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A bookshop is an insidious thing. Its portals are as inviting as the jaws of a trap. The unwary passerby is almost irresistibly lured into its mellow interior, perhaps to while away a pleasant hour in contemplation of its variegated shelves, perhaps only to escape a sudden shower. There is so agreeable an absence of obligation. No one feels the least demand upon his purse when he enters a bookshop, any more than when he strays into a friend's library. He means only to "look around," feels a. certain pride in assuring the unobtrusive salesman that he is hardly even doing that.
On the other hand, the doors of a bookshop take on an entirely new aspect to him who turns to go. He is assailed with an entirely unforeseen sense of obligation. The jaws of the trap close suddenly. The very unconcern of the salesmen, their perfect willingness to let him be, becomes a burden. He feels something like a moral obligation to buy. It seems the only fitting return for the hospitality of his welcome, for the reassuring absence of the officious floorwalker.
There is, further, an unsuspected power in books themselves. Nowhere does a volume look so diabolically alluring as on the shelves of a bookshop. Books of all colors, sizes, shapes, fairly leap from the tastefully arranged display tables. They shout at one in unmistakable superlatives of blurbs. On one jacket a lurid cubist decoration fairly startles the unwilling hand into the sparsely lined pocket; on another, the charming features of its young authoress entice with promises of a vicarious intimacy; on still another, the names of the great array themselves in an overwhelming aggregate of authority, making it almost a duty to one's intellectual integrity at least ;to have the volume on one's library shelves. The thought of when and why you will read the book never for an instant obtrudes itself. The question is purely one of the lust for possession. It is not the content of the book that you want to master. It is the book itself, the hard, concrete reality of it, whose ownership you crave. You want its title, its binding, its vibrant individuality.
There is, of course, the professional haunter of the bookshops and stalls—the man who lounges and reads. He starts at the first shop with the first chapter, proceeds to the next for the second, and so on until the book may be discarded for another. His method has all the charm of stolen fruits, all the elusive precariousness that arises from the imminent possibility of the last copy being sold under his very pince-nez. He may be seen by the hundred in the second-hand bookshops of Fourth Avenue, the fantastic bookshops of Greenwich Village, the tradition-hallowed book shrines of Charing Cross Road, the ancient stalls along the Seine.
Who knows what treasures may not be uncovered by the inquiring eye of the haunter of bookshops? Who knows what bibliographic gem may not fall beneath his searching fingers, what miraculous volume, lost through the years, may not turn up to give the thrill that comes once in a lifetime, filling his brain with the pride of discovery and his pockets with the gold of treasure-trove?
The bookshop is among the last strongholds of romance, the last refuges of the unexpected in an age of the predictable;
J. A. T.
New Books