Editor's note: Regular readers of Books & Culture will be familiar with Wesley Hill, who has just completed his first year as assistant professor of Biblical Studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and Brett Foster, associate professor of English at Wheaton College. Last week we posted an exchange of letters occasioned by their recent visit to the relocated Seminary Co-Op Bookstore in Hyde Park. Here is the second and concluding installment of their exchange.
Dear Brett, Reading about your delight in the relocated Seminary Co-op made me realize that my first letter to you was more gloomy than I intended it to be. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing if it blinds us from seeking out new vistas, and I'm afraid my nostalgia for the old store hasn't yet diminished to the point where I can fully appreciate all the positive things about the new location. But your enthusiasm is infectious. I trust that, after a few more visits, I'll be joining you in praising the new horizons.
One obviously positive note to emphasize is that the Seminary Co-op has relocated, not gone out of business. In today's economy, that's no small thing. At a time when Barnes & Noble is planning to close a third of its stores over the next decade (according to a Wall Street Journal report), any bookstore keeping its doors open is an occasion for rejoicing. And one more positive: the relocated Seminary Co-op isn't just a giant chain bookstore, inviting as those places continue to be for me. (As a friend of mine recently quipped, if You've Got Mail were being remade today, Tom Hanks' villainous company might be a certain unnamed online retailer, and Barnes & Noble could be cast as The Shop Around the Corner.) No, the Co-op stands squarely in the happy trend chronicled in a Christian Science Monitor cover story a couple of months ago: the quiet, steady growth of independent bookstores. Yet another reason to count our blessings!
As I think back to our Sunday excursion, I find myself pondering the future of bookstores like the Co-op. The Monitor story ended on an up note, with no imminent demise in sight for the indie bookstore, but it also charts a subtle shift. With the decline of the megastores like Borders, visiting an indie bookstore may come to be, for many book-buyers, akin to visiting a niche kitchen store or a specialty boutique—which is to say, less of a regular occurrence and more of a field trip, "a high holiday of the spirit," to invoke Auden's resonant phrase. Even for someone like you, Brett, whom I know to be a frequenter of bookstores of all sorts, a trip to the Co-op remains a once-in-a-blue-moon occasion, as you admit, something to plan ahead for and savor, not the bread and butter of your book-buying routine. And I wonder, are you a representative customer in that regard? If so, what might that portend?
I recall reading a fine column in The Christian Century last year, after Borders closed its doors for the final time. The column, "A Browser's Lament" (March 23, 2012), was by Rodney Clapp, and he described how he and his wife used to spend at least one evening a week at their local Borders. Among the virtues Clapp praised about that leisurely time among books was the serendipity of stumbling across titles you'd never see if you were relying on Amazon's carefully calibrated algorithm to channel your browsing. You might be waiting for a (by-now hackneyed) elegy for the codex to follow, but that's not where Clapp concluded. Bringing the column to a close, he said it finally dawned on him where the bookstore-browser can still cultivate her coveted serendipity: the library. In the absence of the wide aisles and comfortable chairs of the megastore, where else can you have the experience of lingering among shelves of books and passing the hours with titles you haven't seen before? Rereading Clapp's column and pondering our recent Seminary Co-op trip, Brett, I imagine a book-browsing future for myself that's part getting-reacquainting-with-my-local-library, part specially-planned-visits-to-the-indie-bookstore.
And a key part of the indie bookstore experience is, as you say, taking in the kaleidoscopic array of the "Recent Arrivals" table. In your last letter you told me about some of the titles that caught your eye at the Co-op, and you asked me to do the same. This is the fun part—here are a few of the many that piqued my interest:
What first caught my attention was a book by Geza Vermes, the (late) great Oxford historian of early Judaism (particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls). Titled simply Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, it's a handsome volume, from Yale University Press, and it comes with an endorsement that says the book "sets out to retrace the route by which a Jewish preacher in 1st-century Israel came to be declared as consubstantial and co-equal with the omnipotent, omniscient only God." In my judgment, that is the most essential question of early Christian history, and I'm interested to see how Vermes—himself someone who can't accept the legitimacy of that route—describes it.
