The Book Shopper

Book Selling Is Not Easy

Over at Destination: Books the companion-other-side-of-the-counter  blog to The Book Shopper, I recently posted an article about "les bouquinistes" the Paris book vendors who have been selling reading material in book stalls along the Seine River since the Middle Ages. The pandemic has crippled their business because of the lack of tourism and the restrictions placed on local citizens. There are links that can take you to the complete story including fine photos of French booksellers. 

This same article has a brief write-up of Shaun Blythell's popular, The Diary of a Bookseller (2018) which is a daily account of selling second-hand books in Wigtown, Scotland. Blythell's book, though entertaining, is not an idyllic portrayal of bookselling  because there are many of his descriptions of hauling and processing boxes of books (some covered in cat hair)  and the challenging Scottish weather. Dealing with cantankerous customers and staff is never easy either. 

For more about reading, bookstores and libraries check out the books available on a shopping list compiled by Emory's Carlos Museum Bookshop.   It even includes this blog's namesake, the book that started it all. Impressive.

---

Fortunately, the cover photo is not a book selling stall or some bizarre Book Jenga game, but rather a sculpture in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. My older daughter Cynthia Browne took the picture several years ago.

Into the Spinning Void

While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1953 humorous novel Pnin about the teaching life of a Russian émigré in a fictitious small New England college town, this line stood out among the many noteworthy passages:

 “With the help of the janitor, he (Pnin) screwed on the side of a desk (in his new office) a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of a soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.”

This reference to the Ticonderoga pencils and those old pencil sharpeners brought back memories of the classrooms of my high school (built in 1912) that mounted similar sharpeners in the back of each room near the “cloudy blackboards.” Also, my father had a similar one mounted in our garage where I could grind a pencil to the finest point of procrastination before tackling my Algebra homework.

Museum Trips

Nabokov’s evocative prose provided additional respite, as I visited the online Made-in-Chicago Museum of Manufacturing to look for pictures of pencil sharpeners. (Thanks to the curator Andrew Clayman for granting me the permission to use the photo of the Giant sharpener made by the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company.)

The MICM took me back to a trip  I made last year to Berlin, where my older daughter Cynthia took my longtime partner Denise and me to the Museum of Things (Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge), which is dedicated to 20th and 21st century product culture.  We spent considerable time there on chilly wet day, soaking in the archive of the German industrial design association Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907. Items ranged from tape recorders and furniture to toy soldiers.

 

Book Shopping Novelty

While at the Museum of Things I purchased  the miniature book The Shadow on the Wall (Schottenspiele) (2014), which has illustrations of how to make shadow animals, which is a new game I like to play with my three-year old grandson Myrick.

Moreover, it is skill I can practice in the spinning ethereal void of 2020.