How to be a bookdealer and do nothing all day

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“Boy hidy, I sure wish I could own an old bookstore and sit around reading all day for a living!”

I get this all the time, in multiple variations, from customers and tire-kickers and browsers and odd assortments of other folks who’ve never been in the business of bookselling.

They see me behind the counter, static, sedentary, focused on repairing a book or entering a title into the database, or searching for a tome some caller needs now and this minute or yesterday in-a-hurry, if you please.

It’s all image and perception, this mythology about what old rare bookstores are like. I kind of like the fact that customers can’t see how it’s all done, the fact that it’s the bookdealer’s job to make it seem easy, effortless and somewhat magical.

Truth is, this is what today has been like thus far:

I pull into the driveway of an old suburban home at 8:15am, where a blue plastic tarp covers the garage entrance, barely obscuring the loot within—old Disneyesque collectibles, garden tools, moldy newspapers, cardboard-packaged kitchen gadgets, missing-paged cookbooks and the like. The proprietor drives up and unlocks the side door so that I can sort through the trove in several rooms. I spend the next 90 minutes hurriedly stacking books I wish to purchase, regretfully rejecting many that just don’t make the cut for a hundred and one reasons, smiling to myself at the amazing range of topics and generations and illustrators and authors whose works have traveled to this musty and lonely place. I feel sad at leaving them behind to an unknown fate, but it makes me feel good to rescue the foundlings I do pick in hope of providing a second life to each.

It is hot and stressful work, since I have to negotiate several sets of steps while peering over high piles of books I’m carrying to the car. Finally, when the vehicle is filled to the brim, I take my leave and head to the shop, hoping to arrive just in time to open the doors by 10:30. I run the car’s AC system full blast so that I’ll be dry and cool and calm by the time the first customer enters. I park the car, begin unloading its contents (this will take all of two days, one stack at a time), then neatly stacking, sorting, cleaning, pricing and readying the children for shelf-placement into the correct alphabetized categorized cubicles, where they will rest and thrive and eventually be selected by kindly foster parents who will care for them, enjoy them and, when the time is right, pass them on to yet another family.

The shop is filled with authors’ and illustrators’ lives between covers. Each little work will once more come alive at the kindly touch and perusal of the solitary understanding reader.

So, this is how I spend my morning so that you can glance at me behind the counter, wonder how I get away with doing not much of anything. The backstage work is everything. The preparation and cleanup are covert but necessary. The effort to please is paramount.

The rest of the day is spent showing off my adoptees and hoping you’ll see their beauty through my eyes.

Boy hidy, it’s fun doing something and making it look like nothing. Every magician knows this open secret. Ask me about our secret handshake

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Parallel Universes at Last Interact

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 HOW TO WRITE ABOUT A PEBBLE

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I am regarding a pebble.
 
This particular pebble rests comfortably in the palm of my right hand. 
 
Editorial correction: A pebble, which is inanimate, cannot rest comfortably, since that suggests some kind of will, a sort of purposeful action on the part of the pebble. It would be more accurate to say, “I am balancing this pebble in the palm of my hand, where it will remain until I decide to move it. It cannot move itself.”
 
This pebble is smooth and time-weathered and at first cold to the touch.
 
Slowly, heat from my palm transfers to the pebble, making it less than cold and closer degree by degree to the temperature of my palm.
 
Editorial correction: From my human perspective, I am making assumptions that may have no basis in known reality—I don’t really have proof that this pebble has been worn by nature, since it might have been thrown into one of those rock-smoothing machines and forced into simulated time-weathering. It might be more accurate to say, “This pebble is smooth, made so by forces of which I am not aware…”

Was this the pebble slung by David to topple the bully Goliath?

Or is it just a foundling awaiting the next post-holocaust race of small children who will pick it up for their homemade slingshots, or paint a tiny face thereon in lieu of store-bought dolls?

Editorial correction: We don’t know whether the Goliath story is accurate—perhaps he wasn’t a bully but a conscripted warrior who, because of his size and political vulnerability, was forced to battle the kid with the pitching arm. Maybe he was just a scapegoat or a foil.

And so on.

Storytellers and philosophers and scientists and artists see pebbles in  different realities, in sometimes diametrically-opposed mythologies. Each has a right to see a pebble in a highly individualistic way. Each is allowed to describe the pebble according to wishes, desires, training, each has a special parallax view. It is up to the writer of the moment to pull these disparate perceptions together into a work of art—such as a story or a treatise or a rainy-Sunday-afternoon meandering column such as this one resting within your field of vision

 

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Backtiming Your Life

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I’m in the middle of preparing breakfast, juggling the eggs, tomatoes, cheese, onions, potatoes, butter, jam, biscuits, so that they are all ready to eat at the exact same moment—what we old broadcasters used to call backtiming everything.