From there my eye drifted to a new book by another Jewish scholar, the Harvard professor of Jewish studies Jon Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (from Princeton University Press). I ended up purchasing this book at the Co-op, and, having read it now, I can report that it lives up to Levenson's usual high standards. Much like Stephen Prothero's recent God Is Not One, Levenson's book sets out to dismantle the attractive myth that, at the root of the so-called "monotheistic faiths," there's a common bedrock of shared conviction, a kind of "neutral Abraham" that's waiting to be recovered and appealed to over against the unfortunate disagreements that later grew up among the three rival religions. On the contrary, Levenson says, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all make use of the figure of Abraham, but they understand his significance in irreducible, irreconcilable ways. Which doesn't spell the end of interfaith dialogue; on the contrary, Levenson hopes, it may reenergize it by helping its practitioners avoid facile readings of one another's sacred texts. (One of the professors I most admired in graduate school told me he'll read anything Jon Levenson writes, no matter the topic, because he knows if he's not already interested in the topic at hand, he should be, if Levenson is addressing it. That was enough of a recommendation for me to make Levenson my intellectual companion too, and I'm glad I have.)
I'll run—more quickly—through a few more titles that caught my eye on the beautifully wide table at the Co-op. David Halperin, author of the influential One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, has a provocative book out called How to Be Gay, a kind of cultural history of "camp." Given my ongoing interest in the intersection between Christian faith and theology and homosexuality, I was intrigued by this new arrival.
A very different book, by Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, prompted a second look, not least because of its fetching cover. The book explores Gandhi's proprietorship of a small printing press during his sojourn in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, but it appears to be, as wise books usually are, about so much more: reading practices, interreligious cooperation, ethics, and social change.
And finally, Brett, at the very end of our visit, as you and I were trying to tear ourselves away from the shelves and make it back to the car, I picked up Matthew Guerrieri's The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination. I was immediately attracted to the minimalist aesthetic of the cover, and the deckle-edge pages (there's no book whose presentation couldn't be improved by deckle-edge pages, in my humble opinion), but as I flipped through it, I found myself equally riveted by the subject matter. What an interesting idea: to enumerate the meanings hearers have assigned to the symphony's portentous opening and explore their contradictions and interconnections.
Well, this has to stop somewhere, so I'll conclude. Thanks for the chance to reminisce about the first of many visits to the new Co-op. Next time, maybe our route to Hyde Park will wend by the Wheaton Public Library?
All the best, Wesley
Dear Wes,
Thanks for your latest letter! What fun it was to read it, to hear about a few books from the Seminary Co-op that you recommend, which are now of interest to me, too, and also to ponder more of your thoughts on bookstores, book-buying and reading habits generally, and, surprisingly, libraries! Everything old is new again, I suppose, although when it comes to public libraries as wonderful places both to check out new books (in both senses) and to find decent, back-corner work space, well, as you suggest, I am hardly someone who needs convincing.
I am glad that you are thinking differently and more positively about the Co-op's new store, compared with your initial, still slightly disappointed impressions, so strongly informed as they were by your memories of the old location. Since our first exchange of letters, I have continued to think about the aspects of the new location that make it an appealing bookstore. You mentioned in your first letter those wooden shelves in the main section, whose thin arches overhead seem like a designer's subtle nod to the tunnel-like experience of the prior space. And how about that improbably bright carpeting for such a "serious" store, with its rainbow colors and De Stijl geometric patterns? I even felt a soft spot for the four sections of "Marxist Studies" books—not shelves, mind you, but four full bookcases! Similarly, you mentioned the color-coordinated rows of Loeb titles, and I would match your impression with mine, at seeing shelved in one place so many light-blue-colored volumes in the I Tatti library, a series of Neo-Latin Italian Renaissance works, meant to complement the Loeb classics, really. I love savoring such details in any individual shop, but such a plentitude of Marxist or I Tatti titles is likely to be found, these days at least, only at Seminary Co-op.
