A Flood and Some Books

 From the stairs this morning I saw condensation on the window and transom of the front door, which I would not have expected in October. A large puddle on the kitchen floor explained this, and I roused my wife to start on the cleanup while I went to turn off the water at the main shutoff valve. (The valve is awkward to reach, and stiff to turn.) The water clearly came from the dishwasher. The dishwasher had caused no problems in eighteen years, but made up for that overnight. The plumber tells us that the failure is in the dishwasher, not in any connection to it.

The basement had its own puddle, aggravated by fallen drywall tape and drywall debris. After some mopping, I hauled wet rugs into the backyard. One remained on the steps for some time until drained enough to be manageable. We will need to bring in someone to do serious drywall work.

One bookcase suffered. The books were swollen, so that it was difficult to extract the first couple from each shelf. Not all the books were affected, maybe eight of every ten, and those that were varied from a little damp to quite wet. Some are probably not salvageable. I don't know whether the bookcase itself will still be usable, for it is of veneer over plywood.

Had I been asked whether I wished to discard any of the books on the three shelves, I'd have probably said, No, why? Yet now the question for some is whether I'll replace them, and there the answer sometimes is No. I found Leszek Kolakowski's God Owes Us Nothing tremendously interesting, but do I need to review the theological history of Jansenism? Perhaps not. I have probably looked into John Lukacs's The Last European War within the last year or so, but will I replace that? Maybe not. On the other hand, I do want to have copies of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, The Last Puritan, and some others that suffered damage.

The Used Book District

Thirty years ago, I suppose that the center of Washington's used book trade must have been Georgetown. Booked Up was near the post office on 30th St. NW, Yesterday's Books was on P just west of Wisconsin, Columbia Books for a while was above a movie theater on Wisconsin, and Georgetown Books was on Dumbarton St. And there were other stores with names I've forgotten--one that looked almost onto Key Bridge from the north side of M St., another downhill of Booked Up across M. For a while after that, Bethesda may have had the lead, with a Second Story Books location on Bethesda Ave. and Georgetown Books relocated to Woodmont..

Now the center may be a a triangle west and north of Dupont Circle. The Second Story Books at 20th and P has been there for all my years in Washington. Books for America has a store on 22nd St. just south of P. Kulturas Books on Connecticut Ave. just down from Florida is worth a look.

I found Books for America as a place to give books away, for the Washington, DC, library system no longer takes contributions of used books, having shut down its own store. But of course it is hard to walk into a book store and not leave with something. My last contribution to Books for America led to my purchasing one book there and three more at Second Story.

Neighbors on the Shelves

Noticed at The Strand in the fall:

(The Dilthey is Die Philosophie des Lebens, by the way.)

And at Kramerbooks just the other day:

Specialty of the House

Over the last couple of decades we have shopped now and then at the West Shore Farmers Market in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles mostly north of here. During about the last dozen I have tried to make time to look in at The Bookworm, a used bookstore on the upper level. Over the years I have bought various books there: Santayana's Persons and Places, Trollope's Autobiography, Chambers's biography of Thomas More, a couple of volumes of Isak Dinesen, and a volume of Novalis come to mind. The proprietor is a retired professor, which may help account for the quality of the selection.

At some point, The Bookworm bought up the library of someone with an interest in Norman Mailer. Had the seller's interest extended only to Mailer's native language, I suppose that the books would be sold or inconspicuous. However, this person bought Mailer in a variety of languages--The Armies of the Night in German and Barbary Coast in Greek come to mind, but by no means exhaust the list; I think that at least one Scandinavian language is represented.Yesterday I found myself reassured by about six inches of Die Heere der Nacht; some things don't change, or change very slowly.

One could do worse, on a Saturday in Cumberland County, than to stop by the West Shore Farmers Market. The smoked meats (ham and bolognas) are good at either of the Weavers stands; the pho is good at the stand the right side of the market; and one can almost always find something  worth buying at The Bookworm.

Bookstores Gone

In the third of a century I have lived in Washington, DC, I have seen many bookstores go out of business. One or two that are still here astonish and gratify me with their persistence. In alphabetical order, and with something I remember buying from them (generally a small sample of what I bought), a few of the now gone:

