Category Archives: small town USA

The Elder Library

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Jack and I grouse about Gore Vidal. He’s become the poster child of books that aren’t moving anymore.

Occasionally someone wanders in and gets excited about our Danielle Steels. (We pay them 35 cents per book. :] ) But for the most part our rural shop fills quickly with the detritus of 1970s book clubs and the five-year-old passions of a reading public that’s not really on the grid.

Gore and his friends are just…. past it. And yet, they were hot items in their day, tickets to discussion groups and in crowds and even costume parties. Now, they’re slightly musty, fusty, freyed-jacket doyennes and dowager duchesses, all but sniveling on the shelves as they eye the bright shiny Lee Woodruff dust covers.

Ah, for the days of glory; we all miss them, don’t we?

But take heart, for a used books shop is not like the cruel fleshmarkets of retails bookstores and libraries–and I’ll just pause here to remind you that some of my best friends are bookstore owners, so don’t write me in a huff; tuck your tongue in your cheek and keep reading! No, used book shops are the hospices of the library world, where books go to finish with dignity what began with flashiness.

Nary a “six months or you’re out” deadline here. We still have a couple of books that we opened our shop with, six years ago. Now, since we don’t keep electronic inventory, it is possible that they’ve been bought and returned for credit two or three times in their post-high-life careers. Or they could just have sat there all this time, taking up shelf space that Tom Wolfe and Barbara Kingsolver would have left more quickly.

Yet this is the joy of a used books shop: nothing is ever over–not until the spine’s last piece of masking tape disintegrates, the cover is too grubby for human hands to contemplate, or the ideas in the book are so old, sad and sorry that to carry the book would be to connote something lower than the bottom shelf. Short of this, the shawl-draped books of yesterday sit, patiently waiting, for readers who remember and appreciate their glamor, their wisdom, their glory days.

It’s not unlike elders in America, is it? There’s an African proverb: when an old person dies, a library burns down. When faces wrinkle, hands shrivel and bodies shrink, do we dismiss the voices and the minds that still carry so much history, so much wisdom, so much insight into how we should live? How much do we miss when we judge a book by its well-worn cover?

Just askin’.

The Perils of Alphabetizing

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Shopsitter Andrew guest blogs today, ruminating on his first week amongst the bookstore shelves….

Bookstore shelves trend toward chaos. I’m not sure if people are to blame… or if it’s some law of physics. Like the weather, small changes in the system can lead to big distortions. Mix up a Mailer and a Mann and somehow you’re only hours away from Nora Roberts popping up in the Westerns.

On some level I had suspected this. But as I started tackling the shelves one by one, re-alphabetizing and stacking, the emotion I was surprised to feel again and again was guilt. My favorite British television personality, David Mitchell, has a joke about how he feels guilty when he doesn’t wear certain pairs of underwear as often as others. “Sorry blue striped, but you’re just too tight,” he’d sigh. Well, sorry Frank Herbert, you just won’t fit there.

I found myself amongst piles of sci-fi paperbacks, wracking my brains to keep from snubbing John Scalzi and to ensure justice was dealt to L. Ron Hubbard, who had held a prized eye-level slot before my gerrymandering. I probably wouldn’t have given as much thought, or poured as much heart, into such considerations if the actual living, breathing authors were sitting in front of me waiting for a seating assignment.

I had several triumphs and a number of failures. I relegated L. Ron’s pulp-schmaltz to a dark corner. But in doing so I had to shift Heinlein and the entire Dune series into equally unfavorable light. All of Asimov is together in a prime display area, but it meant pushing Pierre Boulle down (I’m a sucker for anything Planet of the Apes).

The absolute worst was when I found myself running out of space, which forced all sorts of horrors I’ll never be able to forget. Beloved books are now mid-stack, lost in forbidding towers of flashier spines. I hope one day Game of Thrones and To Say Nothing of the Dog can find it in their hearts to forgive me. But probably nothing can forgive the dreaded double stack, with a pile of paperbacks directly in front of another. It’s fine when it’s Anne McCaffrey obscuring more Anne McCaffrey, but something is deeply wrong with the world when David Weber blocks out A.E. Van Voght.

The amount of emotion we’re capable of projecting on to things that could never emote back could power decades of mediocre day-time soap opera hand-wringing. But it must just be in our nature to attach baggage to even small choices. Or maybe this is just a revealing look at one man’s particular neuroses. Whatever it is, I’ll be tackling paranormal romance next, so watch out Stephenie Meyer.