The Valley of the Shadow of Books
by Russell Kirk
Feast of the 45 Holy Martyrs of Nikopolis, Armenia
Anno Domini 2020, July 10
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.
*Originally published in Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics
(Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Co, 1988), 141-145. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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