Used Bookstories

I have a rather odd, personal secret to divulge. Nearly every time I walk into a bookstore, I get a tingly, weightless feeling in my stomach – a mild version of that sensation that comes with going over a hill in a car at just the right speed that makes your body thinks you’re floating. I’m not exactly sure what it is, or what it means, and don’t want to diminish the feeling by trying to explain it. All that I know is that bookstores excite me. Especially old, musty, quiet, used bookstores with bells that tinkle your presence to the store when you walk through the door.

Today was a perfectly crisp fall day, which is delightful in itself, and I had the opportunity in the afternoon to bike over to a used bookstore in Normal, about fifteen minutes from the IWU campus. I think that, in the back of my mind, I was rewarding myself for finishing a book for class (Frankenstein, if you are curious) and, presumably, doing OK on a Calculus quiz. Anyway, I arrived at the bookstore, Babbitt’s Books, with the general eagerness one possesses with ten dollars in pocket walking into a used bookstore on a lazy fall afternoon as such. I perused some shelves and found a few books that have been on the list for a while, and then discovered a real treasure. My eyes were attracted as though by a magnetic-eye-force to the top shelf of the poetry section, on top of which was poised a worn, blue hardcover book the size of a dictionary with “Complete Poems” printed above “Carl Sandburg” on the binding. (By the way, I am now beginning to realize that this post will probably be a bit long and tedious, so feel free to jump around from paragraph to paragraph at whatever pace and order pleases you. I’ll do my best to be interesting and entertaining, just like on a first date except that you can’t watch me pretend to get a text message when I flip my phone open for the third time in two minutes pretending to have something to do. OK, enough of this). I was elated! Not only have I been an admirer and reader of Sandburg’s since learning of Sufjan Steven’s appreciation for the writer, but was able to visit his childhood home in Galesburg, IL over the summer and lie in his backyard as I imagined he did on warm prairie-summer nights.

I approached the cash register with a childlike grin.
“Finding this made my day,” I offered to the cashier, who looked like a Mr. Babbitt, rather thin, with a grey beard and rimless spectacles, as I handed him the anthology. He opened the cover to look at the price (six dollars!) and, upon reading the name written inside, turned to a woman about his age working on a computer and said, with a touch of nostalgia behind his words and a subtle, warm smile, “This one belonged to Frances.”
I wore a look of curiosity and he replied, “Frances Irvin was a great member of the community. It’s probably good karma that you bought this.” I gave him another smile. “He taught elementary school, right?” to his coworkers, “And then was retired forever…very well read…he’d approve of a young person buying his book.” I said thanks and walked out of the store with an inner lightness that, in an indirect way, defines joy.

This whole occurrence got me to thinking, as memorable situations tend to do; What is it that I love about used bookstores? About used books? About knowing that someone had turned the pages and reflected on the lines and imagined the images of a book that I held in my hand, not too long before myself, as indicated by a penciled-in name on the inside of a cover? I arrived at an idea, a conjecture, a hypothesis. I think that it is heartening to know that another person, known or unknown, had walked where I now tread. And it’s wonderful to see their footprints on the pages (little notes, stains, smudges, lines, etc.). And wonderful strikes me as the most appropriate word: it fills me with wonder, mainly centering on the story of that person, the previous reader and owner of the book. As a side note, I encourage you to write to your heart’s content in a book. Oftentimes, breadcrumbs of observations in a story won’t distract but lead a reader along the path, in my humble opinion.

If a used book is a home in which a person once dwelt, investing time and thought and emotion and life into its frame, then a used bookstore is a neighborhood, a multifarious collection of stories and experiences simply desiring to be shared. I haven’t begun to read Sandburg’s collection of poems yet but am looking forward to where they will take me and how they will open my eyes to a world illuminated by poetry. And I think that is an aspect of the excitement of stories – they exist because they are shared. Frances Irvin’s way of sharing something he loved, Sandburg’s poems, was to give it away, and that makes me wonder what I will do with all of my books and movies and pictures when I pass away. And, why wait till death to give things away? A Bible verse comes to mind:
“If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms” (Luke 17:33, the Message translation).

I think we’re built to share that which we love, and used bookstores are full of opportunities to fulfill this contribution. Unless, of course, someone is simply trying to get rid of a C-list sci-fi book about evil flying dwarves called “Dante’s Divebombing Dwarves." That might be awful. Might.

(note: nearly a year after buying the Sandburg compilation, I discovered, alongside an equally enthusiastic friend, that Carl’s wrote his signature on one of the pages. What!)