A Passion for Books Read online

  My next good genie and an important influence in my life was a short, bald gentleman with horn-rimmed spectacles who stood uncertainly in the doorway and asked, “Where’s the shop?”

  He was Ben Kartman, then associate editor of Coronet magazine, a man as kind and thoughtful as he is witty and urbane. He came in and looked around, studied the empty shelves, and shook his head. He shook his head often that afternoon. He wondered if I was seriously trying to be a bookseller—or was I just a dreamer with a hideout?

  Surely I wanted to survive, didn’t I? Surely I wanted to sell books. Well, in that case, he assured me, I was going about it all wrong. For one thing, I had no sign. For another, I had no books in the windows. And most important of all, I had no stock. How can you do business without inventory? You can’t sell apples out of an empty barrel.

  I took all his comments without a sound.

  Then Ben said, “Sunday, come out to the house. I’ve got a lot of review copies as well as old but saleable books. Even if you don’t sell them, put them on the shelves. The store will look more prosperous.”

  He gave me several hundred books from his library, which we hauled to the store in his car. The Seven Stairs began to look like a real bookshop.

  Ben Kartman also decided that I needed publicity. Not long afterward, my name appeared in a daily gossip column in one of the Chicago newspapers. Ben said that these daily puffers could be important to me, and this proved to be the case.

  Meshing with my association with Kartman was another significant influence—a man who certainly altered my life and might have changed it still more had he lived. He was Ric Riccardo, owner of a famous restaurant a quarter of a mile down the street from my shop and one of the most extraordinary and magnetic personalities I have ever encountered. He was an accomplished artist, but it was his fire, his avid love of life, his utterly unfettered speech and manner, his infatuation both with physical being and ideas that drew the famous and the somewhat famous and the plain hangers-on constantly to his presence. He is the only great romantic character I have known.

  He first came into my store one day before Christmas. He wore a Cossack fur hat and a coat with a huge mink collar and held a pair of Great Danes on a leash. He had the physique of Ezio Pinza and the profile (not to mention more than a hint of the bags beneath the eyes) of his friend the late John Barrymore. He was tremendous. He told me all he wanted was some light reading to get his mind off his troubles.

  Later when Riccardo and the Danes entered the shop, virtually filling it, I would stand on a chair to converse with him. He was very tall, and it gave me a better chance to observe him. Although his language was often coarse, he shunned small talk or fake expressions. The only time he ever reprimanded me was the day I used the phrase “I’ve got news for you.” As our friendship became firm, I would often join him after closing the store for a bowl of green noodles (still a great specialty of the restaurant, which is now managed by his son).

  Now if, as Ben said, I did everything wrong, there was at least one thing I certainly did not neglect to do. I talked to people. I knew my books, and I knew what I was talking about. Ideas were and are living things to me and objects of total enthusiasm. It hurt me terribly if someone came in and asked for a book without letting me talk with him about it. The whole joy of selling a book was in talking about the ideas in it. It was a matter of sharing my life and my thought and my very bloodstream with others. That was why I had been impelled into this mad venture—unrelated to any practical consideration beyond enthusiasm for the only things that seemed to me to be meaningful. Ric was one of those who responded to this enthusiasm.

  One very cold February morning, a cab stopped outside the shop. I saw two men and a woman get out and come up the stairs. There was a good fire going in the fireplace, and it was quiet and warm inside.

  Ric was the only member of the trio I recognized, although the other man looked at me as though I should know him. But the woman! She wore the longest, most magnificent mink coat I had ever seen, the collar partially turned up about her head. When she spoke I backed away, but she stepped in and extended her hand to me. It was Katharine Hepburn.

  “Oh, yes, that’s Katie,” the unidentified man said, and all of them laughed at my obvious confusion. Miss Hepburn sat on my decorated bench and held out her hands to the fire.

  Ric said, “Stuart, my boy, this is Luther Adler.”

  I was too nervous to say anything as we shook hands.

  I could only keep staring at Katharine Hepburn. I adored her. I loved her accent and those cheekbones and that highly charged voice. I wanted so much to do something for her, but I couldn’t think of anything to do.

  Suddenly Ric said, “Let’s buy some books.”

  Mr. Adler looked about and said, “Do you have a book for a Lost Woman?”

  I said, “Yes,” and handed him a copy of Ferdinand Lundberg’s new book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. He gave it to Miss Hepburn, saying, “Here, Katie, this is for you.”

  Without a pause she turned and said, “Do you have a good book for a Lost Jew?”

  “Yes,” I said, and produced a Sholem Asch volume.

