Intro and The Seven Stairs

About this blog, which I’ve been meaning to start for some time. The theme is simple: No one disputes that the modern reading world is heaped with books, and no one disputes that those books are of mixed quality, some good, some bad, some classic, and some simply painful to read. The question becomes one of finding the ones worth reading. One approach is to rely on the word of others, but that necessarily means entrusting the choice to someone else, whose views and tastes necessarily will be different. Another approach would be to simply walking into a brick and mortar megabookstore – of the few that remain – and look around. But that’s also inherently biased; every selection on the shelves is the result of marketing choices by someone else. Someone decided which ones to sell, and someone has carefully arranged them for eye contact and browser attention. The same with E-books and Amazon. Smaller bookstores, by definition, target certain audiences and genres, so their stock is even more pre-sifted. Libraries would seem more honest, and I suppose they are. They’re not bound by economics -- but they have committees and so on who do make choices. They are also cursed with overwhelming abundance, and their books are subject to someone else’s system of organization – both Library of Congress, and the occasional displays. Even the wiki-type mini-lending-libraries popping up in some towns are too structured – the books placed there have been selected by the donors. What I wanted was a sort of serendipitous collection – one that exists because of factors beyond the reach of publishers and marketers and paid reviewers, a collection subject, so to speak, to some invisible and independent hand, not subject to conscious manipulation. The answer I found lies in the used books sold at my local libraries. Not the books winnowed from their collections as they age and wear out, but those books donated to them and placed on carrels for immediate sale, only marginally sorted, if at all. Fifty cents (four bits) per paperback, three dollars per hardback. Books in this particular pile cover everything from the Chicken Soup series to Shakespeare, from how-to-manuals to soft-core pornography, Bill Bryson to Danielle Steele. They come from God knows where, though I have my favorite band of suspects: books that college grads purchased under duress and have carried around until they became too burdensome or irrelevant; inscribed gifts that were never really appreciated (sometimes never even opened, judging by the occasional gift card still stuck between the pages); copies marked “For Review Only” sent out by hopeful publishers and cast aside by jaded reviewers. Sometimes a certain category of book will burst into bloom, often with well-worn and personally notated volumes, which suggests to me the clearing out of an estate, the passing on of someone’s carefully assembled lifetime reading collection to someone who really doesn’t want it, or most of it. Obviously someone somewhere once thought each donated book worth publishing, and someone somewhere thought each worth reading (to be read themselves, or by someone else, either from a sense of sharing or a sense of edification for the other). So I’ll be pulling books from my particular pile of rubble, sorted by fate and circumstance. I’ll emphasize the fifty-cent paperbacks, but will from time to time indulge in their pricier three-dollar companions when one catches my eye. The only firm rules are (1) it must not be a book I have read before (though I may have intended to); (2) it must not be a book recommended to me for this purpose; (3) it must be something that for some reason catches my eye – no arbitrary closing eyes and grabbing; and (4) there are no other rules. So now to the first selection. What better book to start with than The Seven Stairs, by Stuart Brent? This is the story of a man who, in 1946, opened a bookstore in downtown Chicago, “on a G.I. loan for three hundred dollars and a pocketful of dreams.” It’s well written, and a fun ride for anyone who likes books and who perhaps imagines someday being a bookseller – or at least did so in the pre-Amazonian past. Brent writes like the bookseller he set out to be, knowingly, persuasively, enthusiastically. Literary luminaries people the pages (once the initial start-up days are passed), and it becomes obvious that the world of words and writing can be as compelling as any other. It’s the story of a man, who wanted to sell books because he loved literature, and who managed to stay in business by realizing that love is not enough, no matter how noble the object or well-intentioned the lover. Through luck, hard work, self-acknowledged naivety and a self-described refusal to face what his accountant called reality, he did manage to sell books for more than 40 years, moving from a dilapidated tiny seven-step walk-up storefront (the Seven Stairs bookstore of the title) to a fancy Michigan Avenue address. His first customer, a “fat and strong and daring” woman, came in and asked for a book he didn’t have – so he excused himself, ran to a neighboring bookstore, bought the book, and re-sold it to her, realizing at that moment that not only was his stock inadequate, he lacked a cash register and even the ability to make change. But he survived and learned. In the following years his clientele grew to include many stars of the literary and entertainment world, including Studs Terkel, Stephen Spender, Katherine Hepburn and Saul Bellow. Still, it’s obvious that Brent never pushed aside an everyday customer in favor of a late arrival, regardless of the latter’s connections or status. The happy fact is that, relying on his “naive faith in the necessity for selling good books,” against all (or at least most) odds he built and lived his dream. This book will renew your faith in all that’s good about books and bookstores and book lovers. P.S. One added feature to The Seven Stairs is Brent’s appended list of his “Best One Hundred Books”, broken down by category, i.e., Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain while eating alone, The Collected Stories of John O’Hara while in the tub, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when one simply wants a good book. And so on. The list alone is worth the price of admission