The Valley of the Shadow of Books

It is not under totalist dominations only that true literature is in danger today. Unscrupulous authors, avaricious publishers, stupid librarians, incompetent teachers, and a reading-public whose taste has been corrupted may do as much injury to humane letters as could any body of official censors. Despite the flood of paperbacks in America, Britain, and some other countries, the old earnest reading-public diminishes, or at least does not grow in proportion to the increase of population. The typical college graduate reads little or nothing except ephemera and the selections of one of the gigantic book clubs. Popular fiction reeks of the brothel or of Psychopathia Sexualis; some publishers’ editors seem bent on pandering to that poor wretch the literary voyeur. Vicarious violence for the sake of violence becomes the literary ration of children. Will the normative function of literature survive at all?

In 1984, Winston can find only rubbish on what few shelves of second-hand books he encounters in obscure shops; nearly everything published before the Revolution has been burned or pulped. The “democratic despotism” dreaded by Tocqueville might accomplish, without formal political repression, the same result. The content of “basic readers” in American public schools, for instance, has become thinner and thinner during recent decades: the great authors are supplanted by trivia. Or pompous and unread librarian-bureaucrats may eliminate many good books without resorting to the techniques of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. When, one year, I donated several hundred books to a public library, I discovered soon that nearly half of them had been burnt by order of a district librarian-functionary. This censorship by fire had nothing to do with pornography, and only incidentally was concerned with politics; the librarian in question merely felt that most books written before he was born, or books dealing with nearly anything serious, ought not to clutter library shelves. “We find that the public is not interested in such books.” This guardian of our literary patrimony burned, among many other volumes, a set of Macaulay’s History of England and a set of O. Henry’s short stories.

The dwindling of second-hand bookshops is at once symptom and consequence of this decline in true literacy. Once upon a time I was a second-hand-book dealer myself, and I could cite perhaps a hundred instances of the extinction, over fifteen years, of long-established old-book shops that had endured for decades or generations—unto our era of swaggering prosperity and urban disintegration. One pities the rising generation, which may know only the ordered rows of paperbacks, deprived of all the Gothic enchantments and infinite variety that emanated from the dust of the chaotic book-and-curio emporium.

What blight has fallen upon the hoary trade? Why, first, the old-book dealer suffers, like the proprietor of the new-book shop, from the taste of a generation that prefers television and speed to serious reading. But while the new-book store can resort to the public’s appetite for “awareness,” to the birthday-book market, and to its card and record departments, the dealer in dead authors cannot adjust to modern appetites—except, perhaps, by stocking a little surreptitious pornography.

Also, with few exceptions, the used-book trade generally has been a profitless venture: the average bookseller thought himself lucky to win the wage of management, let alone lay up treasure. Thus the steady inflation of prices and wages hits this occupation brutally. It becomes difficult to find competent help—or perhaps any help—at the rate the bookseller can pay. Pressure salesmanship is impossible in this business, and even the most modest advertising is too costly.

But the worst ravager of the valley of the shadow of books is the wrecker’s bulldozer. “Urban renewal,” “slum clearance,” and the general passion for demolishing and rebuilding in every city write finis across the grimy plate glass of that marginal enterprise the book grotto. Most little dealers cannot possibly afford the rent of comparable cubic space in a new building. Besides, how can one shift many thousands of books (the hardest and heaviest articles to move) to a new location, and get them on the shelves once more, when their average value is only a few cents? Some of them have mouldered up near the ceiling for decades, pitifully awaiting a purchaser; and some of those books ought to perish; but in this exigency, off all. Must go to the wastepaper dealer, or perhaps to the bonfire. Like certain sensitive plants, the old-book shop rarely takes root in new soil.

Some fusty caverns stuffed with quartos and duodecimos always will defy the lust for innovation, one trusts. In old Bristol, the bookshops along Christmas Steps may be invulnerable to the urban redesigner (a real Philistine, in unfortunate Bristol), because they twist up a hillside. Probably the Third Avenue dealers will contrive to live through the monstrous alteration of Manhattan. Godfrey’s Bookshop, sprawling through the rooms of an ancient half-timbered house in the oldest quarter of old York, probably will not be demolished to make way for a new and nasty commercial building—not for a few years, anyway. Part of Bloomsbury, with its well-stocked bookshops, will vanish, but not all. Boston and Philadelphia will spare a few forlorn dealers of the old breed.

Yet I wonder how much longer I will be able to descend into the bowels of that immemorial Edinburgh bookshop which extends downward from an eighteenth-century bridge to the squalor of the Cowgate, five floors crammed with hard-to-find works, mostly religious—where I used to pick up volumes of W. H. Mallock or John Henry Newman for sixpence. [*Since I wrote these sentences, indeed the Edinburgh bookshop to which I referred, with its civil clerks, has disappeared. For that matter, the sixpence, too, has been abolished—as Orwell said it would be.] How much longer, indeed, will one encounter the book-carts of Rome or Glasgow, one of the most minute forms of private enterprise still existing in the Western world? As for the dim, unprosperous, higgedly-piggedly, dirt-cheap bookshops that formerly scrabbled for life on the verge of the Skid Rows of Detroit, Chicago, or Cleveland—why, we shall not look upon their like again.

Reading a book borrowed from a college or public library is a sorry substitute for grubbing out your very own infinitely precious, infinitely cheap copy from the ragged regiment on the book-cavern’s shelves or the heaps upon the floor. George Gissing (or Henry Ryecroft) took a deep and laborious joy in lugging the length of Tottenham Court Road, trip after trip, the quartos of the splendid set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall he had acquired for a few shillings. One reads a great work so acquired; while one merely puts the paperback edition on one’s shelves, for a rainy day that never comes. (I suppose here that one possesses bookshelves; some model houses are proudly exhibited that provide no space whatsoever for books.) Once I discovered half a set of Conrad in Lansing, and spent my month’s expense-money in making it mine. Years later, in Salt Lake City, I came upon the missing half of that very broken set, and acquired it out of my private’s pay. The regimented crowds of ytoung people on our mass campuses, occasionally spending an hour in the assigned-reading room so as to qualify for a diploma (or sociability-certificate), never will know that shadowy kingdom of the old-book shop, in which was all manner of delight.

It seems improbable that any abrupt alteration of the modern taste, temper, and economy may rescue the old-fangled bookseller from the fate of the dodo. Yet as the wrecker’s ball makes dust and ashes of our cities’ cores, we might remind one another that old books, like the poor and like the denizens of Skid Row, have to go somewhere—unless we mean to extirpate them. Much of our “urban renewal” really is urban devastation. Rehabilitation, and judicious sparing of mean but living streets, is far preferable. All the odd little shops and corners that make towns worth wandering through—as Jane Jacobs suggests in her Death and Life of Great American Cities—are more humane than are arid vistas of glass and steel. So it is with the perishing bookshop.

Good second-hand bookshops rarely will be sleek and profit-making. We still can afford, I hope, some untidiness in modern existence. A people can come to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Of this bent are folk who think they can leave no spot in town for anything which, like the book trade, does not adhere to the nexus of cash payment; who would prune from the civil social order all diversity and privacy and dustiness—and old-book browsing. For every pulped or burned book, they must pay a nasty price in boredom and blighted imagination.