That particular Friday I first zoomed in on a couple of the bookcases where one finds slightly shabby titles from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Straight off, I noticed an American first of Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Gerard, priced on the flyleaf at $6. This would be less forty per cent in cash, or less twenty-five per cent if using credit. As a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and the author of a little volume called On Conan Doyle, I tend to check out anything relating to Sherlock Holmes or his creator. But I left this book: the binding was loose and the covers stained. Besides, I already owned Adventures of Gerard in both the American and English editions. Had it been a prettier copy, though, I would have bought it to add to my stash of favourites I like to give as presents.
A truly responsible collector would carry a list of his wants or even a tablet computer containing a bibliographical database of everything he owns. I disdain such librarianship. I know, more or less, what books I possess, with a fairly accurate idea of their condition. Most are hardcovers, and usually, though not exclusively, first editions. What matters to me is that the fiction be of the period of its initial publication and that secondary texts—author biographies, collections of essays, scholarly commentaries—be the best of their kind. Given my druthers, I prefer pages displaying a reasonably large type font on reasonably good paper. A dust jacket is welcome but not compulsory, since I confess to an ineradicable fondness for worn book cloth and elaborately decorated bindings.
That Friday, I gathered in relatively short order a small selection from the warehouse’s regular shelves: T.H. White’s Book of Beasts in a jacket, Edgar Wallace’s The Just Men of Cordova—to round out my set of the Just Men adventures—and an omnibus of three Elizabeth Daly mysteries, two of them featuring her rare book expert Henry Gamadge. In the store’s “Books on Books” section, I picked up Printing and the Mind of Man: Catalogue of the Exhibitions at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16–27 July 1963. Those two complementary shows, organized by the legendary bookmen John Carter, Stanley Morison and Percy Muir, highlighted not only key titles in the history of civilization—many items lent by Ian Fleming from his personal library—but also the tools and equipment used to print them. While I own the later, oversized hardcover of PMM, the original guide to the exhibitions seemed attractive on its own and worth $8, less discount. A collector should always trust his or her instincts. As I later discovered, however, the catalogue isn’t particularly scarce or valuable. Still, if I hadn’t seen it physically in front of me, I might never have known of its existence—still another reason to support your local bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
With noon now fast approaching, I finally decided to transfer scouting operations to the adjoining sale annexe. What if the snow started early? In this area of the warehouse the double-and triple-shelved bargain books aren’t categorized. Occasionally one runs across a cluster of works devoted to, say, pirates, or rows of Judaica, or even entire bookcases filled with ponderous tomes in German. Otherwise, it’s a matter of simply scanning every title. To assist my aged eyes, I always carry a little flashlight to illuminate darkened spines on shadowy lower shelves.
On one of these last I noticed two dozen volumes of the English Men of Letters series, matching thin maroon volumes from the late nineteenth century. Some were firsts, some not. I went through them all and kept four, largely because of the author rather than the subject: Mark Pattison on Milton, John Addington Symonds on Shelley, R.C. Jebb on Richard Bentley, and Anthony Trollope on Thackeray. Part of me now feels I should have taken the lot. Having long ago read the Jebb and Trollope, I know those volumes are special—an important classicist on the greatest of all classicists, a major novelist on the master he most revered—while the others are largely examples of outmoded Victorian scholarship. Still, the set did look so pretty en masse…
By the time the snow actually began to fall, I’d made quite a pile of $2 books, all of them in jackets: Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by William Phillips, Augustus John’s memoir Chiaroscuro, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Boy’s Book of the Sea, Peter Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire (still another approach to the “Great Game” in Central Asia), W.M. Spackman’s An Armful of Warm Girl, a short novel as eccentrically original in its style as in its brilliant title, and The Second Cuckoo, a compendium of cranky and funny letters to The Times which I couldn’t pass up since The First Cuckoo already reposed on my night stand. As for The God That Failed, the once famous book in which Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer (who he?) and Stephen Spender “confess” why they joined, then left the Communist Party, that surely was worth the price of a small Starbucks coffee. Finally, just as I was about to hurry home, I plucked forth a yellow-jacketed book that turned out to be Philip Larkin’s Jill, published by the Overlook Press in 1976. Despite the late date, it’s actually the first American edition and was in quite good nick. Larry McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City wanted $300 for a comparable copy.
While Second Story’s warehouse is certainly a treasure house, I would be remiss not to mention an even more Aladdin-like cave of wonders an hour west of Washington. Wonder Book and Video comprises three Maryland stores owned by Chuck Roberts—in Frederick, Hagerstown and Gaithersburg—and a behemoth warehouse and mailing depot the size of a football field. You could fit half a dozen Second Story Warehouses inside. Only friends and special customers are generally allowed in, however. On my all too rare visits, I like best to pick through the several rooms of spillover “vintage” material. I once found two odd volumes from the New English Dictionary, as the Oxford English Dictionary was called when it was first being issued in parts. They were, as I happened to remember, just the two volumes lacking from my friend John Clute’s broken set, bought by him in London forty years earlier. I had Chuck ship them the next day.
