There are many reasons I love this particular sale. First of all, it’s huge, and it’s annual, and there’s a certain ritualistic feel to it. Somehow it’s highly organized without being regimented for regiment’s sake. I also like the fact that it’s held in the fall. Saturday was so autumnal it was almost Midwestern. It was warm, and the sky was blue, and the sidewalks my friend and I hurried along were covered with gold and golden brown leaves that whispered across the concrete.
Inside there was, as always, row upon row of long tables marked with signs and covered with books of all shapes, sizes and subjects. Which brings me to one of the best aspects of the book sale: The people who shop it. You have to move slowly along the side of a table looking down at a stunning array of titles on the spines of books. Even though there are people on either side of you doing exactly the same thing, there is, for reasons I have yet to understand, a rhythm to it that enables people to glide along the edges of tables going in different directions and somehow not run into each other. Here’s what it looks like: Hold both of your hands up in front of you, palms out, and move them slowly toward each other. When they’re about to touch, pull your right hand back and continue moving your left hand in the same direction until it is eclipsed from your view by your right hand.
I have no idea if these two facts are related or not, but first of all, I did not witness or experience a single sloppy, slovenly collision. And secondly, although there were many hundreds of people looking at books for the more than two hours that I was there, I did not overhear a single cell phone conversation. And I didn’t see anyone texting, either. Is that because people who go to events sponsored by an organization whose sole purpose is to support the democratization of the written word have better manners? Or are they simply more focused? Either way, as “an elitist” I like it. I like it a lot.
Before I get to the books, there are two other things I really like about the sale. Maybe they do this every year, but Saturday was the first time I noticed what they call The Book Depot. If you’re finding so many books that they’re getting difficult to carry, you just go to a table and they put them in a box, write your name on it and hold it there until you’ve got another load. The second is that, in the same way I prefer yard sales and thrift shops to stores where everything is new, the tables at the book sale are full of surprises.
Every time I leave a job, voluntarily or otherwise, I take a dictionary with me, so I have a lot of dictionaries. And now I have one more: The Tormont Webster’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary. It’s huge, and it’s beautiful, and it’s printed in a font a bit larger than my others. That was the first thing that caught my attention, and while I moved on initially, two tables later I returned. The second find of the morning was even better. On Saturday morning, as I was finishing a section of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the sister book group, I thought that I’d like to start Christmas morning this year with Love in the Time of Cholera, preferably a hardback edition. And there it was, waiting for me.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini’s second novel. His first was The Kite Runner, which I thought was great. I’ve always wanted to read Willa Cather, and now I have a beautiful copy of My Antonia. I picked up Dreams from My Father because my enthusiasm for knowing that I live in a country whose president can write a decent sentence has yet to wane. One of the books I bought is Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I bought it for a reason that has never before compelled me: I really like the cover.
And finally, a bit of moderation. I forced myself on Saturday to not lunge after everything that catches my attention. While I haven’t craved either of them, there are two fairly recent books by David McCullough that seem interesting to me. One is entitled, simply, John Adams; the other, entitled even more simply, is 1776. I’ll buy one, I thought, and then, next year, if the interest is still there, hope to find the other. The one turned out to be 1776, and while I try to not have two books going at once, figuring that one novel and one history doesn’t really count as two – it does, of course – I started 1776 on Sunday evening, and although I’ve barely dented it, the tales of this country’s quest for independence, I must say, are as intriguing as they are familiar.
