The Pusher (New Years 2004 Reprint)

Note: This is a reprint of a column I sent out, oh, 10 years ago now, purely for my own amusement…

The kids come, one and two at a time. Up the path, a furtive knock at the door. Down the stairs into the cellar, where the stuff is kept. Faces staring at the floor, with every appearance of shame. Then the fateful whispered words, from the addict to the dealer: “Can I have a book?”

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It comes as news to precisely no one reading these columns that I am a book addict: bookworm, son of a bookworm, brother of bookworms, parent and spouse of same. There is little about bookwormish behavior that I don’t know, nothing experts can tell me about the symptoms that I haven’t observed at close hand. It’s all familiar to me. And of all of it, there’s nothing I know better than the urge to share the addiction with others.

There’s nothing that can create a connection between people that’s quite like the bond of having read and enjoyed the same book. It’s like discovering that you share a language that no one around you knows. Reading a book — especially a story — is like living in a separate world for a while. Talking to someone else who’s read the same thing gives you a chance to revisit favorite spots and recall favorite experiences, while at the same time adding that touch of difference that comes from viewing things through the other person’s mind’s eye. That’s one of the prime reasons for giving books as presents. Giving and lending books is an invitation to a conversation about a shared landscape, set of ideas, or collection of characters.

I have longstanding (and inherited) credentials in this regard. Back when my mother taught high school English, she kept a large collection of books in the back of her classroom for students to check out and read on their own. Many of the science fiction and fantasy books were actually mine. I still have a number of paperbacks with a pocket and card glued in the back and “DEAN,” for Mrs. Dean (my mother), printed on the bottom. She didn’t worry too much about the books that walked off permanently, figuring that if they found a home where they were read and enjoyed, they had served their purpose. It was worth it to get people hooked on books. That’s what English teachers are for, after all: to turn people on to reading, even against their natural inclinations, like those hippy activists of the 1960s who would slip LSD to people unawares.

I know I’m not the first person to compare reading to an addiction. For that matter, how many of you, finding yourself stuck, say, in a bathroom for an indeterminate but not inconsiderable period, have found yourselves perusing the fine print on the back of a shampoo bottle, or read a Reader’s Digest article on a subject of utterly no interest to you, or unfolded and squinted at the fine print in the classified section of a three-months-old newspaper your spouse had been using as a moth swatter? Sounds like addiction to me.

And having been a longtime user, who should wonder that I would graduate to distributing? So to speak.

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I remember reading a Dorothy Sayers novel where a man had been murdered to bury his knowledge of London’s drug distribution network. It all hinged on the first line of copy in a weekly ad, and letters mailed to a blind drop, and pubs preselected in telephone books. All very elaborate and unlikely (though the part about Lord Peter Wimsey writing advertising copy was a lot of fun).

My distribution system is considerably simpler, though not without its points of technique. Typically, I start by alluding to the subject in casual conversation — “Read any good books lately?” You know, to make potential customers feel they are in control. If the response is positive, I draw them out with questions: books and authors they’ve enjoyed, their opinion of specific titles I know, and the like. Soon, if things go well, I’m ready to make a recommendation — “I think you’d like this one” — and the offer: “I could lend you a copy.” And the transfer is made, the product (hopefully) ingested, and I take my fee in conversation about the book, its good and bad points. And the inevitable offer of another book to keep the cycle going.

Sometimes it works otherwise with those who enter our home for some reason or another. I recall one young man who, arriving to take his younger brother home from visiting Nathan, was invited downstairs to the abode of the television/video game monitor — which just happens to be the home of our sizeable science fiction and fantasy collection. Inevitably, when he left, he took several books with him. His story is far from unique. Dinner guests, babysitters, relatives — all have been subjected to the lure of the bookspine array, and not emerged unscathed.

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Recently, I’ve decided that satisfying as it is to deal, to match customers to products, the big money (literally and figuratively, though more the latter than the former, I’m afraid) is in the production side of things. They say, you know, that it’s quite easy to whip up batches of the stuff at home. Just takes a word processor, time, and persistence. Of course, the quality is unpredictable with these backroom labs; but hey, caveat emptor, right? Let the buyer beware. Coming in a few years (we hope) to a bookstore near you…