  She gave it to Mr. Adler, saying, “Here, Luther, this is for you.”

  They bought many books that morning, and I was swept away in wonder and exhilaration at the possibility of bringing happiness to Lost Women, Lost Jews, the Beautiful, and the Great, alike in their needs with all of us for the strength and joy of the spirit. It was wonderful—but it was awful when I had to take their money.

  A world very much like that of my dreams began to open up. People came. Authors began to congregate around the fireplace. The shop was visited by newspaper writers like Martha King of the Chicago Sun-Times, who wrote a charming article, for which I was deeply grateful. I was beginning to do business, although still without a cash register. The rent was paid promptly, and McClurg’s permitted me to have a charge account. One or two eastern publishers even let me have some books on open account. And the man from Columbia Records kept dropping by, leading me to believe that they might be thinking about me in spite of their presumed obligations to Lyon and Healy.

  Why did people come, often far out of their way and at considerable inconvenience? I was too busy to reflect upon the matter at the time. There was nothing there but the books and me—and a great deal of talk. But some need must have been filled—by moving people to take notice of themselves, forcing them to think about what they were reading or what they were listening to. We talked a lot of small talk, too, but it was small talk with heart in it. And the effect was contagious. Those who came told others, and they came, too.

  Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

  —HENRY WARD BEECHER, STAR PAPERS (1855)

  © 1988 by Sam Gross, reprinted by permission of Sam Gross.

  Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty or More Times

  Dubliners by James Joyce

  M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker

  Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison by Charles Shaw

  Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

  Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

  The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

  Lorna Doone by Richard Doddridge Blackmore

  Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis

  The Peter Principle by Laurence Peter

  Dune by Frank Herbert

  Lending Books

  BY ANATOLE BROYARD

  A longtime book critic, book review editor, and essayist for The New York Times, Anatole Broyard was also the author or editor of several books himself, including Aroused by Books, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, and Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death. In this piece, which originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review in 1981, Broyard explains the agonies he goes through when asked to lend a book to a friend, noting, “I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.”

  Sum
mer vacation is a time for reading, and my friends come to me to borrow books because I have more than most people. In their innocence, they have no idea what I go through in lending a book. They don’t understand that I think of myself as offering them love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death. Nor do they suspect that I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

  This is not to say that there is no pleasure in lending. Each man has a bit of the evangelist in him, and when a book moves me I want to put it into everyone’s pocket. If such a book were widely read, the world would be a better, lovelier place. But it is not these books that people ask to borrow. How many friends have asked for The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, or Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages?

  A less noble motive for lending books is a simple curiosity to see what will happen, a throwback to the child who makes his toys collide. To press a potent book on someone is like giving a dinner guest a strong drink that may cause him to act either foolish or exalted. Some readers even “pass out” after imbibing such a book: they dismiss the experience because they can’t handle it.

  Occasionally I’m asked, as if I were a doctor, to prescribe a book for a particular condition—for a recently divorced person or one who is suffering from depression. What kind of book a divorced or depressed person might want to read is a nice question: Should it be comforting or a confirmation of their conviction that things fall apart and the center cannot hold? Why doesn’t anyone ask me to suggest a book for someone who has just fallen in love?

  It is irritating to think that others consider reading a leisurely, holiday activity. They enjoy a fling with books while I’m married to them. In their restless promiscuity, they ask only for new books, while I feel that they have no right to the latest Leonard Michaels until they have gone through Chaucer and Rabelais. They are nostalgic about everything but books.

  The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels. Let Baudelaire’s “wing of madness” pass over them like a scavenging seagull.

  There are times when someone will ask for a particular book, and I’ll try to turn them away from it out of a fear that they won’t do it justice.

  Helen Vendler said that I. A. Richards, one of the great poetry critics, was always trying to protect his favorites against the misinterpretations of a careless world. Mallarmé had a severe attitude toward the same issue. He said that “if a person of ordinary intelligence and insufficient literary preparation happens by accident to open one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.”

  Not many of my friends are poor, and thus the question arises: If you truly wish to read this book, if you are serious, why don’t you go out and buy it? Why don’t you make the same offering to literature that you make to other good causes? In Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark’s heroine observes that otherwise worldly people often act as if books were mysteriously difficult to procure. To the doting book lover, the idea of reading a borrowed book is disgusting, an unclean habit akin to voyeurism.

  Occasionally I come across a book so extraordinary that I want to keep the experience to myself. Such a book seems to confer an immense advantage, to make the reader more desirable, witty, or profound than those who have not read it. To lend such a book, to give up such a precious edge in this furiously competitive world, would be foolish. The secrets in a book like this ought to be saved for a rainy day, for an exquisite emergency.

