Several years had passed since I’d last hunted with any enthusiasm. I’d go out into the field, find some game, and take home a few trophies, but the old thrill, that sense of anticipation and joy, had gone missing in action. I began to suspect my days of excitement and pleasure while on the hunt were at an end.
And then, on a recent jaunt through Weaverville, Mars Hill and Waynesville, the hunting instinct, and the thrill that accompanied it, swept through me. Without explanation or cause, the ennui of the last few years fell away like weights, and the kick was back.
And so, so armed with two pair of glasses and a wallet stuffed with cash, I set out to buy some books.
The first safari brought us — my son and several grandkids came along — to the Friends of the Library store in the basement of the Weaverville library. After tossing all the kids a few bucks — old hunters like me delight in creating new ones — that sense of fun I’d mourned as gone and dead surged in me, and I scooped up a dozen books or so I could use for work and for personal pleasure.
Two days later, a Monday, found me in Camden’s Coffeehouse in Mars Hill. Here I wrote for a good while — the place is a delight, and the coffee, delicious — and then learned that the public library was directly behind the coffee shop. Here, too, was a Friend’s bookstore, much smaller than the one in Weaverville, a medium-sized room with little of interest to me, and yet here it was that I bagged the greatest trophy of my print-and-paper safari.
Fewer than a dozen books stood side by side on a shelf with a pink notecard announcing “Old Books $1.” Unbelievably, an 1825 edition of Daniel Webster’s “Orations” stood in this motley crew. The cover was a little wobbly, the spine was worn almost away, and some of the pages were mottled with brown spots, a common phenomenon known in the used book trade as foxing, and I was swept away from the moment I first opened it.
Over the years, I’ve written two or three pieces about this great New England orator and legislator, and Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” remains, in my opinion, one of the finest of American short stories. Now, for less than the price of a cup of coffee, this piece of history could be mine.
At the desk, the librarian nearly charged me two dollars — I would gladly have paid 20 — but she then remembered the sale price. So, one dollar it was for a book that exhales the American past every time I touch it.
What I thought would be my last adventure occurred in the Friends’ store in Waynesville, an establishment located on the other side of town from the library. Here again, I hit paydirt. Among my other purchases that day, I acquired a copy of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “Quo Vadis,” Mark Helprin’s collection of short stories “The Pacific and Other Stories,” and M.J. Cohen’s and John Major’s thousand page tome, “History in Quotations.” Here, too, I picked up Charlie Lovett’s “The Bookman’s Tale,” which I’ve just downed with great enjoyment, and some more books for that part of my collection set aside for the grandkids.
But best of all was a 1970 collection of poetry, quotes, excerpts from speeches, and more, all housed together in the handsome “Our American Heritage.” It’s bound scrapbook-style in blue with pink string holding it together, and like a grand lady, has retained its beauty for 55 years.
Thinking that the safari had ended, I returned to Virginia with a couple of boxes of books in the trunk of my car, 30-some new additions to my home library. The next day, Monday, required a trip to the library to track down a biography of Ben Franklin I needed for work. On my way through the vestibule, I passed the sale cart for our library’s tiny store, and there, for ten cents apiece, were nine volumes of the 1962 Collier’s Junior Classics, collectively called “The Young Folks Shelf of Books,” along with an older copy of Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” My book lust sprang into action, and five minutes later I had bagged 10 excellent hard-cover kids’ books, all for a buck.
My reason for describing these adventures with print and paper is simple: I hope to motivate you to buy books, real books. I want to encourage you to visit bookshops, new and secondhand, library sales, and yard sales. Digital books have their place. They’re convenient, and if you’re going on a vacation, you can literally take a library with you on your electronic devices.
But for me, and I suspect, for many others, nothing compares to real books. There’s the feel of the pages between the fingers, for instance, the notes one sometimes find from previous owners or gift-givers, and often the book’s particular perfume, whether new or aged. These are the books that live in our homes, the books become dear friends.
In her book about the books in her life, “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” Anne Fadiman wisely noted, “Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”
Buy and read a book, and you may have the very good fortune of finding a mentor and a friend for life.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” minick0301@gmail.com.)