Wes, I would just as quickly add, though, that your strong nostalgia for the old store and its coloring of your first visit to the new place are perfectly understandable. The Co-op was a collegiate bookstore for you, and you found titles there, as you put it in your first letter, that shaped your intellectual development. Even though I knew of the store's reputation long before visiting, my days in the Co-op have been far more recent. I think scholars and book lovers generally recall those early bookstores of their youth as if they were old kinsmen. They remain dear, even if long gone.
I didn't purchase my first literature titles till high school, and options were limited in Jefferson City, Missouri. I remember an excellent teacher recommending Heart of Darkness to me, and I found a little Signet copy at Waldenbooks in the Capital Mall. Soon I picked up a battered copy of Paradise Lost at Trade-a-Book, where my mother shrewdly trafficked in romance novels. It was a Mentor paperback with bright yet militant angels on the cover. I think I understood only every fifth line or so, or every fifth elaborate, Latinate sentence scaling down the small pages, but that was enough—I recognized that I was in the presence of something big-spirited, something that was willing to wait till I was grown-up enough really to bite into it. Milton wasn't going anywhere.
I also remember getting a few titles at a downtown bookstore, in the shadow of the state capitol. Which ones? It kills me that I cannot recall. And I would visit a local thrift store near my high school, too, and remember finding Our Town there, and The Ox-Bow Incident, and a less-known title by Flaubert, in a Penguin Classics edition, that was too intimidating to coax my interest at first. I carried it around long enough that I eventually had it handy when I more naturally turned to it in graduate school. It was satisfying, indeed, to have that old copy instantly at my disposal, as if unknowingly I had been preparing for my own future, or at least betting on a more generous and confident literary awareness, unfathomable from that point of purchase in the thrift store. And—oh yes!—I picked up a yellowed copy of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, too. That one just came back to me.
In college, since we're talking about your undergraduate "go-to" bookstore, that's easy for me: it was Acorn Books in Columbia, Missouri, on Ninth Street and just down from the Mizzou School of Journalism and Shakespeare's Pizza. I picked up more poetry books there than I had any reasonable expectation of reading any time soon, and there I also found (at a reasonable price, as I later came to appreciate) C. S. Lewis' magisterial Renaissance volume in the Oxford History of English Literature series. This is going to date me, Wes, but I can still remember traveling to Kansas City with some college friends—I think we were juniors or seniors at this point—and it was the first time most of us had stepped inside of a Barnes & Noble store. Some have ill words for the megastores, and I can sympathize from the point of view of smaller, local booksellers, till my own personal experience betrays me—that day late in college remains vivid in my memory.
Equally vivid is my first visit to Waterstone's, the grand old department-store-sized bookstore on a corner of Newbury Street in Boston: such an inconceivably ample collection of books for sale, it seemed that you might browse forever, or at least until you passed out from lack of food, or from standing or crouching too long, or (this seemed quite possible) from getting lost on one of the upper floors. Or more likely, as you described in your first letter, from simply losing yourself in the browsing. I meant to bring up then that wonderful early detail about Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—that he read in a way that made him "regardless of time." It's the same utterly absorbed state I imagine for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, describing a garret-room piled high with cases with her father's name upon them and his books within them: "Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs / Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there / At this or that box." I appreciate in her simile that sense of being in the presence of something hefty, and of being fed there—books as little bits of cheese for the intellect. Yet that seems almost too modest. In The Screwtape Letters, the eponymous devil is greatly worried to hear of a convert "shut up alone with his books." The big ideas that might be encountered there concern him. Better, he advises, to get the man out of the library and present him with a "healthy dose of 'real life' "—buses and newsboys and such. Those times, the book tells us, either studying or browsing, are important.
