You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory: An Ode to the Bookstore

Roger Darnton’s article about a judge’s rejection of the settlement between Google and the authors and publishers suing Google for copyright infringement reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: in all likelihood, the death of the bookstore will happen in my lifetime.

The story of Google Books (essentially Google’s plans to digitize all print books) is not a new one, but it’s one that, in the cacophony of daily news cycles, probably didn’t show up on too many people’s radars. It’s also one of those news stories that seems “minor” at the time, but that in reality is perhaps one of the most important cultural developments of our time.

Indeed, as Darnton points out, the court-rejected settlement between Google and those in the publishing universe is but a slight bump in the road. You can be certain that Google will go back to the drawing board, failed settlement in hand, and craft something that will hold up in a court of law. If Google doesn’t manage to do it, someone else will. There’s simply too much money on the table, too much at stake, for all parties to walk away.

But this story is only tangentially related to Google, e-books, and digital libraries. They are but symptoms, a smattering of tea leaves in which we can read our future. Rather, this story is a love story, an ode to the bookstore.

I spent many of my formative years in Eugene, Oregon, working at a large, family-owned, used bookstore. Smith Family Bookstore is actually two stores, and between them, they have somewhere north of one-million books. And no database. When you have more than a million books and no inventory system, you get to know the books and the people looking for the books extremely well.

Before I began working at Smith Family, I was fresh out of an MFA program and something of a book snob (i.e., prick). I only read particular types of books. Literary fiction and poetry. Certainly not science fiction, mysteries, or other types of genre fiction. Reading was supposed to be a chore, a serious undertaking. If you were getting real pleasure from books, if you were enjoying what you read, you were surely doing something wrong.

But at Smith Family, “modern classics” (the name for non-genre fiction) only takes up about a tenth of the store. In the back half of the campus location are two floors and 30+ rows of books, each row a different section, each shelf threatening to buckle from the books stuffed into it, the books finding ways onto the floor, onto the tops of the shelves, rising like smokestacks, like skyscrapers. Within each section are sub-sections, the subjects within them so diverse and deep as to be almost encyclopedic. For instance, Aisle 9 was the religion aisle. The lefthand side was Christianity, bibles, biblical scholarship, and specific subsets of Christian denominations. The other major world religions were on the righthand side of the aisle, along with subsections specifically for  witchcraft/Wicca, numerology, UFOs (a near religion in Eugene), satanism, ghosts, and other paranormals. Aisle 9 was the “home” of the customer who dressed as a wizard, complete with a cape and staff, and who would ask you personal questions, apply an obscure mathematical system to your answers, and then predict the day you would die. It was like a real-life Billy Goats Gruff.

This, of course, didn’t even cover what was deemed “metaphysics,” that huge swath of writing by various gurus, self-proclaimed messiahs, and other visionary burn outs from the 60s and 70s who had managed to maintain followings among small, but devoted groups of true believers. Those books were on the left-hand side of Aisle 10 across from the self-help. Where else but Aisle 10 could you find a corporate-type desperately reading Wayne Dyer in search of clues as to why he couldn’t hold down a job, standing next to a man who smelled as though he’d been hot boxing cigarettes in a Yugo for the past 10 years and who was himself reading about getting his chakras in order by channeling dolphins.

I found myself quickly opened up to all that I had once ignored, my snobbery erased (and thankfully so). Part of this was living on the West Coast (to quote Utah Phillips, “You’ve got to be open. If you’re not, they pry you open.”), and part of this was the sheer exposure to so many different books. It wasn’t long after beginning work at Smith Family that a significant portion of each paycheck went to paying for my book habit.

My point in all of this is the bookstore. Amazon, iTunes, and presumably a resource like Google Books are wonderful for people who know exactly what they want. But sometimes the greatest discoveries in life come by surprise, when you think you’re looking for one thing, but then discover something else you along the way that you would have never known to look for. The physical process of browsing, plucking, handling, skimming, then re-shelving (or not) a book cannot be re-created on the internet. A good bookstore is more than just a business, it’s a warehouse of voices, where Socrates, Danielle Steel, Pico Iyer, Valerie Solano, Charlotte Bronte, and John Zerzan can share space equally and ahistorically, awaiting the set of eyes that will connect to the ideas and stories between their covers. Without the bookstore, I would never have discovered some real gems.

There was Fruit Palace, by Charles Nicholl, part travelogue, part true-crime tale of a journey through Columbia’s cocaine underworld during the 80s by the accidental, rather hapless author.

