First, if you’ve never read Christopher Moore and you enjoy books that make you laugh, you’re seriously missing out. I read Fool for the first time a few months ago, and if I wasn’t laughing, I was at least smiling. I didn’t even care about making the faces while reading it in public because it was so good that part of me hoped someone would ask me about the book. I’d had a copy of it sitting on my shelf forever and just hadn’t gotten around to reading it until this year. I have a plethora of unread books on my shelves, though, so that’s nothing unusual. Part of my reading goal for the year is to not read books that I’ve already read. I got into a strange habit the last couple of years where I just kept re-reading many of the same books over and over. I did read a few new ones, but not as many as I would have liked. So this year I decided to make more of an effort to read new material.
To that end, I had something wonderful happen to me the other day, and it involves a book. A few months ago, shortly after reading Fool, I was perusing the sale shelves near the front of my local Barnes and Noble, just to see what was there, and I saw one or two books that I thought I might like to take home. Both were hardback editions with dust jackets, appearing to be completely ordinary books one expects to find at a popular book retailer. One of those books was The Serpent of Venice, a continuation of Moore’s Fool. Just about the only way I will pay for a hardback book is if it’s cheaper than a paperback copy, or, less often, if I just can’t wait until the book is re-released as a paperback. This particular copy of The Serpent of Venice fell nicely into that proviso, so I snapped it up and took it home, where it has been resting, along with the other volumes I purchased that day, on my bookshelves.
So on Thursday, I decided I wanted to read The Serpent of Venice. I climbed into bed and put out all the lights except for my bedside lamp, removed the dust jacket, and opened the book. I can’t stand to have a hardback book with a ratty, bedraggled dust jacket, so I always take it off the book and leave it safely on my shelf until I’m finished reading the book. But once I removed this particular cover, I noticed immediately that this book was in excellent condition, even better than the usual condition of new books. Unlike my copy of Fool, this book’s pages were edged in royal blue to match the covers. Inside the cover, the end pages displayed a lovely reproduction woodcut of Venice. And as I was flipping through to Chapter One, I saw that some of the words had been printed in red ink, and on the title page was a large, scrawling scratch of blue ink. An author’s signature! Unusual for a hardback book that I bought off the sale shelf at a large chain retailer to be signed, but I suppose it wasn’t too far out of the ordinary. I shrugged it off and began to read.
To some people, a book is just a book, unless you are an enthusiast. Whether it is a hardback, paperback, or an e-book makes little difference to them. Similar to someone who is into cars, it might be easy for non-lovers of the subject to see the differences between a low-end, mid-range and a high-end product, but less easy to appreciate those differences. I can look at an Aston Martin and see that it’s far nicer than a Ford Focus, but if you start talking to me about torque and drive shafts and suspensions, I will probably have the same glazed look that non-book-lovers get when I talk about foreshadowing and the complexity of anti-villains. Like someone who loves cars, I notice the little things about a book, like the quality of the paper, the binding style, the strength of the glue on the spine, how easily it opens, etc.
This book was no Ford Focus. Senses tingling, I turned to the copyright page, just to check and see. And there, in tiny letters about halfway down, were the words every bibliophile secretly dreams of reading: FIRST EDITION. My breath left me in a surprised whoosh. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I managed to pick up a signed first edition book hidden inside a regular edition dust jacket on the sale rack at Barnes and Noble. Normally I hate surprises, but I’m more than happy to make an exception for this one.
The sheer improbability of this book winding up on my bookshelf struck me, and it got me wondering about the lives of books. I don’t know about you, but when I travel, I take at least one book with me, and when I reach my destination, I usually buy one or two more from the local bookstore. I would say that it’s because I want to support the book industry, which is true, but there’s a secret mission underneath that. It all started when I bought a book at a street fair that had its dust jacket covered in the crinkly plastic you only find on library books. This cover had been permanently affixed to the book itself, and in between the original dust jacket and the plastic was a little green slip that said “THIS BOOK IS FROM THE ARLINGTON HEIGHTS MEMORIAL LIBRARY” and proceeded to list the library’s address. The book had somehow made it all the way to Alabama from a library in the Midwest, and then onto my bookshelf. Who’d brought it out of the library that last time? Did the library decide to sell the book to a warehouse dealer? Had anyone else owned it after the library and before I discovered it?
Until I got to college, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as buying books secondhand. There were no secondhand stores near me, and my parents certainly didn’t take me shopping for books often enough for them to be aware of the local book buying scene. No, that was a love all my own. My father may have introduced me to the notion of reading for pleasure, but I took it and ran. So when I started having to order textbooks and realized that you could buy used ones and sell yours back when you were done with the class, it was like discovering a new moon orbiting Earth.
Since learning that books travel much the same way that some people do, getting in a car or on a plane and arriving at a whole new location before dinnertime, I’ve been making it a point to go to a local bookstore in every city that I visit and take at least one book home with me. I have some books from Oklahoma City from the time I went on a road trip to Arizona, and many others from up and down the East Coast, some used, some new. I frequently purchase books on Amazon and Alibris, and there’s no telling where most of those books started out. Once, I walked into a used bookstore and wound up having a conversation with the store owner, and he let me hold a book that was 900 years old. That was a pretty amazing moment for me. Nearly a millennium on this earth, bouncing between how many hands and how many different countries and continents, and somehow that little bundle of vellum and goat skin rested briefly in my palms.
Last week, a girl from the hospital where I work left her job to go and teach English and work as a missionary overseas for a year. We worked in different parts of the hospital, so I didn’t see her all that often, and we weren’t particularly close. But she’d noticed a book I’d been reading, and so I told her about it. She seemed intrigued, and the few times I saw her after that, I asked if she’d read the book yet. Each time she told me she hadn’t gotten it from the library yet, but that she was excited to read it. So when I found out that she was leaving the country, I decided to give her a going away present. I gave her my used paperback copy of the book, which I had bought some time in high school, and now it’s probably on its way with her to Taiwan. It’s kind of cool to think about contributing a book that used to sit on my shelf, one I never thought I’d part with at that, to someone else and her journey, both literally and figuratively.
So that’s my idle pondering for this blog: that books are more than the stories in between their covers. They also possess stories of their own, given to them by the people who pick them up, carry them around, and set them down. Like the proverbial fly on the wall, they hear our conversations and see us walk through the living room in our underwear to get a glass of water before bed, but they never tell a soul. However that stray signed first edition of The Serpent of Venice wound up inside that regular edition dust jacket and onto a sale shelf, I’ll probably never know, but it’s in my possession now. And whatever warehouse my old paperback copy of The Eyre Affair came from before I bought it back in high school, it’s on its way to Taiwan with a new owner now.
May the travelling page-turners be with you.
Thalia Huntley 