User Submitted Blog Post: On the Cheap

The culture Web site PopMatters has just launched a fun enterprise, inviting various writers to write essays on the used bookstore. It's a brilliant idea, given how transformative a place it can be for young readers and writers---if you're any sort of serious reader under 25, you're probably too broke to drop $25 on a new hardback (or even $14 on a new paperback), and libraries can be understocked with a lot of more obscure stuff. As a teenager, used bookstores are where I learned about a lot of major authors, took fliers on lots of not-so-major ones, and generally started building my library. I doubt I paid more than a quarter for my copy of Paul Fussell's Class, probably the most important book I read in my teen years.

But more than just being a repository of cheap books, used bookstores are unusual repositories of intimate information about readers. Diane Leach's lovely contribution to the PopMatters series gets at some of this, discussing some of the odd bits of arcana she's discovered in her used-book purchases. Leach writes:

Written on the flyleaf of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

August 1989-For Joan-With so much love and thanks-you are a rare and vital friend-Mary.

But Joan didn't keep the book. What happened? Perhaps Joan died, or found the writing life impossible. Perhaps she came to despise Mary.

When I picked up Janet Fitch's White Oleander, a sheaf of snapshots fell out, family photographs of total strangers. They're still tucked in the book. It seems wrong to throw them away.

Critics often don't get many reminders that books are very intimate things for many readers. I get plenty of free books, fresh and new, while most readers have to agonize over buying a new book, regardless of how much money they're free to spend. I'm often tasked with getting through a book in a matter of days before I have to leap into the next one; most readers stick with books for weeks if not months, the two becoming close travel companions. (By comparison, critics are sleazy---we have lots of flings and one-night stands.) That may speak to the most important element of the used bookstore---the way that it reminds us of why reading is worthwhile in the first place, not just for the knowledge we gain but from the emotional relationships we build.