Backtiming? Here comes a memory:

Let’s go way back to the days before computers: as a radio announcer, I need to end my music show at exactly 8:59:50 pm, so that a nine-second station identification and “time check” can be performed precisely one second prior to ”hitting the network,” meaning that my sentence has to stop one beat before the network newsperson begins reporting news. It has to seem effortless to the listener, but as any professional performer knows, you have to work hard to look effortless. So, how do I make that musical piece end at exactly 8:59:50 pm? Well, I check the length of the final song on the program. Hmmm, it’s three minutes and 21 seconds long. So, in order to end perfectly, the record must begin at 8:56:29 pm. That means that what I am ad-libbing right before the record starts has to end at exactly 8:56.28pm, but sound easy and natural to the listener. The entire hour is pre-determined this way, working backwards and then proceeding forward. Thus the term backtiming. Everything has to be backtimed. 

Do this backtiming thing a few thousand times and you never again have trouble making things end at exactly the right instant. It’s all done with computers these days, so announcers no longer need to know this stuff.

Back to the kitchen and making breakfast.

I’m not a good cook, but I do know how to make everything happen at about the same moment. The oven has to be preheated, biscuits laid out and ready to insert on signal, the onions and potatoes are sauteeing nicely, starting just early enough to time out with the eggs and sausage, the tea must be made and ready to go, the utensils and plates and napkins appear just in time…everything has to be hot and presented together, or my little show will be ruined.

I do pull it off, and you’ll have to ask Liz whether the whole thing is worth it.

I am now father and grandfather to several good cooks, but I recall how they, too, had to learn to backtime, even though they never heard the term. Margaret, for instance, used to cook for the family one night per week when she was a pre-teen. Having never heard that magic word, she at first took several hours to get everything ready. She merrily prepared one course from beginning to end, then began the second course to completion, then the third. After a while, she caught on to the fact that if the courses existed in parallel universes, they could be put together simultaneously and dinner ready in less than an hour. This is something you teach yourself, and to this day, she’s an efficient and wonderful cook.

So why did this whole subject pop into my head? Well, like much of my writing, it started out as an essay on the memories that inanimate objects contain, but my fingers wrote something else. Maybe I’ll get around to the inanimate-object thingy next week.

Stay tuned for station identification

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Too Late to Edit the Uneditable

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Free entertainment abounds in local publications.

This is an actual direct quote from the editorial page:

“…management, employees and loyal customers are rejoicing because of an unbelievable groundswell swell of support across the South…” There’s nothing sweller than a groundswell swell of support, don’t you know? Or a swell groundswell, especially if the groundswell is unbelievable. Why even make the statement if it’s unbelievable? The mental chaos is so swell, the reader forgets the purpose of the article.

Another editorial page quote:

“Our affection for the automobile and neglect of transit make Birmingham-Hoover area roads the second most deadliest in the U.S.” What’s worse than being the second most deadly of anything? The second most deadliest, that’s what’s worse.

Funniest newspaper quote of the year:

“Asked if it was against the law (to parachute off the top of tall Birmingham buildings in the middle of the night), Williams chuckled and said, ‘You just can’t go around jumping off buildings anytime you feel like it.’” Does this mean you are allowed to parachute-jump off buildings anytime you don’t feel like it? Or is there a certain time it’s ok to parachute-jump off buildings? Even if these questions are rhetorical, the statement itself is straight out of Mayberry or Dogpatch.

Alabama tour guide listing:

“ANNUAL TOUR OF HISTORIC MOBILE HOMES THIS MONTH” While the proofreader and editor took long naps, this went to press and was distributed throughout the English-speaking world, in order to attract tourists. To non-Southerners, it sounds like what they already may think of us—owners of mobile homes so old they are now historic. On the other hand, I’d love to see what a tour of historic mobile homes would be like. The residents of Mobile, however, are not amused. 

And this heading from an obituary column in a hospital employee newsletter:

IN MEMORANDUM

Is this enough for now? If you know of other actual press quotes, send me a memoriam

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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If I Were a Camera…

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If I were a camera, I’d snap images of the dozens of merrily poetic scenes that run by me each day. They happen so fast, they are so overlapping, that I can’t get them all written down in time to capture the flavor.

If I were a camera I’d be snapping all the time.

