Books on the Move

Libraries, any large collection of books, distort time. No doubt the result of ordering a temporal system by subject, alphabet, and other arbitrary guides. Books make their slow anachronistic converse across the shelves, forming alliances and enemies, multiplying potentialities. The casual visitor senses it; the librarian, the page, the collector is awash in it. The silence of a library is oppressive in the extreme. It hangs over one like the tall shelves. The whispering of books occupies the opposite side of our sibilant vocalizing, our "library voices.' Their silence is very nearly heard.

The library drove me to bookstores like Victor Hugo's, New England Mobile Book Fair, and other stores in Boston whose names I probably didn't even notice. There my friend and I would tease out the smallest whims and the vaguest literary pretensions, daring the bookstore into forcing up the book that we at that moment had to have. Hunting for used books returned them to the realm of event and personal experience. Against the library's overwhelming static abstractedness, we created a moving drama. Random chance, intrepidness, preoccupation, and disappointment became tied up in these peculiar packets of information.

Now that I've moved from a bookstore groupie to an employee at Downtown Books & News, I can better appreciate our difference from a library. Downtown Books & News is not only large and exceptionally well-stocked, it is open. It invites concourse and idle chatter, as well as avid, near-obsessed hunting. There is an air of expectancy and vigor. The books here are in transit, on display for the next proud owner. They are snatched up, passed around, occasionally ignored- a salutary balm. Not to be overly poetic but there is a floral, or at least organic, aspect to the kind of exchanges that occur here. The books, although representative in content, are unique in character. Some are inscribed, or well-worn; the larger ones sometimes crowd out the smaller. There is no inventory to account for it all. As a book becomes more difficult to find used it creates the illusion of rarity, which creates desirability. The individuals ensure the success of the species. Books here have adapted.
Over the course of the last few months we have received, dissected and assimilated a large part of a personal library, thousands of volumes, mostly natural history, some amazing esoterica, photography and other non-fiction. Fascinating stuff. It has had our regular customers talking, even writing letters to each other. The power of a bookstore is that the library is dislodged; diffused among its appreciators. It reenters the stream of human affairs. The library does not measure us, we measure the library- recreate it in miniature. It becomes a means of self-reflection, communal and individual. And I don't have to wear headphones. The music keeps the books from getting uppity.

Scribed by the fuzzy mascot of Downtown Books and News, Aaron Gunn.