by Jerry
I could see through the fancy glass-and-grillwork revolving door at the front of the lobby that it was getting dark and still raining hard. I could also see a taxi sitting out front, and wonder of wonders, it had its light on.
I shot through the lobby, out the revolving door, and into the cab. “Can you get me to 1745 Broadway in ten minutes?” I said, even though I saw now that the reason he’d been sitting there was that traffic was completely gridlocked. “There’s fifty bucks in it for you if you can.”
“You got it,” he said, and maneuvered the cab into a nonexistent right-hand lane, and raced past a truck and down the street, missing a woman with an umbrella by millimeters, and a bicycle messenger by less than that.
When I was able to breathe again, I looked back to try and see where I’d come out and determine how far it was from the bookshop, but we’d already turned the corner and were moving up a side street.
Which one? Sixth Avenue? Seventh? I tried to spot a sign so I’d know which street the bookshop had been on, but the rain was turning into snow, and between that and the darkness, streaked with red and green and orange light, it was impossible to make out what the ones we passed said.
I gave up, texted Brooke to tell Random House I was on my way, but it was going to be close because of the traffic, and then looked up which side of the street it was on so the driver could drop me in front of it and maybe save a couple of minutes, and by the time I’d finished telling him, “It’s on the west side, in the middle,” we were at Ninth Avenue and 55th, a fact I knew because the traffic had slowed to a dead stop right in front of the sign.
Three blocks away. And it was 4:53. I peered out at the sleet, wondering if I should get out and make a run for it, but, based on the pedestrians I saw, I’d freeze before I got there, and the cabbie was already turning into a nonexistent gap and bulling his way up the street.
He pulled up in front of Random House with nanoseconds to spare. I thrust three twenties at him and opened the door.
“You want a recei—?” he began.
“No,” I said, and flung myself out of the taxi, across the wet sidewalk, and into the building. Only to find that the editor was already gone.
“He was able to get a flight out of Newark,” the receptionist told me. “He said to tell you he was sorry about making you come all this way and that he’d text you.” He did. “Sorry to cancel. Had a chance at another flight and thought I’d better take it. Storm’s supposed to get worse. Will reschedule.”
And a couple of minutes later, “Listened to your WMNH interview. Your comments were great. Definitely want to meet with you about doing book.”
And immediately after that, “Especially liked the whole ‘Goodbye and good riddance’ thing. And the fact that books are in no danger of disappearing.”
I’m not sure that’s true, I thought, remembering that deluge of endangered books pouring down the conveyor belt, and was about to text him about it, but he’d already sent, “Have to go. Boarding,” and besides, it would be more impressive to hit him with the whole story of the book preserve and how it worked, so I texted, “Bon voyage,” and then went back out into the sleet, which was rapidly turning into snow, and tried to find a taxi to take me to Fiada’s.
There wasn’t a taxi to be found, and ten minutes later an assistant from Tor called to tell me they were canceling the dinner because of the weather, followed by a call from Harper Collins doing the same thing with the meetup for drinks.
I was just as glad. Getting another taxi seemed to be out of the question, I was freezing, and all I wanted to do was get out of these drenched clothes, get something to eat, and go to bed. Because if I was going to write about Ozymandias’s operation, I needed to go back there first thing tomorrow morning and get Cassie to give me the rest of the tour including those other floors and answer some questions. Like, how had they managed to get the smell of smoke out of those books? And what precautions had they taken to make sure they didn’t become the next Wheeler Field?
If they hadn’t already. There were tons of stories on the news about flooded basements and ruined merchandise, including one about a designer shoe store’s basement full of floating Ferragamos and Jimmy Choos.
There wasn’t anything about Ozymandias Books, but the shoe store was on 48th. They could very well be in the same block. Which reminded me, I needed to find out the bookshop’s address. Between the rain and talking to the cabbie and checking the time, I had no idea what street it was on.