Like you, I heard the news a while back that Barnes & Noble will be closing hundreds of stores over the next ten years. This saddens me. Their absence will be like that vanished Waterstone's, or the defunct Borders stores that came up in your last letter. (The one near Highland Park, Illinois, on Skokie Boulevard, I think, is now the nondescript North Shore Health Center. That's a bummer.) Of course Barnes & Noble's greater concern lately has been the plummeting sales of its Nook e-book readers, despite massive investments to ensure their increased or at least sustained success. Personally, I've been grateful for e-books only when a physical copy is non-existent or is considerably more difficult or costly to obtain. So we're talking, in my case, an occasional Amazon Single title, or a new UK monograph on an Irish playwright, whose e-book is a fraction of the cost, even before one factors in overseas shipping and the days it'll take before the book is in hand. Even I can grasp the market benefits of that decision.
For me, though, such decisions are rare, the result of exceptional circumstances. More broadly, it seems that the thrill of e-readers may be wearing off for a good many book-buyers. Maybe I don't have to worry quite as much these days that I will soon be writing for E-book Tablets & Culture. On the contrary, Books & Culture has been out in front when it comes to covering titles focusing on the material pleasures of books and the places that sell them—think of those podcasts or reviews of Booked, My Bookstore, and Unpacking My Library.
Really, we could point to several promising signs of the relative health of print. This year's massive Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference took place in Boston; cruising through the huge vendors' halls, you wouldn't be likely to fear that print culture is dying. The literary journal A Public Space invited readers to join it at AWP "in pursuit of bookishness"—although, true enough, that message was electronically delivered. Maybe even newspapers, which so many have written off completely, are poised to make a comeback. Investor Warren Buffet Buffet's company has purchased 28 newspapers in little more than a year. When it comes to financial viability, Buffet is certainly known for knowing a thing or two. Perhaps even newspapers have a future.
Some developments leave me more ambivalent, though, including one that would appear initially to be great news. The New York Times Book Review recently expanded its children's best-seller list, dividing it into picture-book, middle-grade, and young-adult categories, as well as including e-book sales. Young Adult fiction, the editors explained, has "become a major pop-culture force for both teenagers and adults." Hooray for publishing, right? Or, does it signal something worrisome about our reading culture if YA books are booming—especially when we factor in research showing that the sales boom is largely thanks to 25- to 34-year-old readers consuming books written for 12- to 18-year-old readers. At this rate, soon Goodnight, Moon will be the talk of our book clubs and literary gatherings.
Wes, there's another reason my relationship with the Seminary Co-op may be different from yours: I will always favor hunting around a used bookshop to visiting even a phenomenally stocked store such as the Co-op. My trips there are indeed sporadic, but I make a point of visiting more frequently the Powell's nearby, and the excellent O'Gara and Wilson just across the street, or, a little north of the Loop, Open Books, whose proceeds support a literacy program for Chicago's youngest readers. As for the half-dozen or so Half Price Books locations throughout Chicagoland, well, don't get me started! I mentioned in my last letter Julian Barnes, and in that same preface he describes a book-lover's evolution I can identify with: what was for me Waldenbooks at the mall was for him W. H. Smith, and eventually he came round to valuing more highly "the old, the secondhand, the non-new book." He writes, "I preferred the democratic clutter of a shop whose stock was roughly ordered and where bargains were possible." He came to love the thrill of the search, then, both within the store and also in terms of arriving at the store, in some cases.
Most book-hunters, I imagine, will cheerfully share in Barnes' confession about what happens following a high-mileage trip to a bookstore, only to find nothing desirable there. It is impossible, he admits, not "to buy a scattershot array of stuff to prove that your journey hadn't been wasted." I might add that sometimes you become determined to find something, anything, as a show of support for a bookseller. It's a way of saying, "Hey, sorry, I didn't find anything here I was looking for, but then again my searches tend to be specialized or at best eclectic, and this is just to say that I nevertheless am glad that you exist. May you continue to exist." And may the next shop I visit have the book I'm seeking. Not just any edition or copy, and not just information for its own sake, which in the Internet age is so thoughtlessly present at all times. No, "that certain book" is where the booklover's bliss is to be found, in that particular edition. Feel free to amass your Kindle titles; I'll be roving about in search of J. M. Dent's exquisite little Temple Library and Temple Classics editions. We'll compare our acquisitions at your peril.
