Where the Beechwoods Used to Be; or, why I love Secondhand Bookstores

Say what you like -- call it silly, childish, anything -- but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?

-- George Orwell, "Coming Up For Air"

Only a fool stands in the way of progress...if this is progress.

-- Captain James T. Kirk

I grew up in a house filled with books. I mean this literally. Both my parents and my older brother were voracious readers, albeit readers with different tastes, and there were bookshelves almost everywhere -- the living room, the den (which we called "the sunporch"), the upstairs hallway, the various bedrooms, even the basement. Excess books were to be found in the attic, the garage and, in the case of rare volumes from past centuries, in the breakfronts in the dining room. My father read scholarly history, biography and works on politics, along with some historical fiction: big, hard-backed, intimidating-looking works of almost Biblical proportions. My mother devoured mysteries by the freightload -- probably forty or fifty a year, mostly paperbacks, which to me seemed more approachable and less frighteningly adult. My brother's tastes were eclectic indeed: comic books, science-fiction, pictorial volumes on cinema, collections of essays and short stories by writers as varied as Harlan Ellison and George Orwell, this, that. It was damn near impossible to go anywhere in our house without encountering books, and being a child of a curious nature, I started first by looking at the pictures (if any), then reading the descriptions on the flyleaves of the dust jackets, then making tentative efforts to read the books themselves. Most were way over my head in terms of subject matter, but that didn't stop me, and I delighted in the literary smorgasbord I could sample at will: a novel about ancient Rome, a biography of Al Capone, stacks of Fantastic Four comics, mysteries written by Lawrence Sanders and Agatha Christie, the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin. Believe it or not -- and you may not, if you're thirty or younger -- one of my favorite pastimes was yanking a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off its shelf and just turning the gilt-edged pages for hours, marveling at the pictures, diagrams (some of them transparencies or fold-outs), sketches and maps. Today this sort of thing is done via the soulless instruments known as Google and Wikipedia; but Google-Wikipedia have nothing on the pleasure of sitting in an easy chair with a big, leather-bound volume tooled in gold, reading about crocodiles or the Battle of Hastings or the Sahara Desert or the Xyphoid process or any other of ten thousand random people, places or things that make up this world.

Growing up, my family had an obsession with moviegoing which was pretty impressive, but the one thing which rivaled it was our tendency to make Viking-like raids on bookstores. No such establishment in the Maryland - D.C. - Virginia area was safe. There was nothing my father liked better to do on a Saturday during the early 1980s than pack us into the car, hunt down a book merchant, and loot him empty. Everyone got a book, and some of us got two or even three. My mother spent a lot of years in a state of frustration over the staggering sums of money we -- meaning her husband -- spent on this passion. In those days, of course, bookstores were not what they are today or were just ten years ago; the mega-chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders did not exist. Crown Books was probably as big of a chain as existed and the individual stores were not very large, and no, you couldn't get a cup of coffee or a Danish and no, you couldn't get wi-fi because it didn't exist and neither did the Internet. A bookstore was just that -- a store with books in it. Nothing else. But that was fine with us, and especially with me.

You see, the family obsession with the written word carried with it its own aesthetic. When you grow up surrounded by books, you constantly encounter certain tactile and olfactory sensations which get bound up in your mind with various concepts and emotions, all of them positive. Thousands of books create a smell of paper, leather, linen and dust which permeates not only your nose but your childhood; touching those pebbled leather or scratchy linen covers brings forth memories of sitting by the fireplace, reading in perfect comfort and security into the late hours of the night. The associations are pleasant, and they linger into adulthood. So it's little wonder that entering a bookstore now, especially a secondhand bookstore, plunges me immediately and totally into some of the happiest days of my own early life.

The secondhand bookstore has distinct advantages in my mind over the firsthand bookstore for several reasons. Firstly, the moment you walk through the door your nostrils are confronted with the smell of thousands of decaying, dust-coated tomes full of foxed paper -- to me and other bibliophiles, a terrific sensation. Secondly, the lighting is almost invariably dim, giving the whole place a hushed, intimate atmosphere. Third, the fact that the books are all used means that the place is full of nearly extinct, out of print editions, old volumes from past centuries, and other impossible-to-find works, often by long-dead or obscure authors. Perusing stacks of these old mummies often yields great treasure, for the fact that a book has become utterly forgotten by no means excludes it from greatness, and should you find some long-forgotten great work, you experience the special pleasure of being let in on a dusty old secret known only to a select few.

