Lately, this funny thing has been happening. Every time I go outside, it pours. It's never raining when I leave the house; it waits for me to get a few blocks away, and then the skies open up like a boring party favor. I think I have pissed off a thunder god.
Today I got lucky, though. It held off just long enough that I decided to get some things done: Buy some tank tops, go to the bank, maybe run to the hardware store. I didn't get any of these things done, though, because a book store happened.
I can get lost in any book store. Barnes & Noble may be clean and corporate, but the shelves are still magic and numerous. I've even been known to somehow get swallowed up by a single wall of paperbacks in the grocery store. That said, there's something magic about old book stores, especially when the store is as old as the books and nobody knows what's in there anymore. In places like that, there is no hope of getting an accurate catalog because the attempt would be like the world's most devious easter egg hunt. Books hide behind unrelated comrades. They wait for the right person to come along and then drop down on their heads from the duct work.
And so, on my way to pick up some tank tops, this happened.
Having shelves facing the street is the lure. It works.
The outside shelves had older books from various schools of humor and the era of gender studies when academics just threw any idea at the wall to see what stuck. Drawn by the word magnet I may have been born with, I wandered inside.
Though the most dazzling aspect was a shelf of books that should have crumbled a century ago if not for studious librarians staving off the laws of physics, I personally am always hunting for the 1920's, especially the women who wrote therein. First I got sidetracked by the basement:
I might as well just move in.
I found a curious thing down there. A book called The Dante Club, more modern by a lifetime than the books next to it. I'd read it in high school (or rather, while skipping high school, but if you'd attended my high school you would understand). It wasn't the Great American Novel, or even a particularly American novel at all, but I had fond memories of it. I held it in my lap for a minute grinning like an idiot.
I also took a picture out of sheer disbelief at its presence.
In the end, I didn't take it home. I left it for someone else to find and form memories with.
I took this home instead.
Flapper writers, and former flapper writers, have a standing invitation to my home. This one even has that delightful old book smell. Please welcome my new...Addition? Edition? Let's say, both. It's possible that this book has never left New York. It was likely written here, printed here, and passed from hand to hand here since the 40's. If I ever travel the world, I will take it with me...and someday send it home again.
Flapper writers, and former flapper writers, have a standing invitation to my home. This one even has that delightful old book smell. Please welcome my new...Addition? Edition? Let's say, both. It's possible that this book has never left New York. It was likely written here, printed here, and passed from hand to hand here since the 40's. If I ever travel the world, I will take it with me...and someday send it