One thing still submerged here, but now close to the surface, is the strangely enlivening limitation that physical books bestow upon us. Working with manuscripts and books in all of their singularity and "losability" can be humbling, but in a good way. Take Calvin, for instance, who can easily seem to me like a benign alien with superpowers of the pastoral and theological variety. Well, what a different view I glimpsed in Jean-Francois Gilmont's Jean Calvin and the Printed Book at the Co-op on that afternoon. Clearly Calvin loved books, and balanced well those pursuits with his duties in Geneva and Lausanne. Making his own books, though, could cause him real grief. In one case, he sent the only copy of a treatise via a messenger that he soon feared was a "fraudulent absconder." When the manuscript failed to arrive on time, and was feared lost for good, Calvin writes, "I was so upset I had to remain in bed the next morning." Similarly, when he misplaced notes for his commentary on 2 Corinthians, he remarked that, if they were truly gone, "I have decided never to touch Paul again." How thoroughly human he seems at these moments! A humble, struggling author, after all.
Here's one last quotation from Barnes: "To own a certain book—and to choose it without help—was to define yourself." He recounts how he stubbornly chose Ulysses as his book of choice for a student prize, and soon received it in a ceremony from a clearly disapproving Lord Mayor! Surely he is getting at one reason why material books mean so much to us. One classical illustration of this is Alexander the Great's veneration of his copy of the Iliad. Plutarch tells us that he slept with it—and a dagger—under his pillow, and on his campaigns he carried it in a precious casket repossessed from the vanquished King Darius. I also think again of your mentioning Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order. You called it a "milestone" in your theological pilgrimage. That's saying a lot, I realize, but maybe those most crucial books in our lives become even more than that. They crystallize for us our hopes or certain fears we're facing or strains of a truth we're now willing to hear. They encapsulate our values or tastes, ones held at the time or ones we imagine for ourselves as desirable to be held.
Books in their physical forms conveniently let us have, and also record, those conversations with ourselves, and between our present and past selves, too. See, for example, Sam Anderson's "Marginal Thinking" feature where he displays his comments in books' margins from his past year's reading. That's one kind of continuity books make possible, and there are others—between author and reader, between reader and other readers. Suddenly, books seem like very sociable equipment, and nowhere more so than when books are given as gifts, turning them into keepsakes, objects for preening, or omens.
It's as if the people behind our gifts books stay there, always. For examples ranging from hilarious to heartbreaking, see The Books They Gave Me, Jen Adams' print compilation based on submissions to her popular blog. I will content myself by simply offering a few impressions. First, too many people in the world are giving and receiving Augusten Burroughs' books. Period. Giving Anna Karenina may portend divorce. Just saying. The sentences "My books are your books" and "Keep it as long as you need to" are powerful things to tell someone. I'd forgotten what a special book Red Sky at Morning is. The person who gave someone a copy of W. E. B. DuBois' writings and inscribed, "Rejoice in your heroes!" sounds like a good friend. Beware of boyfriends who give you books by Charles Bukowski or Ayn Rand or Tom Robbins. And especially the boyfriend who accidentally throws away your "much cherished" copy of Franny & Zooey. On the other hand, Don Quixote or Robert Creeley's For Love? Those are fine choices, promising choices. The person who gives a PDF file of a Neruda book? I can say only that he has so much still to learn. Why do books themselves matter? Because your copy of Cat's Cradle and the inscription within it may one day, in the words of a contributor, "seem like a moment frozen in history when there was so much potential between us."
So Wes, for both of our sakes, I should begin to wrap this up, but let me end with three things. The first two are questions, and will be best approached, perhaps, in person during our next visit. I hope so. First, do you ever feel extremely grateful for even those books on the opposite end of the spectrum from works that profoundly shape you intellectually? I mean really strange, far less germane studies that make you think, "Wow, I had no idea," or "I can't believe there's a book devoted to that," which for me becomes almost instantaneously, "I am so happy that such a book exists." I discovered since our visit to the Co-op that there is an annual award for the "oddest book title of the year." Two titles that delighted me were How Tea Cosies Changed the World and Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop. More seriously, when I saw a publisher's advertisement for Gohar Homayounpour's Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, I immediately thought, "There is no way that's not just totally fascinating." And I bet there are surprising insights to be gleaned from John Kran's Creamy & Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food. Then there's Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor, which explores the armor of cloth (cloth?) that Alexander wore when conquering much of the known world. And let me add Jesuit Latin Poems, The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, The Police: 1978-1983, and Eavesdropping: An Intimate History. How remarkable that these books await us, and so many more, and soon you must hit me with some curious titles that you've encountered.
