A Bookstore Bestiary
Posted: Saturday, October 11, 2008
by Gregory Lewis
PopGnosis
I am addicted to books. Not so much reading them as collecting them from used bookstores. I've catalogued and road mapped used bookstores across Upstate New York and New England, and have even standardized a used bookstore aesthetics protocol.
One of the requisites is disorder. My favorite bookstores are those wooden shacks that list southward, as a result of decades, perhaps a century of unrelenting pounding by the cruel winter north wind. It is better when the walls of these venerable dames are lined with books, which double as insulation. They will have footstools to sit upon, and are so thick with paper that cell phone reception is completely cut out. One must be of proper resolve to enter the sanctum sanctorum that whoever so calleth from the outside world shall not be heard.
"Oh look, honey, a book on wood carving."
Still, one might find rare gems in any used bookstore. I found a small book in one of these pretentiously elite stores titled "Cosmic Consciousness," dated 1907. It was not the larger classic by proto-psychologist Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, but a half-sized clone by a mysterious author named Ali Nomad.
I had trouble reading the book, quite honestly, which reflected in so many ways the same material as Dr. Bucke. They were, in fact, contemporaries. The back pages of my book were filled with interesting illustrated ephemera of exotic and oriental swamis, mind reading masters, and thought control. In fact, this edition was published by the New Thought Fellowship of Chicago, Illinois. The title page read:
Cosmic
Consciousness
THE MAN-GOD WHOM
WE AWAIT
By
ALI NOMAD
Consciousness
THE MAN-GOD WHOM
WE AWAIT
By
ALI NOMAD
Below that was a handwritten signature in florid script, Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall, and below that a was a narrow white sticker with red lettering. Emblazoned on the label's left side was a clockwise-rotating red swastika, and to its right the words:
International New Thought Fellowship DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL 209-210 Masonic Temple, Chicago Ill.
One could not help mull the implications of the swastika, but as this book was published 1907 and not 1937 it would have to be exonerated in connection to a more nefarious identity. Only a score of years prior and even the Boy Scouts of America branded themselves with the swastika, as did other institutions, not the least of which would be Mdme. Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, to which I intuited this Dr. McIvor-Tyndall or Ali Nomad were connected.
In fact, it turns out McIvor-Tyndall and Ali Nomad were the same person. Ali Nomad was the pen name of the famous turn of the century hypnotist Dr. Alexander McIvor-Tyndall. I discovered this after researching the name, when I came across a Florida woman's plea on a genealogical site who was looking for information about her grandfather, McIvor-Tyndall. Through email correspondence with the granddaughter I learned enough about my little book and its author to safely conclude I not only had an authentic signed copy, but I now had all the provenance I needed to authenticate the book as belonging to Dr. McIvor-Tyndall's personal collection. This would become one of the most collectible books I ever owned, but acquired quite unintentionally for that purpose.
I coveted the book for many years, but finally, as the fortunes of divorce and child support swung to counterbalance my means, I put the book up for auction on Ebay. I paid $11 for it in 2000; I sold it for $90 in 2007.
There was an early period, freshly out of work and needing money to eat when my book purchases were promptly listed on Ebay. My reasoning went like this: If you live in Afghanistan, your natural resource is lapis lazuli; for Sri Lanka it is sapphires; Burma rubies; Colombia emeralds. But from Central New York to Cape Cod it is our wealth of rare used books.
Thus, was I able to acquire a first edition of "Dorothy's Marvelous Adventures in the Land of Oz," a first edition of the original Cosmic Consciousness by Bucke; and many copies of various editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, not all of them Fitzgerald translations, either, and a couple of them with exquisite "tipped-in" illustrations. I have since given those to my daughter for her to build her own legacy.
Eventually, after I settled in to other jobs that sustained my very humble life style I was able to buy books for the reading, not selling. I discovered many better used bookstores in western Massachusetts and eastern New York and southern Vermont than I could have imagined while living in Syracuse.
One run down little hovel in the Town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, called Troubadour Books is a veritable ramshackle collection of sticks and wall paper which, should the wrong book be pulled from the collection of 17th Century Catholic Doctrine stuffed obliquely in a ceiling corner on its north east side, would topple down on its poor, but mercifully engrossed patrons. Low-roofed and small, it resembled what one might expect a Mount Everest base camp to look like. It was a vestige from an era when occupancy codes didn't exist.
