One sees here and there the tag "habent libelli sua fata", "books have their fates". They do, and it has seemed to me that more and more it is a very quick fate--the Homeric epithet "okumoros", swift-fated, seems to apply. The book that was everywhere in 2010 became a special order in 2020, and now is simply unavailable at most stores.
A look through the best-seller lists of other years shows that the process is not always unfair, that many books deserve their quick disappearance. But there are others that deserve to be on the shelves and stay. Having looked into Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, I thought it might be interesting to look into Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey. The most likely local bookstore says that this is "not available"--NYRB Classics brought it back into print in 2002, but that was two dozen years ago. I gave a friend a copy of Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil some years ago, but that also is not available. Well, Vintage brought it out 30 years ago. And apart from books never bought, there are those that one wishes to replace--lost by a loan, or to household disasters.
A textbook tells me that that the full clause is "pro captu lectoris habent libelli sua fata": books have their fates, according to the reader's ability. Fortunately, the ability of the reader is not fixed, and I have read with much interest books that I had set aside years before that as unreadable or uninteresting.
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