Spies Abound in the Cathedral of Books

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The attractive young customer brings her trio of old books to the counter where I stand half-hidden but ready to accept payment.

She’s purchasing 19th-century editions of Alfred Tennyson and Emily Dickinson and Robert Browning, three literary icons so famous that we’ll never appreciate them for who they actually were.

“Hmmm…Tennyson and Browning and Dickinson together!” I say, “I wonder what their dinner conversation together might be like?” I’m pondering aloud, to the delight of the customer. She smiles and wonders the same thing.

Then, the personalities of the three come to mind and I blurt out a thought, “I think what would happen is, Emily would excuse herself in mid-conversation on the pretense of going to the ladies’ room, then duck out and head for home.”

The young customer agrees. She accepts the packaged books and waves good-bye, perhaps continuing the fantasy of Emily and her two dates and what might have happened next in each of their lives.

My days are often like that. The irony of a bookstore is that authors are thrown together in oddly out-of-time, out-of-logic, outrageous ways, even before they arrive at check-out. Hemingway presses against Hesse, just down the row from Gellhorn…H.G. Wells stands near Virginia Woolf and embarrassingly close to his real-life mistress Rebecca West…Henry Miller is dangerously near Anais Nin, and Arthur Miller is right there near Marilyn Monroe.

Even more provocative is the fact that authors who would probably have disliked each others’ works are forcibly housed in proximity. Mickey Spillane razzes Rex Stout and mocks Georges Simenon…Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey cozy up but sneer at W.P. Kinsella and Alexander King and Charles Kingsley… Emily Bronte and Pearl Buck try hard to find common ground but fail.

Imagine the mutterings you might hear late at night should these authors’ books come alive and party once they know we’re out of earshot.

Another customer brings Mein Kampf and the New Testament and Bertrand Russell to the counter, and once again my mind runs wild. Jesus would definitely have to come between Adolf and Bertrand to break up the fight, don’t you think?

But wouldn’t you like to be an invisible witness during that conflagration?

Actually, truth be known, I suppose we readers actually are invisible witnesses…spies who listen in on unlikely conversations, chaotic encounters, entertaining and sometimes deadly confrontations.

That’s what reading is all about

 

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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