SNAP #1

An energetic, tiny puppy runs past the shop, pulling a woman in her wheelchair as she shops the streets.  I rub my eyes and realize this pup could not possibly be pulling such a load—the wheelchair is battery-powered, and he’s just doing what opportunists have done since time began: find out which way the masses are heading and run ahead to make it look like they’re leading the pack. The puppy is leading his source of nurture retroactively and having a merry time of it. The puppy really is pulling the chair! As Charlie Chan once said, “Sometimes the impossible makes itself happen.”

SNAP #2

“Will you buy me a candy bar?”  It’s the voice of the checkout clerk, and I’m the only customer at the counter. First, I think she’s talking to herself via one of those earpod phones—that is, until she repeats the question, looking straight at me. I realize she’s trying to get me to add a dollar to my purchase so that she can legally pluck said candy from the display and eat it, free of charge. I’m so taken aback—so in a hurry—that I comply. She thanks me. I leave the store knowing that I’ve been smoothly and legally panhandled. For some reason, I don’t mind. Her bosses will never know.

SNAP #3

This happened once when I was very young…and I learned a valuable lesson from it:

In the throes of a very busy day at the shop, a street person enters, toting a heavy box. He wants to sell me the contents—a bunch of books, the likes of which I normally try to find, familiar titles I can always use. Without taking time to examine them, I hastily offer him a few dollars and proceed to help three customers, field one phone call request, search for a book I just know was here a few minutes ago…you know, the multi-tasking kinds of things you do to run an efficient shop. Later, when things have settled down, I  go through the ritual of pulling volumes from the box in order to examine, clean, price and shelve them. It’s right about then that I realize I’ve just purchased my own books. The street guy has gone into my basement storage area, stolen whatever he saw there, then entered the shop to sell them to me. I’m amused at my carelessness, I admire his aggression, I roll my eyes at the silliness of the incident, and I file away yet another anecdote to pass on to you on a day like today.

SNAP #4

Again, it’s a long time ago at the shop, and I am plying my trade like any other rare-book dreamer surrounded by centuries of words and bindings and paper. A smiling, middle-aged man and a small, pleasant, elderly woman enter together, bearing a brown bag—hopefully containing goodies for the shelves. He has brought her to me, and she has a story to tell. She reaches into the recesses and brings forth a small, thick book, places it in my hands, then waits for my reaction. This calfskin-bound volume is obviously old, very old, an artifact from another time, another life, another continent. The paper is stiff and white—whiter than last week’s newspapers. As I leaf through the hand-written pages, I recognize Latin and some other language, names from ancient Greek and Roman times. Markings and stains indicate that this book has been through times of war, peace, times of good, times of bad, somehow surviving long enough to come to rest in my Museum of Fond Memories in Birmingham, Alabama. Objects this old have their own distinctive vibration, a buzz not quite of recent yore. The small woman wants me to have it—the many volumes it once accompanied have been sold at auction in New Orleans, and this is the last she owns. The man has told her I will be the one booklover who will respect and savor the book, not abuse it, not send it to an undeserved fate. I pay her what I can, she is satisfied, and she and her companion disappear into the morning, never to return.

SNAP #5

It’s years later. “I heard you got a 500-year-old book around here,” a good ol’ boy says, as he wanders about the shop. “Sure do,” I say. His eyes widen and he is silent. “Want to see it?” I ask. “Can I?” he answers. I unlock the display case, pull the ancient relic from its hand-made box, and hold it before him. “Man oh man!” is all he can say. “Want to hold it?” I ask. He laughs nervously and declines, afraid he might cause damage. “No, please,” I insist. “Everybody should hold a 500-year-old book at least once in their lives…just to see what a real book feels like.” He caresses it, turns the pages and is satisfied and awed.

This is a routine I repeat many times over the decades, in a feeble attempt to share my awe of the past, the wonder that old things engender, the realization that artifacts help awaken our senses and our imaginations—our appreciation of all that has come before us. Visitors who experience the past in this hands-on act carry with them the visceral memory that you can never get in a museum. Museums, after all, never allow you to touch or get too close. But here, in this one museum in the world, I insist upon touch, and you can attain the shock and awe that comes from sharing in the palm of your hand that thing that hundreds of people before you have held and cherished over many, many years. For a split second you are linked through the centuries to ancestors you can only know through touch and sense.

Can’t get this from a Kindle or a history textbook.

Quick, where’s my camera? Wait—it’s right here, all the time, just inside my observing heart

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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CAN’T STOP MY BRAIN flashthoughts #835

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Things happen when you’re sitting all alone in the airport cellphone parking lot in your transportable solitary cell, waiting for the call to do a drive-by at the baggage area to give your wife a ride home.