It was the least I could do. After all, it was Clute who introduced me to the most exhilarating booking I’ve ever known, judging on a volume-per-minute basis. On misty Saturday mornings in 1980s London, all the city’s runners and a few mad collectors would congregate around the canvas-covered book barrows on Farringdon Road. When George Jeffery, with a flourish, pulled away the tarp from one of his trestles at 9 a.m., the table would be swept bare in twenty seconds or less. On my first visit, a novice among the professionals, I nonetheless scored two bound volumes of the Strand magazine containing the first six Sherlock Holmes adventures. They set me back all of fifty pence each.
If I’m not mistaken, I now seem to be growing distinctly garrulous, as book collectors often do when they start to reminisce. Instead, let me end where I began. When I got home from Second Story that wintry Friday, the snowstorm had begun in earnest. I ate some of the home-made chicken soup my wife had left me, then sat back in a chair with a glass of wine and watched the thickly falling flakes. I felt serene, wonderfully at peace. Still, that quiet contentment, I knew, wouldn’t last for long. Once the snow cleared, it would be time to check out the Friends of the Montgomery County Library Bookstore in nearby Wheaton. Who knows what might show up there? Why, once I found an almost mint copy of… But I really should tell you about it some other time.
Dussmann:
A Conversation
DANIEL KEHLMANN
FIRST MAN: Can we talk about the book trade?
SECOND MAN: Do we have to?
FIRST MAN: I’m afraid so. We’re writers, after all. And we’re readers too. We live off it, in many respects.
SECOND MAN: Theoretically.
FIRST MAN: What do you mean theoretically—we live off the sales of books!
SECOND MAN: Not necessarily. I live off giving readings and talks. Also teaching sometimes. I teach people who want to write books how to write books that sell so well that you can live off them. I do that because my books don’t sell so well that I can live off them.
FIRST MAN: If the bookshops were better, you could live off them.
SECOND MAN: It’s nice of you not to say that I could do it if my books w
ere better. But the bookshops aren’t to blame, they really aren’t. Not the big ones, not the small ones.
FIRST MAN: I love the really small bookshops.
SECOND MAN: Oh, me too.
FIRST MAN: The tiny shops where the owner speaks to each customer personally, full of passion and a sense of mission.
SECOND MAN: Fabulous.
FIRST MAN: I’m glad that they still exist.
SECOND MAN: Me too.
FIRST MAN: But I don’t like to go to them.
SECOND MAN: Me neither.
FIRST MAN: I actually don’t want anyone to speak to me.
SECOND MAN: Full of passion and a sense of mission. No, I don’t want that either. I don’t need it. I have a sense of mission myself.
FIRST MAN: Really?
SECOND MAN: Yes. No. Whatever. I don’t know whether I have it. Anyway, passion and a sense of mission are inherently good things.
FIRST MAN: Very much so.
SECOND MAN: But I don’t need that. What I like is…
FIRST MAN: Yeah?
SECOND MAN: Well, I like to be left in peace. I really like that a lot.
FIRST MAN: Yeah, to be left in peace, that’s a wonderful thing.
SECOND MAN: And that’s why I like Dussmann.
FIRST MAN: The huge cultural department store in Mitte, the extremely ugly central district of Berlin?
SECOND MAN: That’s the one.
FIRST MAN: You live nearby, don’t you?
SECOND MAN: Oh yes.
FIRST MAN: Awful area.
SECOND MAN: Really awful. In Mitte no one praises Berlin’s charm. The Friedrichstrasse train station is there, the streams of tourists are there, the employees of parliament and public television are there on their way to work or to their conspiratorial lunches at the taxpayer’s expense. Dussmann fits in there. Dussmann doesn’t have any charm either. But Dussmann has books.
FIRST MAN: Three floors full.
SECOND MAN: Four floors, four! Not to mention the movies in the basement. Incredible quantities of books. Everything thoroughly organized, everything makes sense. When you look for something, you find it.
FIRST MAN: The way foreigners imagine Germany.
SECOND MAN: And the way Germany in reality hardly is nowadays. The trains are always late, the large construction sites are never finished, and you can’t get an appointment at the local administrative office due to overload. I know people who can’t get married because they can’t get an appointment there. Unless you’re marrying someone who works at the office, then it’s quick. These days Germany is as disorganized as any country in Central or Eastern Europe.
FIRST MAN: Except at Dussmann.
SECOND MAN: Right. At Dussmann order prevails. Four floors—
FIRST MAN: And a basement with movies.
