James Agee’s A Death in the Family there, and Melissa Sprague wrote her name in the front cover of the paperback, as well as on the first page, in schoolbook-perfect cursive script. Throughout the novel, Melissa telegraphs her thought process as she writes her notes in the margin, “Reality of getting back home will ruin memory”; “Author implies that the only way to get home again its through death [sic].” I flat-out love this; I almost wish every novel could have this sort of running commentary in it, and I love that I know what she thought about this thing that I’m now reading. This edition was published in 1980 and was probably used in a high school or college freshman course, and drawing that connection, sealed in the amber of the ballpoint pen on paper, between her mind and mine is rather unique.
That was also the store where I found a first edition of Hector Berlioz’s Evenings with the Orchestra, translated in 1956 by Jacques Barzun. It came from the collection of
Hugh Hazelrigg
1612 University
Bloomington, Ind.
Who was he? When did he read this? Did he buy the book for himself? I have no idea, and no real inclination to Google him and find out. All I know is that he and I both read this sentences of Berlioz’s describing the difficulties of new music:
“[W]hen a musical work is really new, it requires more time than other works to exert a strong influence on the organs of some of its hearers and leave in their mind a clear perception of what has taken place. It acheives this end only by dint of acting upon them again in the same fashion, of striking again and again on the same spot…[A]n opera that does not fall flat at the start is always given again several times in succession in the theater that has just produced it. If successful, it is repeated later in twenty, thirty, forty other theaters….This cannot happen with symphonies that are given only at wide intervals.”
That was written in 1854, translated in 1956, and might as well have been published in 2011. The book set me back $15.48, by the way, and has plates of various Delacroix paintings and other illustrations in it.
What other treasures I’ve found along the way! A first paperback edition of S.J. Perelman’s The Road to Miltown from 1960, found in Chicago’s Myopic Books. Peter DeVries’s humorous I Hear America Swinging also from there, in a first edition from 1974 inscribed by “Dorothy” as follows: “I hope this is good for some laughs.” A first edition of DeVries’s Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (“Nobility is a great inconvenience, as you may know yourself if you’ve tried it.”)
There are other books, and I have glories of records to tell some other time. I’ve only been searching them out for less than a year at this point, but finding Frank Sinatra’s Come Swing with Me, with two brass bands in either stereo channel in a Norfolk, Virginia thrift store, is worth calling out now. But knowing that there was someone else who derived some measure of enjoyment, comfort, solace, and companionship from this book or that record makes the object larger than the inch or two of shelf space it occupies. The shared memories take up lodging in another’s mind.