The Shelves

Here they are:

The All-Stars that earned a shelf in the bedroom: Ulysses, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Tennyson, Orwell et al.

The Lion's Share: These living room shelves have everything from Austen to Svevo.

The B-Team: Playbills, memoirs, and anthologies.

A Few Words on Isherwood

 

Christopher Isherwood was an author I inherited, like Graham Greene and G.K. Chesterton. Years ago, before I moved to Beirut, my father suggested that I read his expat kunstlerroman The Berlin Stories. My mother even bought me a copy. This spring, four years later, I finished the book. I used to think that you could never love these writers – the inherited – as fully as those you find yourself. That is, of course, wrong. The opposite is often true.

The Berlin Stories is really two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris (originally Mr. Norris Changes Trains) and Goodbye to Berlin, stapled together by place and voice. In each, Isherwood’s literary avatar makes l’entre-deux-guerre Berlin his own. He teaches and drinks and wanders and watches, with the detached sadness of all expatriates, as the Nazis come to power. The work is valuable in literary terms and as an historical document. But as with the better-known A Single Man Isherwood’s strength is ultimately the personal, his power: evocation.

When I read through the autobiographical muslin of The Berlin Stories I see the author and his disjunctive literary self but I also see me. This is a hallmark of all affecting literature: to be "personally addressed."  But Isherwood has a special purchase here; he – like Lawrence Durrell – has the remarkable power to approximate another’s memories while reciting his own. When I read about the underground bars and the damp streets, Sally Bowles and the chain-smoking cynics, it’s no longer Berlin but Beirut; and I rush for a pad to scribble down evenings and conversations that I had long since forgot.

Old Copy of an Old Book

A beautiful old copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has long been a prize possession. I love the poem and the exquisite paintings that accompany old versions of the book. So it's fair to say I was pretty amazed to find this 1946 edition for $2 in DC last week.

From the 11^th quatrain:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Wisdom from David Foster Wallace

 

Here's David Foster Wallace on writing, television and craft. Thankfully DFW's archives are being made available by UT Austin's Harry Ransom Center. 

The Old Pro

Mysak at work on the corner of 68th and Columbus.

At the corner of 68th and Columbus, across from the Post Office, there is a small, street side used books stand. This easy-to-miss, table and crate operation is run by Charles Mysak.

Mysak is a fixture of a certain stretch of the Upper West Side. Alternately grumpy and effusive, he carries a hardboiled authenticity that is redolent of an older New York.  “I quote Hemingway to the effect that ‘man can be destroyed but not defeated,’” he told me during a meandering chat on a snowy afternoon last week. “And this comes from a man who blew his head off at 60 years old.”

Snow or shine, Mysak, also 60, and his books, some older, some younger, make the commute from Wayne, New Jersey to this familiar curb every morning. However you gauge success, the stand has been open on this very spot for 11 years – outlasting the towering Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble a few blocks down.

Mysak, once a general practice lawyer, has been selling books for more than 20 years. He is an authority on collecting, buying, selling and lugging. If there were such a thing, he would be a professor emeritus of The Book Shelter.

He describes his connection to books with an elegant simplicity. What draws him to them? “Passion for knowledge,” he said.

“Books are the ultimate computer. You can open them up and there you are, depending on where the author wishes to take you. Clearly they’re the method by which one becomes a civilized human being…historically. That and also I’m trying to make a living at it.”

Mysak believes that the love of books, even for the bookseller, is beyond the material. “You can’t measure it. An accountant couldn’t measure it,” he said with a Cheshire grin. 

But he can count the number books in his possession: tens and tens of thousands. Most acquired from a Trenton-based shop, Acres of Books, that closed in the early nineties after the UPenn professor that ran the store died. (“As can happen with people who like books, their children don’t necessarily,” he said.)

In addition to their transcendent value, Mysak is certain his books have practical value as well. You want to learn about revolutions? Here are four volumes of Thomas Paine. Interested in the evolution of political vitriol? Voila, a biography of H.L. Mencken.

Mysak has a particular affection for these two, Paine and Mencken, along with the great American postwar novelists Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He has everything these men ever wrote in his personal collection, which he keeps separate from the books he sells.

After a disheartening reflection on the unhappy ends of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Mysak came to a question of enormous importance to The Book Shelter: Does he ever sell from his personal library? “No. I won’t do that,” he stated firmly. “My library is independent of my books.”

But then a slight revision: “Although it’s happened from time to time. Historically of all the great libraries over the course of the hundreds of years they’ve been created (with the possible exception of the Morgan) most of them have had to buy and sell at times.“

The most tragic case of a library lost (after Alexandria) may be that of the avid book collector and all-around brilliant founding father Thomas Jefferson: “Poor old Jefferson gave his [books] to the Library of Congress,” Mysak said shaking his head, “and they burned. The only thing they have left is the inventory of the books.”

 A harrowing reminder that (and perhaps the makings of a post-modern prose poem.)

After taking too much of Mysak’s time, I solicited some words of advice for the amateur collectors like myself. How should we used book enthusiasts approach books?

“Buy them,” Mysak answered. “Come here and buy books.”

"Baked Ham and Cold Beer"

Charles Simic – whose translation of Milan Djordjevic’s Oranges and Snow has been sitting patiently on my desk for weeks – has captured the self-image of many American poets (and, I’d guess, writers in general) in a blog post for The New York Review of Books. He not only illustrates the desk-to-fridge lifestyle, but defends it. “Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience,” Simic writes, taking a playful jab at the bedrock of American individualism. He continues:

“We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it.” (Where is Poetry Going? by Charles Simic, NYRBlog)

Sadly, I think the same thing can be said of most journalists.

A bit of background

Years ago I sold a couple of college textbooks. It was the end of the semester and the university bookstore fliers had colorfully advertised quick cash. I can’t remember what I did with the money (probably bought a round of shots and a tank of gas), but I carry the guilt of the sale to this day. The act of selling books, even heavy, poorly written Microeconomics and Astronomy textbooks, was a kind of betrayal. I had sold two objects but also two relationships (in this case, two bad ones) and it felt wrong.

This somewhat unhealthy but happy attachment to books no doubt dates back to my childhood, to two artistic parents and a house anchored by bookshelves, but we’ll leave that for a different time. This blog is not about me; it’s about my books. And I have quite a few. Many of them have traveled with me across countries and oceans, on planes and trains, in duffels and side bags and coat pockets. We’ve lived together in hotels, hostels, and apartments, in the Middle East, the mid-Atlantic, and places in between. Some (The Anatomy of Melancholy and 2666, to name a couple of heavy ones) I’ve carried thousands of miles and never read.

By necessity my books are itinerants, my great fear is that one-day they will be homeless. By writing about them here, I hope to give them a virtual shelter – a home away from whatever the future might bring. But that’s just the beginning. I also hope to shed a little light on the companionship they’ve provided and the ways they can illuminate different corners of the world.