I typed the name into my GPS app, hoping I wouldn’t need an address for it, but it didn’t work, and trying the same thing on MapQuest and Google Maps didn’t either. And all googling “Ozymandias Books” brought up was a headshop in Boulder, Colorado, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem about a traveler in the desert who stumbles onto a monument to some forgotten pharaoh that has an inscription that says, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” even though whatever “works” he’d had have long since disappeared.
Just like Ozymandias Books seemed to have done. I changed the search to “Ozymandias Bookstore.”
That got me a bunch of bookstores that had copies of Ozymandias and Other Poems and Shelley’s Complete Works for sale and a coffee-shop/used books-and-records/internet cafe in Dubuque. I refined the search to “Ozymandias Bookstore Manhattan.”
That kicked up two bookstores in Manhattan, Kansas, and a book about the Manhattan Project. I changed Manhattan to NYC and got a list of thirty bookstores, including five Barnes and Nobles and the just-closed Elliott’s, but not Ozymandias Books.
come on, the address had to be listed somewhere. I didn’t have time to walk all over Manhattan looking for it. Come on, the address had to be listed somewhere. I didn’t have time to walk all over Manhattan looking for it. I googled “NYC bookshops,”
“NYC used books,” and “NYC used bookstores” and then remembered Cassie’s saying “We’re not a bookstore,” and tried “book preserve” and, even though she’d said it wasn’t a library, “NY libraries.”
That brought up a photo of the 1911 Albany Capitol fire, which made me wonder all over again how they’d gotten the books out—flames shot from every window in the old Victorian building.
There was no listing for Ozymandias’s under “archive” either, and I eventually gave up and went to bed.
In the morning I tried “book storage” and “book depository” (which brought up the Kennedy assassination), and “rare books,” with no results, and then had an idea. Maybe there was a phone book in my room, even though it was one of the things I’d posted about as going the way of the dodo, and I could find Ozymandias in it.
There wasn’t, and the person at the desk downstairs didn’t even know what a phone book was. “There’s an Apple store in Times Square,” she suggested tentatively. “They might have a book on phones, I guess.”
I tried to explain what a phone book was and why I needed it.
“Can’t you just look up the address on your phone?” she said.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, and since it looked like the rain had more or less stopped, went out to see if I could find the place on foot.
I had a general idea of the bookshop’s location—somewhere in the upper Forties or low Fifties between Madison Avenue and Broadway, which was only an area of twenty blocks, and I could eliminate some of them right off the bat. Obviously Ozymandias’s hadn’t been on the same block as Grand Central Station or 30 Rock, or I’d have noticed.
And I’d be able to eliminate others by what I remembered of the street Ozymandias’s was on. It had been in the middle of the block, in a recessed doorway, and there’d been a deli in the same block and a souvenir shop—and maybe a florist’s? or a nail salon? and somewhere in there some hoardings where they were repairing one of the buildings, all of which should make my job easier.
That’s what I thought. It only took me half an hour to realize what I told you at the beginning, that all of Manhattan’s streets have delis and scaffolding
and souvenir shops and that all of them look exactly alike.
The taxi driver who’d taken me to Random House. He might remember where he’d picked me up. But I had no idea what the taxi’s number was, and I’d paid cash and jumped out the minute we got there, so I didn’t have a receipt either, and I only vaguely remembered what the driver had looked like. He’d had an accent, but I had a feeling that in New York that wasn’t going to be enough to narrow it down.
I did remember what the fare had been—six-eighty. I hailed a cab, got in, and asked the driver, “If the destination was Fifty-seventh and Broadway, and the fare was six-eighty, how many blocks would you have taken me?”
He had an accent, too. “Are you saying I cheat my customers?” he said, and ordered me out.
“Wait,” I said. “Do you know what street Ozymandias Books is on?”
“Out. Before I call 911.”
I got out, and went back to walking the blocks again, going up and down them till they blurred into an endless stream of pizzerias and shoe repairs and Starbucks, and I had no idea which blocks I’d checked and which I hadn’t. Or what damned street I was on.
