What Happens Next?

Monday is my day off. I get up late, watch TV in bed, take a nap. The usually day off stuff. Then I hop on the bike and go book shopping. Bellingham is a great place for book lovers. There are at least half a dozen used book stores within the city limits. Three of them are located on the same block of Grande Avenue. One of the three is closed Mondays, but Grande is still my first destination. Walking into the store is the best part. You push to door ajar, it sticks a quarter of the way through its motion and you have to transfer its weight to your shoulder briefly to keep it swinging open. As you take your first steps in, the bell rings over the door, the signal for the woman stationed behind to counter to look up briefly from whatever tome she happens to be engrossed in today. Your eyes adjust to the dim light. Then the scent hits your nostrils. Dust. And paper of course, but mostly dust. But this dust is no ordinary dust. This dust is different. It smells different. It smells like adventure, laughter, romance. This dust has history and science and stories to tell. It’s the dust of ideas, and it smells wonderful.

Sometimes I know exactly the book I’m looking for. Other times I let the book find me. I like to start at the very back of the store. I work my way forward quickly, just glancing over the books at eye level. Stretching my hand out to one side or the other, I let my fingers run over the bent and broken spines. The concave of paper-backs and the convex of hard-backs flowing by underneath my palm. On rare occasions, I’ll find one simply by touch. But usually I end up back at the front of the store. Then I return to my favorite sections; History, Science-Fiction, Classic Literature, and make a more thorough search. The key to finding the good stuff is to remember to look beyond eye level. In a store that’s wall to wall books, it’s easy to forget that it’s also floor to ceiling books. Squat down or sit on the floor, get a stool or stand on your tip toes, whatever it takes. The good stuff has been cleared out of the middles of the shelves by other people. It’s up above and down bellow where you’ll usually find your day’s catch.

My first used book store experience came at the age of 10 or so. My mom would take my sister and me to Book World. It’s now a hardware store, but at the time it was the most amazing place I’d ever seen. I was so used to going to the store with my parents, finding stuff I wanted, then being told I couldn’t have it. But here, I almost always found something I wanted, and my mom would usually buy it for me. Partly I think, she wanted to encourage me to read, but I suspect it was also a cheap way to get me to shut up for a few hours.

I suppose that’s still why I do it. They’re cheap entertainment used books are. But there is one problem with used book stores, and it’s people like me. I own somewhere on the north side of 300 books and I have never, will never, sell any one of them to a book store. I’ll loan one to a friend sure, even for years at a time, but while it may stay somewhere else, it’s still mine. The used book store is an intermediary between book lovers. We go there and find the books we want that someone else no longer wanted. But some of us want all the books we have. That’s where the system breaks down. If everyone who owns a particular book still wants it, then there won’t be any copies in the used book store for anyone else to buy. And so, every once in a while, I am forced to make a trip to a new book store. Don’t get me wrong, despite living in a certified hippie town, I’m no Wal-Mart protestor, and I don’t have any moral problem with frequenting large chain book stores. My problem isn’t one of the heart; it’s one of the wallet. I’m cheap you see, and new books are not. None the less, I walk through the well oiled doors, and hear the electronic beep signaling half a dozen clerks to converge on me, asking if they can help me find anything. As I step onto the well lit shop floor and see the perfectly spaced shelves freshly stocked with pristine, unopened books, I remember that every single one of those dusty, dog-eared, water warped, coffee stained, sunlight faded, beautiful used books started its life in a store just like this one. Freshly printed and cut, just waiting to be purchased at retail price.

A book is so much more than just a pound or so of paper and ink. A book can be a teacher, a passport, a conversation or a challenge. And whether you’re the first to read it or the last, whether you sell it, lose it, loan it, or keep it forever, it will always be yours. Because the most amazing thing about a book is that it’s not limited to the words contained on its pages. The book is only a beginning. What its ideas create is all up to you. So… What happens next?