The strange joy of second-hand books
Of course, second-hand books may have passed through several hands over many years, but ‘several-hand books’ only underlines that the ownership of any given book remains vague, beyond enumeration. Whatever we call them, second-hand books don’t readily give up the secrets of their worn covers, cracked spines or multifarious ownership.
You may be lucky and know the past owners, the sacred pedigree of an annotated or signed book by one of the great and the good. Collectors live for such details, for the cachet of owning that rare book with a known history, reminding us that a book is also an individual thing, an object: occasionally, an object to be lauded or publicly presented under museum glass.
For those with less ambition, or less ambitious pockets, buying second-hand is a cost-saver, not a collector’s indulgence, much less an “investment” — except, perhaps, intellectually. Such books are often purposive, enabling communion with written thoughts and feelings, imagined adventures, or explications of ancient history, rather more than they are inherently beautiful or unique. They are fostered for their ideas, not for their material worth.
second-hand books of any rank are bound to invoke a sense of the melancholy of past ownership or dead owners.
Either way, sacred or not, all books are at least immanently second-hand and can be expected to live on, past the lifetime of their original purchasers.
In this way, second-hand books of any rank are bound to invoke a sense of the melancholy of past ownership or dead owners. Or if not of the dead, then of the unknowability of an object rescued from the bookstore or the charity shop or the Amazon marketplace. From whence do these books truly come?
I have reflected, flickeringly, on whom these owners may have been: people, at least, with the same interests as me. When a book from Oxfam hits my doormat, I am half-way through fighting the padded envelope before wondering whether it was donated by the relatives of the recently deceased.
Sometimes, the assumed dead have a name: the handwritten dedicatee to whom the book had been gifted or perhaps the possessive owner herself. A name only, but glancingly personal, suggestive of the gender, class and age of my predecessor. Perhaps they still live, their books scattered for the sake of downsizing or in rejection of a gift.
How uncanny and how useful that someone else had the same interests as me in The History of Printing in Britain by Colin Clair, or Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England by David Cressy, or Gout: The Patrician Malady by Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau. How useful that they — the authors, books and owners — have afterlives.
one becomes not only the collector of one’s own interests but of other people’s, fragments of what they were or hoped to be.
And surely I am not speaking of the same owner in the case of each book, and not least because I purchased these from the Oxfam website at different times. What I can conclude is that, in rescuing these books (one never merely buys a second-hand book), one becomes not only a collector after one’s own interests but of other people’s, fragments of what they were or hoped to be.
Little else obliges these books to stick together as objects except that they were variously shuffled off to Oxfam and then purchased by me, each carefully selected. Yes, I am the one with an evident interest in printing, rebellious sexual behaviour and gourmand’s diseases, all catered for by the ghosts of owners past. I summon and they arrive, uniquely configured to my interests.
Sitting there, on my shelves, or at-hand on my increasingly burdened desk, they are piled, almost beyond easy movement, but they will scatter again, just as they were scattered from other shelves and other desks before they reached me: death, for books, is just another adventure.
Although past owners are not generally known, there are other marks that highlight the object’s journey, taking it out of absolute anonymity. I have a book that came from publisher HarperCollins’s own library: “not to be removed”. Did the publisher’s archive have too many copies or was it taken, and put on the market, in error? Will I one day get a knock at the door?
I have found business cards, presumably recruited as bookmarks, that provide the contact details of the previous owner: in one case, an executive for a Silicon Valley tech company. Did he look out from the corporate suite dreaming of more literary pursuits as he read Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why?
Then there are the books expunged from the dutiful shelves of the public library system. Perhaps this is a sad reminder of the closure of so many libraries in the UK, the US and elsewhere, or the encroachment of digital resources, or perhaps simply a sign of a clearance of under-issued books. Sad in any case, but the objects move on, to sit on the shelves of more appreciative readers.
The joy comes always in the possibility that a book will spark into new life and inspire others beyond the original ownership.
The joy then comes in spite of the interstitial sadness of the object, moved from one kind of life that is over and into an expectant other. The joy comes always in the possibility that a book will spark into new life and inspire others beyond the original ownership. In this case, the word ‘ownership’ is perhaps too proprietorial: it is instead surely a kind of guardianship, our witness to the value of the book, and a passing on of that value at the point that we ourselves must pass on. And who can know what value those previous owners obtained from their brief ownership?
When I was a student, I went with friends on a semi-spontaneous drive to Hay-on-Wye, a plan which we had been toying with for a few days. We vaguely knew that the renowned Hay Festival (which Bill Clinton called “Woodstock for the mind”) had been advertised around this time and we optimistically drove to it, without checking, without tickets, without directions.
We eventually arrived to find the festival had finished a few days before but, not discouraged, we immersed ourselves in this so-called “book town”, which was my version of Disneyland: every street lined, one after the other, with bookshops. This exaggerated little place was heady and unbelievable.
It even had a castle, though rather tumbledown than fantastical, which acted as a bookshop, in whose grounds bookcases stacked with volumes lined the perimeter stone wall like soldiers, exposed to the open air and the temptations of casual thievery (you paid at the exit into a wooden honesty box). A castle full of books. How unreal it all seemed.
Then later I experienced something unusual. We entered what the signage boasted to be The World’s Biggest Second-hand Bookshop. As I walked in, I was greeted along the entranceway by giant walls’ of books, almost twice my height, stretching beyond what my senses could handle. A dizzying warehouse of books stacked forever in every direction. One could spy still other floors up and down. It held an Escher-like dizziness and induced a vertigo I hadn’t experience before and certainly not since.
The smell of old books was so strong that I felt nauseous, the sensory overload too much, even for someone with a penchant for the smell of old books. I had to leave and fled into the fresh air. Too much of a good thing, indeed. Books — my mistresses, my masters — could exist in such number that the reality of them was too powerfully there, a phenomenological excess.
The dream of an infinitude of books, suddenly at hand, was too much: be careful what you wish for. A reminder, too, of one’s own limited capacity to exhaust the world’s information, one’s own limited time on Earth, the simple melancholy that all the world’s books could never be scaled, even if one had the resources to rescue every one of them.
Since then, scientists have analysed the smell of old books, surely a factor in the sensation I felt that day, though perhaps, prosaically, I had simply endured an allergy to dust. Hay-fever? Those who collect, will know the timeless aromas.
In this, an eBook reader, for all its other benefits, does not transmit the years, the environment, the past hands, the accidental marks and rips, and least of all the smell of books, which is the sensorial mark of time.
The ownership of a second-hand book is part of the object, the ‘book-hood’ of the book itself. How can the world survive the loss of such human tracings when the digital world produces perfect copies, a continual evasion of ownership and history, a recursive and brutal newness that makes me hanker to be locked up in the world’s biggest second-hand bookshop, whatever its excesses, whatever my ironic need to flee?
Better to be mad in heaven, than sane in hell.
