I left Ann Arbor last Tuesday morning on the nearly last day of February, answering the inscrutable exhortations of my balance sheet to head South in search of inventory. By the time I rolled south of Canton, O., past the whited brutalist sepulcher of the Football Hall of Fame, and into the rolling farms of southern Ohio, the landscape was suggestive of the days of Ernie Wessen and barns full of regional Americana and early American imprints–or such anyway are the necessary illusions a bookseller allows himself as he heads into warmer climes at the tail end of winter, spurred on by the suspicion that his trade is dying and all the good stock has vanished.
By the time I was south of Charleston, West Virginia, the road cuts appeared sufficiently bituminous to fuel a couple of power plants, and the sight of the first Creationist billboard was not enough to knock the irrational good cheer from my heart (reminding me as it did of West Virginia’s rich tradition of contumacious religious polemics). The sunshine eventually produced in me sufficient cheer that even the gaggle of tattooed tweakers who seemed to loiter around every gas station were unable to put a dent in my latter-day Whitmanesque fellow feeling.
(My bold Yankee self-assurance notwithstanding, I will admit that the sight the next morning of three Subaru Foresters and four Obama bumper stickers in the parking lot of the Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill where I enjoyed breakfast did much to alleviate my cultural bends.)
The balance of the week was spent in the company of some of the best sort, including a meandering day spent with elder bookman Norman Kane (the Americanist), who at 87 has seen more material than you can imagine and who is still buying and selling and letting the occasional scout in on a nominally secret stash or two; I also on a whim drove though a rainy night into Charlottesville, where I found some good stuff at Heartwood Books (an open shop, mirabile dictu) and was subsequently treated by Mary Gilliam of Franklin Gilliam :: Rare Books to a fine lunch at the Whiskey Jar, where Mary and Gillian Kyles were kind enough to carry the burden of the conversation as I stuffed my face in an unseemly manner with some of the best fried chicken and collard greens one might hope to secure.
(Despite my unctuous fingers, Mary let me scout her stock after lunch and I managed to find a few lovely things which happily for us all were encapsulated in Mylar. Her tolerance of this louche scout might very well be the happy fruit of our tenuous biblio-genealogical connection that stretches back to my tenure at the Brick Row Book Shop, which had of course been sold to John Crichton in 1983 by the legendary Franklin Gilliam, Mary’s late husband and the namesake of the current concern.)
After one misbegotten but picturesque shortcut down a one-lane dirt road somewhere in the hills north of Charlottesville, I eventually washed up on the shores of Lorne Bair, where I was entertained and diverted with inventory and provided with safe harbor and dogs and cats and conversation at length before I made the trip in Washington the next day for the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair.
For somebody who did not exhibit at the show and was thus not tethered to a booth, the fair proved a good one. The dealers are parceled into several warrens in a Holiday Inn and one could escape the bustle of the main room of exhibitors by wandering into one of the quieter ancillary rooms; but even in the backwaters the fishing was good, yielding up such grist for the Bibliophagic concern as a nice promotional item for a troupe of performing pigs who traveled in tandem with a new-fangled “talkie” motion picture feature, a promotional pamphlet for a legless lecturer, and a perhaps unrecorded first edition of an argument for Spiritualism advanced from beyond the veil by a Methodist bishop. I even picked up a novel scheme for ship-to-ship communication (with its own written alphabet) from the stalwart Greg Gibson of Ten Pound Island Books, though my efforts to appear sufficiently picturesque so as to make an appearance in his Bookman’s Log as an emblematic token of the decline of the book trade did not meet with success.
A bookseller of this era of course cannot compose even a modest travelogue without taking a moment to hold any given book fair up before him like Yorick’s skull and speculate on the decline of the trade. I have noticed that I can only be analytical about the trade–and then only halfheartedly–in hindsight; when I am on the prowl in the aisles of a book fair or poking around in a storage locker somewhere, I cannot be bothered with any questions other than about the item in my hand, in front of me right now. If a woodcut portrait of an enterprising legless lecturer does not make your fingers itch then all the yammer about e-books and dusty tomes will availeth us not. Turn your attention to the object in hand and stagger forward in 30-day bursts of payables and receivables and the trade has in a manner survived–that after all is the common ground between this latter-day pygmy Americanist and my older and wiser colleagues.
(The title of this entry is of course meant to suggest the manner in which I scampered from college town to college town on this trip; fans of A. J. Liebling would I hope recognize an allusion to his apt summary of the spread of Mediterranean culture to America.)
