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COMMENTARY
December 20, 2006
Book notes
If I had my druthers, I would currently spend about one-third of my time loitering in second-hand bookstores, one-third trying to draw or paint the scene from my balcony, and the remaining third sleeping and eating.The first is beginning to disappear as an option. While it is true that second-hand bookstores usually turned over in a generation -- for they have always been small enterprises, and their proprietor’s children have seldom wished to sustain the family poverty through their own adult lives -- both the number and quality of establishments is declining. Yes, the Internet has been taking over their function -- inefficiently, since the main point of visiting a second-hand store is to discover books, not track them down. But the real cause lies deeper. Today, we have, especially among university graduates, a full generation of people who cannot read a book. This is especially true of graduates in the humanities, who have the additional disability of never having been exposed to one. They have learned only “theory”, from things that are not books. And their money is reserved for other “consumer durables”. On the other hand, I learned when I lived in Kingston, that you could still sell traditional, “literary” books to the students of the Royal Military College. They were regularly seen, browsing, in their cadet uniforms, in the town’s several used bookshops, alongside the odd American tourist. Just no one from Queen’s. Except, the occasional request for a discounted course textbook from a Queenie -- who would characteristically leave on discerning that the bookseller didn’t stock “new”. This Christmas, perhaps the best all-round civilized used bookstore in Canada is closing, on Queen Street in Toronto. Abelard Books lasted thirty-odd years. Its proprietor, the bearded, kindly, cranky and obsessive Paul Lockwood -- a hero of our time -- will try to continue peddling the rarer sort of specialist, “collector’s” volumes, via Internet, probably from his home. But he could no longer make rent with a large general stock in the middle of the city. Yet Toronto, I have noticed, is not a small city. I am so old I can remember when whole neighbourhoods in London, and New York, were given over to the antiquarian book trade. And some stores survive -- though just the Strand in mid-town Manhattan; and when I last checked, London’s Charing Cross Road had been surrendered to growing demands for electronic paraphernalia, tourist trinkets, and sex toys. No doubt something similar happened, in the old book districts of Rome and Alexandria, as the ancient world shuddered towards its fall. I once had a large library, of which I was inordinately proud. Thanks to accidents and vagaries of postmodern life, I now have a much smaller library, but one that has through the winnowing of necessity become more truly useful. So many books that I only piously hoped to read, went on to other pious hopers, leaving me only a core to which I cling, as to an identity. In the course of which adventures, so many books went back and forth between Abelard’s place and mine. As the store’s final clearance winds down, and books once valuable can be retrieved for pennies, I find myself reloading. The Collected Poems of John Fuller, for instance. An anthology from the old literary magazine, Agenda. Bound volumes of the first two years of Arion, another quarterly, founded to revive humane classical studies, the generation before last. A book giving Lancelot Andrewes’s side alone of his delicious theological controversy with Cardinal Bellarmine in France. An illustrated catalogue of treasures from the 50th-anniversary exhibition of the Pierpont Morgan Library. That sort of thing. In each book, just a few pages are significant to me. One almost wants to shear them out, and keep them portably, sparing the weight for the next time I must move. All through the store, I find books that I pawned years ago, with my name still in them, and am inclined to take them back lest they end their days in a Michigan landfill. Or other books, I never owned, that deserve a better fate. (Who else might ever read Samuel Butler’s 17th-century mock-epic Hudibras? Especially this copy, that once belonged to “Jas. Endicott, China, 1896”.) Technology will or won’t save each text to some later time. But that is not the point, which is rather, the continuity of a literary culture, which never reduced to the printed reproduction of words alone. A friend just wrote about his daughter in Florida, trying to make one of her grandma’s Christmas treats from the old recipe. It had survived in three handwritten versions. All three forgot to mention the most obvious thing: that you must line the baking tins with dough. "Hence," said my friend, "the fallacy of reading a text isolated from the community's living tradition.” Or, what was called among the learned, the “Sola Scriptura” fallacy. To understand it, you must both read and live. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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