The World’s Greatest Used Bookstore Dream
I saw it first from the outside. Five floors of windows. Shelves jammed in all the windows. With narrow, steep stairs going up the back walls. This place was dedicated to BOOKS!
I think it was in Ann Arbor. It was a nice old crusty downtown in an old academic town.
I knew it was a cranky place right away. Maybe I’d been there before in another dream. But they were having their big annual sale today, so I went in.
This place was full of hustle and bustle and tall shelves. I wandered around, easily finding the whole huge sections dedicated to what I loved. Just glancing around I saw every variation on every gun, canoe and exploring book imaginable. From every year and point of view. These were fine books, many with covers facing out. I saw about 30 covers facing out all featuring different views of bolt-action rifles. This place had DEPTH.
Now, I also gathered from dream memory that this place had a unique stocking method. It was volunteer based. You’d go into the deep stock and get what you knew were fine books needed for the daily shelves and bring them out and shelve them. You took good care of the subject shelves which you knew, of course. It all made sense.
The pricing was a little odd. Either 1 or 2 was the price. At the checkout desk, the front inside cover was xeroxed and based on numbers there the cash register would ring up 1 or 2. If it was a 1, it cost $8.15, if it was a 2 it cost $15. Or something. This was the special sale. Somehow perhaps you ended up paying more than usual. Or maybe the 1 or 2 resulted in just a certain amount of mark-down. It wasn’t much. It didn’t seem like a real incentive type of sale. But the place was jam-packed. It made me think, hmmm, I guess people will love a sale even if they don’t save anything. But then this was no ordinary bookstore.
It didn’t have ALL the books by any means. It didn’t have the BAD books. It had special editions. It had pencil annotated copies, marked up by authorities in the field. It had misprintings. I recall a first edition by Thomas Edison, about discovering electricity, where corrected words were printed backwards. Bizarre! It’s like the last set of plates made were RUN backwards. When I woke up it didn’t make much sense, but I guess it had to have been a registration problem. The old text was run first, then the corrected plates run backwards over top of it. Well, it was just a dream. But this bookstore had UNIQUE books. It had all the scholarly monographs on important subjects. But the good ones. This bookstore was about the depth of culture. Not about careers or academia per se or commerce. The thing was it did not matter to them if the book looked bad or was in bad shape, if it was good or important, they were proud to stock it.
There were also back halls and rooms and foyers stacked with books. Behind the store area was the staff area which was old and quite elaborate.
The thing was this bookstore also sold art and sculpture. Which was handled just the same as the books. All kinds of variations on classic sculpture were stacked around. All different takes on similar themes. This place had depth.
This place wasn’t just a bookstore. Is any good bookstore just a store? New commercial stores are stores, of course. But was this? Obviously not. It was like a museum. The owners and staff here inventoried and collected the entire depth of our civilization and clearly felt it to be their duty.
Cataloging was the thing. Things needed to be dug out from chaos, from private collections and plugged each into their proper places in the Dewey Decimal system of the stacks. It was serious business. By the way, the staff and owners here were gruff, scruffy, dour, serious, harsh, quirky, snobbish, elitist people. No monkey business. Many policies that didn’t really seem to make sense. This place was older and deeper than sense. The geniuses who shopped, volunteered and worked here knew better than to question these policies. And rolled their eyes at anyone who did. It was kind of red-tapey, but for a good cause. It worked. Do not disturb!
I overheard a heated conversation between an older manager and a not-young bearded, empassioned volunteer. “Yes, I’m going. I have to leave. But what will become of the Longfellow section? I know what will happen, Emerson and various mixed critiques will start creeping in at the bottom shelves like they do and no one will weed them out!” It was obvious that he’d built up the Longfellow shelves to be a rumpled, dusty but nonetheless active masterpiece of some type and that they needed constant attention. Those shelves represented the real and vital presence of the contribution of a long-dead creator. Longfellow still held up his corner of our civilization and if he was let to falter it would be intolerable. It was obvious that every aspect of our entire culture and heritage, as represented by this bookstore, needs every piece to be properly upheld and represented. The knowledge must be kept clearly available. That is what seemed certain from seeing this shop and that commitment. Sure, maybe our fevered fellow was a little unbalanced. But it was obvious that civilization itself needed all those cranky myopic eternal grad students if it were to endure. That the whole was its parts. And that neither glamor, celebrity, commerce or any type of power pressure had anything to do with it. There was no sense of everything being included, no trash, just culture, big and small. With care.
The shelves also stocked old packaging, nice old catalogs and advertising displays. –I saw one on a series of nice recurve bows from the 1940’s it looked like. Sincere renderings of those curved pieces of archery craftsmanship. A couple of younger fellows in the aisle there were even looking at a nice old recurve bow they’d found in an old cabinet there. This store had it all. And it was good that it did.
