September 15, 2010
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Unused/Abused Bookstore Credit…
Before I left for Taiwan I had to get rid of a lot of things. I gave a lot of it to my then girlfriend who said ‘she would hold on to it for me‘ and I know in the back of my mind I was thinking ‘if I’m going to leave this to anyone, I want you to have it’, because in the back of my mind, I had no clue if I was to ever return or not. I narrowed my CD collection from about 500 to exactly 100 CDs (plus all Bob Dylan albums that are in a category of their own), took my DVD collection down to about half of what it was (half of which I now have no clue why I kept) and my book were, well, mostly kept intact, save for some I decided to either release back into the wild or give away.
On my trip home last June I had to get my book collection back from a friend’s house and pack them up to go into a closet in my parent’s house. I know I should have just let them free into the wild, but so many of those books hold some sort of sentimental attachment to them… and I’m a hoarder of almost anything (who knew ‘hoarder’ has an ‘a’ and not a ‘w’…), so if I have the entire John Riving collection, I’m keeping it (in hardcover to be exact)! I brought five Rubbermaid bins with me and one big cardboard box. I planned to fill the bins and the overflow would go into the ‘why the hell do I still have this’ box which would go to a used bookstore for credit or cash. Of course, who would opt for cash from a used bookstore? They usually give you twice as much in credit to get older books out of the damn shop. This is the same thing that happened two days before leaving for Taiwan.
I went to a few of the used bookstores, but I had a bit of a problem with some of them. The cool little white house bookshop in the Wortly Village area of London had an old lady who ran it who looked at me like I Was carrying the plague on my shoulders whenever I went in there. She was nice to everyone that came in, even my friends, but she hated me. I have no clue why. I traded books to her on credit, tried to discuss books with her, asking her for specific things and recommendations and she still wanted me gone like a recurring sore on her upper lip. So I didn’t go back to her that day.
The most popular bookshop in London is the City Lights Bookshop in the nastier part of downtown and they claim to have almost anything you can think of. Everyone goes there more to look cool than find quality books. I did get some cool shit from them time to time, but one day I took them a bunch of books which included two Fletch novels which I had bought newer versions of, and was told ‘No one reads this garbage. You can keep it.‘ Garbage? Really? The Fletch books are my inspiration to being a writer, Gregory McDonald created some of the best dialogue fueled novels ever, and he won multiple awards for them. So, I never went back to those book snobs who had multiple copies of On the Road on display behind the counter as if Kerouac makes you better than anyone else.
There was a cool little shop in the south end I frequented because of the young kid who worked there. I called him Spicolli due to his exact resemblance to the Sean Penn character in Fast Times at Ridgemount High right down to the voice and attitude. The owner was also a really nice, laid back guy who would take books he didn’t even need to give you some more credit, and then donate them to book charities. I remember in my last few months in Canada, Spicolli was working through the Stephen King collection in order of publication so he could read and enjoy the Dark Tower series more. He even had a big notebook where he kept track of characters, relations and connection between books (especially any reference to Flagg in The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon and other novels). I took them a big box of books that last week and I told Spicolli that I was leaving for Taiwan. He said if I wanted to donate anything he didn’t take to a bookfair for charity it would be cool, so I did. I just gave him the box and looked around while he figured out a total. He offered me about $25 cash or $50 credit. I don’t know why, but I took the credit. I had already chosen the books to go with me to Taiwan, but for some reason I still wanted to free some more books from the store.
I only used a little credit that day, I think only a book or two (including The Invisible Man, the first book I read in Taiwan) and figured I would give the rest to my girlfriend to use when she wanted. Just as I was leaving Jeff (we were on a first name basis by this point in my totally warped mind) told me his boss was always looking for old VHS tapes and I laughed and told him I had a box I was going to take to the Goodwill just after leaving there. He told me to come back later when the boss was in and he may take them off my hands. I laughed and told him to let him know I would be back.
Later that day I returned (still with my credit slip in my pocket for about $45) with the VHS tapes I had no clue what to do with. The owner told me he was looking more for certain movies and rare ones, but if he liked a title he would take it. A he started digging I told him I was off to Taiwan after seeing Bob Dylan that night and if he didn’t want them to donate them to one of the charities he helped out and he immediately asked if I had any credit with them. I showed him my almost useless slip and he crossed out the total and said, ‘I’ll just top it off to $100 if that’s okay‘. I almost fell over. One hundred dollars credit at a bookshop with so much to buy at such cheap prices was like giving a crack addict a pre-warmed pipe and a rock the size of Everest.
I shopped as best as I could, thinking the whole time that my girlfriend could use it all as she read even more than I did, but it was like it was burning a hole in my pocket. I think I got about 5-6 more books that day, a few that came with me and others that just went into my private collection. I always felt kinda bad about getting some of those books. It was like going into a pet shop and getting a puppy, then chaining him up outside and never playing with him. Would they have found a better home with someone else?
So this year upon packing up my books I made sure a few of those freed, then neglected books were taken on a journey half way around the world to be read somewhere they never should have been. I’m tempted to save them for somewhere even more obscure than Taiwan, like in the mountains of Nepal next year, or the beaches of either Sri Lanka or the Philippines this Chinese New Year. But I also kinda want to crack into them now and start reading as I am still on a roll with good novels (I finished The Road and actually enjoyed it’s bleak, depressing story of survivors at the end of the human race). The two I know I bought that day were The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson and The Paper Men by William Golding which are both here and ready to go, but I also brought back other novels which sat in my collection for long periods of time waiting for their turn as well like Out of Sight and Unknown Man #89 by Elmore Leonard, One Lovely Night and Kiss Me Deadly by Mickey Spillane, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon which has actually been waiting it’s turn to be read since I dropped my absurdist novels class in university at the beginning of the second semester more than 10 years ago.
Of course I also have book from here I traded for still to be read, books friends gave me to read and, coincidentally, On The Road, which my girlfriend gave me when I left inscribed with these classic words…
‘My gift to you as you embark on your most excellent journey.
To be on your own, with no direction home…‘I still haven’t read it. I don’t know why. It’s almost like I am waiting for a perfect moment for that book, yet I have no clue when or where it will be. Maybe a long time from now, but it waits with the rest on the shelf.So my point tonight? (Don’t kill me… you know I love tangents) I don’t know what to start reading now. Any suggestions?
Oh, I did give the credit slip to the girlfriend when I left, I think she still had about $65 left on it which at this bookstore was a great haul.
