Stories, True and Otherwise

Once upon a time, in the world before Tomato Nation, I worked in an antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea. I made seven dollars an hour. I learned how to “spine up” a shelf, tweaking the books into a neat, flat row.

I learned how to pull book-search matches off the ABA wire, a résumé relic of another age, like so many of my vintage skills (VCR-to-VCR editing; best iron-on practices). I learned about firsts, about toning. I learned that the first-editions buyer at Kinokuniya would buy just about anything, that Mrs. Dinsmere wouldn’t, that the grad student who got teary even talking about the Audubon prints he wanted could never afford them unless one of us pretended to have found them for $40 below market and covered his action (so that’s what one of us did) (the grad student came to retrieve the prints toting a coffee can of saved cash, and wept at the sight of them, but carefully, to keep them dry; if it’s not the best forty bucks one of us ever spent, it’s close).

I learned that a lighted loupe gargoyled to the owner’s anxious brow meant surgery in progress — the rebuilding of a broken board, the gluing of a wandering flyleaf — and I shouldn’t interrupt until after the procedure. I wish I’d made him teach me how to give an antique book another few years…to keep the story going. Not the most useful skill on the face of it, but that guy with the doll hospital knows: not every thing is “just” a thing.

I have my own bookshop now. It’s all true crime, some new, mostly secondhand. Before I signed the lease, it was a barbershop, whose proprietor left the property in handcuffs last year. The neighborhood has a lot of theories (involving drug-dealing) and opinions (involving his hilariously narrow tank tops; I share these opinions) and few facts, but I think it’s fitting that I could open a true-crime joint because “Davey” (allegedly) committed a crime and is (probably) in the joint. I renovated the place, sent the barber chairs to Queens, threw out a dusty hairdryer and some loose Advil I found in a drawer. I left Davey’s first two-dollar bill on the mirror with its cheery good-luck note. The spiders stayed too, a rotating cast of daddies longlegs whom my associate, Woodland Jane, periodically escorts out to a tree well in front of the shop. It is both bad for business and aspirationally impressive how quickly a Charlotte can find her way back under the gate, throw a line between a stack of Ann Rules and the space heater, and get down to some insect murders of her own. I used to hate spiders, but it’s nice to have someone there when I arrive, even a tiny someone who takes hostages.

One book, part of a JFK/crackpot trilogy, came to me with a dead spider pressed in museum-quality style between the pages. She seems to point accusingly at an explanatory sentence about the CIA. This is my favorite part of the bookshop — these “freebies,” proofs of life, that make a book sometimes harder to sell but also easier to love sometimes. The story in the book, sure, In Cold Blood is a classic and finding a first printing at an estate sale for two bucks is my second-favorite part, but the story of the book before it came to me, that’s what I love. Crumbs. Hasty bookmarks from long-gone department stores. Football trading cards, torn dollar bills (still legal tender!), nail polish streaks, curling bookplates. Sand. What you…hope? Was a chocolate chip? Each book had its own life, and too, so many of them make their ways here because a life has ended, because the book is a property about a murder — or because the book was the property of a mortal. That’s the deal with the estate sales: someone died, that story ended, but now new ones begin somewhere else, with a child’s roll-top desk and a tote bag of hardcovers crossing the river to start over in Brooklyn, filling a tiny car with that old-book smell.

Yes yes, it’s mildew. Decay. I know. Everyone knows. We who love it, love it for that; it is the past, and it is right here. To open my great-grandfather’s Churchills is to sit beside him seventy years ago. To find a “heritage” streak of French’s in a signed Robert Graysmith is to know that, in a previous life, someone couldn’t put the book down long enough to eat or even wipe her hands. That book’s story was loved. Then it was let go. Now it’s here, in Exhibit B., with all the other stories and stories of stories, spined up, nice and neat.

They’re so tidy, books. Stackable sturdy citizens of hushed places, of trains and firelight. They all end; they all wait to start again. Someday, on a greyed card stashed in a copy of Sarah, Plain And Tall…the story continues.

Happy birthday, Don.