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I am addicted to books. Not so much reading them as collecting them from used bookstores. I've catalogued and road mapped used bookstores across Upstate New York and New England, and have even standardized a used bookstore aesthetics protocol.
One of the requisites is disorder. My favorite bookstores are those wooden shacks that list southward, as a result of decades, perhaps a century of unrelenting pounding by the cruel winter north wind. It is better when the walls of these venerable dames are lined with books, which double as insulation. They will have footstools to sit upon, and are so thick with paper that cell phone reception is completely cut out. One must be of proper resolve to enter the sanctum sanctorum that whoever so calleth from the outside world shall not be heard.
When I enter the more orderly bookstores, pretentious and haughty, pandering to the upscale tourist and sandwiched between new age boutiques and candle shops I cringe. Their orderliness belies a paucity of Proust, a dearth of Dostoevsky. These were not edifices of literature so much as commercialized theme parks intended to lure the literati wannabe, and entrap the unsuspecting debutant.
"Oh look, honey, a book on wood carving."
Still, one might find rare gems in any used bookstore. I found a small book in one of these pretentiously elite stores titled "Cosmic Consciousness," dated 1907. It was not the larger classic by proto-psychologist Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, but a half-sized clone by a mysterious author named Ali Nomad.
I had trouble reading the book, quite honestly, which reflected in so many ways the same material as Dr. Bucke. They were, in fact, contemporaries. The back pages of my book were filled with interesting illustrated ephemera of exotic and oriental swamis, mind reading masters, and thought control. In fact, this edition was published by the New Thought Fellowship of Chicago, Illinois. The title page read:
Cosmic Consciousness
THE MAN-GOD WHOM WE AWAIT
By ALI NOMAD
Below that was a handwritten signature in florid script, Dr. Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall, and below that a was a narrow white sticker with red lettering. Emblazoned on the label's left side was a clockwise-rotating red swastika, and to its right the words:
International New Thought Fellowship DR. ALEXANDER J. McIVOR-TYNDALL 209-210 Masonic Temple, Chicago Ill.
One could not help mull the implications of the swastika, but as this book was published 1907 and not 1937 it would have to be exonerated in connection to a more nefarious identity. Only a score of years prior and even the Boy Scouts of America branded themselves with the swastika, as did other institutions, not the least of which would be Mdme. Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, to which I intuited this Dr. McIvor-Tyndall or Ali Nomad were connected.
In fact, it turns out McIvor-Tyndall and Ali Nomad were the same person. Ali Nomad was the pen name of the famous turn of the century hypnotist Dr. Alexander McIvor-Tyndall. I discovered this after researching the name, when I came across a Florida woman's plea on a genealogical site who was looking for information about her grandfather, McIvor-Tyndall. Through email correspondence with the granddaughter I learned enough about my little book and its author to safely conclude I not only had an authentic signed copy, but I now had all the provenance I needed to authenticate the book as belonging to Dr. McIvor-Tyndall's personal collection. This would become one of the most collectible books I ever owned, but acquired quite unintentionally for that purpose.
I coveted the book for many years, but finally, as the fortunes of divorce and child support swung to counterbalance my means, I put the book up for auction on Ebay. I paid $11 for it in 2000; I sold it for $90 in 2007.
There was an early period, freshly out of work and needing money to eat when my book purchases were promptly listed on Ebay. My reasoning went like this: If you live in Afghanistan, your natural resource is lapis lazuli; for Sri Lanka it is sapphires; Burma rubies; Colombia emeralds. But from Central New York to Cape Cod it is our wealth of rare used books.
Thus, was I able to acquire a first edition of "Dorothy's Marvelous Adventures in the Land of Oz," a first edition of the original Cosmic Consciousness by Bucke; and many copies of various editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, not all of them Fitzgerald translations, either, and a couple of them with exquisite "tipped-in" illustrations. I have since given those to my daughter for her to build her own legacy.
Eventually, after I settled in to other jobs that sustained my very humble life style I was able to buy books for the reading, not selling. I discovered many better used bookstores in western Massachusetts and eastern New York and southern Vermont than I could have imagined while living in Syracuse.
One run down little hovel in the Town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, called Troubadour Books is a veritable ramshackle collection of sticks and wall paper which, should the wrong book be pulled from the collection of 17th Century Catholic Doctrine stuffed obliquely in a ceiling corner on its north east side, would topple down on its poor, but mercifully engrossed patrons. Low-roofed and small, it resembled what one might expect a Mount Everest base camp to look like. It was a vestige from an era when occupancy codes didn't exist.
Like Doctor Who's T.A.R.D.U.S. ("Time And Relative Dimensions In Space") time travel police phone booth, the Troubadour is much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside.