  The moment a book is lent, I begin to miss it. According to T. S. Eliot, each new book that is written alters every previous one. In the same way, each absent book alters those that remain on my shelves. The complexion of my library, the delicate gestalt, is spoiled. My mind goes to the gap as one’s tongue goes to a cavity. My security is breached, my balance tipped, my affections confused, my barricades against chaos diminished. Until the book is returned, I feel like a parent waiting up in the small hours for a teenage son or daughter to come home from the dubious party. In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman’s brother marries a girl as the only way to repossess a book he lent her. Some bibliomaniacs would sooner give away a book than suffer the anxiety of lending it.

  For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails . . . and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

  —ANONYMOUS “CURSE” ON BOOK THIEVES FROM THE MONASTERY OF SAN PEDRO, BARCELONA, SPAIN

  The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony or ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice— but what the borrower usually says is, “I enjoyed it.”

  I enjoyed it—as if that were what books were for.

  On the Return of a Book Lent to a Friend

  BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  I give hearty and humble thanks for the safe return of this book, which having endured the perils of my friend’s bookcase and the bookcases of my friend’s friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition. I give hearty and humble thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant for a plaything, nor use it as an ashtray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff. When I loaned this book, I deemed it as lost; I was resigned to the business of the long parting; I never thought to look upon its pages again. But now that my book has come back to me, I rejoice and am exceedingly glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honor, for this my book was lent and is returned again. Presently, therefore, I may return some of the books I myself have borrowed.

  Welcome Home Borrowed Book

  ANONYMOUS

  I really am obliged to you for bringing back my book,

  It moves me much to look whereon I thought no more to look;

  It reminds me of the early time when it was lent to you,

  When life was young and hope was fair, and this old book was new.

  How well does memory recall the gilt that on it shone

  The day I saw it, coveted, and bought it for my own;

  And vividly I recollect you called around that day,

  Admired it, then borrowed it, and carried it away!

  And now it comes to me again across the lapse of time,

  Wearing the somewhat battered look of those beyond their prime.

  Old book, you need a rest—but ere you’re laid upon the shelf,

  Just try and hang together till I read you through myself.

  I cannot comfortably read a book belonging to another person because I feel all the time afraid of spoiling it.

  —LAFCADIO HEARN

  How to Justify a Private Library

  BY UMBERTO ECO

  Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of the best-selling novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. In the first of these two short essays, both of which appeared in his 1994 collection, How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, Eco deals with the question everyone with a sizable libraryinevitably encounters—“Have you read all these books?” In the second, he vents the frustration he has felt as a user of public and institutionallibraries.

  Generally speaking, from my childhood on, I have been always subjected to two (and only two) kinds of jokes: “You’re the one who always answers” and “You resound in valleys.” All through my early years I believed that, by some strange chance, all the people I met were stupid. Then, having reached maturity, I was forced to conclude that there are two laws no human being can escape
: the first idea that comes into a person’s mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.

  I possess a collection of review headlines, in all the languages of the Indo-European family, going all the way from “The Echo of Eco” to “A Book with Echoes.” In the latter case I suspect the printed headline wasn’t the first idea that came into the subeditor’s mind. What probably happened was this: The editorial staff met, they debated some twenty possible titles, and finally the managing editor’s face lighted up and he said, “Hey, guys, I’ve had a fantastic idea!” And the others responded, “Boss, you’re a devil! Where do you get them?” “It’s a gift,” he must have replied.

  I’m not saying people are banal. Taking as divine inspiration, as a flash of originality, something that is obvious reveals a certain freshness of spirit, an enthusiasm for life and its unpredictability, a love of ideas—small as they may be. I will always remember my first meeting with that great man Erving Goffman, whom I admired and loved for the genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitesimal aspects of behavior that had previously eluded everyone else. We were sitting at an outdoor café when, looking at the street after a while, he said, “You know something? I believe there are too many automobiles in circulation in our cities.” Maybe he had never thought this before because he had had far more important things to think about; he had just had a sudden epiphany and still had the mental freshness to express it. I, a little snob infected by the Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen of Nietzsche, would have hesitated to say it, even if I thought it.

  A second shock of banality occurs to many people in my condition—that is, people who possess a fairly sizable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can’t help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place). The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books, people accustomed to seeing a couple of shelves with five paperback mysteries and a children’s encyclopedia bought in installments. But experience has taught me that the same words can be uttered also by people above suspicion. It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already read books and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.