1. Bonifant Books, in Wheaton Triangle. I believe that it was started by one or more of the dealers from Imagination Books in Silver Spring. It closed about 2007. I found a bilingual edition of the Rule of St. Benedict there.
2. Calliope, in Cleveland Park. It flourished in the early 1980s, and  was replaced by a video outlet, I think. I know I bought a volume of John Montague's poetry, and am fairly sure I bought J.V. Cunningham's Collected Poems there.
3. Chapters, downtown. It began on the 1600 block of I St. NW, then moved a block north and east to K St., and made its last stand on 11 St. NW between Pennsylvania Avenue and E St. I bought quite a few books from them between say 1985 and 2008, the slimmest perhaps Joyce Cary's War Among the Bobotes, certainly the fattest Roy Jenkins's wonderful biography of Gladstone.
4. Columbia Bookstore, Cleveland Park and Georgetown. It had an upstairs room on Connecticut Ave., then one on Wisconsin Ave. At the Cleveland Park location, I bought a two-volume edition of the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson.  At the Georgetown location, Jacques Barzun's The American University.
5. Foreign Language Books, in Georgetown, I think in a rowhouse on Dumbarton St., vanished in the early 1980s. I'm not sure whether the store that hangs on north of Tenley Circle is a descendant or not.
6. Georgetown Books, in Georgetown, then in Bethesda till about 2008. I deeply regret not dropping $100 on a facsimile of Johnson's dictionary there about 1985. I did buy a number of books there over the years, including a paperback Roman Journal when it was in Bethesda, and I think Johnson's Lives of the Poets in Georgetown.
7. Globe Books, downtown. Globe was on 17th St. NW, opposite the Old Executive Office Building. There is a sandwich shop there now. I believe I bought a paperback of James Webb's Fields of Fire there.
8. Imagination Books, Silver Spring on Sligo Avenue. It was a consortium of several independent dealers and closed in 1992.. One year when there was a sale on I bought the WPA Washington: City and Capital, with map.
9. Olsson's, various locations: Georgetown, downtown, "Penn Quarter", Alexandria. Before Borders came to Washington, Olsson's was much the biggest store, so I bought many books there. It closed in 2008.
10. The Trover Store, various locations downtown. The Trover Stores had the peculiarity, at least for a while, of shelving books within a section by publisher. It must have made inventory easier in some ways, but as a customer I thought it confusing. From the sale when it went out of business I bought a Don Quixote and a Rob Roy.

Then there are the ones with names that escape me. The used bookstore about where Pennsylvania bends into M St., where I coveted but did not buy a battered Malone edition of Shakespeare; the store on M St. almost to Key Bridge; the one on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington across from the old Sears; no doubt a couple at least on Capitol Hill.

Let me add that

1. Chapters lives on not as bookstore but as the Chapters Literary Society, which you can find on Facebook.
2. One of the dealers from the old Imagination Books run Silver Spring Books, on Bonifant St. in Silver Spring, between Georgia Avenue and Fenton St. (It is conveniently located across from the Thai Derm restaurant, if book shopping builds your appetite.)
3. I could add Borders, which will be going out of business shortly.

Booked Up

In 1978 or 1979 I found my way to Booked Up, a used book store in Georgetown. Somehow I became aware that the proprietor, a tall, lean fellow, was the novelist Larry McMurtry. During the years I went there,  the most conspicuous of the stock was priced an order of magnitude or two beyond what I could afford..  I did manage to spend between $100 and $200 there over about seven years. And I'm grateful to the proprietors for letting a scruffy fellow with a backpack browse their annex unwatched.

About the middle of the 1980s I found my way to Georgetown and Booked Up less often. Then one day in the 1990s I read that McMurtry had packed up his books and taken them to Archer City, Texas. I'd love to spend a few days browsing his holdings there, but I can't imagine an errand that would take me to Texas.

A couple of years ago McMurtry brought out Books: A Memoir, about his years in the book trade, not just in Washington or Archer City, but in Houston and California and points beyond. It is a slim book, of 109 short chapters, easy to pick up and browse at odd moments. It gives a picture of the antiquarian book business in the days before the internet, when Polaroids of shelves were the most advanced technology in use. I believe that anyone who likes bookstores would enjoy this book. Those who know Washington or Houston would probably enjoy it still more, though I must say that most of his acquaintance in Washington was of a social stratum I know not at all, and Houston I must take entirely on faith.

McMurtry writes that Booked Up was replaced by a a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Perhaps so, though I think I remember that the short-lived garden store Smith and Hawken had the property about 2002.  I have no idea what's there now, but I doubt it would be a bookstore.

The book review

This morning I gave the New York Times Book Review a quick and purposeful look, ignoring all but the page counts of the books reviewed. My estimates were 2700 pages of non-fiction (memoir, history, economics, etc.) and 1200 of fiction, not counting the crime fiction that gets lumped together in one column. It seems to me that the fiction count is lower than usual, for there are novelists of varying quality who run to 500 pages in their usual novel. Review a couple of those one week, and you're up around 2000 pages of fiction.

This really doesn't matter to me, for there is very little chance that I'll read most of these books. Yet I find it interesting to compare the page counts with what I guess my rate of reading to be. For non-fiction of any complexity, I might read 100 pages a week at the high end, say fairly academic history, maybe 60 for philosophy. Serious fiction I might read at 200 or 300 pages per week. Of course, all these rates are subject to reduction owing to house projects such as painting or planting, work emergencies, travel, and so on.

So were I to read every book reviewed in today's issue, it would likely take me half a year, in which time the NY Times will brought out another 25 or so book reviews, call it another 12 years worth of reading. (And this omits the difficulty of picking a half year that does not include either a summer beach reading or a holiday books issue, either of which is much larger than the usual.)

In his autobiography, Trollope writes

"And readers will also find that by devoting an hour or two on Saturday to the criticisms of the week, they will enable themselves to have an opinion about the books of the day. The knowledge so acquired will not be great, nor will that little be lasting; but it adds something to the pleasure of life to be able to talk on subjects of which others are speaking; and the man who has sedulously gone through the literary notices in the Spectator and the Saturday may perhaps be justified in thinking himself as well able to talk about the new book as his friend who has bought that new book on the tapis, and who, not improbably, obtained his information from the same source."

I guess that's it.