There is of course another reason I prefer secondhand bookstores to the big conglomerates, of which Barnes & Noble is, now, I believe the last representative; they are privately owned and, for this and the fore-mentioned reasons, are in possession of a soul. And as our nation continues down the path of gentrification, cultural homogenization and corporatization generally, soul is an increasingly rare commodity anywhere. The secondhand bookstore, like the mom-and-pop grocery, the independently-owned hardware, toy, dime or record store, the hobby shop and the family-owned diner or coffeehouse, is increasingly in the process of being exterminated. This extermination is cold-blooded, deliberate and seemingly irreversible, which is odd because nearly everyone -- every human being with taste or aesthetic feeling, that is -- prefers to do business with the small businessman rather than the large if given any kind of choice at all. And is not merely sentiment that drives this preference. So long as small businesses of any kind proliferate, the customer is sure to be treated honestly and fairly in the vast majority of his dealings; what's more, if he is a repeat customer, he will also be treated personally. All of these qualities are absent from corporations and chains. They are run not by owners but by managers, and staffed by underpaid employees who like as not get no benefits and are treated poorly or indifferently by their employer, and have neither the incentive nor the native interest to please the customer. Going to a Barnes & Noble may be a positive experience to the Bibliophile insomuch as it is full of books and coffee, but in comparison with a good secondhand bookstore it is rather like tinned peaches versus ripe peaches taken directly off the tree. The former gives you the simulacrum of the thing you want, and the latter gives you the reality.

Whenever I move to a new city or state, the first thing I do is run down a mental checklist of the things I will need to locate after, or even before, I unpack: A friendly pub. A good restaurant. An honest mechanic. And a bookstore, preferably secondhand. Until a few weeks ago I was a habituate of a place in Burbank called Movie World, located downtown on San Fernando Boulevard. The title of the store was deceptive; while Movie World did sell movie posters, old VCR tapes, cinematic publicity stills, television scripts and various other ephemera related to Hollywood, it was by and large simply a used bookstore. And what a used bookstore. From floor to ceiling were stacked tens of thousands of hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, leatherbound collections -- you name it, it was there, coated in dust and jammed in so tight against its fellows you practically needed a crowbar to pry it free. Indeed, Movie World was a firetrap of the first order, overstocked to an unsafe degree (there were literally avalanches of magazines and books that blocked entire isles), and not terribly well organized, though the gentlemanly owner tried his best to do so. He had, he told me, once run three secondhand bookshops, but the other two had folded and he'd been forced to cram the stock of both the others into his sole remaining store. Truth be told, I didn't mind; in fact I rather liked the ramshackle appearance. After the brightly lighted, sanitized, everything-in-its-place appearance of a Barnes & Noble, the existence of this kind of store, where every square foot was heaped with such a freight of books and old magazines and rolled-up posters and dog-eared 8 x 10 headshots that you wondered why the floor didn't collapse, was a positive joy for me. What's more, it was directly around the corner from my gym. I could roll up in my car, work out for an hour, then wander into Movie World and inhale its intoxicating scent as I hunted the isles for something new to read. Like as not I'd then eat lunch across the street, enjoying the first pages of my spontaneous purchase -- a pleasure all the more pleasurable for not being shared.

