The delicious delirium of delving into dead books: a visit to The Monkey's Paw

I’m thinking about dead books, those out-of-print, forgotten, lost or hidden volumes that slip into our hands after revealing themselves in shops or garage sales, in dust-coated boxes abandoned in attics or even floating atop the contents of trash cans. These are books not sought out, but discovered. Everyone has some hanging around: children’s books, textbooks, oddities. From where I’m seated I spot The Fabulous Flight to the Mushroom Planet, a teenage thrift store find, The Truth About American Diplomats, borrowed and never returned, The Truth About Fonzie, a birthday gift. Many seem mere novelties, but they’re also artifacts. Some contain secret knowledge from the past, ideas and voices otherwise lost.

Across from a liquor store in a Portuguese neighborhood in Toronto lives a small bookshop called The Monkey’s Paw. I was directed there by another bookseller months ago while searching for, appropriately enough, scholarship on Poe. But I quickly abandoned my hunt upon entering, as preserved biological specimens, manual typewriters, engraving plates and a few thousand carefully selected dead books caught my magpie eye. In the afterlives of dead books, this place appeared a significant junction.

I got snared by one shelf in particular: every other title struck me as a gem. I was trying to discern what linked them together, and, just to prove what a nerd I am, I think I actually laughed out loud with delight when I realized this was, as the proprietor himself labeled it, The Death Section. I left that afternoon with a copy of Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial and Death. I darted through traffic, bought some Fuller’s Porter, walked home and nestled in for hours of folklore, forensics, decomposition and delicious, chocolaty beer. Before that afternoon I never knew getting rid of a corpse could be so cumbersome!

I returned to The Monkey’s Paw today to speak with its owner about dead books. The window display showcased a stellar crop: Clinical Assessment of Malignancy and Deception, Cornish Guernsays & Knit-frocks, Women on Heroin!, What Wood is That? and The Life and Work of Walt Whitman: A Soviet Perspective. There’s also a Remington Rand with a toy raven perched upon it. Wow.

Inside I admired a Blue Velvet pres kit, a 3-D display called LIFE OF THE SILK WORM, a sinister little volume entitled Morbid Craving for Morphia and, hung like tiles upon a narrow wall, a collection of Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books with titles like Ventriloquism Self Taught, Sex Life in Greece and Rome and Facts You Should Know About Digestion. Ridiculous phrases like “penetrating an enigma” were being typed in my brain. This is truly the dead letter office of books.

As Nico chants above the rumble of streetcars, Stephen Fowler sits before a map of the USSR, happy to discuss his enterprise. He opened just six months ago, after moving to Toronto from San Francisco. The spirit of The Paw, Fowler says, is characterized by “the beautiful, the arcane, the macabre, the absurd.” What with the store and a family, he admits he doesn’t read like he used to, though whenever he’s got a cold, he curls up with a big book about ants.
I ask him what makes a guy enter a racket as tough as selling dead books.

“What I’m banking on,” he explains, “is that out-of-print, odd books is a growing market. I believe we’ll soon see the end of the book as we’ve known it for 500 years. Big publishing houses can’t wait for this, as it means an enormous drop in production costs. New bookstores are doomed. But old books, I mean, in the 20th century, how many books were published? You can’t undo them. They’re still out there. Waiting.”

What, I ask, is the allure of a dead book. “There’s the sense of something that’s fallen through the cracks, and you’ve retrieved it,” says Fowler. “I only stock the weirdest books I can find, and if somebody like me wasn’t salvaging and reintroducing them to others, they’d be gone. So I think of my vocation as kind of curatorial. Here’s this piece of culture I select from the morass, place on a table, and suggest that it’s a real and valuable thing.”

Of course, books also possess immediate, practical value. As we converse, a woman of Caribbean descent –let’s call her Delvina– pokes her head in asking to examine something in the window called A-Z of Jamaican Heritage. Delvina won’t come inside because of her unusual breathing problems, she explains. She peruses the book outside for some time before re-entering and informing us that governments searching for “Pharonic power” are trying to destroy her via the magic of her own people. She says she’ll buy the book later. Fowler, a seasoned bookseller, just nods like he sees this sort of thing daily.

But maybe Delvina’s somehow at the heart of these thoughts about the afterlives of dead books, the journey of rare objects holding rare knowledge trying to find precisely that individual reader who’ll summon up their wisdom and usher their dead words back into life. I think about Delvina as I head home, with more beer and more books that I wonder when for the love of God I’ll ever find the time to actually read.

Weightless words: devices, choices, and the future of reading

Introducing Kindle™

The following, abridged text was authored by The Amazon Kindle Team: “Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle…

“Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen …you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute… Newspaper subscriptions are delivered wirelessly each morning. Most magazines arrive before they hit newsstands. Haven’t read the book for tomorrow night’s book club? …Kindle delivers your spontaneous reading choices on demand.

