I Frighten Myself

We had a meeting this week; a presentation of new titles by one of our favorite publishers' reps. It's something that happens in Independent Bookstores of a certain size, something unique to the business that I've always appreciated.  An hour or so is set aside so that those of us who work on the sales floor but aren't buyers may hear about the newest titles and get advance-readers-copies, or "ARCs" as they've known in the business, of any that might interest us. We all get to hear what the buyers hear, and even the buyers get to hear about the books that may not have been sold to them.  It's an interaction, or meant to be, rather than just a lecture or a presentation in the more usual, business sense.  It's always good to hear about new books, and to talk about new books with one another and with the people who know more about the new ones than we might otherwise.  Moreover, publishers' representatives -- that vanishing breed -- the good ones anyway, actually want to hear what booksellers may have to say about the books we will be selling.  The publishers, the good ones anyway, still want to hear from us as well, believe it or not.  It is one of the essential relationships in the business of selling books.  We need one another, perhaps now more than ever.  It's good to work in a place where this necessity is understood, where these conversations are respected and regularly scheduled as part of what it is we are all still trying to do.  What that is, what that has always been, is to sell books, yes, but on a less immediately practical level, and hopefully without drifting off into the mystical, what we do as booksellers, reps and publishers is to make the connection between books and readers.

There's an assumption here that has recently been challenged, one that I can't help but think we may too often have assumed was shared by more people than might still be true, if it ever was.  What we still do for a living as booksellers, those of us lucky enough to still be booksellers, the way we do it and why, is predicated on the idea -- call it a conviction -- first that books matter to everyone, and more, that our job is to see that anyone who wants them, and can afford so much as a used paperback copy, should be able to find the books they need and own them.  More than one assumption there, I see.  Unpacking them is, I think part of the job now, so let me try.

Books matter because there is nothing still, and here I include the Internet, higher education, television and any and all other mediums of instruction, entertainment and formal communication that have ever been or are likely ever to be more efficient at conveying from one human being to another not only all that might be said, but said better.  That is what books do.  That, to my admittedly conservative mind, is what, in our enthusiasm for the new, we might be forgetting.  Music moves us more effectively, drama may be more immediate, pictures, according to the cliche may indeed be worth a thousand words.  Words still matter more, books still matter more, or should, if we have any sense at all.  It remains to be seen if all the wonders of the new technology will be able give us, as promised, unfettered access to all these things, not just to entertainment and information, but to the whole history of human endeavor and achievement.  (Living in a Capitalist system, as most of us now do, and with recent developments in policy in Washington and elsewhere surrounding these issues, I think I might be forgiven some doubt regarding this potential Utopia -- even as I still hold some hope that we won't fuck it all up in pursuit of immediate financial gain rather than the larger good.  But then, not being much interested in money or having much myself, I have little enough reason to see the one as being much the same as the other.  Others, some of them on the Supreme Court of the United States, obviously make no such distinction and believe that money is speech, the market is always the best arbiter of the good, and that this is, if we would only let God see to the details, the best of all possible worlds.  I have no such faith, I'm afraid, in God, the system or the FCC.  Again, old fashioned, that's me.)  I would point out just here that it was in a book that I first read about things like capitalism, art and philosophy, among other things, and it was in a book by Voltaire that I first learned to distrust philosophers.  For the time being then, in my lifetime anyway, I still believe that books are necessary, if for no other reason, because it is only in books that I learned to be suspicious of any system, politician, expert or technology that suggests we might do as easily without them.

As I still like to eat all too regularly, among other practical considerations, I am in a small way a participant in the business of business.  Whatever my traditionally liberal opinions and any intellectual pretensions I may have to occasionally understanding what is always being so reverently called the bigger economic picture, I am not myself averse to making money, money with which, I blush to say, I would probably just buy more books.  Despite then an admittedly sentimental attachment to some of the higher ideals of socialism, I believe absolutely in not just reading books, but owning them.  As someone who buys and sells used books for a living, I know I am not to be the last person to own most of the books I have.  I would hope I will not be the last person to read some of 'em either.   Owning books is not necessary to appreciating them, I know, but it helps.  It helps, I believe in more ways than we might still admit or understand at this moment when we would seem to be so eager collectively, in the name of efficiency and the new, to divest ourselves of what we've come to call so dismissively and reductively as "paper-books."  It would behoove us to remember that these very objects, these bound pages of paper and ink, have been not only the collective record, but also the single greatest achievement of human culture.  Nothing produced in the whole history of our species has done more to facilitate the communication of ideas across time and space, offered greater access to a greater number what is best in us, or better kept the history of our kind.  Short of actually memorizing the text, to own one's own Candide is to have him always with us; Candide and Cunegonde, Pangloss, and yes, Voltaire.

