Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 books neatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be rifling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of unsorted, unpriced stock is extraordinary.
As I announced last month I had begun reading The Diary Of A Bookseller written by Shaun Bythell. The excerpt above is found on page 126. I led off with that snippet from page 126 as it resonated with me personally. All my adult life I have been attracted to second hand bookstores. All my children have accompanied me into a bookstore one time or another. Together, we have spent hours browsing shelves of used books. My personal library has grown over the decades with the stray older book of an economical copy of a 1st edition of Animal Farm, just to mention one of many. My oldest still will contact me once in an while from an old bookstore excited by a bound treasure he has come across. Many times I crouched to rifle through a carton of books before they found their way to a shelf adorned with a current price. We called our visits to bookstores, booking. You wanna go booking?
Bythell’s diary is much more than a carton of unsorted books on a floor. At the age of 31 Shaun bought The Bookshop. he begins with a lament that before closing on the shop, he should have read a piece of George Orwell’s writing published in 1936. ‘Bookshop Memories’ rings as true today as it did then , and sounds a salutary warning to anyone as naive as I was that the world of selling second-hand books……Orwell worked part-time in Booklover’s Corner in Hampstead while working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, between 1934 and 1936. Shaun ends by stating, each month here begins with an extract from ‘Bookshop Memories’. (Preceding found on page 1 & 2.)
I include here the excerpt of George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’, Bythell included leading The Diary’s month of July off.
There are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who come every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying.
Bythell encounters with the public, as highlighted in his diary over the days and the months included in its pages, leave a literary trail of colorful personalities. Many attempt to negotiate a price other than posted on the book in question. Others try to sell books to Bythell at prices plucked from fairyland. In all cases personalities are worn like a dust-jacket more outrageous than the book in hand. His employees are as quirky and notable as the daily customers and browsers who populate the rooms of shelved books. You meet volunteers like Andrew with Asperger’s, Callum the bike rider, and Smelly Kelly. Smelly Kelly doused himself with Brut 33 and thereby acquired the moniker, smelly. He is a recurring visitor to The Book Shop. His intentions are not to browse the tens of thousands of books on the shelves. His intention is to flirt with Nicky at the counter. She is constantly trying to avoid his eyes and his Brut aroma. An example of this can be found on page 155 and 156.
She asked me to find her an excuse to escape if Smelly Kelly came in to continue his Brut 33- scented wooing. Unsurprisingly, on seeing her blue minibus parked opposite the shop, he pitched up at about 11 a.m. I pretended that I had a parcel to collect from the post office in Newton Stewart and asked Nicky if she would mind picking it up for me, to which she readily agreed. Smelly Kelly then asked if she could give him a lift there as he wanted to visit his brother, at which point there was no option but to fall on my sword and tell Nicky that I would go to Newton Stewart, taking Smelly Kelly with me, if she could cover the shop. The journey was horrendous, the air of the cab of the van was barely breathable so dense was the cloud of Brut 33, even with all the windows open.
There are many many customers, booksellers, neighbors, Wigtown owners of other book shops, and various other colorful personalities. Their connections for the most part are their love of books. The Scottish country side and its fishable rivers are the backdrop to The Book Shop. Each person is connected like the jewels in the Buddhist metaphor, Indra’s Net. In short it is a net of jewels, where the polished surface of each jewel reflects all other jewels. A process of infinite reflections. ( CAMLAB– Harvard project.) May be I stretch the metaphor but as I read Bythell’s diary, his comments, written judgements, and colorful snippets of the many daily visitors polished each to reflect on another as they touched the net of used books found across the many shelves of the book store. If you love books and the atmosphere of used book stores you will love The Diary of a Bookseller.
This month as I visit my metaphorical lighthouse I reflect on Indra’s Net. I am not a well read Buddhist scholar, but I do have a some Buddhist’s texts in my personal library. I have been blessed to have some Buddhist friends who inspired me to learn more and I did. Also it was a very close Jewish friend who took me and my youngest son for our first visit of many to the New England Peace Pagoda at 100 Cave Hill Road in Leverett Massachusetts. Somewhere over time I had read or heard a little about Indra’s Net. Whether it works or not as a metaphor overlay of all the people who flock to The Book Shop, well that is for you the reader to decide. I did look into this Buddhist metaphor and found some more information that I share now here. (Thank you Google!)
Included in an article by SAND is a quote by Francis H. Cook, Huayyen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
The Hua’yen school has been fond of this image, mentioned many times in its literature, because it symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. The relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual intercausality.
That rhymes with me. I believe our lives are like jewels and we reflect off of each other beyond this finite moment into infinity.
Thank you for reading.
Be at peace and joy!
Mark