When we were looking for our apartment a few years back, my wife suggested I needed an office. It was partially because my profession is one that requires me to sit by myself for long stretches of time and I have a terrible attention span which means the smallest noise can knock me off what I was doing, so quiet is important. But mostly, because as she put it, she was tired of looking at all my stuff. Namely my book collection. I’ve got well past a thousand novels, chapbooks, art books, poetry collections and about 500 paperbacks the last time I checked — which was in 2018. I collect a few things, from clothes to records, but my obsession with books is unmatched. I’ve tried to really boil it down, attempted to see if my shrink had any clue, wondered if maybe I come from a long line of people who loved having books around or if there’s some Freudian or Jungian or whatever-ian explanation for me finding comfort in having lots of books stacked and standing around me. But I’ve yet to come up with an answer. All of the books I buy I read or, at the very least, intend to. I buy some for research, others I own multiple copies of because I like to have various covers and spines to look at. I don’t really have a practical way for organizing my bookshelves, but can say that the Rob Gordon from High Fidelity way of doing things chronologically makes some bit of sense to me. For me, in the least hippy-dippy way I can put it, my shelves are organized by feeling. Yes, I’ve got some Russians and Japanese books together, and I’ve got Kafka near Robert Walser because of the German thing, but also because I read Susan Sontag on the literary link between the two of them and it stuck with me, so the two sit forever together on my shelf. Also, my entire collection of Vintage Contemporaries sit together, and the other titles of authors who had V.C. paperbacks come out in the ‘80s1 sit nearby them. So Mona Simpson and Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, etc. are on the same shelf.
It isn’t quite bookshelf anarchy, but it’s close.
I feel weird calling myself an actual book collector; I’m a person who collects books. I’m not fueled by scarcity or price and I don’t want to sell anything of mine. My office isn’t filled with leather furniture and a never-ending supply of mylar, but within the walls, I do have certain rules for what I keep on my shelves. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’d say most books that have come out in the last year or two don’t likely sit on my shelves unless I really, really love them. It’s more likely I’ll put them in storage, think about the book a few years later and decide I want it near me. Maybe I’ll read it again, but it’s the knowledge that it’s right there that I like. A recent example of this is something from The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans that started swirling around in my head and I needed to remember exactly what it was. When I couldn’t find my copy, I ran down to the basement, tore through some boxes, found the book after an hour and decided it needs to be in the office because it’s obviously a book I love.
So when I did my book shopping in Paris, I knew exactly what I was looking for. I wasn’t going to stand on line with the people waiting to go in Shakespeare and Company for a glimpse into the charming and historic book shop. I live within walking distance of several great book stores and maybe 30 minutes from several more. I avoided the line because I went right into the vintage book shop where there was, surprisingly, nobody save for the bookseller who was hard at work reading a book. I was a little stunned, to be honest. All the American and British tourists waited to get into a bookstore, and I noticed many didn’t buy anything. That act alone seems strange to me. At least buy a book if you’re going to spend 20 minutes walking through a place known for being a famous bookstore. But I digress.
I can make off like a bandit with books in any country, especially going somewhere like Tokyo or Tel Aviv and browsing through art and style history books. The thing about Europe, especially France and the U.K. is more about finding different editions of books I already have. I have this strange habit of collecting copies of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. I like the book, but I now have several copies because, for whatever reason, the art picked for the title always appeals to me. That whole dirtbag British academic thing, I suppose.
I picked up a few great titles at Shakespeare and Company. The real get was a signed copy of Cecil Beaton’s diaries from the late-1940s into the ‘50s. I walked a little way down a nearby alley in the Latin Quarter and found myself in the Abbey, a place that is my idea of a perfect bookshop. Walls crammed from floor to ceiling, every sort of title imaginable, it’s the sort of shop where you’ll find at least one hidden gem if you look hard enough. I picked up a few Graham Greene and P.G. Wodehouse titles because, no surprise, I collect those. I especially go for any of the old orange Penguin Paperbacks.
Even though the Abbey is owned and operated by Canadians and the entire staff spoke English, I noticed something funny that hadn’t dawned on me before as I maneuvered my way through the stacks and piles, down the stairs and standing over people crouched to browse on bottom shelves. I’ve always thought of myself as a great city walker, I know how to get around and try my best to blend in for a large, bearded American. I’m most comfortable at cities despite having written a book about the American suburbs. Yet besides restaurants and bars, there is no place indoors where I understand body language, where I’m fully aware of my surroundings and in tune with the environment quite like a bookstore. It doesn’t matter where it is, but as I walked through the Abbey, I noticed for a second that my brain sort of functions in a state not quite like when I’m meditating, but not far from it. I’m focused on the spines of books, that’s basically my breathing. The people around me, the books on the floor, the tight corners of bookshelves, those things are all distractions that I note, then move on from. This is how I’ve always been in places that sell books, but I never quite realized just how tuned in I get until I found myself in another country doing what I’d do at Unnamable or Books Are Magic in Brooklyn.
There was another bookstore we found in Paris. This one sold only French titles, all vintage. I picked up a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (Grandeur et Décadence), which I already own three copies of. This one was different. Besides the cover looking like a Belle and Sebastian EP from 1998, it was a French version. As I clutched the copy of the book I knew for certain I was buying even though I couldn’t fully understand the language it was printed in, I thought about the idea of energy, about how we might look at a piece of jewelry or a symbol and consider it a talisman, something to protect us. I never quite thought of books that way. I’ve never looked at a copy of What Makes Sammy Run? or some Barbara Pym novel I’ve been meaning to get to and considered it might protect me from demons or sickness or whatever. But when I was walking through the bookshop with my copy of the Waugh paperback, my obsession with having and being around a lot of books became a little clearer to me. I started to understand that the language or country doesn’t matter, it’s what books are supposed to represent. You know what I’m talking about. All the cutesy little things people print on mugs and t-shirts about how books are special and the studies that conclude things like how reading fiction makes you more empathetic. If you read, you’re one of my people. You don’t have to like the same books I do, but just knowing that partaking in books on a normal basis in our world of new content and different systems if delivering said content to us flash by all the time, that lets me know we’re at least in a similar place in terms of what brings us happiness. And when I’m in a bookstore, especially one surrounded by older, vintage books, if I pick one up, I know that somebody, maybe you, spent your time reading that book. And that even though you sold it for a dollar or two bucks store credit, that paperback or hardcover has a little piece of you that has been passed on to me.
This is important because while there are a few Vintage Contemporaries titles from the ‘90s I love, the covers aren’t as good.