It may be that Candide, the indestructible Candide, could survive even the death of the book, that Voltaire's satire, Voltaire's ideas, that the memory of Voltaire himself might survive even into an entirely digital age, the possibility of which the philosopher never conceived.  For all I know, he might think better of such a future than I do facing such a possibility. Were he to find himself magically transported into such a future, as a true man of Science, a title to which I do not so much as aspire, and a genius, Voltaire would at the very least I suppose be fascinated by the possibilities.  I have my doubts though as to how readily such a future might recognize him should he turn up.

Because, one of the things that has already happened in my lifetime has been the curious, not to say terrifying indifference with which we have come to accept the substitution of preference to permanence as the standard by which we judge of the value of not only art but ideas, the ease with which we let slip our attachment to good, better, best in the gratification of our own sense of individual worth.  In an age in which we might read anything, or nothing but text-messages, email and tweets, does it matter, I would ask, that supposedly all the books ever written may one day be available at the touch of a screen or the click of a mouse, if there's no one left, no one we might trust anyway, to tell us what we might better read, what might be better written, better said?

Who's to do that if what I say in a blog-post to a dozen readers is not only as accessible but no more "privileged" --  a usage of that word I have come to despise -- than what Voltaire first published in 1759?  If the obvious answer to that question is to be only our teachers, how then are we to trust a culture where that category of person, already underpaid, increasingly themselves ill-educated in only the pernicious practice of standardized examinations and now much more maligned as a class than at any time I personally can remember, are the only arbiters left between us and our literature?  If criticism is to be reduced to only an academic vocation and "reader reviews," some of them we already know to be the product of anonymous flacks, and all opinion made equal, who's to tell the adult reader that she might do better than to keep reading juvenile fantasy, that there are more complex and more beautiful experiences yet to be had in books, better ideas, better novels, better reading?  Who's to recommend and champion the best new writers, preserve and promote the best old books?  How is anybody to know what great books there are if there's nowhere to see them but in uniformly ugly html?  If the conversation about books is reduced to the inanity of a fan-chat on Reddit, "the front page of the Internet," how will anyone but specialists ever again come to read Zadig unless it is assigned them for extra credit, or Voltaire's history, his essays, his wonderful letters?

I don't make too much of what booksellers do.  What we contribute to the culture is, by weight of influence no great measure.  It is no small thing however to contemplate a world without us, without independent bookstores, without books.  Ours is a kind of conversation that seems to me necessary, even if I am not individually.  As with librarians, and school teachers, we may have more influence individually than we know; witness the example of my friend and fellow bookseller Nick, who is now, after more than forty years in the bookstore, meeting not just the second but even the third generation of students who will read a book for the first time, most memorably, and only because Nick put a paperback into their hands and talked to them until they found they could not but read it.  The larger question is what are we to do without if we decide we don't need the recommendations of booksellers like Nick, if we don't need professional reviews and critics, editors, publishers and publishers' reps and all the conversations, unseen most of them by the general public, that are required to bring a book from the writer to the reader?  Are we meant to just trust to one retailer of all things?  To read only what we happen across online, or what we already read?  Is the very act of reading a book to become a specialized recreation, like train-spotting or dressing up like super heroes, or recreating the battles of the American Civil War; something done by eccentrics, or "nerds" at conventions and the weekend?

Absurd questions, asked in the confidence that they will be seen as such by anyone -- bless you -- willing to have read so far in this ramble through my personal insecurities and terrors.  I frighten only myself, I should think.  Call this yelp just my own small voice raised in defense not just of my livelihood, and of books, but of the conversation, all the conversations necessary to not just make but equally important to find books.

I recently learned about some new ones, good ones, if you're interested.  And then, there's always Voltaire.

He once famously said, “The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”  

True.  I'll try to remember that.  Gives me hope, come these dark nights.