Category Archives: out of things to read

Caretaking the Eternal Library of Humanity

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My friend Anita out in Kansas is looking to relocate the bookshop she manages, Al’s Old and New Books. She has discovered that some people think used bookshops are…. downmarket, while others prefer the term “passe.”

Bollocks!

Jack and I have often commented that we oversee a library of ever-changing leftovers, some of which have mass appeal, some of which have esoteric appeal. But the reason we like what we do is that we’re not full of the latest bestseller, face outward on the aisle so mega-shoppers walking to the mall can be enticed by “Oh, I heard about that on Twitter!” impulse moments.

We have the long-term, hardcore stuff. The 1970s classics on Marxism, the Leif Ungers and Robert Fords and Lisa Changes. People who write well but disappeared into the well of marketing madness with nary a splash. My agent Pamela and I were talking one day about the “nebulous” position of used book stores in the publishing world. “After all, NYC doesn’t make any money from them,” she said, but then added, “but we all benefit from them. You are the caretakers of humanity’s eternal library, aren’t you? Like a benevolent dragon trying to get the gold horde out there instead of sit on it.”

Used book stores are the place where the sounds of silence outweigh the shrieks of hawkers telling you why THIS BOOK is the Next Great Thing. You can look for yourself–and thus see for yourself–in a used books shop. In a society that equates old with “has been” rather than “wisdom,” used books shops are a place for those who know when not to swallow a line.

We love running one. And this week, we’ve sold an amazing number of  what from a mainstream point of view would be “nobody’s gonna buy these” books. We sold about 20 volumes of philosophy. No, really, PHILOSOPHY! Mostly 1960s textbooks and treatises.

We sold a great wheen of French novels, both translated and in the original language. And we sold a set of plays written in the 1700s. A cheap, simple copy for someone who wanted to look at their structure. $3.20 and out the door she went.

This is part of why used book shops matter. It’s nice to have big well-lit shops with the bestsellers in them at full retail, but it’s also nice to have a dowdy little community center where you can think for yourself. That, and the $1.50 cuppa and the comfy couches and the cat option and the fact that if you come in and say, “Oh crap, I left my wallet at home,” we will say, “Fine, we’ll write it in the ledger and you can pay us next time you come.” And the customer, who only gets down from Ohio four times a year, stares at you like you’ve gone mad, and comes back two months later and pays up.

This is why it’s important for us to be here. Downmarket, my arse. Up the caretakers of the eternal library of humanity!

The Monday Book: PARALLEL UNIVERSES by Fred Alan Wolf

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Jack actually read this and kept tapping me in bed to share interesting bits, so I feel as though I’ve read it. Here is why Jack liked it:

The book is saying that Newtonian physics basically were accepted as the only way to see the universe until the early 1900s, but the trouble is that as it became possible to, if not observe, then imagine or understand the smallest particles that one finds even inside atoms, there were anomalies in the Newtonian system that couldn’t be explained by those rules. So a number of people independently started developing quantum physics. Although quantum did explain the anomalies within the Newtonian view, they provoked new anomalies within the quantum system!

Until….

Researchers working independently realized that the process of measuring and studying the particles actually effected the particles, changing their behavior. It’s that Schrodinger’s cat thing. So the act of measuring changes the measurement. And this has led to the theory of parallel universes. In other words, an infinite number of universes are probable, each with a slight change that takes it into an infinite number of different possibilities. (Think that original Star Trek episode where the transporter malfunctions and they wind up in a weird Enterprise that turns out to be in an alternate universe, aka where Spock has a beard. Or that movie Sliding Doors.)

Because you’re observing the universe that you’re in and only that universe, that becomes for you the one and only universe.

Unless…..

you are schizophrenic, or suffering from other behavioral disorders. The author suggests that what people in some conditions are experiencing is the actual observation or collision of that other universe. When people with “disorders” are seeing things other people don’t see or hearing voices or watching shadows or scared of something that hasn’t happened in history, they’re actually seeing for real what the rest of us can’t see.

Taking this a stage further, all these quantum theories suggest that there is a dimensional link between time and matter. This explains things like black holes and tesseracts and time bending. Thus in the same way that you can look back in time and see history, the future can also affect your present. You’re at a point on the continuum that has both ends all played out, but put that word predestination out of your mind, because both ends have infinite possibilities; you just can’t see the historical ones because you’re inside one of them. Got that?

So what you experience as the present is an immeasurable small piece of all the possibilities that have been and could be. And the future has an effect on the present, but we can’t see it inside the universe we’re currently riding inside.

Now keep in mind that this book was published in 1988, so there may be new stuff out there, but this book reads well. It’s a serious read, but it has lovely humor and references to pop culture and the guy writes well. So even if it’s not narrative, it flows well.