What bookstores and the literary life contribute to ... life

 

What bookstores and the literary life contribute to ... life

 

A stack of new books illuminates the wonder of printed books — writing them, buying them, reading them

 

Review by Michael Dirda

The Washington Post, May 4, 2022

 

Marius Kociejowski opens his enthralling memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” by observing that bookstores have begun to follow record stores into nonexistence. “With every shop that closes so, too, goes still more of the serendipity that feeds the human spirit.” While there may be “infinitely more choice” in buying from online dealers, “to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.” As he says, “I want dirt; I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery. I want to be able to step into a place and have the sense that there I’ll find a book, as yet unknown to me, which to some degree will change my life.”

 

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An accomplished poet and beguiling essayist (try “The Pebble Chance”), Kociejowski has also enjoyed a long-standing career with various London antiquarian bookshops, starting with the once-venerable firm of Bertram Rota. Though a self-described “factotum” — which my dictionary defines as “an employee who does all kinds of work” — he nonetheless specialized in cataloguing modern first editions, once even handling books from James Joyce’s library. Over the years, Kociejowski came to be friends with poet and translator Christopher Middleton, travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “arguably the greatest prose stylist of his generation,” and the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who as the reigning monarch of the joke Kingdom of Redonda, appointed him poet laureate in English of that tiny uninhabited island.

 

I like unusual books. Here’s what I’d read — if I had time.

 

While authors can be colorful, book dealers are often notably cranky and eccentric. One conducting business in fashionable Cecil Court put up a sign that read, “Do not mistake courtesy on my part as an invitation to stay all day.” An independent book scout known only as Mr. Howlett invariably “wore an old, battered, greasy brown trilby all the year round, an aged raincoat in summer and a threadbare overcoat (two sizes too large) in winter.” What’s more, “he carried his ‘stock’ in a series of cardboard boxes,” these last secured with sisal twine until they fell apart.

 

Spiky and forthright in his views, Kociejowski calls Witold Gombrowicz “the most horrible man in literature,” finds Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky something of a phony, and is seriously suspicious about the factuality of Robert Graves’s celebrated World War I memoir, “Good-Bye to All That.” Summing up our “cancel” culture, he writes quite simply that “the revisionist is, more often than not, the enemy of literature.” His own excellent taste has led him to embrace Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, Bruno Schulz’s short stories, the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rose Macaulay’s novel “The Towers of Trebizond.”

 

Contrary to its cover blurbs, Jeff Deutsch’s “In Praise of Good Bookstores” may be too high-minded to appeal to any but a few readers. Not only mildly academic in tone and lacking in amusing anecdotes, Deutsch constantly dresses his prose in borrowed finery: He can’t write a paragraph without quoting someone. Still, he provides a detailed memoir of Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstores, of which he is director, coupled with admirable reflections on a bookshop’s value to a community. Along the way, he stresses the importance of organizing stock to maximize satisfying “browsage,” noting: “All classifications result in evocative adjacencies.” I admit that “evocative adjacencies” is delightfully Henry Jamesian.

 

Altogether more entertaining, though, are William M. Breiding’s “Portable Storage Seven” and Chris Mikul’s “Biblio-Curiosa.” Breiding’s zine provides 228 pages of lively commentary on classic science fiction, including an overview by Christina Lake of tales in which a sleeper awakes in the far future, Bruce Gillespie on the rambling “shaggy-dog” fantasies of the inimitable Avram Davidson, Gregory Benford’s reminiscences of fellow science fiction giant Brian Aldiss, Darrell Schweitzer on Robert Graves’s underappreciated “Watch the North Wind Rise,” and Cheryl Cline on “weird” Westerns. I particularly enjoyed scholar Dale Nelson’s history of his personal library, which concludes with a list of his most often reread books, headed by C.S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” (16 times).

 

As you might guess, Mikul’s “Biblio-Curiosa — available directly from its Australian author-publisher — specializes in neglected, strange and kitschily awful books. One essay — of the latest issue’s five — presents Roland Puccetti’s 1972 novel, “The Death of the Fuhrer,” in which Hitler’s brain is surgically removed, kept alive in a vat, and eventually implanted into … well, I should say no more. Okay, I’ll add one further detail: Mikul declares that this novel features “the most ludicrous sex scene” he’s ever read. I can hardly wait to acquire a copy.

 

Still, this issue’s highlight is a substantial introduction to the Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer, who in the 1940s and ’50s was almost a major writer. Usually set in Guyana, his books frequently draw on that country’s bloody history of slavery, showcase intensely observed descriptions of weather and nature, and are often tinged, or soaked, with the supernatural. Mittelholzer once described his most famous novel, “My Bones and My Flute,” as “a ghost story in the old-fashioned manner.” A sawmill owner acquires an old document that reads “he who touches this parchment seals himself in a pact with me, Jan Pieter Voorman, to listen to my music, and, later … to join me in death.” Soon, four people have touched the document, which causes dire personality changes even as they try desperately to forestall the curse by locating Voorman’s grave.

 

Poetry matters. Two new books remind us why.

 

Let me end by recommending two more books about books that I’ve only just begun. Leslie McFarlane’s “Ghost of the Hardy Boys” — a 1976 memoir that will be back in print in June — is an insider’s account by the writer who, under the name Franklin W. Dixon, produced 21 of the mysteries solved by the brothers Frank and Joe Hardy. Finally, David Lehman’s “The Mysterious Romance of Murder” surveys “crime, detection and the Spirit of the Noir” in fiction, film, poetry and music. As one might expect from this distinguished poet and versatile man of letters, his sprightly new book isn’t just deeply knowledgeable, it’s also a lot of fun.

 

Michael Dirda reviews books for Style every Thursday.