My Life As a Roving Bookseller

Like many lovers of literature, I first discovered the world of books at the public library. There wasn’t a single book store in the little town I grew up in—no cafes where people sat around drinking coffee and reading, no hip poetry readings. With no TV in our house, and only one movie theater in town (and, of course, no internet yet), the library saved me from my family’s one shelf of TimeLife books and children’s classics. The library was multitudinous abundance. I remember running my fingers over the packed shelves, title after title, and feeling down my spine, the tingle of delicious anticipation. I was free to take them home, pore and puzzle over them until I was done, returned them and get more, forever. I vowed to read everything in the children’s section--in alphabetical order, thus demonstrating an early appreciation for how books are best arranged. Soon my nascent editorial voice began to make itself heard, allowing me to skip over the Hardy Boys in favor of Ozma of Oz.

Far too soon I reached the Z’s, and felt for the first time that panic of having nothing to read. The local librarian must have caught wind of my dilemma. She allowed me to begin in the adult section, having surreptitiously asked my parents’ permission, and I was truly launched into the world of literature. I soon became aware that there were books that were considered “classics,” necessary reading for the educated, and I diligently began to plow my way through my first backlist, probably one of those long litanies of titles from the back pages of old Penguins or Modern Classics.

What could have motivated an eleven-year-old to tackle the likes of Vanity Fair and Down and out in Paris and London? The details of much of that early reading are lost to me now (freeing me to re-read, if I so choose), but how I felt while doing it has never left me. I fell into those other worlds as if I were plummeting down a deep well. I was no longer a young girl from a tiny little town in rural California. I was a wily French peasant (Balzac) or Elizabeth Bennett or a randy college professor from the back East (Updike, among others). I was literally gone for hours, and on weekend I read more than I slept, ate, or talked to my family.

The next time I had that feeling of limitless literary possibilities, I was in Paris, and walking into Shakespeare and Company for the first time. I was in the same world as my heroes the expatriate Left Bank writers, poets, editors, and publishers of the early Twentieth century. The aged bookseller, famous for sometimes letting itinerant writers crash on the premises, must have thought I was yet another crazy youngster from the sticks, for the few seconds that I registered in his mind, before he returned to that deep river of words in which he lived. He was happy to sell me a somewhat battered copy of Madame Bovary, gruffly rebuffing my sad attempt at conversation, and I was back out on the street. I was complete—I had a book.

I came to make my life in San Francisco pretty much the same way. I seem to be perfectly suited to spending much of my time in a very small room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves more or less crammed full. The business part consists of a telephone and a computer/cash register with the occasional strange visitor who may or may not have some vague connection with the written word. I move books from place to place: out of boxes into lines of alphabetical order; out of people’s hands into neat plastic bags; on to the hold shelf, banded and tagged with the names of mysterious future customers.

Lately, I have (finally) begun to wonder why, why I do it, and why it seems so important. It seems we are getting further and further away from the idea that books are important or have value in this world of instant information. Perhaps we are confused about their basic nature, just as we sometimes confuse information with knowledge. (I am sometimes shocked by how what I don’t know is defined by what I haven’t read.) I have seen the light that goes on in people when something they have read excites them and they have to talk about it. I’ve felt that feeling myself.

What would happen if that kind of excitement was celebrated instead of ignored? What if there were actual physical places (not online) where a good conversation, an open-ended exploration of the ideas embodied in our common literature, was taking place? Would you want to participate?