It was like when I’d gotten lost in Ozymandias’s stacks looking for the bookburning section, with no idea of how to get back to where I’d been or even where I was, and every aisle of books looking exactly like every other.
I went back to the souvenir shop I’d just passed, bought a tourist map and a pen shaped like the Empire State Building (the only kind they had) and tried again, this time crossing each block off on the map as I finished walking it, and marking each corner deli, each souvenir shop. I found lots of them and lots of scaffolding, but no Ozymandias Books.
Maybe it was in one of those blocks I’d previously eliminated. It had, after all, been raining, and I’d been focused on finding shelter, not on my surroundings. I walked up to Rockefeller Center, but one look at the skating rink and that giant gold statue of whatever it is convinced me I couldn’t have not noticed it, even in a deluge.
That meant it wasn’t in the blocks I’d mapped out and I must have walked farther north after that interview than I’d realized. I expanded the search up to Fifty-Third Street, which took me the rest of the day, and the next morning enlarged it farther, over to Park Avenue.
Still nothing. Could it have been farther south? I expanded the grid again, down to Thirty-Eighth Street and then Thirty-Fourth.
Maybe there’ll be another miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, I thought, and Ozymandias’s’ll be there, right next door to Macy’s.
But the only thing next door to Macy’s was a Victoria’s Secret and then the Empire State Building, and when I stepped out into the street to try to see what was in the next block down from that, I was nearly hit by a cab.
That gave me an idea. Just because the taxi driver hadn’t known where Ozymandias’s Books was (or wouldn’t tell me), it didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t. I went back up to Forty-Fifth and started walking the blocks I’d originally checked, this time stopping in every coffee shop and bar and barber shop I came to and asking them if they knew where Ozymandias Books was and/or if they knew of a bookstore in this neighborhood.
I got answers ranging from “Never heard of it,” to “There used to be a bookstore over on Eighth Avenue, but it closed last year,” to “No bookstores in this part of town. The rents are too steep.”
It was getting dark. I’d only covered about a third of the territory I’d mapped out to ask people in, but I was dog-tired. I took a taxi back to the hotel, watching the meter and trying to calculate the price per block, still hoping to locate Ozymandias’s that way, but no dice—the fare was based on time, not distance, and when I got back to the hotel, I got a text from Brooke wanting me to call her. I hoped it didn’t mean the Random House guy was coming back sooner than expected.
It didn’t, but it was almost as bad. She’d set up a bunch of interviews and meetings for me for the next few days.
“No,” I said. “You need to cancel them.”
“They won’t be like the WMNH interview, I promise.”
“That’s not it. It’s that I don’t have time. I’m too busy to do any interviews or meetings.”
“Busy? Doing what?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, hung up, found a hotel on Forty-Eighth so I’d be closer to the search area (and so Brooke couldn’t come over and drag me off to meetings), moved my stuff over to it, and got on Google Earth, wondering why I hadn’t thought of that before.
It rapidly became apparent. Because it was designed for finding a particular address and zeroing in on it, not scanning whole streets, and the resolution wasn’t good enough to always make out the numbers above the doors, particularly on the office buildings.
Office buildings. Maybe that’s what I should be looking for, since I was having so much trouble finding the bookstore. When I’d come up, it had been into an old-fashioned office-building lobby with a revolving door. If I could find it, I could simply take the elevator down to the stacks. Plus, it had to have been only a few doors down, a block at the most, from the bookshop entrance. Using it as a point to orient myself by, I could find Ozymandias’s itself.
Except I couldn’t find the damned lobby either. I spent I don’t know how many days looking for it with no luck. It wasn’t that there weren’t any revolving doors or lobbies. There were scores of them, a lot with the marble walls and old-fashioned brass grillwork I remembered, but not the one I’d raced through to get to my taxi.
I tried their elevators anyway, but they only went down one or two levels and opened onto cobwebby furnaces or suspicious building supers. Or both.
