Dear friends,
The steady and reassuring dance of superb reading material continues through the doors of Brown and Dickson. Everyday, great books come in, and they go out again in the satchels of smarty-pants customers. It is a relief. In opposition to the newsfeeds on our phones, this reliable and deeply appreciated stream of bookstacks and boxes offers reprieve from the stick-in-the-eye news stories that puncture our lives. We do love to be informed. However, the WAY these news stories appear—like a three-year-old who just learned how to scream BOO! behind you—is likely more the point than their content, as McLuhan once observed.
Being the introverted sort, we feel like we are stuck at a party that is primarily performative, where the guests are laughing just a little too hard at bad jokes. We’d rather be back at home beneath knitted blankets getting QUIETLY drunk instead of loudly drunk in public like these baffoons. Every revelation from the press makes it sound like the world is three sheets to the wind and telling stories about that time they went to see April Wine and lost their shoe.
Perhaps that’s the Soul of North America these days: go home—you’re drunk. We are always, always, happy to leave the party. Give the ol’ contemporary world an “Irish” good-bye and retreat into the sequential, calm, and equally dynamic truths of good books written by good people and good beer brewed by artists and their arty friends.
We recently purchased one such collection.
It was housed in a garage—not a car garage but a garage insulated and renovated into a study. Home-made shelves of frankly perfect height lined the room. There was a desk, a lovely chair, and spines piled as high as the cement floor could withstand—meaning, there were a lot of books. It was the classic library of a liberal mind: philosophy, literature, sciences, politics, arts, and personal eccentricities galore. Many of the volumes had bookmarks from independent bookshops. Some had photos of trips abroad. Some had notes in the margins recording a stray thought or insight.
Not a dog-eared page or edge-worn cover was to be found among them. These books were cared for like a pedigree pup. He had even organized them by era. The first shelf was for the Greeks, the final shelf for mid-20th century (his general cut-off). Oxford University Press, Penguin, Faber and Faber, Modern Library, and Dover editions were abundant. It was a lifetime of collecting and reading. London has libraries like this all over like secret pockets of the resistance. We bought a bunch. A whole bunch.
Have you ever been with someone that will not stop talking? We have. It’s hell. Have you ever been with someone who insists on the world acting like a mirror to their concerns…and then will not stop TALKING ABOUT IT? We have. It’s hell.
It’s a hell reflected infinitely into itself. Now, we are not suggesting that we be removed from the world like some Gentleman Philosopher quietly composing essays in his wood-filled study (despite the deeply seductive fantasy this offers—so sweet, so relaxing), but maybe there is space to step back and think, maybe feel, your way through life at a pace that isn’t at the velocity of an emergency vehicle driven by rowdy drunk people leaving a very loud drunken party?
Listen: the beats between the notes, the silent spaces, have a meaning that counters the sometimes stick-in-the-eye forte of contemporary thinking. You know what we mean. Those boxes—those sweet, well-stocked boxes of clean, undog-eared Penguin Classics, carried gently yet excitedly into the shop—frankly offer all of the relief we’ve needed this past week.
We didn’t expect it. Nor did we engineer it. It just happened. We were pricing these beautiful titles on our kitchen table and said to each other, “Fuck this feels nice, doesn’t it?’
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