I patronized Movie World for years. Occasionally I'd go inside with a friend, but in a sense, Movie World was my friend and there was no need for further company. I don't know how many purchases I made there, but the number must be very great indeed, and included some terrific finds: old army manuals from WW2, out-of-print classics like Beau Geste, trashy adventure novels covered with mustard stains (I hope they were mustard stains), smashing autobiographies of obscure actors. Shopping there -- or just wandering there, without buying anything -- became a settled part of my routine. I really didn't need any of the stuff I bought, especially the scripts for episodes of forgotten 80s television shows like Matt Houston, but that was part of the fun. Nobody ever died because they didn't buy that old steel ammunition box from WW2 they saw in the junk shop window; on the other hand, nobody who hasn't paid hard-earned cash for a useless item simply for the joy of possessing it has lived a day in their life. Anyway, one day late last year -- I'm sure you knew this was coming, though I'm not sure I did -- the owner informed me that after decades in business he was finally retiring -- he'd sell off his entire stock, give away what didn't sell on his last day, and vacate the premises he'd occupied sometime around the year of my birth. If I may extend the metaphor, it was rather like having a good buddy tell you he's decided to leave town forever and head for the opposite side of he earth, where you can never visit. It reminded me of a similar experience I'd had in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000s, when Second Story Books was forced by developers to shut its doors to make way for some fucking abomination of an art gallery that nobody wanted. In that case, it was less like losing a buddy than witnessing a murder you are powerless to prevent and equally powerless to avenge (unless you burn the fucking art gallery to the ground, which I may or may not have seriously considered). In both cases, though, these individual tiny incidents belong to a much larger trend -- a cultural massacre, a sort of slow-rolling genocide of everything which possesses soul in favor of everything which does not.

When Movie World shut down, I struck out in search of a replacement, but I've yet to find one which truly fills that particular niche within my soul. A very well-maintained secondhand bookstore does in fact reside very close to me in Toluca Lake, but in my first visit to the place I found it a little too well-maintained: too bright, too neat, too organized. Even the presence of several cats, sleeping peaceably atop stacks of books, couldn't quite give it the atmosphere of run-down, homey charm that I associate with a "real" used bookshop. It occurred to me as I left (having bought two books; hell, I'm not wasting a visit) that the mom-and-pop operations, even where they survive, have had to change their character somewhat in order to compete, or feel as if they are competing, with the big chains. Thus the cleanliness, the harsh lighting, the absence of dust. But it is precisely these things, in my mind, which lend the secondhand store its final coat of charm. Shops like that don't really give a shit whether you have allergies or expect to be served coffee or fume because there's no wi-fi for your android phone; not because they are indifferent to your wants, but because they concentrate on your needs. Customer service is sometimes more than satisfying petty desires in the consumer; it is sometimes slipping past them and reminding you, via a book avalanche or a handful of dust-bunnies, why you actually came into the store in the first place.

In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell brilliantly and evocatively told the story of a harassed, disappointed, much put-upon London everyman named George Bowling who rebels against the cold, mechanistic, heartless trend of the modern world by trying to revisit the idyllic country town of his boyhood, only to find that it has been utterly destroyed by the wheels of "progress." In confess that sometimes, as I comb through Los Angeles for a proper secondhand bookstore and a re-connection to the best days of my own childhood, I feel much like poor old George Bowling, who discovers there is no refuge from the bright lights and dead souls that surround him. Yet all is not lost. The hulking chain stores like Borders, which helped obliterate the secondhand store nationwide, are themselves being driven out of existence by Internet-based booksellers like Amazon: Borders ceased to exist almost a decade ago, and Barnes & Noble is sluggishly dying. Some will of course decry this as the final doom of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but I see the strong possibility of a different future, because I know I am not alone in my passion for the tactile experience which is part and parcel of entering a bookshop. Human beings are gregarious animals and while they may enjoy the convenience of online shopping, it doesn't exactly fill up a Saturday afternoon for the family. The market abhors a vacuum, and if the last of the big chains goes into extinction, I foresee the rise of a new generation of bookseller -- one who bridges the gap between the cold, "full service" store which serves coffee and biscotti and carries mostly new releases from big publishers, and the dusty, dimly-lighted, no-frills secondhand store about which I have just waxed rhapsodic-nostalgic for the last few thousand words. This new sort of bookstore will carry heaps of old used books, but also sell coffee and have the latest bestsellers. It will have a lounge where people can read and get wi-fi, but the furniture will be secondhand and mismatched, and anyone talking on a cell phone will be told roughly to get the hell out. And best of all, it will be privately owned and privately run, designed and organized to the owner's whims and personal tastes. Said owner will not be a mere manager selling a commodity which to him might as well be pork bellies or wheat futures, but rather a bibliophile who passionately loves books, and reading, and the whole atmosphere which can surround both. Beechwoods can be cut down, you see, but they can also be replanted and regrown. All it takes is love, courage...and a little bit of soul.