Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Transformative Collection

I just finished reading Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press, 2010), a book which served up an odd juxtaposition of dot-com uber-business and a collection of antiquarian cookbooks. Naturally, the technology business interested me not at all and the cookbooks tremendously, which was unfortunate seeing as how the novel’s first half was devoted primarily to the former. To be honest, I almost gave up and would have were it not for the fact that the collection found stored in the kitchen cabinets and even in the oven of a small run-down California house previously owned by a lichenologist, proved to be the most interesting character of the lot. By the book’s end the collection commanded a startling amount of money while the dot-coms stumbled, but more importantly, the collection transformed the lives of all who came in contact with it as it slowly gave up its secrets.


This is not a book review, so what happened in the story, or what I thought about it, is immaterial. I mention it only because in a smaller way a collection of books entered my life as an alchemist too, changing dramatically my identity as a bookseller. Not long ago I wrote about Elmer and the landslide of books which cascaded into our lives because of him. But before Elmer there was Lillian and it was her books -- her family’s books really, as it was a generational collection which came from a house in which the last survivor had lived her entire eighty-something years -- that set me on the path I’ve followed ever since. At this auction I acquired for the first time in any significant number, books that cannot be scanned, books so beautiful and compelling I knew that I would never avidly seek their modern counterparts again. In their pages I found pictures and letters, notes, even a treatise on book collecting written by Lillian’s mother. The books, the family, became “mine” in a way that I cannot explain without sinking into sentimentality and so I will not even try. I will just say that it was so and leave it at that.

As I thought about all this at five a.m. when I finished Goodman’s novel it occurred to me that my transformation may, or may not, prove beneficial in the coming years. Already so many of the old books are available free as PDF downloads, or in print-on-demand format. Soulless though they seem to me -- soulless though they ARE – they have their followers and, in many instances, are the more practical option. It also occurred to me that even though no one would accuse traditional library book sales of harboring an embarrassment of riches these days, I no longer “see” the new, the shiny, the trendy, or the popular culture goldmine. For me these things have receded to the point that they may actually be invisible to me. I have no doubt in my ability to recognize exceptional modern books – I have, for example, Birds of America in the Audubon Society’s incomparable Baby Elephant Folio edition and two Chinese art books in a clamshell box so incredibly, wondrously gorgeous (see photo above) you would have to be entirely ignorant of books not to recognize their value, both monetarily and otherwise

But of course these books are not any more readily available than their antiquarian counterparts, so to a greater or lesser degree, most sellers must maintain a mixed stock liberally larded with modern books of the more ordinary variety. Some of these titles occasionally rise from the dead and ascend to the stratosphere for reasons so inane one can only marvel -- $1000 for Anna Nicole’s biography after her untimely death, for example. Most, however, reward their sellers handsomely for only one brief shining moment before taking their inevitable journey south. The window of opportunity for the vast majority of books is the size of a crack. She who fails to crawl through it immediately gets less and less and eventually almost nothing. If the electronic reader continues to grow exponentially there may not even be a crack. It only stands to reason that the number of physical books printed would sharply decline, making their acquisition ever more difficult.

The bottom line is we ALL stand at an interesting juncture – sellers who prefer the old and those who prefer the new. Will one win and one fail? Will neither win, or will we both somehow find a new footing? That’s the question without an answer, the koan we ponder endlessly.

I do know one thing though. If wishes were horses a stampede of antiquarian books would race out of cupboards and ovens everywhere and on to my shelves. In the face of the unknown, win or lose, I  still cast my lot with alchemy.

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