18. The Two Types of Bookstore
The downsides of being organized.
There is a large, well-known bookstore, a chain of bookstores actually, in my city. I visit these locations fairly often, as much as once a week, sometimes buying books, sometimes just poking around. The central bookstore is well-organized and vast, though the fact that it is so well-organized makes it actually somehow seem smaller — if you know the book you are looking for, you can easily search for it and determine whether it is there or not, and on which floor and in which aisle. Being able to determine the presence or non-presence of a specific book seems to me to contract the store’s massive repository, reducing what could be an endless, tangling labyrinth of potential paths into a single, easily navigable route. It is like entering a jungle in which a teeming variety of plant and animal life dwell, but which are all catalogued according to a strict Linnean classification system. But nature is not laid out this way: the very word jungle carries with it a sense of thickly entangled life, an irreducibly complicated system of vines and creeping things, of mysterious hanging mists and furtive movements under broad palm leaves, and overhead the calls of unseen birds and the hooting of a distant predators.
There is another bookstore in my city, one much, much smaller in size, for everything is packed into the various rooms of a converted house. This modestly sized home overflows with books, with stacks upon stacks, some shelves double-layered with books, so you have to pull out rows of books in order to see what titles lie hidden behind. The store is organized, yes, but the almost-comic abundance of extra stacks that cover the floor, at times making egress a challenge, add an ineffable sense of endlessness: one garners something of the flavor of being in a Byzantine library of old, where around any corner, or lurking at the bottom of a particular stack, one may find a book one has never heard about, never suspected, and yet somehow longed for. It is a place of discovery, a moldering vault of the past, and being inside that place is like being at the bottom of the sea: voices are hushed, customers squeeze by one another with difficulty in such cramped quarters, and it feels like time has slowed here, becoming less like a flowing river and more like a lazy pool of glycerin. Here, the jungle metaphor is apt: you are traversing a verdant equatorial ecosystem, the yellowing bricks of paper have become towering trees all around, the floor a fecund carpet of moss and leaves, and like some intrepid explorer, you navigate your raft along a flowing muddy Amazonian tributary, unsure of what surprise may lurk around a given bend.
If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
