Pilgrimage

What will I miss when my service is done, as it will be soon, on the committee that's brought me once a year to Portland? Well, this year, unlike last, we had the sense to collect our lunches from the buffet provided before we retired to our deliberations, so I will miss the free lunch, and the company. I've made some friends. I've also read more new books than I ever would have otherwise, and some good ones, too. I will even miss, to some small extent, reading the bad books, I think, if only for the satisfaction of having them shouted down. The books I liked that others on the committee didn't? Well, there wasn't much pleasure in that experience, though it has been rather wonderful knowing that even my less popular suggestions were taken seriously enough, most of 'em, to be given a civil hearing. It really has been an honor, working with all these other booksellers, reading all these new books, knowing that it was all to an admirable purpose.

I will miss all that.

I will miss the annual pretext to spend the day at Powell's as well. There will be other opportunities of course; nearly everyone who visits us in Seattle seems to want at least an overnight in Portland, so as to get to Powell's. I understand perfectly. There are few places on the west coast, if not on earth, I would rather be myself. Always happy for the excuse. Always worth another look. To slightly alter Boswell, "... what can a man see of Powell's being one day in it?" Given the way I earn my living, I can always justify a bit of professional curiosity about what's doing at the largest used bookstore within driving distance. I do learn something from every trip to the big store on Burnside. Just to see the mix of new and used and bargain books on the shelves, on any given visit, is always educational. Interacting with the staff, browsing the displays, noting the prices that have gone done on books I'd contemplated buying but didn't a year ago, I learn something from all of this.

One of the more difficult aspects of adding used books to a store that traditionally has always and only dealt in new has been persuading people in the business and out to take the bookstore where I work seriously as a destination for the kind of books one hopes and expects to find in a great used shop. I think we've achieved a remarkable amount in the years since we started; our used inventory is exceptionally thoughtful, clean and carefully incorporated with the new, our customers and sellers all seem satisfied with what I find in my travels to be among the most reasonable prices and terms on offer, and I would argue that our service is equal to any. Visiting one of the great used bookstores reminds me that we still have a great deal to do, and a long way yet to go, to make the bookstore where I work come just as quickly to mind as a place where real bibliofiends simply must go. I very much want that. I hope and believe we may have the opportunity to do just that, still.

One instructive moment on this trip was finding a book that I'd visited at least twice before, still on the shelf at Powell's, still waiting for me. The Colvins and Their Friends, by E. V. Lucas, is the kind of book I don't so much hunt as wait out. I collect the author's many books of essays, when and where I can find them, and afford them. Lucas was one of the last of the old boys who could earn his living and his reputation largely from writing the kind of casual essay that while it has not disappeared from our literature, has lost much of it's power in the marketplace. To write and write profitably, as one collection from another expert practitioner of the art, Hilaire Belloc, was titled, On Nothing & Kindred Subjects, is now no easy thing, if it ever was. Both Englishmen wrote in a time when print was all; newspapers and magazines and reviews, always needing literary copy, paid handsomely, some of them, for the privilege of printing the thoughts of someone like E. V. Lucas on "Insolence," or "Saturninity," a review of "Carlyle's Provocation," or what makes "A Good Poet." Lucas made a comfortable living writing, among other things, charming guides to the great cities, his efforts in this line being highly idiosyncratic, far from strictly helpful books, all with titles like A Wanderer in Paris and London Afresh, books meant to be read about the places the author knew well and loved, rather than as manuals of tourist navigation. In addition, E. V. Lucas wrote and edited dozens of other books, including the best edition of Lamb's letters, and what I still think the best biography, in two volumes, of that noble ancestor of all subsequent personal essayists, down even to the best essayists of our day, like Sedaris and Co. This book I did not buy until this visit is a biography of sorts, really a carefully edited collection of letters from and to Sir Sydney Colvin, a literary and art critic, best remembered now for his very real and important friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. Among other things, Colvin edited the first important collection of Stevenson's letters. Lucas knew Colvin, and was specifically requested, in the older man's will, to write just such a book as Lucas eventually did. I've read a little in it now. It is a charming book.

When I first took it from the shelf at Powell's, the price asked for it was, I thought, too high. For that price, I did not need to own the book. The next time I picked it up, the price was lower, but still too much, I thought. I bought, among other things, Thackeray's letters, in two fat volumes, on that trip, having waited for the price to come down as it did and should have. The book on Colvin stayed where it was. This time, the price of Lucas's book was down to $5.95. Sold.

What will always be difficult for booksellers not usually involved in used books, either as sellers or collectors themselves to appreciate is that this business of keeping such a book, a good yet hardly popular book, until the price and the customer meet, is something worth doing, indeed, that there is no other way to bring the kind of customer one ultimately wants most, the collector, regularly into the store, where he or she will just as invariably spend more money than he or she ever meant to. That's how it works. I know because obviously, I am that spendthrift. (I won't tell you just what I spent this time at Powell's, on just such bargains. Since I don't feel obliged to even share that figure with my husband, I see no reason to reveal it here.) Most booksellers who deal either exclusively or primarily still in new books -- bless them for the dogged optimists they are -- haven't much patience with such seemingly time-wasting efforts to adjust their prices, or keep their inventory around, in the expectation of meeting the needs of buyers like me. "Turn" determines the value of a section in most bookstores that deal in new books. A book must sell in a given time to justify its occupation of a certain space on the shelf. Books that do not perform according to this formulation must be got rid of, either as returns to the publisher or as fodder for the clearance-tables. It is a well established business model, in both the independent and the corporate chain stores. That the traditional customer for used books also shops regularly for new books would suggest that such a reader has no expectation of finding a book, as I found this one, after not one but two reductions in its price. Had I found it anywhere but on the shelf at a great used bookstore, I would think that about right. As a man who has spent a good deal of his life in used bookstores, and spent a good portion of every dollar he's ever earned on used books, I count on the best used bookstores to defy the economic imperative of "turning" all their books at the price originally marked, confident that when the right reader finds that book at what eventually is the right price, it will be but one book among many that goes into the bag that day. Moreover, the best used bookstores, damn them, know that this as much as anything else will bring me back, again and again and again, with a good excuse or without. It is that confidence in the taste of both their buyers and their customers that makes a great bookstore Powell's. It is knowing to keep E. V. Lucas on the shelf, even marked down twice to just six bucks, that can attract and keep the loyalty of that other regular customer, the one who doesn't need another book, but will always buy more than he or she needs. That is the customer, I'm convinced, along with the kid who can't afford new books, and the old person looking to buy something better remembered than kept, and the reader of sophisticated taste and limited means, who will keep bookstores in business, no matter the convenience of online shopping, machine reading, and the failure of the American educational system.

Somewhere in the world, the other person looking to own The Colvins and Their Friends, by E. V. Lucas, published in New York, by Charles Scribner's Sons, in 1928, in a good, clean copy, will be disappointed to learn that I found it at Powell's for just $5.95... at last. (Not to mention the twelve other books I bought this time.)