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.

A book as daunting as this beard: War and Peace, Part One

The signs preceded the announcement of the book’s publication. I moved house in July, and my new neighbours turned out to be Russians, a whole shwack of them whom I could watch go about their yard work and endless renovations through a series of large windows as though they were the subjects of some Bruegelesque panorama. They’re cute. They shout a lot. Later on I attended a normal party that my friend Peter mistook for a costume party. He came dressed as Napoleon, brought with him a bottle of brandy, sort of sulked much of the night. Finally, I got talking to this homeless guy who camps out front of a coffee shop I frequent. He never says much, just leaves out a collection plate and hunches over a book. I decided to ask him what he was reading. It was a dog-eared copy of War and Peace.

I’m not especially superstitious but I am fond of coincidence. Mere days after my chat with homeless guy I saw it on Amazon: a brand new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the Sonny and Cher of Russian-into-English translation, superstars in their field, and rightly so. The new hardcover edition looked regal, enormous, glorious. Its appearance was accompanied by trumpets in my mind, a proclamation that now, now the time has come for me to finally read Leo Tolstoy’s gargantuan magnum opus about Russian society during the Napoleonic era. I felt a surge of readiness and ordered a review copy.

Full disclosure: I am not qualified to be a books columnist. Among my chief deficiencies are two items that apply directly to this column: 1) I haven’t read all the classics of world literature, I mean like not even the top five. 2) I have a problem with big books. Now, the first deficiency might come down to my lack of education or, more self-flatteringly, my diversity of interests that keep me from pursuing any sort of regimented reading program. The second deficiency however I consider to be a professional hazard. I review books. I read slow. There’s a lot of books out there. So tell me how a guy’s supposed to pay the bills reviewing all these new books and still have time to catch up on every literary doorstop in the Everyman’s Library?

But enough excuses. The moment had come, and along with it the holidays. Surely Christmas in Cowtown with the folks would provide ample time for Tolstoy. Yet it proved impossible. There were visits. There were sudden meals occurring at strange hours. There were walks in need of shoveling. There was booze. More problematically, every time I endeavoured to dig in my heels and just get going already I found the book unexpectedly forbidding. The entire first paragraph is in French for god’s sake. I’m a bad, bad Canadian. Je ne parle pas francias. I’m from Alberta. Okay, so there’s footnotes with all the English, but still…

This pathetic farce continued. I spent a promising night in the mountains, but got sidelined by two books I purchased at The Banff Book and Art Den –F. González-Crussi’s On Seeing and John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, both of which are really good. Then came my Christmas gifts –Brad Pager’s critical study of Werner Herzog and some long out-of-print volume with the delicious title of Sex and the Occult– which added further, enormously pleasurable distraction from what I was now thinking of as my War and Peace self-betterment project. Then January came, deadlines were looming. I was, it seemed, an utter failure.

Then a funny thing happened. This time, not a coincidence exactly, but a sort of accidental gift. Having finished with writing for the day, I decided to hike over to a quiet coffee shop a good half-hour’s walk away to get in some reading. I scooped up my satchel and left, not realizing until I got there and ordered something hot that I scooped the wrong satchel, not the one containing whatever book I should be reading for work but the one with, you guessed it, War and Peace. Fuck it, I thought, and settled into it.

…And having made it past the first few pages this time, I realized something: it’s terrific, even fun. The French bits began to feel rhythmically appealing, of a piece within the social pretensions of the many characters, who gradually didn’t seem so difficult to keep track of but rather came vibrantly to life through sly descriptions –“Being an enthusiast had become her social position”– and even more so through the dialogue –“Opinions are opinions, but you see what a good and nice fellow I am,” says Pierre, not long before we find him tying a police officer to a bear and tossing them into the Moika. “Precisely because you’re father is rich, I don’t consider myself his relation,” Boris tells Pierre –as Pierre’s father lays dying and Boris’ mom is hanging around making an embarrassingly desperate play for the gasping man’s pity cash.

I’ve still barley cut into War and Peace’s 1224 pages, but I am now officially under its spell. I’m equally aware of course that it’ll probably take me a while to get through it, to truly savour it, and so I will report on my progress in future columns. For now, adieu, mon petit liseur. And please feel free to correct my miserable, condescending French.