Tag Archives: second-hand books

We Have an Anchor

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It’s been a hard week here at the bookstore, and that’s a fact. Jack is getting on with the basement renovations, despite crazy weather (from 4 to 62 degrees Farenheit in two days?!) crooked walls, and mucked-up windows. I’m working my way through piles of donations from people who cleaned closets in January, and greeting new customers and new friends the book has brought us. Business is thriving.

But some outside pressures we need not go into have got me rattling just like the basement windows in these bitter winds: confused, pressured, cold and battered. Rattled.

Books are excellent therapy in such times. Walk the shelves, straightening and arranging; set the spines upright; run your fingers over familiar titles and remember when you read them. Breathe in the dust and ideas that float on the sunbeams of a second-hand books shop. Sit at the table and drink a cup of tea, surrounded by the weightiness of all those books holding the collected weight of human learning.

There’s a hymn that says, “We have an anchor that keeps the soul steadfast and sure while the billows roll, fastened to the rock which cannot move, grounded firm and deep in the Savior’s love.” 

I’m a person who believes in Jesus as He presented Himself, and who turns a suspicious eye toward many of those offering to interpret Him for the rest of us. Perhaps I have two anchors: the eternal one I neither take for granted nor feel compelled to force on others; and the “take time to think” drag force of 38,000 books, just sitting there, reasonable and silent, in a world full of people screaming for attention. Pull one down at random, read a page at random. Just breathe. Drink tea. Relax. Read about–learn from–someone else’s experiences.

Dust, ideas, silence. Peace in a buffer zone. Our bookshop is a space whose walls are lined floor to ceiling by books. Inside them are ideas enough to start a hundred revolutions, yet oddly enough I feel like they shelter me. They remind me that this too shall pass, that there is very little new under the sun, that how I feel now has been felt by hundreds of real people and fictional characters in the past, and will be in the future. It’s okay to be rattled; I’m in good company in these high winds.

We have, here in our little bookstore, an anchor and an Anchor. And that’s enough.

Book Betrayal?

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I came back from my first-ever SIBA (the Southern Independent Booksellers’ Alliance) conference with a box of some 100 books thrust at me by reps, readers, and some people I think had just crashed the hotel. I triaged these into “not my thing,” “not normally my thing, but let’s try” and “Oh boy!” piles on the long shelf beside my bed.

They made a satisfying bulwark against boredom, and I congratulated myself that, at two books a week average, I’d be reading through them well past Christmas. Of course they got mixed in with new books authors sent for our stocking consideration (we’re getting about one a week now) and the piles got bigger. But then a funny thing happened.

My expectations changed. I found myself reading, not for the satisfaction of the stories, but to determine if I liked the author’s methods. I was reading…. oh dear God in heaven, help me…. only to see if I wanted to sell them.

Sure, I like cozy tales about inherited wedding dresses and chasing down the stories of the brides’ lives from 1902 to 2012. But that’s kind of a trite idea, so it has to be done with really compelling writing. A steampunk send-up of Jane Eyre? Yes, please–so refreshing to fracture a famous tale without using vamps or zombies. I could tell customers about that one with enthusiasm.

That bedside wall of books that was going to take me cozily under covers through the Holidays dwindled faster than the plot line of a Cornwall thriller, as I assessed, summarized, speed-read for basic action ideas, and otherwise treated these books like commodities.

And went through them at a rate of two per night. No slow savoring, no “catch me with your phrasing, reel me in with your descriptions, still me with your elegant prose.” Just, “Yeah, got it. Next.”

Selling used books is a different world than new. Apparently I had slipped unaware through the portal. In the freewheeling, forgiving world of second-hand, not every book pulls its own weight. And eventually, even the oddest books find people who want to love them. It’s more like an adoption service, a recycling center, a retirement home. Communal, not capitalistic.

Now I was doing cold hard “yep, this’ll sell, this won’t” separations of the sheep from the goats.

But . . . I like goats. . . .

Maybe we’re not ready to be new-book retailers, God Bless and Keep Them. I don’t mean what they do is in any way less than what we do, just different, vastly different.

We like our cozy little slow-life retirement and recycling center. And–let’s face it–eventually those hot new commodities are going to land on our shores anyway. So maybe we’ll just wait here in the rockers. . . .