Published: April 06, 2008 11:49 pm            

The Off Season: ‘Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?’

By Mike Lunsford — I have a long list of favorite places to be, and ranked just below being at home on a Saturday morning — where I can wear an old T-shirt and blue jeans and not shave until Sunday — is the dollar aisle of an Indianapolis discount bookstore that I visit as often as I can.

A trip there is like a hunt for buried treasure; I never know what I’m going to find hidden in the sands of its crammed shelves.

Already bulging with overstock from retail stores, there’s always a steady flow of customers through its doors who lug in box after box of old books that they want off their coffee tables and nightstands and living room bookcases.

Its smell of aging paper and ink is as enticing to me as a bakery’s open door, and there’s always a slight edge to the customers there as they feverishly snatch up that perfect title before a competing bibliophile spies it.

About a week ago I had an hour to kill there, and sure enough, I hit pay dirt. For a buck I found “For the Love of Books,” a neat little tome about one of my favorite topics: reading.

More specifically, the author, a Boston trial lawyer named Ronald Shwartz, a one-time English major who luckily went on a guilt trip for taking up the study of law after dropping literature midway through college.

He asked 115 writers to come up with a series of essays in which they discussed the books that in one way or another had changed their lives or influenced their careers.

Shwartz’s book isn’t new; it was published nearly 10 years ago. But it still reads fresh and relevant to me; his introduction, alone, was more than worth the price I paid. He writes: “Bookstores were of course my weakness … I was soothed by the symmetry of aisles and sections; mesmerized by the vast compression of facts, ideas, lives, epochs, travels, and regions of the heart. Books of imperishable charm or painful insights, endless realignments of twenty-six letters — all contained in one impossibly small and dense place, a paradoxical mix of tranquility and sheer explosive potential — as if a bookstore or library can be said to breach some law of physics or create a new one all its own, like a nuclear bomb with good intentions.”

He’s right, of course. Put me in virtually any other kind of store or shop and I’m keenly frugal, a tough sell, the kind of customer who’s not below doing at least a little wheeling and dealing. I take convincing; I’ll figure prices by the ounce, pound or ton, and I’m more than happy when I can save a few dollars by bringing my own truck and weak back and stout son for homegrown delivery service.

But put me in a bookstore and I turn to jelly; it’s Christmas and my birthday and “Bombshell Bargain Days” all rolled into one. I have about as much common sense as a man who shops for cars based on the attractiveness of hub caps. The writer/preacher Henry Ward Beecher surely had people like me in mind when he said, “Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?”

Books are my addiction. Two stacks of them in my office have now reached between 4 and 5 feet high, as tall as the overfilled bookcase they stand before. By the way, I call those columns my “Yet-to-be-read” piles, and as soon as I get done with the book I’m currently reading — a great account by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson on the invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943 — I plan to take on the book at the pinnacle of the front pile, Michael Beschloss’ “Presidential Courage.” Books by David Halberstam and Ken Follett, Frank DeFord and Garrison Keillor, Norman Maclean and Bill Bryson are in the Green Room just below, waiting to go on.

The problem is, I add to those stacks faster than I pull from them. I’m a little concerned that I could end up like 87-year-old Anthony Cima. Shwartz recounted the story of the San Diego retiree who was in his 12-square-foot hotel apartment when an earthquake hit the city. He was buried under the nearly 9,900 hardcover books he had accumulated. The local newspaper’s headline about the incident read, “Man Almost Killed by Love of Books.”

Actually, the moral of this tale isn’t that I need to get rid of books at all; I think I do that often enough. I loan a lot of them to friends and relatives and students, then forget who has them. I also donate a few to the library, even sell some in our annual garage sale. But keeping Cima and those twin towers in my office, as well as the bookcases in our family and living rooms, in mind, it’s my hope that the New Madrid fault does no shifting prior to my next attempt to thin the stock a little.

There are some books that are such old friends that I know I will never give them up. Shwartz got me to thinking about my own favorites, the ones that have made a difference in my life, the ones I have returned to like old buddies year after year for advice and adventure and solace. In other words, could I answer the question that Shwartz asked writers such as Dave Barry and Joyce Carol Oates and Ethan Canin?

Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut, who took part in Shwartz’s project, wrote to tell him, “Anyone asking a writer a question like yours should own a thumbscrew and a rack.” By the way, Vonnegut listed, among others, Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology,” Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” and interestingly, despite his well-known atheism, The Book of Genesis.

For me, well, I hate to make commitments on things like favorite book lists, but mine would be remarkably similar to Vonnegut’s, that is if you throw Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island” into the mix, maybe a little Robert Frost and David McCullough and …

I had to be in Indianapolis again this past weekend, and since it was only 71 blocks away from my original destination — practically next door — I managed to spend a few minutes (actually, it was two hours) meandering through that bookstore like a lazy stream.

I only bought five books. After all, I have the perfect spot for another stack on the other side of my desk. I just hope we don’t have any earthquakes.

Mike Lunsford can be reached by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail C/O the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

        

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