You’re going to have to try something else, I told myself when I got back to my hotel after a particularly frustrating day. But what? I supposed I could ask Brooke if she knew where Ozymandias Books was. She was a native New Yorker. But if I called her, she’d demand to know why I’d been ignoring all her messages and texts, and I was afraid she’d start talking about meetings and interviews again, and I didn’t have time for that.
And if I called the WMNH interview guy, he’d go off on a rant about the death of the independent bookstore.
I was on my own here. I supposed in the morning I could expand the search area again—or the kinds of lobbies to look at. I’d been in a tearing hurry to get to my appointment that night and hadn’t really gotten a good look at the lobby—or the door. Maybe I’d been wrong about it having been a revolving door.
But I couldn’t do either of those till morning. Till then, I decided to call up that list of New York City bookstores I’d found earlier and ask the ones that were still open if they’d heard of Ozymandias Books. I figured if anybody’d be likely to know where it was, they would.
But they didn’t, and, halfway through the list, I realized I was going about this all wrong. The books were the way to find it. If the ones on Ozymandias’s shelves really were among the last copies in the world, then googling their titles would lead me there, as the only place they could be found. I typed in Ambush in Apache Canyon.
Three items came up—a Wikipedia entry that turned out to be one of those space holders for an unwritten entry, a blog post by someone else who’d read the book when he was a kid and wanted to buy a copy, which ended, “If anybody knows where I can purchase one, I’d be willing to pay top dollar. I can’t find one anywhere!” and a listing on Amazon.
I’d thought Cassie had said they weren’t a bookstore, and this might be some other copy and she was exaggerating how rare their books were, but it was worth a try. I clicked on it.
But all it showed under “Copies Available” was a dash, which meant they didn’t actually have the book, and when I tried AbeBooks, it said, “No exact match. Do you care to expand your search?”
No, that was the last thing I wanted. The whole point was to narrow it down, not make it broader. I tried looking for the book on BookFinder and Alibris.
It wasn’t listed on any of them.
Bu
t Cassie had said it had just come in recently. Maybe they hadn’t had time to list it. I needed to try some other title. If I could remember one. There’d been a Vagabond Boys Going Somewhere Or Other, but I had no idea where, and a Grace Harlowe at Some College or Other. And The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood. I tried that.
Nothing. “No longer in print,” the online bookstores read, and “Unavailable,” and when I checked Project Gutenberg and Google Books, it wasn’t there either.
Why not? If Ozymandias was an archive like Cassie said, why hadn’t the books they had been digitized? What good was it to save all those books if you weren’t going to make them available to scholars?
Maybe it was just that scholars weren’t interested in preserving The Dionne Quintuplets or Ambush in Apache Canyon. I needed to come up with a more important book—or author.
There’d been a Shakespeare—what was its name?—and a Poe and a Melville, but I needed exact titles.
I stared at the laptop screen, trying to remember the books in those first shelves by the baggage chute. But Cassie’d said those hadn’t been catalogued yet, so they probably wouldn’t have made it online either, and neither would the ones in the bookshop. Or on the stairs. It was going to have to be something in the Floods section. Or in War.
Eventually, after several hours of trying to remember, I managed to come up with half a dozen titles: Marooned on Saturn, New Theories of the Atom, Visitations from Beyond the Veil, Tommy Toad’s Birthday Surprise, Dirigibles: Our Future, and Noah’s Ark on Ararat, the one that had been rescued from the Yancey Creek Carnegie Library flood.
But I didn’t have any luck with them either, and when I googled Following in the Master’s Footsteps, it didn’t bring up anything at all, not even a dash on Amazon.
Jesus, the WMNH interview guy was right, I thought. Things do disappear into the ether.
I needed the name of a book that would be listed more than one place, one whose endangered state would cause an outcry, and not The Vagabond Boys in Bryce Canyon, whose name I’d just remembered. Its demise would hardly have been seen as a literary crisis.
