The Book Oasis

The Book Oasis Blog

Wednesday, December 29th

Books - The Consuming Passion

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "Where do you get your books?" After many years of experience, and many different answers ("Everywhere" was a favorite response) I usually respond with, "Where don't I?" You name the place, chances are I've been there.

A lot of my books come in with customers. Like many bookshops, I have a generous trade-in policy (see my 'Products' link on the website) so people bring me their old books. That's also satisfying for the customer, because they are able to get their heart's desire for a discount!

One of my favorite comparisons to bookhunting is that it's like a perpetual treasure hunt. I've frequently used a metal detector for "coinshooting" as the term is, sweeping across a field or a plain of sand looking for coins or other treasures. With books, the process is much the same: sweep your eyes across shelves and boxes, waiting for the treasures to jump out at you. But unlike coinshooting, where the coin is detected automatically, you have to do the work yourself; you must know what consitutes a treasure. So, a lot of study is required, which only heightens the anticipation.

The danger about books, though, is that once you start looking for books--or even just keeping your eyes open--you can't stop. Just today, for example, I was pawing through a junk shop and spotted a First Edition of _Make Room! Make Room!_ by Harry Harrison, which later became the Charlton Heston movie, Soylent Green. Snapped that up right quick. And later, in a box of junk, was a signed copy of Bill Owens' famous book, _Suburbia_. It quite made my day.

And then there's the moments of just plain dumb luck. I'll never forget the day I came to work and found a box of donations sitting at my front door: 99% junk, but at the bottom of the box, a First American Edition of George Orwell's _Animal Farm_! For every pile of quartz, there may be a diamond in the rough.

Happy Hunting!

Larry Burdick on 12.29.04 @ 06:47 PM PST [link]

Saturday, December 11th

Close the Book on Mona Van Duyn

From the AP:

Mona Van Duyn, whose lyrics of love, everyday life and the transcendent power of art made her one of the nation's most honored poets, as well as the first woman to be named poet laureate of the United
States, died Dec. 2 of cancer at her home in St. Louis. She was 83.

She wrote with the sensibility of a small-town midwesterner who was married for more than 60 years, combining the thoughts and humor of ordinary people with elegant poetic forms. Her poems often ended with a subtle insight of universal human concern.

Mona Van Duyn, a midwesterner whose work was narrow in scope, often was called a "domestic poet," though she disliked it.

Perhaps because of her retiring nature, her limited output -- she wrote only nine volumes, most of them slender -- and a lifetime spent outside the orbit of New York's literary circles, Ms. Van Duyn didn't
reach wide public recognition until she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 at the age of 70 for "Near Changes."

The following year, she was named poet laureate, an annual appointment of the Library of Congress honoring an American poet's lifetime achievement. She was the first woman to hold the post, which was
created in 1985. Six women had been poetry consultants before the selection of Ms. Van Duyn (pronounced "Van Dine").

In an address to the Library of Congress in 1993, she spoke of why poetry matters in modern society.

"The private aspects of the wild and the unique are saved for the poems," she said. "Iconoclasm is saved, hoarded, for language -- for forms on the page."

Although she disliked the term, Ms. Van Duyn often was called a "domestic poet" because of the relatively small canvas on which she worked. Her subjects included time, love, art and, as she once put it, "the wintry work of living, our flawed art."

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in the small town of Eldora. Her father, a onetime farmer, ran a filling station, and sometimes took her books away, telling her to play outdoors.
Describing herself as the "the tallest female in the town and, for all I knew, in the world," she read every novel and book of poetry in her local library. Even after she had won a scholarship, she had to plead with her father to go to college, hoping to be a writer or a fashion designer.

She graduated from Iowa State Teachers College (now Northern Iowa University) and in 1943 received a master's degree from the writing program at the University of Iowa.

She taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Louisville in Kentucky before settling with her husband, also a writer and an English professor, in 1950 in St. Louis, where both taught at Washington University.