“Kindle’s paperback size and expandable memory let you travel light with your library. With the freedom to download what you want, when you want, we hope you’ll never again find yourself stuck without a great read.”

The Illusion of Choice

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a technophobe. Technological advancements fill me with as much wonder and excitement as they do trepidation. As a freelance writer, these days, without the internet I’d need a new profession, which is problematic since I seem to possess no other skills. And, need I add, you're reading this on a blog.

To be sure, I am by some standards a dinosaur. I covet vinyl –its weight, texture, bottom-rich sound, visual beauty, the decisive pleasure of dropping the needle– and when at home listen to it almost to exclusion of other formats. I go to the movies to sit in the dark with strangers as often as possible. I own the rather morbidly named Magic Bullet (are we meant to ponder the mysteries of the JFK assassination while we whip up our smoothies?), but I grind my pepper with mortar and pestle for no other reason than I have a really cool mortar and pestle and these smooth, well-crafted objects feel good when gripped in my hands. I’ve never downloaded a song or a movie from the internet, above all because it seems the most boring way possible to discover something new, removing all the pleasure of finding.

Yet I was the first person I knew to buy an iPod. I run in the mornings and thrive on music to keep me going. I have an obsessive need to travel light, so I was totally jazzed about not having to fit a bulky wallet of 48 CDs into my backpack anymore. I took my iPod everywhere, all the time, and always on shuffle. I became a walking advertisement for the device, enthusiastically showing it to everyone I met.

Then, without ever thinking about it, something changed. I grew tired of the sterile exercise of shifting music from CDs to my computer. When preparing for a walk, I found myself actually wanting to consider what to listen to, to walk up to my collection, take a disc from the shelf, examine the cover, remind myself of the track listing, what the packaging had to tell me. On my iPod were hundreds of songs, available through a mere finger tap, a seemingly mind-boggling selection –but I wanted to make a choice. Lately, unless I’m going for a run, if I want to move through the city with music I use my discman. A teenager in a restaurant recently asked me what it was.

The principle behind the marketing of Kindle is choice, but the choice it offers is not unlike that of a big box bookstore: contained within are a lot of books, but nothing in particular. How do you choose something from the virtual “everything” on offer? For most of us, managing the babel of infinite choice is a journey dictated by advertising, by whoever has the most money to spend. Does it make me a Luddite that I want to leave my house, enter a public space inhabited by other people, browse, maybe read a random page, linger in the aisles, maybe talk to someone who might share or understand my interests, might direct me toward some unexpected title or even engage me in conversation about a book?

The Unbearable Lightness of the Virtualization of Everything

In Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, a problematic film, but one whose essential despair I find touching, the protagonist, a middle-aged family man and government employee, lives in a world where seemingly every pleasure has been compromised by a draconian conspiracy between labyrinthine bureaucracy and regulation, mindless consumerism, superficial status obsession, and technological distance. The protagonist’s only refuge lays in banal fantasy, yet in this sense he’s no different from his daughters, who when their not locked into some video game have their iPods constantly stuffed in their ears. Everyone around him is continually plugged into some electronic device that allows them to hover in a sort of fantasy realm, cut off from their immediate reality. It’s a comedy, incidentally.

Like other Arcand films, the philosophy guiding Days of Darkness reminded me of Milan Kundera, a writer with a peculiar gift for chronicling the uglification of the world. But the film’s final image made me think of John Berger’s writing, with its emphasis on attending to the sensual world. We see the protagonist sit down at a table, before him a large bowl of apples. Nearby a woman is canning preserves. The protagonist picks up an apple and begins to peel it, and the act yields a sort of quiet, modest revelation. We can smell the inner flesh of the fruit as its peel falls away, feel the spray of juice as the knife traverses its surface.

For the lover of reading (as opposed to a book-lover), Kindle promises an unprecedented freedom: wherever you are, a virtually fathomless selection awaits. Contrasting the dusty, bulky weight of libraries you’re offered perfect lightness, an entire literature cradled invisibly in the ether. It sounds like something out of science fiction –like a dream deal. As I write this I’m still amazed by the prospect and all it implies.

But what about that shed weight? What about the weight of a page, of a real book, with its margin notes and worn corners? What about the weight of an apple? The weight of a real baseball bat? The weight of a real body next to yours? I’m under no illusions that technological progress can be reversed, nor would I wish it so. Our relationship with technology is absolute, at least as old as the wheel, its path is carved deep into our destiny. But I also think, perhaps now more than ever, its worth considering every how and when to use that technology, to question whether we want to simply adopt every new development without considering what’s lost.