Like Doctor Who's T.A.R.D.U.S. ("Time And Relative Dimensions In Space") time travel police phone booth, the Troubadour is much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside.
I don't think I impugn the owner's reputation; he is fully conscious of the general state of his building. It is slowly, ever so slowly, like the unsuspecting mammoths exhumed from the La Brea Tar Pits sinking into the topsoil. One day, thousands of years from now some archaeologist will perchance dig out the store, then mistaken for an Indian burial mound, except for the preserved body of its owner Stephen, who will be found draped over a paperback coffee table anthology of R. Crumb's work in the Modern Art section, equally preserved. Its cartoons will amuse the archaeologists for a while, before they attend to the frozen early anthropoid accompanying it.
I love that store more than any other, and have paid numerous visits, and an almost equal number of purchases.
For, surely no other store is so full of literature on Gnostics, both Sethian and Valentinian, or more eccentrically Manichean, with every paperback ever put out by Doctor of Early Christianity Elaine Pagels, or volumes of Jewish and Kabballist literature, Theosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism, Sufi and Crowley, the Peyote Church or the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians and all the classical psychologists from multiple editions of James to Jung's Collected Works in first edition hardbound or modern paperback-your choice.
One section is simply a lump on the floor, piles of pairs of foreboding Oxford Dictionaries spanning a random selection of modern decades. There are shelves on politics, the "Just Plain Weird," and if you want W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, it's there, too. Maybe it really is all Greek to you, but if you like Greek, you would find it at the Troubadour. Stephen stocks a comprehensive, but expensive collection of one-of-a-kind and first edition Beat literature.
Occasionally I get sale notices from the Troubadour, with cryptic phrases like, "the leopard triangulates, beware the master."
"Hi," I said upon entering last October. "I have come to triangulate."
Stephen the owner laughed. "He's catching on," he said to his helper.
Only half a mile northward on Route 9, just over the Whately town line is The School House, a brick bastion of old books nearly equal in number to the Troubadour, or possibly exceeding it. For its prodigious size the School House lacks some important factors, however. One is the charismatic and quirky owner of the Troubadour, who advertises his selection as "for holy fools." The other is that the School House is a little too orderly, not by much, and too expansive. The books are not well grouped by genre because it is a cooperative, with different owners occupying different sections. Here, though, you are likely to find really old books that are less for reading than as décor in a glassed cabinet.
Not far away in the hip little town of Montague is the Book Mill, which for all its lacking in content makes up for in spades as a favorite hangout for the counter-minded and alternatively predisposed thinker. It has Wi-Fi, a beautiful upstairs reading room with a view overlooking a sheer precipice and river 30 to 40 feet below, and the Lady Killigrew Cafe right next door. In fact, you can order coffee or tea at Lady Killigrew's, and drink it (in their own cups) in the Book Mill's reading rooms.
The Book Mill is really a complex more than it is a single store. There are two restaurants, the bookstore, an antiques store, a record and CD store, and an art store. I'm probably missing one or two. There are numerous picnic and bistro tables and twisting, multi-level decks to sit outside when the weather's right.
They all comprise a renovated gristmill in one of the most rural, hard to find back roads in Massachusetts. Not far away is Lake Pleasant, where America's first spiritist community once dwelt at the turn of the 20th Century. If you are looking for paperbacks on post-modernism, gay-lesbian themed theater, local historical, economics, rock & roll and biographies this would be the place to browse.
In the Town of Berlin (or is it Hoosac, where Grandma Moses painted her primitive folk art?) New York, right across the Vermont state line is another bookstore whose name I don't immediately recall. It is also held in place by the sheer thick inner turgidity of books. To go upstairs is to take your life into your hands. Hand-hewn timbers, floor boards with holes in them ("I see you down there!"), and tall bookshelves that lean toward the patron like special effects scenes from the Hitchcock film Vertigo make this bookstore unsuitable for the faint of heart.
I bought an old Bible there. I am not a Bible reading person, in the traditional sense, but have simply wanted a readable copy of an old King James Bible.