SECOND MAN: Four floors full of books, everywhere red wall-to-wall carpets, well-arranged display tables, perfect organization. I haven’t found out about new releases from newspapers for a long time, I’ve found out about them from the Dussmann display tables on which they are well arranged. You find everything here, and what you don’t find, the competent employees show you. When I was looking in the comics section recently for the second volume of the comic version of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books—a work that probably isn’t asked for every day—the employee was able to tell me its exact location on the shelf without having to look it up somewhere. And what the competent employees can’t show you because it’s not there is ordered, and is there the next day.
FIRST MAN: The next day?
SECOND MAN: Yeah, that’s even quicker than with—
FIRST MAN: No!
SECOND MAN: With—
FIRST MAN: Don’t say the name!
SECOND MAN: Quicker than with the big bad bookseller on the internet. By the way, Dussmann’s employees are distinguished by the utmost objectivity. They don’t want to chat. They answer questions, they look things up for you. Sometimes they even advise you against something. Recently an employee in the children’s section told me not to buy a certain audio book for my son: “Much too scary for a seven-year-old,” she said. She had really listened to it! And when I asked for Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series in the juvenile section, the employee knew immediately and without looking it up that they didn’t have it in stock but that there was a Doctor Dolittle book in the English section. Such expertise isn’t imposed on you at Dussmann, but when you need it, it’s available.
FIRST MAN: Is it fair to say that Dussmann is the future of the book trade?
SECOND MAN: I think so. The model of the big chains has failed—inflexible, rarely appealing, always the wrong books in stock, often employees who don’t know much. But the small, nice, cosy bookshops with limited space and enthusiastic booksellers can’t be the answer. People are used to getting what they want immediately. The answer is therefore: big bookshops that are, however, not part of a chain. That seems to work. With a coffee shop too, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t need one, but a lot of people like that, I have nothing against it. What also must be praised about Dussmann, by the way, is the absence of music! It’s quiet there! You don’t hear anything! That’s conducive to concentration and reading, and in my case leads to buying much more than intended. And have I already mentioned that Dussmann is open until midnight? And every day? Even Saturday!
FIRST MAN: You’re really enthusiastic.
SECOND MAN: How could you not be enthusiastic: no music, and that until midnight! And no music! There’s simply quiet; that’s just incredible—quiet!
FIRST MAN: Are there author readings at Dussmann?
SECOND MAN: Of course.
FIRST MAN: How are they?
SECOND MAN: I don’t know. They’re on a special event stage, far away from the books; you can shop and not catch a word the authors say, isn’t that fabulous?
FIRST MAN: You don’t like readings?
SECOND MAN: Of course not, I can read on my own. I learned how in school, it’s been working great ever since, I read books on my own.
FIRST MAN: Well, it’s not only about the reading. Usually authors also explain at readings what they were thinking while writing and whether they work in the morning or in the evening or—
SECOND MAN: But if I don’t have the slightest desire to know that, what then? What do I do if it doesn’t interest me at all whether they work in the morning or in the evening and if the book is actually enough for me and if I also assume that everything these people say at their readings is inventions and lies anyway—what then?
FIRST MAN: But you yourself give readings!
SECOND MAN: Of course.
FIRST MAN: Why?
SECOND MAN: As I already mentioned, I don’t sell enough books not to have to give readings.
FIRST MAN: That’s the only reason?
SECOND MAN: That’s the only reason.
FIRST MAN: At Dussmann too?
SECOND MAN: God forbid. I love Dussmann. I don’t give readings at Dussmann. I don’t want to be a writer at Dussmann, I’m a customer!
FIRST MAN: Has Dussmann ever invited you to read?
SECOND MAN: I can say with pride: yes. I would also be a little sad if my favourite bookshop hadn’t invited me.
FIRST MAN: And you declined?
SECOND MAN: Of course.
FIRST MAN: But you read elsewhere?
SECOND MAN: Yes.
FIRST MAN: You are a bit odd.
SECOND MAN: Did I mention that I also buy my desk blotters, my pads, my pens, everything I need to be a writer at Dussmann? Not only do they have books, they also have the best stationery section!
FIRST MAN: There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know.
SECOND MAN: Yeah?
FIRST MAN: Why is it that at a time when hardly anyone still writes by hand, more notebooks are sold than ever before? All these stationery sections in the bookshops.
SECOND MAN: Writing is simply changing from a cultural technique into a lifestyle thing.
FIRST MAN: Not writing. People can’t write any more at all. Not by hand. Not with a pen and paper. They don’t even have the fine motor skills for it any more. The muscles in their hands don’t play along. No, the lifestyle thing is the purchase of notebooks, which are then left lying around unused.
SECOND MAN: A world in which everyone has empty notebooks lying around at home. Fascinating thesis. Where is Slavoj Žižek when you need him?
FIRST MAN: But we wanted to talk about the future of the book trade. Dussmann isn’t a member of a chain. There are no other branches, only this one. That’s important. And we wanted to talk about Berlin.
SECOND MAN: That’s the same thing.
FIRST MAN: Berlin and Dussmann—the same thing?
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