Book Ends
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.
Tags: September 11th
Thanks for this- like lots of others I come by every year to reread. If I ever make it to New York again I’ll visit your store, even as a librarian I never tire of the old book smell.
HBD, Don.
love to you. and happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah. And HBD, Don, wherever you are.
Thank you so much. I’ve come here as soon as I wake up every September 11 for the last 20 years or so. I still have some Tomato Nation pens and magnets from the olden days, before everything changed.
Happy Birthday, Don
I could smell the books, reading this. I am so happy to hear you have your very own shop, and I hope to visit one day.
Happy birthday, Don, and hello to all those who stop here each year to remember.
This is always a hard day to face, but I was actively dreading this year’s anniversary, an avalanche of renewed grief spreading over all the other traumas that have happened over the past year and a half. I am so grateful to have this place and Sars’ thoughtful stories each year to ease the way to safe remembrance, and to see other TNers check in is wonderful. Thank you all.
Happy birthday, Don.
This year you have me wondering if the DABDA model for grieving could have another stage — Thriving, perhaps, or Growth, something specific to the part of ourselves that develops only because we lived through the loss.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thanks, Sars.
Happy birthday, Don.
Grateful for you, Sarah. And for all of us here together, every year.
Happy birthday, Don.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Two F-15s flew low over our house this morning and for a moment I crossed paths with my dumbstruck and terrified 22-year-old self, standing on a concrete stoop 500 miles from here, unable to imagine what would come next.
Thank you, Sarah, for keeping this tradition alive, and congratulations on the bookstore.
Thank you again for the meditative musings on this day. Like many others, it’s a comfort to check in here. Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, as always, Sarah. And to everyone who comes back year after year, to hold this space together.
Clover, your response is so lovely. Thank you for your eloquence.
Happy Birthday Don.
I’m struggling to put my gratitude for this space into words. Over and over again, you’ve met me where I needed to be, with laughter (MBTV), rage (TINO), and now here, each year, as we all face this impossible day together.
Thank you, Sars. Thank you to everyone who gathers here, too.
And happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday Don.
Thanks for doing this. It’s nice to know that on this bluebird day (just like THAT day) we are still here, still somehow impossibly here through 20 years of love, pain, grace. I feel like we owe them all that much—to be grateful for our mere existence on a sunny perfect September day.
It means so much to me personally to check in here and visit my old self. Thanks again. Okay
I come here every year for you and Don. Thank you for your wonderful writing. Happy birthday, Don.
Thanks, Sarah. For writing the thing twenty years ago that helped start changing horrible chaos into narrative that could bear to be memory. And for keeping the faith, every year. Happy birthday, Don.
Happy Birthday, Don. I come here every year and this year, I discovered Exhibit B. Can’t wait to visit. Thanks, Sars.
Twenty years…it still doesn’t seem that long ago. Thank you Sars for not just glossing the day over, not just retelling events, but just acknowledging and honoring our shared pain, glimpses of joy, and shining beacons of hope that still ripple from that darkest of days. And providing a place we can come and just BE and be together in a psychic and psychological group hug.
My 9 year old asked me what happened, and I couldn’t even give her the much-abridged and condensed Cliff Notes summary without crying and she couldn’t understand why I had tears 20 years later. Someday, I will have to give her a more in-depth look, but this is not the time (or the year).
But book lovers we both are–she still new to their joys, especially that of well-thumbed pages with their hidden treasures both within the text and pressed between the sheets–and your post today reminds me that another way to bond and bridge our experiences is to explore a used book store together.
Your blog is very much like such a bookstore to me, and reading present and past posts and comments reminds me of friends come and gone, distant family only seen now and again, and of spirited gatherings and discussions with kindred souls.
Sars and the rest of the Tomato Nation, I really do love you all as one does when the group has been together for years, albeit virtually. Thank you all for this reunion and for elevating it to a…well, not exactly a joyous occasion, but to one of peace and comfort among like-minded friends.
Happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don. Thanks for still being around after all these years, Sarah.
To you Sars, for allowing us to return each year.
To those who share this yearly check in.
To Don, on his birthday.
And to all of those who we lost in a middle of a chapter.
Thank you, Sarah.
