The Past in the Present

The casual second-hand book readers and collectors have their imaginations locked in the recent past, a band perhaps half a century deep. They may be perfectly happy in this Eden but there are ways to escape for those of wider ambition.

During the mid-1930's a man who must have been a high order optimist opened a second-hand book store on Olney Avenue, a few doors down from 5th St. the intersection that marked the central business district of our neighborhood in North Philadelphia. I must have been 8 or 10 years old and I became a regular customer until he went out of business.

My main purchases were juvenile adventure novels set to backgrounds like college sports, the Russo-Japanese War, detective mysteries. The average price per book was 10 cents.

I also collected books from boxes in the cellar of my Aunt Fanny's house. My step-cousin, Lenore, who was about 18 then, would lead me down a long, dimly lighted flight of stairs into a cluttered and scary space. Fanny's eccentric husband, Harry, had assured me that this was where they kept the dead bodies. We would root out some boxes and I would select two or three titles to take home. Here I got history textbooks, animal books, natural history.

Later I graduated to O'Leary's world-class book store downtown and I became a serious collector of William Saroyan and Authur Conan-Doyle.

I have forgotten titles, especially from the earlier days, but I retain vivid impressions of etched illustrations and of daring characters.

I realize now that as a reader of used books, and I have in the main remained true to this habit, I have been slightly out-of-sync in time. In the 30's I was

catching up on stories issued in the 1890's, always about 30 or 40 years late. This is an existential experience of used-book people: Life is in one era but the imagination is in another.

I am a haphazard and eclectic collector so I tend to dodge around like an H.G. Wells time-traveler, not easily placed or traced. But beyond intention, the time-traveling reader has an almost naturalistic block.

The dates of used books readily available on the market tend to roll forward. The books I picked up effortlessly as a boy are not seen now in stores, in catalogues, or in internet listings. Books issued in the early 20th and late 19th Centuries are becomming rarities, if they are even available.

The casual second-hand book buyer is anchored in the near past but also denied the earlier dates. Civil War titles written at the time or shortly thereafter are not tripped over lightly at garage sales. The only sure way back to that period is through a specialty dealer.

So we casual second-handers are locked in a rolling time-band going back perhaps twenty to fifty years from the recent past. Our only escape is by stenuous effort and cold cash, we must buy new or buy rare.

But where are the books of yore that are now slipping into an almost forbidden zone? A carefully constructed book with acid free paper should last as long a the cave-homes of Yunnan, at least 400 years. How could so many follow their original owners into oblivion so unexpectedly and so quickly?

Let's call it wear and tear. Some books, of couse, have no residual interest or enduring value to any living reader so their being sent to the papermasher for recycling is hardly a loss. A visit to the well-publicized multiple shops in Hay-on-Wye where there are literally millions of such unreadable books will convince almost any bibliophile that not every book is worthy of salvage. Yet wear and tear also attack the worthy, defined as a book that someone, somewhere, at some time will want to read.

The answer: Conservation, institutionalized in libraries and museums assisted by bookdealers, collectors, and the concerned. Collection, care, repair, and careful storage.

One more thought. We can think of books as the past in the present. But even if they are physically accessable we may not be able to use them because of limits to our literacy. Books in foreign languages or in earlier versions of our own language, if we can't read them, can't crack the code, might as well be on the moon.

Second-hand readers have five ways to enlarge the time-space box to which they have been assigned by habit and situation: Buy new, buy from specialists or visit specialized libraries, become literate in more languages and cultures, support book conservation, encourage and support translations.

Don't get me wrong. I'm content in my small alcove holding its millions of titles. But I am aware of the door leading to the enormous chamber adjacent.

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alvin Katz copyright 2000