The Blurb

I went to a book sale a few weeks ago and was sorely disappointed. Shelves of cheap paperback novels mocked me as I scoured a single shelf posing as the Literature section. A few books caught my attention. They were classics in the classic sense—books worth spending money on just to have the titles legitimize your library. These classics sat rather sheepishly on a third of a shelf next to the children's books. They were such poor quality I couldn't even bring myself to go through the purchase evaluation process with them (there's a nice topic for a future post).

As I wandered about the store hoping to stumble across a misshelved gem, I internally berated the store for failing to make culture publicly available. It had always been my feeling that bookstores existed as a kind of warehouse of culture. A person need only enter the warehouse, look up the location of the right product, and find that location in order to plug into a constant knowledge supply. If they weren't sure what the right product was, they could just grab whatever was handy. Everything had some use.

It seemed to me that this bookstore was more of the landfill of culture. All those books that should have been reduced to a single word on their first edit had somehow slipped unnoticed through the fingers of careless publishers and conglomerated in rural Wisconsin to doom nearby residents to lives of meaninglessness. The most frustrating part about the experience was that I seemed to be the only person in the store distressed at the putrefaction splayed about. Folks meandered by me apparently grabbing books by chance. It was as if each person had a title ticker that reminded them at random intervals to pull a book off a shelf and flip through the pages. As if flipping through the pages would give them any idea of the book's content.

My inarticulate tirade shifted from the store managers to the indiscriminate customers who let such stores exist. If people refused junk books and demanded cultural enlightenment, the hoggish purveyors of pollution would be expunged and a ubiquitous savior-faire among the hoi poloi would again make our nation respectable in the eyes of the world. At least in my mind.

Apparently I was the only one in the store of that opinion. Enlightenment gradually settled upon me like snow in a gentle breeze. The people had blended with the books until I could barely distinguish between them. Both were full of opinions and decidedly unremarkable. I found myself staring into the optical illusion of two parallel mirrors—each reflecting the other in an infinite cycle leading to oblivion.

My next revelation was even more frightening—I couldn't find myself in the image. The beauty of a lackluster landscape is the contrast a remarkable figure presents. I desperately wanted to stand out in the picture I saw, but I didn't. It took me a while to come to grips with that image. I wandered about the store glancing through any book that caught my eye. Clinging to my idealism, I returned most of them. But I left with five books in my bag.