We recently sent a humble email to one of our customers asking them if they’d be interested in a copy of Roald Dahl’s Ghost Stories. We asked, “Is this the sort of thing you’d be into?” A quick reply followed. “YES! But I already have it. Please keep me in mind for anything ghost related or anything with a witch or a haunted house.” Swoon. This customer had nailed the trifecta of one of our favourite constellations. There are many others, of course. She could have also said, “anything murder, psychedelic, or library related,” and we’d have felt the swelling joy of kinship in our hearts. A common love of books is what binds us together.
It reminded us of being downtown in the 90s and haunting record stores. It may seem pathetic now, but back then you had to physically seek out people with similar interests, through the back pages of magazines, trips to specialty shops, and midnight screenings. Today’s surveillance nightmare sets this kind of behaviour up as creepy stalkery, perhaps rightly so. But in the 90s, how else were you supposed to find other people in your city who ALSO thought Trent Reznor was like totally hot? You were 16. You couldn’t get into bars. You could barely leave your block. That #2 bus though, the Dundas route, took you downtown to Sam the Record Man where other leather-clad punks hung out around the N section of “Alternative” records and, like, they could be your new besties.
We’re older now, have burned through friends and lovers, and have a kind of “been-there-done-that” sense of things, like detectives lobbing jokes over a body. “I’ve seen it all, lady,” we posture, flicking a smoke. Despite all of our cynicism, book collecting is a bastion of juvenile enthusiasm, unbroken by maturity. The secret conversations we have with some librarians reveal the interior glee we keep over our youthful fascinations. Just chat with a keen Children’s Literature librarian about the cool stuff they’ve acquired for their collections and you’ll be taken straight to the Wonka Factory (repurposed as a playground and not a death-trap, of course).
Adult life requires trust. We have responsibilities and people counting on us. Few have the Wonka fortune at their disposal. Our role as booksellers requires us to be accountable and measured. 30-day-return policies and the like. Fair market value. These are VERY important values to have. But sometimes you just want to be in downtown London standing outside Sam the Record Man talking about how The Downward Spiral is SO MUCH BETTER than prettyhatemachine. Or, in that unforgettable moment, hear Public Enemy for the first time, through someone who just said, “I think yer gonna like this.”
We can’t express how cool it is when we write someone telling them that we have a book they might like and they enthusiastically reply with a YES I’D LOVE THAT. Our little wants list, kept on small recipe cards in a small recipe box, is a written record of bibliodesire. It has customer notes like MUSHROOMS, ANYTHING BY OR ABOUT SYLVIA PLATH, or POST-COLONIAL BRITISH EMPIRE. One person just wrote down, “CIRCUS FREAKS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!” Desire is so fleeting. What is its record apart from nuptials, making-out, music, or poetry? Strangely, in our case, it is a little pile of cards storing the private, book aspirations of a small North American city.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
