Living In Rhythm

Here's something weird about me. For as much as I love music and buying/owning CDs, I am not really a fan of used music stores, or buy and trade places. I don't know. There's something really satisfying about unwrapping new music and feeling like it is yours only and no one else has ever listened to it and had an opinion on it. I don't like to share music. I like to recommend music. I'll make someone a mix. I will not lend them a CD. You know you're very special to me if I actually physically lend you a CD. I am protective of my music.

Strange, then, that I am almost the complete opposite with books. (Though I don't lend them out, typically, either.) Used book stores are my playground. I love them. I love knowing that someone else's hands have turned the pages. Even better if someone else's name is written in the front cover. I once bought a book I will probably never read, just because someone had written on the first blank page 'I adore you' and nothing else. If someone ever bought a book for me and wrote that on the first page, I'd likely propose. (Possibly via the first page of a book.) Old books smell better. They're easier to hold. The pages aren't all pressed together.

I found an incredible used book store today. My theory on used book stores is that there has to be a certain amount of disorganization. I've been in a book store in Vancouver that was so organized it was disorientating. I'm sorry, you have books separated by alphabetically by genre, then alphabetically by author? Too clean. I was in a used book store in Halifax that was such a disaster it was overwhelming. There were general 'sections', but I got totally lost, fearing that if I didn't look at every shelf (nearly impossible, unless you had an entire day) I'd miss some potential gem. Then I heard someone ask the clerk for a certain genre and the woman said, "Oh, you have to go to our other location for all children's books." Another location! Absurd! How would you ever know what you had, to be able to answer someone if they needed a title?

The store I was in today was small, in an historic old town near where I live. It was broken up into sections, and the books were alphabetized vertically, instead of horizontally on the shelves, so the owner (who was the only one working in the store) could fit more books on the shelves in her little shop. There was a huge room of mystery books - her favourite; I asked - and a perfectly appropriate back corner with wall to wall, floor to ceiling shelves of classics. The front part of the store was all fiction, alphabetized by author. She had a travel section, cooking section, sci-fi, religion, etc. History and biographies were lumped together, which makes sense to me.

I asked for a book and she knew exactly which shelf it was on, exactly which books it was in between, and when she held it up, she said, "Wait, which edition did you want, honey?"

This woman just loves books.

I walked out the door $20 poorer but with four books in my hand, and that is a fair trade if you ask me.

Next time I go back, which will be soon, I'll likely be picking up more classics.

Suggestions?

This post is archived under books, the collection