Like a lot of second-hand stores, the books that fill the shelves of Happy Dusty Books represent the tastes and predilections of its customers. Our shop relies almost entirely on both random people swapping a few dog-eared hard-backs for in-store credit as much as we do the estates of deceased booklovers selling entire libraries to pay off debt (or to at least get rid of some thirty-odd volumes dedicated to the fine craft of butterfly collecting). Our stock of new editions is almost an afterthought. As such, my everyday task of pricing and shelving new arrivals is nothing if not rewarding. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I lock up the store each night with two or three newly-found treasures tucked under my arm. It’s a bit humbling, however, to think that the books our customers no longer want are often times far more random and interesting than whatever I’ve independently found for myself. Take a gander of the first page of my latest snag: I am not SPOCK, by Leonard Nimoy.
I don’t go around introducing myself to strangers as Mr. Spock. But when someone addresses a letter to “Mr. Spock, Hollywood, California,” I’m the one who gets it.
Most people play many roles in their lives. Roles like parent, child, breadwinner, homemaker, brother, sister, friend and lover. But most function under one collective role — individual identity.
Not so in my case. I am identified in at least two specific roles. Leonard Nimoy–actor, and Mr. Spock–Vulcan.
“I didn’t recognize you without your pointed ears.” I hear that all the time. It’s a joke, well intended and good natured, and it’s part of my life.
The obvious intention is to communicate with me. “You are Leonard Nimoy, an actor who plays the role of a pointed-eared Vulcan named Mr. Spock on Star Trek.”
Let’s try a variation. “You are Mr. Spock of Star Trek. You are standing here now, looking like a human named Leonard Nimoy. Therefore, I have difficulty recognizing you.”
One more variation. A parent holding a bewildered child by the hand says, “Johnny, this is Mr. Spock. Don’t you recognize him?” The child stares and in his eyes I see no recognition. If he had the verbal skills he would probably say, “No. That’s not Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock has pointed ears and arched eyebrows and greenish skin and wears his hair in bangs and he has a uniform with a blue shirt and black pants and boots and he’s on TV. This man doesn’t have any of those things and he’s not on TV, he’s standing here in front of me!
Who is correct, the parent or the child?
Wow. This man is on-point like a Vulcan’s ear (sorry, that’s a Rob Sonic lyric — I couldn’t resist). I never took a philosophy class in college (and I very consciously avoided all philosophical dialog at the coffee shop I once practically lived at), but damn, isn’t that deep? Wouldn’t you love to spend two hundred pages with Mr. Nimoy as he waxes poetic on matters of celebrity and identity? I for one sure would, but then again, before I made it past the first chapter, I switched Nimoy’s company for that of a nymphomaniac.
Shelving in the forever-disorganized Erotica section, I recently came across The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet. What initially caught my attention wasn’t the word “sexual” in the title, but rather the Grove Press logo — a little cubist tree — printed on the book’s spine. In college I took a class titled “Modernism & Obscenity” in which we read a selection of books that had been banned throughout the middle half of the Twentieth Century (picks included James Joyce’s Ulysses [blech!] D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover [yeh!] and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer [blech!] — the latter two published by Grove’s imprint Black Cat), and I’d come to associate Grove Press (kinda despite myself) with little that’s not odd-ball and smutty and highly intelligent, all at once.
Not the case, however, with Catherine Millet’s Sexual Life, a bukkake-covered autobio of the well-known (at least in France) art critic’s love of swingers’ parties, gang-bangs, and other gatherings in which she invites 100 plus men run the train on her. Sure, such accounts of wanton orifice-stuffing are sure to furnish something akin to j.o. material, but by time I reached the half-way point in the book, I realized that — despite myself — I was bored, which is probably the worst reaction the founder and editor of Art Press could have anticipated. It’s as if she assumes her swanky anecdotes are so sweltering, so titillating, that they practically tell themselves. All she needs to do — her attitude seems to indicate — after a passage in which she describes how much men (her observation, not mine) love to blow their load in a vagina already dripping with other men’s muck — is write something trite like “and so I rang in my thirties…”. It’s like she’s a somnambulant cowgirl riding bareback through the range who, from time to time, yanks on the horse’s mane as she navigates the stony creek of a chapter break. Hicc-cup!
And while I revel in our bookshop’s liberal borrowing policy and the $200+ in credit I’ve accumulated by trading in all the paperbacks I’d stacked up during college, I think, after five months of employment, I’ve reached a breaking-point. After racking up great titles like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, I think it’s about time I sit down and actually fucking read these books. Sometimes when customers buy a stack themselves, they feel a need to apologize for their apparent gluttony, or at least explain themselves. After I stuff Happy Dusty bookmarks into their fresh purchases, I wave my hands and say, “Hey, I work at a bookshop. You’re talking to the worst of them.” I wonder if they’d ever guess the extent of it. I’ve somehow become the type of guy who’s read the first twenty pages of every book that’s become a household title. Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but I’ve probably at least skimmed a good chunk of these books. Maybe I do it because I hope to impress an after-party by casually sizing-up the host’s book collection. Equally plausible is the act of consuming that I relish as much as I do reading. There’s not much a bookstore clerk earning minimum wage can afford (trust me, daily bus fares and coffees are luxuries), but second-hand books, on the other hand, coupled with a healthy employee discount, is always too tempting a pleasure to pass up. And the bolstering to one’s ego a slightly better-than-average knowledge of books provides? It might just be that the kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome has as much to do with it as a compulsion to flash my literary colors. I just don’t know which impulse is more childish.