Happy birthday, Don.
I wish I remembered what name I used back in the day, just in case anyone remembers me.
Happy birthday, Don.
And thank you as ever, Sars.
Thank you, Sarah, for tending the light in the window all these years. This space and all of us that gather here on this day year after year have become sacred in my heart. Sending love to all and birthday wishes to Don.
Twenty years. I come by every year to re-read and hope to see a new entry from you on this day.
Congratulations on Exhibit B! I hope to make it to New York to meet my long lost cousin in the next year and your shop is now on the list of places to visit.
Thank you for leaving the light on for all of us, Sarah. Happy Birthday Don.
This site is always my first stop on this day. I appreciate having this peaceful place to mark my remembrance and I’m grateful for the way you continue to do it with such grace. Thank you, Sars.
Happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don. Thank you, Sarah, and all who reunite here every year. Everyone’s comments make me cry as much as the essay. Twenty years?!? Impossible.
There’s no real coherence to my thoughts today, so I’ll just say, “Happy birthday, Don. I hope you’re ok.”
Thanks Sars
lovely, as always. thank you. happy birthday, don.
Thank you, Sarah. Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you Sarah, and happy birthday Don. So many years, hard to believe or count them
every year, without fail, i visit this site and read your newest entry and the original.
i commemorate that day. but also remember the time before it.
coming here always makes me remember fondly the entertainment, laughter and community of tomato nation and mbtv.
a strange mix of emotions: relived horror and sadness tempered with nostalgia.
thank you sars, for everything. and happy birthday don.
Every year.
Thank you Sars, Happy Birthday Don.
Thank you, Sarah, for another lovely piece. It’s such a blessing to touch base here each year.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you Sars, and thank you all for being here every year.
Happy Birthday, Don.
I know he will never, ever be found. But I come every year to see if he has been. Thanks for keeping up the tradition.
My first stop on this day yearly is always this site. Thank you, Sarah–and happy birthday to Don, too. From someone else who works with old paper and books, to give ’em a few more years to tell their tales, or spiff them up for a loving owner.
Oh, Sarah, thank you for sharing happy news today, especially this year. Something to look forward to when it’s time to travel again. I’ll be able to visit and say hello in person, but until then I’ll shop online! I hope the store is a joy and a raging success. And thank you for being here every year.
Happy birthday, Don. I hope there’s cake wherever you are.
Thank you, Sarah, and the rest of you too.
It’s comforting coming here each year.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you Sarah.
Happy Birthday Don.
I avoided 20th anniversary coverage, but I could not let the day pass without checking in here, for that old book smell.
I love that you’ve turned a new page, as well as the very idea of opening up a true crime bookstore in a former barbershop.
Thank you, Sarah.
Happy birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah, and everyone else who has commented, for your beautiful and moving words.
Like others said above, I thought this might be the year Don was found. But I read another story today about a woman who was trapped in rubble from Tower 1 for 27 hours. She has never found the first responder who discovered her. So many angels…
HBD, Don.
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sarah! 11:18 pm on the 11th. Wouldn’t be right if I didn’t make it here.
Thank you. I have a thousand things to say, but thank you covers them all. Thank you.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Congratulations on your new venture, Sara. I also love used books for everything you have in here.
Happy birthday, Don. I hope you are doing great out there.
Thank you Sars for this, and also thank you to all the commenters. So lovely to see so many that come here again and again. This was the best site, always. Good luck with the bookstore! And, of course, happy birthday, Don. I like the feeling of us all sending good vibes to Don, maybe out there somewhere.
Well, now I know where I need to stop when I finally get back up that way! It’s been way too long and I can’t wait to share the city with my kiddo.
Thank you for always being a place we can come together on this day all these years later.
Your book store sounds amazing, and I will definitely visit the next time I’m in that area of Brooklyn. True Crime is my jam, and so glad to find kindred spirits (okay, ghouls of a sort) that are into this kind of thing. I love the smell of used books; to me it’s more of a ‘stale frito’ smell.
Love to you and Dan.
Thanks. I love old books…they stories they could tell!
Happy birthday, Don. I can’t believe it’s been twenty years…remember very clearly reading your post of your experience.
Well, see you next year!