https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-secondhand-book-is-a-3-time-machine-1498605454
A Secondhand Book Is a $3 Time Machine
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Danny Heitman
June 27, 2017 7:17
p.m. ET
My 16-year-old son
loves to read as much as I do, but unlike me, he prefers to savor his
nonfiction and novels on an electronic reader. Although I’m thrilled when any
young person enjoys reading regardless of format, I wonder if my teenager is
missing out on the joys of used books.
This came to mind
recently when I attended a used-book sale. I go every year, and I often spot
complete sets of Dickens, Twain or Poe labeled with the personal library seals
of their former owners. When I find several volumes from the same donor, I
can’t help but wonder if a household bookshelf has been emptied, perhaps
because someone died or moved into a nursing home. I’ve come to regard the
hints of personal history in these books as a sheltering presence, like
lingering in an old church for an hour or two.
This year, for three
bucks, I took home a first-edition copy of the American anthropologist Loren
Eiseley’s 1975 memoir, “All the Strange Hours.” The first page bore an
inscription: “To Gar. Christmas 1976. From Mickey.”
“Gar” sounded like a
nickname, which made me feel as if I were eavesdropping on an intimate
conversation. Within the fourth chapter, I found a longer message from Mickey,
written in cursive on a yellowing sheet of loose-leaf paper: “Gar—I ended up
having to send you my very own copy (still crackling new) of this because, believe
it or not, I haven’t been able to get to the bookstore to get you a copy.
Getting ready to wrap it for you, I started reading parts of it again. I know
you will enjoy reading every page of it. Have a nice Christmas. Hope to see you
soon. Greetings also to Peggy. Love, Mick.”
Secondhand books
remind me that the world of reading spans time as readers reach across the
years to shake hands with each other. Eiseley isn’t read much today, but before
his death in 1977, he was a big deal. His books sold well and were eagerly
anticipated, which Mickey’s note conveys. My vintage copy of “All the Strange
Hours” had landed me in a yuletide some four decades ago, when Jimmy Carter had
just defeated Gerald Ford for the presidency, and readers raw from raging inflation
and Watergate would surely have found respite in reading a naturalist’s memoir.
In “84, Charing Cross
Road,” Helene Hanff celebrated old books as torches passed between generations.
“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read
oftenest,” she wrote. “The day Hazlitt came he opened to ‘I hate to read new
books,’ and I hollered ‘Comrade!’ to whoever owned it before me.”
Like Hanff, I’ve
opened old books and found some path a prior pilgrim has worn through the text.
In my tattered copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” a reader I’ll
never know penciled “integrity” throughout one chapter, inviting me to consider
to what degree that single word might summarize Woolf’s sensibility.
I’ve been thinking
about how I might extend my own greeting to some future soul through the books
I’ll leave behind, as I turn each page of my old Eiseley, hoping, as I always
do when I read, to touch the eternal.
Mr.
Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, La., is author of “A Summer
of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”
Appeared in the June
28, 2017, print edition.
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