(Continued)
Wait. My collection just smacked me upside the head. Of course, I read to be entertained. I own almost everything Edgar Allen Poe has ever written, stretched out over several very different editions and volumes! I even own Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein – that stupid crap – I scoffed and guffawed and disdained every fast-turning, madcap, action-packed page. A quick online investigation yields four novels (one of them a graphic novel) and five issues in a comic book series of Dean Koontz’s hideous abortion of the Frankenstein story. I own a mass market and a used copy of the graphic novel. I felt it my duty, as a Frankenstein collector, to at least take a look.
Shudder. Now I need to take a bath.
Which reminds me of a scene in an "adults only" Frankenstein comic I found at St. Mark’s – my first, and so far only, full frontal nude of the monster.
I’m going to stop now, having clearly bitten off more than I can chew (for a column, anyway). I’m always interested in people’s bookshelves, so I hope this is interesting for someone else out there in the internet ether. It must be. A few websites approach it – for fun, try Lookshelves.com.
At the end of the day (and I’ve spent all day doing this – it’s snowing, and I have no intention of leaving my apartment until my friends call to meet up for an "unbirthday" drink), I have a stack of trade paperbacks that I’m going to disperse amongst friends and family. Then, what’s left will sit on the stoop for whoever walks by. I used to hang on to every book I owned, but as shelf space is at a premium and I’ve immersed myself in the used/rare/collectible book world I find my paperbacks have become vulnerable. The only ones I save are the ones I intend to re-read. I’d include that list, too, but I see I’ve come back to websites. The internet. Dot-com. It’s encroaching! Charlie’s all around me. (Future column about Vietnam books?)
I once read an essay by a book dealer who saw, at the heart of his profession, a drive to conserve. "Our job is to search out and buy from remainder tables, from garage sales and the junk heaps, those books which our instincts tell us someone should be looking for, and hold them until that person appears. In other words, we are trained to cull the worthy from the dross. We rescue the past to hold for the future, and if we’re wrong we lose money, so we learn to hone those instincts.2 "As I’m embarking on what my place in this profession will be, I can’t ignore all the new ways that people are reading. I can’t deny the impact of electronic media, nor do I want to. Rather, I feel a drive to try to preserve what’s happening now. Who, or what, is at the edge of the struggle between books and new media? How do I harness, represent,
or preserve this movement for future generations? What does that collection look like? Books seem, to me, to have a greater permanence than this electronic media – I want to hear thoughtful arguments to the contrary. Some say that books are increasingly being produced to be desirable as objects. Again, to me, books have always been desirable as objects. I’d like to see what changes people are referring to when they make statements like that. I’ve just dipped my toes into Book Arts waters, in pursuit of answers to these questions, and I will endeavor to share my findings. What is the future of the book?
True History of the Kelly Gang begins with an epigraph:
— William Faulkner