A Bookstore Reverie
On time and books, and browsing through years.
To saunter through a bookstore, to linger before shelves or over display tables, to get lost in a book you’ve picked up, even in passing, while doing so, is to plumb time in a curious manner. Bookstores — good bookstores like The Strand and many others not so grand but quite as cultured — are storehouses of memory, where the assembled spines of books serve as a kind of temporal baffling to make the days, months, and years layered between their lines more resonant, a cocoon of learning and sensibility. In this admittedly idealized perspective, accomplished booksellers, like their librarian counterparts, are first and last rememberers. In the amnesia of our moment by moment, importunate but unimportant newsfeeds, where even our memories are packaged for us, bound and gagged in jejunely friendly kidnappings (“You have a new memory;” “2 Years Ago — See Your Memories;” “Buddies, Friends, Amigos”) to be ransomed by our Pavlovian attention, delivered to us with no intervention of mind or emotion, without recall, as it were, our sentiments reduced to gimmicked interactions productized for the profit of others — in this state in which memory is plucked like a string to make us dance to someone else’s music, the atmosphere of a bookstore can infect us with a singular sense of intuition, a need to honor an abiding alertness hidden beneath our distracted attention, a sense of persistent agency that is an avatar of story, real or make-believe, a self that moves through time hoping to find some way to mark, or, better yet, keep it. Which is just the kind of timeliness certain books can speak to, for every volume is a repository of hours invested by the writer in one tense and the reader in another; every paragraph we come to read, no matter how smooth its surface, is a record of the author’s exertion as she marks her time in words, and the more carefully composed the words are the more the minutes marked will expand the ones we expend pondering them.
Think about the commitment we risk when we open a book: we’ll spend long commutes or whole evenings between its covers, over days and weeks and maybe months, in pursuit of entertainment or erudition, diversion or deep thought. How much sheer time our books absorb. When we watch movies, in contrast, no matter how good they may be, we cede two hours of attention to someone else’s control, and when the film is done with us, we are, generally speaking done with it; there is none of the ongoing conversation or — if initial infatuation clicks — the protracted engagement that reading a book can conjure. This promise of untapped time, of romance in the offing on shelf upon shelf, is what gives a bookstore its seductive air for browsers fleetingly flirtatious or perennially in the mood.
On that day two weeks before Christmas, even while I was glad for the promotion of my book and for every Instagram and Twitter post The Strand social media team had deigned to include it in, I was happy to be in a familiar dimension that extended beyond the digital timeline that channels our lives like relentless railroad tracks (all aboard for oblivion, “Like” it or not), quietly communing with a past version of myself who had, decades ago, haunted this same space with a timid hunter’s apprehension, bewitched by the spirit of serendipity.
I wore the weight of the intervening years more heavily than The Strand seemed to — in fact, the store had undergone something of a makeover. It was brighter, cleaner, less encumbered — less overwhelmed — with overgrowths of volumes, at least on the surface; its space felt more ordered and easier to navigate, friendlier in every way, stripped of the sense it had for me in the distant past that I could wander too far in a certain direction, turn a corner into a neighborhood I shouldn’t be in, a shadowy corner of thought I might not find my way out of. There was now a broad, airy staircase in the middle of the main floor, up to a shopping area I didn’t remember, and the entire enterprise had been spruced up into the epitome of a modern retail space: merchandise well-displayed, experiences and programs — the Book HookUp! — aptly trumpeted to arrest traffic in its path, ancillary products alluringly arrayed. Where before, at least in my dim but potent recollection, the place had seemed to trade in secrets, the sense of invitation it purveys today is less furtive, more welcoming, both larger and smaller at the same time.
It is also lonelier. I’d first wandered The Strand’s miles of books when that course of discovery was but one of several — was it dozens? — in the neighborhood, at the tail end of its time as New York’s Book Row, of which The Strand is the solitary survivor, no doubt in part because of its knack for renewal. Making my youthful, eager way through the stacks of The Strand in my formative years, or wandering through the warrens of Biblo & Tannen on Fourth Avenue, or descending into the fathomless basement of Dauber & Pine on Fifth, I’d discover on each foray tracts of unexplored territory — terra incognita of the bookish life — as if the emporiums were expanding underground from one week to the next in a fairy tale of intellectual adventure, luring the hero (that would be me) deeper into labyrinths lined with piles of disorganized tomes to be pawed and pored over — mined — until they revealed some treasure to be toted home and pondered like a relic of a sacred quest.
