The Joys of Used Books

I was strolling North on Yonge Street in Toronto on a hot July afternoon when I came upon a bin filled with used books. I stopped to have a look since I’ve discovered several treasures in this way.

For example, I have a book, published sometime in the 60s, all about UFO abductions, and written in a very compelling, if rather sensationalist, way.

I also have a paperback about the past lives of children, which was a fun read, though disappointing in that neither of my children have started telling me about their past lives.

I’ve scooped up regular novels too. In fact, at a used book shop in Montreal I found the novel, “Sanditon,” which Jane Austen was writing at the time of her death. Someone finished it for her, though not in very typical Jane Austen style. Still, a good find.

Seeing nothing that interested me terribly in the sidewalk bin, I pushed open the shop door and went inside. There were books on top of books on top of books. A hand waved at me from behind a huge stack of paperbacks. It was the cashier, though she was practically buried beneath the yellowing piles.

“Can I help you?” came a voice from somewhere behind the books.

I was about to tell her that I was just browsing, but since I couldn’t see any organization in the books, I didn’t really know how to go about browsing. In fact, a lot of the books were in piles on the floor, some of the spines turned in, some with no writing on the covers at all. In order to ‘browse’ in a shop like this, I would need an entire day, and I’d only cover a tiny fraction of the selection available to me.

I decided to ask for specifics. Since I’d recently gotten a recommendation to read Romola by George Eliot, I asked for it. The hand waved towards the top shelf behind me. Sure enough, there was Romola alongside Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. This place was more organized than I had first thought.

I snatched a copy of Romola and let my eyes wander over the piles and stacks that surrounded me. I picked up a few volumes and set them down almost right away. Then my eyes fell upon a small pocket-sized book entitled “Spanish Stories and Tales.”

I’ve always been interested in obscure folk tales and legends. I find kernels of inspiration in the usually unknown stories. I’ve read and enjoyed the tales of Herodotus, a book of Chinese legends, several books on Japanese fairy tales (many of them remarkably similar to Grimm fairy tales), and international tales of warrior women. I find any of these stories can be a jumping off point for a potential novel.

In my book of Spanish tales, I discovered “The Cock of Socrates” by Alas, which should be required reading for anyone interested in either philosophy or religion.

I also discovered a gem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled, “The Secret Miracle,” about a Jewish playwright sentenced to execution by the Nazis. In his final moment of death as the firing squad rains bullets upon him, he prays to God to grant him one more year to perfect his floundering play. In that moment he is able to live in his mind for 365 more days, enough time to put his jumbled thoughts in order and feel good about the literary work he’s left for the world. He dies, a moment later, satisfied.

These stories made me wonder whether our interconnectedness is limiting our philosophical reasoning. Does anyone still sit around debating whether time exists, or whether the possibilities of thoughts are finite or infinite? Surely these answers are not available on Wikipedia.

Sometimes I worry about the volumes of used, little-known books out there languishing in jumbled piles in rarely visited book shops. Most of them will never be read again, yet many of them contain such pearls of dying wisdom.

I still intend to buy a Kindle (Good heavens, I’m the author of an e-book! I don’t know what I’m waiting for!) but I hope when I have my e-reader in hand and am busy downloading all those new gems that I still take the time to browse the old shops for those lost treasures.