I don't think I impugn the owner's reputation; he is fully conscious of the general state of his building. It is slowly, ever so slowly, like the unsuspecting mammoths exhumed from the La Brea Tar Pits sinking into the topsoil. One day, thousands of years from now some archaeologist will perchance dig out the store, then mistaken for an Indian burial mound, except for the preserved body of its owner Stephen, who will be found draped over a paperback coffee table anthology of R. Crumb's work in the Modern Art section, equally preserved. Its cartoons will amuse the archaeologists for a while, before they attend to the frozen early anthropoid accompanying it.
I love that store more than any other, and have paid numerous visits, and an almost equal number of purchases.
For, surely no other store is so full of literature on Gnostics, both Sethian and Valentinian, or more eccentrically Manichean, with every paperback ever put out by Doctor of Early Christianity Elaine Pagels, or volumes of Jewish and Kabballist literature, Theosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism, Sufi and Crowley, the Peyote Church or the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians and all the classical psychologists from multiple editions of James to Jung's Collected Works in first edition hardbound or modern paperback-your choice.
One section is simply a lump on the floor, piles of pairs of foreboding Oxford Dictionaries spanning a random selection of modern decades. There are shelves on politics, the "Just Plain Weird," and if you want W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, it's there, too. Maybe it really is all Greek to you, but if you like Greek, you would find it at the Troubadour. Stephen stocks a comprehensive, but expensive collection of one-of-a-kind and first edition Beat literature.
Occasionally I get sale notices from the Troubadour, with cryptic phrases like, "the leopard triangulates, beware the master."
"Hi," I said upon entering last October. "I have come to triangulate."
Stephen the owner laughed. "He's catching on," he said to his helper.
Only half a mile northward on Route 9, just over the Whately town line is The School House, a brick bastion of old books nearly equal in number to the Troubadour, or possibly exceeding it. For its prodigious size the School House lacks some important factors, however. One is the charismatic and quirky owner of the Troubadour, who advertises his selection as "for holy fools." The other is that the School House is a little too orderly, not by much, and too expansive. The books are not well grouped by genre because it is a cooperative, with different owners occupying different sections. Here, though, you are likely to find really old books that are less for reading than as décor in a glassed cabinet.
Not far away in the hip little town of Montague is the Book Mill, which for all its lacking in content makes up for in spades as a favorite hangout for the counter-minded and alternatively predisposed thinker. It has Wi-Fi, a beautiful upstairs reading room with a view overlooking a sheer precipice and river 30 to 40 feet below, and the Lady Killigrew Cafe right next door. In fact, you can order coffee or tea at Lady Killigrew's, and drink it (in their own cups) in the Book Mill's reading rooms.
The Book Mill is really a complex more than it is a single store. There are two restaurants, the bookstore, an antiques store, a record and CD store, and an art store. I'm probably missing one or two. There are numerous picnic and bistro tables and twisting, multi-level decks to sit outside when the weather's right.
They all comprise a renovated gristmill in one of the most rural, hard to find back roads in Massachusetts. Not far away is Lake Pleasant, where America's first spiritist community once dwelt at the turn of the 20th Century. If you are looking for paperbacks on post-modernism, gay-lesbian themed theater, local historical, economics, rock & roll and biographies this would be the place to browse.
In the Town of Berlin (or is it Hoosac, where Grandma Moses painted her primitive folk art?) New York, right across the Vermont state line is another bookstore whose name I don't immediately recall. It is also held in place by the sheer thick inner turgidity of books. To go upstairs is to take your life into your hands. Hand-hewn timbers, floor boards with holes in them ("I see you down there!"), and tall bookshelves that lean toward the patron like special effects scenes from the Hitchcock film Vertigo make this bookstore unsuitable for the faint of heart.
I bought an old Bible there. I am not a Bible reading person, in the traditional sense, but have simply wanted a readable copy of an old King James Bible.
"Is it a Guttenberg?" joked the ancient storeowner, who noticed how thoroughly I was looking it over. In the 19th Century it had belonged to a minister, judging by the margin notes and birthday reminders inside. For a mere five dollars, I put it in a paper bag along with a hardcover edition of Jung's Aion, a copy of Shamanism Through the Centuries and two futuristic science fiction paperbacks.
I had conquered the problem of time on less than $10 in gasoline.
Freelance journalist Gregory G. Lewis was a regular contributor to the West County News of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. As a correspondent to several Franklin County towns Mr. Lewis was better known by his Arts & Entertainment contributions, especially On the Marquee, a review of the region's outstanding art, music and drama.
"My assignments took me to dinners and breakfasts with the Governor; and to the 2006 Massachusetts Democratic Convention where I met candidate Deval Patrick, US Senator John Kerry, and even Kitty Dukakis," said Mr. Lewis.
Since the West County News closed its doors in August, Mr. Lewis has pursued the night life and high life of South Florida, in the
Proustian tradition. He now carouses tropical climes and exotic personalities, capitalizing on years of experience thrusting himself in the public eye.
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