Yes, things happen when your brain won’t be idle,

even though you’re on idle and your car is idling.

Like,

1.  When a fugitive, would you rather be at large or on the loose ?

2.  Does the poor grammar of the song Live and Let Die bother anyone but me? “…but in this everchanging world in which we live in…”

3.  Did you run your car off the road when the local public radio station interviewer and interviewee simultaneously and repeatedly pronounced Pythias as PIE-thee-us?

4.  Do you love the passionate poetry of this passage from a Howlin’ Wolf song, “…this bad love she got…makes me laugh and cry…makes me really know…I’m too young to die…” ?

5.  Why do I obsess over the fact that Gene Autry mispronounces Santa’s reindeer’s name as Donner ? It’s Donder, I tell you, Donder. See http://donder.com/  (I learned it at the annual Donder party.)

6.  Do you find it inexplicable that the more Ahmad Jamal or Dimitri Shostakovich or Miles Davis repeat a musical phrase or note imterminably, the more it grows on you and becomes a powerful statement?

7.  Isn’t it remarkable how drummer Joe Morello’s burst of laughter and relief at the end of Dave Brubeck’s tune Unsquare Dance makes the piece just about perfect? You have to turn the volume up real high to hear it.

8.  Notice that if you think real hard about it, there are at least eight (maybe more) museums within quick walking distance of Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories? Tourists already know this. Here they are: Sports Hall of Fame/Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Radio Museum (at the Alabama Power Company building), Birmingham History Museum, McWane Center exhibits, Ullman Museum, Reynolds Library Medical Museum, Civil Rights Institute/Museum, Museum of Fond Memories... I’ll let you fill in the rest.

9.  As Shel Silverstein said, “This town grows old around me…” but as it grows, it only gets better and better. Brigitte Bardot commented, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”

As the center of the Universe, Birmingham is ripening and ready to burst into a new future. As the bookstore at the center of the center of the Universe, Reed Books, too, becomes more beautiful.

Those are my fragmentary momentary thoughts. Just can’t stop my brain…

 

A word here, a word there—it adds up.

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Some are born editing, some try to become editors, some need editing, some editors need editing.

It’s in my DNA, I suppose. I’m in the born-editing category, and most of my family have this affliction, too.

Possessing the editing syndrome means I’m never bored. Everywhere I go, there are wondrous words, signs, sentences, paragraphs, tomes, graffiti, names, phrases—and each has its own story, its own mysterious genealogy and chronology and biography.

I’m in the Middle of Nowhere, Georgia, reading a local weekly newspaper in the lobby of an unnamed motel. It’s graduation week and all the local graduates are listed by name and photograph. This is big news in a small town, and I wish it would once more become big news in big towns, too.

Graduate names include Destiny, Arvestus, Kadijah, Gabriel, Chetavious, Ecstasy, Markenique, and a plethora of additional traditional and made-up monikers. Only name missing is Moniker Lewinsky, but that’s another story—and a bad joke, too. Anyhow, the smiling faces of these graduates emanate from such places as the Gatewood Academy for Sparkly White Kids, the Nathaneal Green Academy for Privileged Caucasians and the like, plus a healthy sprinkling of public schools with eclectic and diverse blends of students. It’s a merry mix, a cross-section of America that reveals itself in alphabetical relationships. Lots of students who probably would never be seen next to each other in real life are juxtaposed side by side in this graduation ritualized order. Hope it’s not the only time they will be stirred together in friendly amalgams. Some even get to be valedictorians and salutatorians, words I’m certain they will never, ever use in casual conversation for the rest of their lives—not counting bursts of bragging. I’d love to have been the class stentorian announcer.

Continuing my journey from neverland to somewhereland, I listen to an old pre-TV radio mystery show with the wonderful line, “She was wearing a gown that started at the floor and ended unexpectedly.” What a great piece of writing! Appears in a story “The Big Money” by Phillip Andrews. I would not edit that sentence one whit—or even two whits.

I miss the old writing. Notice how nobody every slakes a thirst anymore? Maybe they quench, but slaking is definitely out of fashion.

Then at the airport I see a sign that includes the usage VEHICLE OWNER’S and in the same sentence, VEHICLE’S OWNER’S. Stretching a point, both are actually correct—just clumsy. It’s a true American tradition to misuse apostrophes in liberal amounts, but these accidentally are almost OK.

 Anyhow, I’m always stimulated by words, and I’m forever grateful whenever leaving behind yet another Motel Hell I’ve been forced to occupy—this most recent one with the slanted squishy-bottomed shower for the balance-impaired and the complimentary continental breakfast which was efficiently removed (perhaps shipped back to the Continent) a few seconds after I entered the dining area to break my fast…and the side-entrance doorlocks that never worked.