And how could one find and not purchase Adam Parfrey’s Cult Rapture, the collection of essays on cults and cult-like groups in the pre-millennial years that was published by the always intriguing Feral House press?

During the years of working at Smith Family, I found and slowly built a small collection about hobos, including the gems: What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way: Black Hoboes and Their Songs; The Freighthopper’s Manual for North America; and the pre-beatnik, hobo-biography by (the original) Jack Black, You Can’t Win.

And then there were two of my favorite finds. One, the wonderful history Children of Ol’ Man River, by Billy Bryant, which tells the story of an Irish theatrical family in America. The Bryants lived and performed on boats on the Ohio River and its tributaries before it was dammed up, traveling to out of the way towns and performing plays. The other, Fuck, YES!: a Guide to the Happy Acceptance of Everything, is a pitch-perfect satire of the self-help book. It was written by the Reverend Wing F. Fing, though rumors abound that Fing is really Tom Robbins.

But if you know bookstores, then you know that surprise finds are just one of the attractions. Other attractions include the people, both employees and customers. Where else but a bookstore would you find the following employee rant/note about shelving philosophy?

12/1/04

Hey! Most are probably tired of hearing that case studies books don’t go in Native American Studies. These books all look the same and have anthropological words in the title like “ethno” etc. So it seems reasonable that everyone would be able to grasp this concept. But here’s a new angle: case studies don’t don’t go in Native American for historical reasons, i.e., anthropology as a history of participation in genocide and racism against indigenous American cultures. So don’t put case studies in Native American studies!

Used bookstores are like second homes for many people. At Smith Family, we had regulars that would come to the story every day, often hanging out for hours at a time. Some regulars knew the stores better than our employees. Then there were the folks who only showed up every so often, but whose appearances were so distinctive, you could never forget them.

There was A, a man whose improvised, non-sequitur soliloquies to store clerks were so eloquent they would rival Shakespeare, if the bard was a paranoid schizophrenic:

Conscious god-farming is what magicians are always aiming for. Of course they just get fried in the process. People will do anything to get out of the pattern. I read this book about Philip K. Dick, but I gave it to the boys across the street. The FBI couldn’t understand it and Philip K. Dick couldn’t explain it to them. You know how it goes. They got Ma over at Ya-poh-ah on the 10th floor. She felt guilty for being fat as a child. She’s dying slowly, slowly.

Speaking of Philip K., there was a customer who spoke in a very loud voice for no real reason that we could discern (i.e., he wasn’t hard of hearing). Every couple months he would come into the store and ask, loudly, “Where do you keep the Dick?” And then, in one of those “only in Eugene moments,” we had the guy who, before parting with each of the 30-50 books he brought to sell, would throw his I-Ching coins to decide if he would accept the buyer’s offer.

Which isn’t to say that it was all crazies and annoying, self-involved hippies. There was Mr. G, a brilliant man who lived on a small monthly pension, who dressed well, if shabby, and who, after receiving his monthly check, would come by the store, breath smelling of malt liquor, and purchase one or two of the books he always had on hold. His selections were always curious volumes of literary criticism, psychology, art theory, and/or books in Icelandic or Norwegian. The word “totter” was made for Mr. G, and you were never sure if he were about to pass out or fall over. Always polite (he addressed the clerks as “dear boy,” or “dear girl”), he had a mind like a steel trap, and the time or two I managed to draw him into conversation about one writer or another, I quickly realized how out-of-my-depths I was.

You can’t get any of that from an e-book, or for shopping for an e-book. Nor can you get the sometimes hidden treasures, the intimate memories people use to mark a favorite passage of a book, then forget. In my time at Smith Family, I found old photos, a girl posing uncomfortably in a slip, a series of photo booth snapshots of a woman trying to look “sexy” for some man, pouting her lips, smiling coyly, and lifting her hair. This particular strip of photos was signed ”To Jake.” Persumably, Jake tucked them into a book, intentionally or un-, and then sold it. There was the studio portrait of a priest in his collar, a black and white photo of three cold-looking couples on their front porch, “Christmas 1947″ scribbled on the back. People leave money, of course, but not as often or as much as you’d think. People leave stamps, grocery lists, pressed flowers.  And the bookmarks, there are always book marks, tons of book marks, book marks from other book stores in other towns, stores that are long gone, their bookmarks like the fossils of a species that used to roam the earth , but can now only be known by the fragments of their bones.