Second, are there any books that you just totally despise? Was it the Goncourts who showed their disdain for popular taste by refusing to have books by certain canonical French authors darken the shelves of their personal library? It feels foreign to me to think of any book like this. Don't get me wrong, plenty of books exist that I don't wish to waste my time with, or that seem filled with terminal dullness, but neither assessment carries with it that kind of vitriol. So let me know next time if any books generate in your that level of animosity.
Finally, Wes, I just have to bring up again your focus on libraries. It is a timely focus, first of all. According to a recent Pew report, 60 percent of people surveyed said they had visited a library in the past year, and 90 percent said that "public libraries are important to their communities." We may wish to temper this report's optimism by noting that the book-centered nature of libraries is rapidly changing, and perhaps it must if these institutions expect continued support. A number of libraries I regularly visit have what you would most expect—books for consulting and circulating, and space for study—but increasingly they are community centers, too. I feel less sure about one university in Texas that now has a completely bookless research library, which I am inclined to call a study center, or digital-resource commons, or whatever.
I wouldn't want to overlook another connotation of "library" besides community or university location, and that's the personal library. It is arguably the meaning most suitable to the book-buying occasion of these letters of ours. Alberto Manguel, noted for his extensive library, argues in A Reader on Reading that each reader's library could be only hers or his: "every reader must feel that he or she is the chosen one." Much more might be said here, but let me simply list a few of the great lines from the poet Albert Goldbarth's "The Library," a six-page inventory of books, some that seem quite real and some more fantastical. It begins,
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals the Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
Already the poem gives a good sense of the varied meaningfulness and afterlives and physical dimensions of the books we collect, and the personal histories they hold for us, the kind of history that is impossible to convey on a Facebook page. Goldbarth's list is full of lovely wonders, shifting between exaltation and dismissal, among affection and fear and hope: "This book is the shame of an entire nation." "This book I actually licked." "This book hangs by a string in an outhouse, and every day it gets thinner." "After this book, there was no turning back." "This book set its mouth on my heart, and sucked a mottled tangle of blood to the surface." "This book is the Key to the Mysteries." These whimsical testimonies help to fortify my tentative confidence in the future of the book. Goldbarth's "Library" is the opening poem in a collection entitled, not incidentally I think, Saving Lives.
And, while the book's history is relatively brief in the long span of human experience, it is also comforting to know that some of today's worries have a recycled quality to them. One author declares publishing "as dead as cold mutton," which sounds timely—except that the statement appears in Francis Meynell's English Printed Books (1946), and he's describing the publishing landscape as it seemed in the 1880s. In Meynell's own day, he was more intent on praising the success of Penguin Books, which he described as "one of the happy events of our age." I purchased this book in a charming main-street bookshop housed in what used to be a historic hotel, in a small town between Greenville and Columbia, South Carolina. Personally, that encounter was also a happy event, with Meynell's book, and with the shop itself. While I was there, a young man entered, clearly local, and both employees greeted him by name, and offered condolences for his recently deceased grandfather. I soon overheard how he had died in Mexico, and the service had been swift, and was that because they don't embalm the dead in Mexico, one of the employees asked. An odd but touching interaction. A human scene.
The new Seminary Co-op's opening is another happy event, and speaking of such events, let us plan for a public-library book-browsing crawl sometime, Wes. We can visit Wheaton's library, sure, but also ones in West Chicago, Carol Stream, St. Charles, Glendale Heights, Elmhurst, Lemont, Glencoe, and beyond! Fortunately for all of us, they welcome anybody. They're kind of like books in that way.
Brett
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