Free at last, I’m on the highway again, reading the signs and listening to the words, words, words that frame my life

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the End of the Story

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What got me started on this column was the annoying notion that many folks pay little attention to process and focus their interest solely on the next thing.

One reader begins a book, loses interest, scans a few pages, then reads the last page, puts it aside and reports that that was a pretty good read. I find many a partially-read book at the Museum of Fond Memories.

In a movie theatre, I’m seated early to catch the previews, get a good seat, watch the animated logos and titles and credits and prepare myself for a good story…then sit past the ending till all the crawls have, well, crawled away. This is becoming more difficult to do, since moviegoers often chaotically come in during the first few scenes, try to find a seat, block the view of those behind them, chat loudly to their entourage, even go so far as to ask us early-arrivers to move down two seats so they can get their gear into the row—guaranteeing that I’ll have to sit behind one large guy nicknamed Booger, who has two tubs of popcorn and a supersize-gulper spread across two seats while his companion texts and giggles, never once looking at the screen.

Then, while the final scene is gearing up for the emotional punch, some moviegoers start rising, gathering their life’s belongings, stretching to occlude the screen, and generally making snarky remarks to one another while the credits disappear from my view.

Would these same people read a book, skipping the first chapter entirely and tearing out the last two pages before reading them, then report that they had read the book?

At a poetry reading, I count 35%  of the crowd gazing into their laps, texting, googling, looking up missed call numbers. Are the poets chopped liver?

Maybe we could found a nudist movie theatre/lecture hall/reading room where attendees are not allowed to bring anything with them except their attention. Would we then have a crowd of people who actually heard the story, saw the story, appreciated the story as it was meant to be received? Or would we just have a roomful of naked people who can’t wait to leave and do something important, something truncated and incomplete and quite bereft of meaning?

There, I said it and I’m glad. Since you haven’t bothered to read down to the last line, I don’t think you’ll get to appreciate this wonderful quote from Confucius: “By the time a man begins to smell himself, everybody else has been smelling him for three days.”

Sorry for all this—every year or two, I just gotta do a rant

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

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So long, baby sister

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ROSI

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Rose Mari (Rosi) Reed, a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, died on June 17, 2012 at the age of 61.  She had resided in Columbia, SC since 1998 and was the daughter of the late James Thomas (Tom) Reed II and Frances Lee McGee Reed of Tuscaloosa.

 Ms. Reed graduated from Northington Elementary School and Tuscaloosa High School, and attended the University of Alabama.  A talented artist and craftsperson, she was a consummate film buff and an active member of the Alabama Wildlife Rescue Center while residing in Alabama.  Rose Mari loved opera, ballet and 60′s rock ‘n roll.  She played clarinet and piano.  Her passions were archaeology, anthropology and helping injured and helpless wildlife.  She was a Girl Scout from elementary through high school.  Rose was baptized at Forest Lake Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa.

Rose Mari’s employers in Alabama were Alford Screen Printing, Warrior Screen Printing and Pier One Imports.  She worked at Sears while attending the University of Alabama. In Birmingham, she was employed by Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories.

 

Rose recently said that her favorite place to work in Columbia was Graph-itti T-Shirts, Inc.  She had worked at Graph-itti for six years and planned to retire in 2016 at age 65.  She embroidered sports and business clothing using computerized sewing machines.

 

Rose Mari loved Halloween, Christmas, birthdays and any other excuse to have a party.  She was shy and quiet with strangers. Those who were fortunate enough to know her, met a humble, kind, sensitive and intelligent person.  

She is survived by sister Barbara Jean Reed Partrich, Columbia, SC, and brothers James Thomas (Jim) Reed III, Birmingham, AL; Ronald Lee (Ronny) Reed, Houston, TX; Timothy Ray (Tim) Reed, Chattanooga, TN; eight nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and grandnephews in Alabama, Texas, South Carolina and Idaho.

“Knowing Rose Mari was worth the effort it took to break through the shyness. When she spoke of subjects and people she loved, her face and voice came alive. She was knowledgeable and-well read, but kept opinions to herself unless asked for. She listened and noticed things most people missed. I loved conversations with Rosi. She has left an irreplacable space in my home and heart.” –Barbara Reed Partrich

 

 

Rose Mari’s family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations may be made

to:

Alabama Wildlife Rescue Center

100 Terrace Drive

Oak Mountain State Park

Pelham, Alabama

         or

www.awrc.org.donate

(c) 2012 A.D. by Barbara Reed Partrich and Jim Reed

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