What Was I Thinking?

IMAGE AND TEXT REDACTED OWING TO SENSITIVITY OF THE SUBJECT OF THIS BLOG ENTRY

Twenty years ago I got a call from a man who ran a prestigious REDACTED art gallery. It was located in REDACTED, and it was one of those intimidating places where you REDACTED. He was on my mailing list, though he’d never bought anything. I didn’t care for the stuff he peddled – REDACTED, REDACTED, REDACTED, and REDACTED – and I didn’t like the REDACTED  of the whole operation. After all, we weren’t dealing with English royalty here. They probably sold their flashy stuff to REACTED.

In the course of this telephone call the owner of the gallery regaled me with a description of his fine reference library of Pacific arts and culture, including seminal works of discovery. He concluded his discourse by informing me that, of course, he wasn’t interested in selling this material. The reason for his call was that he was thinning out his REDACTED library and had several boxes of REDACTED books to sell. I asked him if he could name a few of those fine books, and he reeled off three or four of the most REDACTED titles by the most REDACTED authors REDACTED, REDACTED, and REDACTED. I informed him with all the hauteur I could muster that I was a rare book dealer and had little interest in buying his REDACTED. I suggested he call the Salvation Army. He hung up in a snit. Or maybe I hung up in a snit.

Flash forward to September 2018. I received a gracious email from an old gent down in REDACTED. He ran a small gallery and, over the years, he’d accumulated quite a few books on REDACTED. Was I interested in coming down for a look-see? I explained to him that I’d need to know more about what he had on offer before schlepping to REDACTED to look at it. He told me that sounded reasonable, and promised to send a list. I promptly forgot about our conversation and went on to more pressing matters which, that week, involved stacking cords and cords of firewood.

Next day I received an email containing a painfully handwritten list of the contents of fifteen boxes of books. Nearly every one of them was REDACTED I responded to his email with a careful explanation of why these perfectly good books no longer had any commercial value. His reply was gracious. He understood the changing market, he said. He almost felt bad for the books – it certainly wasn’t their fault! It was a shame, I agreed. Fifteen boxes of REDACTED that should have been worth thousands. The Internet had so destroyed the market that I wouldn’t pay more than REDACTED a box for them.

Done! he replied.

Why had I said that? What was I doing? I pondered that question all day (stacking cordwood is very meditative),

and I pondered it on my hellish drive to the impossible-to-get-to town of REDACTED

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I pondered it as I was filling the back of my poor old car with those poor old books.

I pondered it as I dragged them into my office and sorted the pure dreck from the slightly less dreckish. What was I doing?

The only thing I could think was that this was some senile act of nostalgia, some attempt to recreate my past. Or maybe I was honoring the books that had made that past possible. Those good, honest, workmanlike books had paid mortgages and car payments and college tuitions. They’d put food on the table and whiskey in the glass. It was almost as if I owed them something, but there was more to it than that. I was fond of them. They were my old friends. I would rescue them and surround myself with them one last time. I would catalog them and put out a list full of them, and people would buy a few because I’d price them so cheaply, and I’d work my tail off filling orders and making hardly any money for my efforts, and then I’d put them online, where they would not sell, and they’d be with me forever, to my dying day. That was why. That was why I did that foolish thing, and I’m writing this to say I’m at peace with my foolish decision.

Oh, I nearly forgot. This story has a punchline. You’ve probably guessed it by this time.

The friendly old REDACTED down in REDACTED He was the same guy who’d called me from the REDACTED twenty years before. The books on offer were the sames ones I’d already rejected. He’d mellowed with age, and so had I.