The Library and the Bookstore
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In two days, and after my wife undergoes a major surgery, I will be the father of a new-to-this-world baby girl. I’m totally thrilled and anxious once again to undergo those first grueling weeks of the newborn stage.
I’m giving myself a little pass this month and sharing an article I recently published on my other newsletter City Reads. City Reads is a fun writing project I’m doing with my friend Rebecca. Our goal is to visit all the bookstores in the Washington D.C. metro area (my territory) and New York City (Rebecca’s territory). If you’re into books, bookstores, and East Coast cities, check it out and subscribe.
I’ll be back in December with my sixth annual review of the books I read in the last calendar year. Until then!
The Library and the Bookstore
I’d like to tackle another essential book/bookstore question dogging my mind, a question born not only from starting City Reads but from the moment I started buying books.
There was a definite moment, though its exact date escapes me. It happened sometime in high school, when, after years of going to the library with my family, I started to go alone, mostly to shop in the small library store where paperbacks were $.50 and hardbacks $1.
Why not continue to use the library exclusively? Why buy books?
There’s room for library fanaticism at City Reads, as well. My life is certainly better with libraries around. By sheer luck and civic planning, I’ve never lived more than a 10-minute drive from one. Right now, they’re a place of magic for my two-year-old, home to books and toys and other toddlers. I check out my share of books and films, including audiobooks through Libby, one of the library’s greatest successes in the digital age.
Libraries, while serving many functions, have the same core utility as a bookstore: to support a reading public and supply them with books.1 So what explains the urge to own books, not just borrow them?
If I were to be a little cynical about my own book buying (a healthy dose of which is probably advised for any line on the personal budget), I would have to admit that I buy books in order to signify something about myself: that I aspire to be well read, have good taste, or declare that I read at all, a rarer and rarer pastime.
That cynicism doesn’t encompass all that books mean to me, though. The act of reading is an uneven exchange between reader and book. For only a little bit of time and attention, a book grants invaluable gifts—perspective, truth, and beauty. The investment in this relationship almost merits that I own the book, that I keep it as a memento of new worlds and new ideas.
Owning books has other value. For parents, there’s the hope that one day your children will pull a book down from the family shelf and turn this love and exploration into a generational movement.
There’s the ability to lend a book to another, though, if we’re all honest, it happens less than we think it will. Our tastes are too peculiar; the people most prone to borrow often like to own for themselves; commonly, we’re too afraid to let one go lest it should come back in a lesser condition, or worse still, never come back at all.
Then there’s the idea that you yourself will return to your own collection for wisdom. This too may happen less than we’d like, but when it does, aren’t you so glad you had that book around?
I recall weighing a job offer that would take me across the country, and unable to sleep, proceeded to open East of Eden and reread the discovery of the word “Timshel” and the divine promise in Genesis that “thou mayest choose for thyself”. Or a few months later, after accepting the job and moving, rereading on multiple occasions the opening paragraphs of the New York section of Willie Morris’s North Toward Home where he cautions the new urbanite not to let go of those things most important to him.
Where does this leave me? Reminded once again that book lovers are a dying breed. Who can protest our wanting to keep the relics of our fictional sojourns nearby? Some books I’ll check out from the library. Others I’ll purchase used, fewer new. I’m glad to have them all.