Ms. Van Duyn, who had written poetry since she was 5, battled depression for much of her life and, on occasion, was treated in psychiatric hospitals, but she did not dwell on these episodes. "I have not found the subjects for my poems in my illness," she said in an interview with the reference publication World Authors. "It is the years of good health between depressions that I cherish, that seem to
me most real."

Survivors include her husband of 61 years, Jarvis Thurston of St. Louis.

Known for the subtlety and elegance of her verse, Ms. Van Duyn occasionally delighted in wry wit, as in the closing lines of her "Sonnet for Minimalists":

The world's perverse,

but it could be worse.

Larry Burdick on 12.11.04 @ 12:08 PM PST [link]

Friday, December 10th

Burning the Midnight Oil

It's been said that a Mother's work is never done. Truth. But a bookseller's work has only just begun! that thought passed through my head more than once last night as a friend and I struggled to assemble new shelving for the Religion, Philosophy, and Books From Abroad section. No sooner does one task get finished, then three more appear, often in an area once thought to be tranquil.

Through a friend, I was offered some extremely durable metal shelves, and I leaped on them like a jungle predator. The bulk of my shelves are pinewood constructions created to hold paperbacks. Now, with an increasing stock of 8" - 10" high books, these shelves are just horribly impractical, so the prospect of larger shelves for next to nothing was too good to pass up. Of course, one of the fees to be paid was loading and assembly, which I'm so used to. The big hand was pointing to the twelve, and the little one was at the three before we were finished!

Sometimes I like to joke that "this is the shop that scraps built", but the truth is that every bookseller resuses things when he assembles a bookstore. I've got some shelving that I bought at the Crown Books liquidation sale, and I also bought their stickers, too. I met a bookseller who kept all his books in drawers in cabinets, which he salvaged from a defunct Navy base. Another seller I met got lightly-used computers every year from a company that upgraded their own systems every twelve months. But why, do you ask? Partly because it saves money, and money is a nice thing to have around. The other part is because reusing is in the blood.

I know that doesn't make sense, so I'll try to be a bit more clear: Every used/rare bookdealer starts out small. You get your books from yard sales, garage sales, and other places. While your about this process, you see other things which catch your eye--beyond the souvenir glasses and old 45's there are things like old chandeliers, pictures, and statues, and then your brain starts to work on what you see. The old drop-leaf table with the $5.00 sticker on it would look great in your guest room, and while you're picking it up, you see a window frame that looks better than the one in your bedroom, so you grab that, too. After a while, it becomes second nature; you realize, with a start, that you haven't been to the mall for months, because you can get the same thing for less, albeit secondhand. But you don't even think of it in terms of stigma--it's a point of pride and ingenuity. On my desk at my house I've got an old automobile destributor that I use to hold pens and pencils. So many things can do double-duty, it soon becomes a sort of game, figuring what can also do what.

And that's the way the book business is: today a customer asked me for a book which she could use to help her Spanish-speaking neighbor improve her English. The book had to be a relatively easy task, but at the same time interesting. I thought for a bit, and then selected a copy of "Chicken Soup With Rice", by Maurice Sendak. Why? The story is based on month-to-month installments, there are pictures on every page which would be good vocabulary practice, and the story is in verse, which makes for fun reading. Double-duty strikes again. Sold!

Last night, while assembling the shelves, I remarked to my friend that the book business is a lesson in evolution--both the business, and the owner must be adaptable to change and circumstance. But more than that, the proprietor must know how to adapt to the situation, and know how to make his environment change with him. I thought about that as I wheeled my old pinewood shelves out to the dumpster. Darwin's theory was that life had to change in order to survive, and make use of what the environment provided. Then this morning, one of my neighbors walked in and said, "We were drooling over your shelves outside, and we were wondering..." I smiled, as Evolution reared its head again, and said, "Take 'em!"
Larry Burdick on 12.10.04 @ 03:28 PM PST [link]