"Is it a Guttenberg?" joked the ancient storeowner, who noticed how thoroughly I was looking it over. In the 19th Century it had belonged to a minister, judging by the margin notes and birthday reminders inside. For a mere five dollars, I put it in a paper bag along with a hardcover edition of Jung's Aion, a copy of Shamanism Through the Centuries and two futuristic science fiction paperbacks.
I had conquered the problem of time on less than $10 in gasoline.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Hello GregoryEnjoyed this article very much. I have no need for belongings in the materialistic sense, actually I downscaled years ago to just what was necessary and could fit into a suitcase. But when it comes to books, there I have a problem. Seems no matter how many times I Force myself to go through and release some, mainly because books are heavy you know and the handles on a suitcase can only stand so much weight before they break, they come right back. Books are gold to me, perhaps they can't purchase anything I need but they can provide something much more valuable, knowledge. Except of course for the "coffee table books", they are "for decorative purposes only" and I do not own these. Have no need for simple aesthetic decorations.As to Massachusetts I lived there for many years in Gloucester. Boy did I get an "education", after moving from the deep south of Georgia being around "Northeners" was an experience. Gloucester, as you probably already know, is a fishing town and bars lie side to side, left, right, up, down. Fishermen, real fishermen doing it to live, love their bars. Being a protected "from the profane", meaning cursing and drinking, southern bell I saw a side of life I didn't know existed. No one in my family cursed much, the men maybe a damn now and then, but the women NEVER and the women most assuredly were NEVER to enter a "drinking establishment". That was for "loose women" only. As my mom would say.Well in Gloucester at The Green Tavern I met my first "woman cusser" and I was appalled. Not only did she "cuss", she was LOUD and she drank and she was old. Her name was Muriel and I grew to love her very much. Didn't take me long to meet women of a different sort in the North from the South I grew up in. Though shocked by their differing behaviour, I soon learned to admire them for their forthright speech and their not giving a damn how loud they were or what people thought of them. Very different from "my" world where women were to speak softly, never curse, never drink, sit properly, say yes mam-sir/no mam-sir and over-all never openly disagree with "the man". After the shock wore off a little, I loved the way they spoke their minds to their "men-folk", played pool, sat at the bar and drank beer, etc. I actually became quite good at pool.I know this sounds odd in todays world but at 35 years old, never being out of the south, in 1993 when I and my 3 children moved to Gloucester with a native "Northern Man" I and my children received an "education" in people and life-styles. Best thing I ever did for my children or for myself, for that matter.Great article well-written as always.Many BlessingsPlease log in to respond to this comment.Thank you once again for reading and commenting, Goshwin. I think we may be of like mind when it comes to books. I honestly prefer the older ones, and have never collected coffee table books. The cruel lessons of life have forced me to give up books I love so often, I almost don't have the heart to collect any more. I am one of those "holy fools" I mentioned in my story.As for New England, I hailed from the western part of Massachusetts, the corner snuggled into the east side of New York and the southern border of Vermont. As a rule, Boston and the outlying coastal areas are notorious for their alcohol consumption. In truth, I never liked bars, although I went in them when I was in college. Now I never go into bars or pubs, and I don't drink alcohol except once in a great while. It's not a judgment against drinking so much as I don't have much in common with people who hang out in bars. It puts me on edge to be in a bar, because I'd rather be somewhere else, either in the library or book store reading, or outside writing, or just about anywhere other than a dingy room with dim lights and people draped over a glass. The New England coast is really a place where the imagination comes alive, though, and quite honestly I somehow feel it is more interesting than the Florida Keys, which is where I am now.Please log in to respond to this comment.
Hi GregoryThe bar scene in Gloucester was an experience, socially, but I am NOT an abider. I prefer to face life with full consciousness. And I love life, why cloud it? I agree that seldom will anyone "of interest" be in a bar but...I, as you, prefer librarys,book stores, eclectic coffee shops and even more, the great outdoors.Yes, New England is an very inspiring place. Heck, even Steven King thinks so. LOLI have a lot of family in Florida and spent my young years when school let out for the summer, in Clearwater with an aunt and uncle. I loved it. Not the Florida Keys I know but still... The Florida Keys are beautiful but in competition with some parts of New England, it would be a tough race.Many BlessingsPlease log in to respond to this comment.
I deem this my finest article on SearchWarp.
G.Please log in to respond to this comment.
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