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It Is a curious thing that so many people only go into a bookshop when
they happen to need some particular book. Do they never drop in for a
little innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some knightly souls
who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of
chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any
certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that
needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long
pining away on an upper shelf--why not ride up, fling her across your
charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly,
you book-lovers!
The lack of intelligence with which people use bookshops is, one
supposes, no more flagrant than the lack of intelligence with which we
use all the rest of the machinery of civilization. In this age, and
particularly in this city, we haven't time to be intelligent.
A queer thing about books, if you open your heart to them, is the
instant and irresistible way they follow you with their appeal. You know
at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one
might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you
may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell
upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of
the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you. A few
lines glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of thought for the
day, reverse the currents of the mind, change the profile of the city.
The other evening, on a subway car, we were reading Walter de la Mare's
interesting little essay about Rupert Brooke. His discussion of
children, their dreaming ways, their exalted simplicity and absorption,
changed the whole tenor of our voyage by some magical chemistry of
thought. It was no longer a wild, barbaric struggle with our fellowmen,
but a venture of faith and recompense, taking us home to the bedtime of
a child.
The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond shadow of doubt, that
that book must be his--not necessarily now, but some time--is among the
happiest excitements of the spirit. An indescribable virtue effuses from
some books. One can feel the radiations of an honest book long before
one sees it, if one has a sensitive pulse for such affairs. Its honour
and truth will speak through the advertising. Its mind and heart will
cry out even underneath the extravagance of jacket-blurbings. Some
shrewd soul, who understands books, remarked some time ago on the
editorial page of the _Sun's_ book review that no superlative on a
jacket had ever done the book an atom of good. He was right, as far as
the true bookster is concerned. We choose our dinner not by the
wrappers, but by the veining and gristle of the meat within. The other
day, prowling about a bookshop, we came upon two paper-bound copies of a
little book of poems by Alice Meynell. They had been there for at least
two years. We had seen them before, a year or more ago, but had not
looked into them fearing to be tempted. This time we ventured. We came
upon two poems--"To O, Of Her Dark Eyes," and "A Wind of Clear Weather
in England." The book was ours--or rather, we were its, though we did
not yield at once. We came back the next day and got it. We are still
wondering how a book like that could stay in the shop so long. Once we
had it, the day was different. The sky was sluiced with a clearer blue,
air and sunlight blended for a keener intake of the lungs, faces seen
along the street moved us with a livelier shock of interest and
surprise. The wind that moved over Sussex and blew Mrs. Meynell's heart
into her lines was still flowing across the ribs and ledges of our
distant scene.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling
in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great
social import. Even as the tranced swain, the book-lover yearns to tell
others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the
postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone
messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find.
Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want
you to love her, too!" It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little
indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too. He
sees an enthusiastic review--very likely in _The New Republic_--and
says, with great scorn, "I read the book three months ago." There are
even some perversions of passion by which a book-lover loses much of his
affection for his pet if he sees it too highly commended by some rival
critic.
This sharp ecstasy of discovering books for one's self is not always
widespread. There are many who, for one reason or another, prefer to
have their books found out for them. But for the complete zealot nothing
transcends the zest of pioneering for himself. And therefore working for
a publisher is, to a certain type of mind, a never-failing fascination.
As H. M. Tomlinson says in "Old Junk," that fascinating collection of
sensitive and beautifully poised sketches which came to us recently with
a shock of thrilling delight:
To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with
sails furled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane
of a brimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight
as the rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite
lyric.
To read just that passage, and the phrase _the bright plane of a
brimming harbour_, is one of those "rare and sensational
delights" that set the mind moving on lovely journeys of its own,
and mark off visits to a bookshop not as casual errands of
reason, but as necessary acts of devotion. We visit bookshops not
so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover,
in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own
encumbered soul.