Change and its Rewards

Years ago, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, pocket change still had value. The old men in that era might inquire, “Do you have any silver?” because in their own youth some coins were made with silver. Change in the purse meant the possibility of penny candy, the beggar having hope for the lunch counter, and school children providing for other children via Lenten “rice bowls.”  The jingle of change was the promise of seedlings, which in turn is the promise of fruit or an acorn-to-a-bed.

During those years, paper money — a few dollars — could buy you a few things, especially secondhand things. While hand-me-downs may have been the dread of younger siblings, for the rummaging truffle pigs of secondhand shops, thrift stores, garage sales, vintage record stores, and used book stores, one man’s castoffs could be treasure to another.

In the United States there was a string of used book stores featuring donated books, the shops run by alumnae of Bryn Mawr College. These ladies hoped to raise money, bits at a time, for scholarships at their alma mater. A few of these bookstores remain: in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton, New Jersey; and Washington D.C.  In my own lifetime I knew the one in D.C., and three others: in New Haven, Connecticut; Albany, New York; and in another city I don’t recall. Autumn days with a pack of cigs and the crunch of fallen leaves were the preferred conditions for these adventures.

Among the used books were certain volumes which belonged to a larger series — among these were Everyman’s Library. While I did not favor these, I would open the cover to reveal the quote:

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.

Books, like trees, are the companions of every season. They can also be moral accompaniment.

I imagine now the titles I rummaged among were treasured by readers of another era and that many of these readers were old Protestants and Anglo-Catholics of educated classes.

Here are some authors and titles I came across over and over in the ‘80s among the used books:

Will and Ariel Durant
The Story of Civilization

Rudolf Otto
The Idea of the Holy

Denis de Rougemont
Love in the Western World

Thomas Merton
The Seven Storey Mountain

Etienne Gilson
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy

Jean Leclercq
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Christopher Dawson
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture

Ralph Roder
The Man of the Renaissance

T. S. Eliot
Christianity and Culture
The Waste Land and Other Poems

Sigmund Freud
Civilization and its Discontents

Émile Mâle
Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century

John Henry Newman
Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Kenneth Clark
Civilization

Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh

Henry Adams
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past

Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel

William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Henry James
The Turn of the Screw

Robert Penn Warren
All the King’s Men

Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August

William Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Jessica Mitford
The American Way of Death

James Herriot
All Creatures Great and Small

John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness

Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage

James Joyce
Dubliners

Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front

Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
The Loved One

Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking

Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy

Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning

Paul Horgan
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History

Fulton Oursler
The Greatest Story Ever Told

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Divine Milieu

Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet

Omar Khayyam
The Rubaiyat  (with illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan; think Grateful Dead stickers on a Volkswagen)

Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism

Anne Freemantle
A Treasury of Early Christianity

Alban Butler
Lives of the Saints

Plato
The Republic

Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics

Saint Augustine
On Christian Doctrine
Confessions

Dante
Divine Comedy (trans. by Dorothy Sayers)

William Shakespeare
Complete Works

John Milton
Paradise Lost

Helen Waddell
The Desert Fathers

Paul Tillich
various titles

Charles Dickens
various titles

Mark Twain
various titles

Bret Harte
The Outcasts of Poker Flat

O. Henry
Stories

Emmanuel Swedenborg
various titles

Sigrid Undset
Kristin Lavransdatter

Leon Uris
Trinity

Arnold Toynbee
A Study of History

Johan Huizinga
The Waning of the Middle Ages

Erich Auerbach
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

R. G. Collingwood
The Idea of History

The Warren Commission Report

I am sure the denizens of favored sections found their own repeat titles repeatedly. Considering my own favored shelves of then, I am certain some reflected social trends — like the ebb and flow of bestseller lists, books turned into film and TV, curriculum, spiritual fads, and others the emptied contents of apartments and houses, a next generation forgetting the import of grandpa’s selections; still others a held virtue of tradition or patriotism.

Those old shops came with the smell of decaying pages like an umami-scented welcome of a warm autumn stew. Sometimes you could spot a mite, very much at home, crawling down a page. Among the stacks too might be your competition up to his own hunting and gathering. In an age before the Internet and Antiques Roadshow you might even find an autographed volume gone unnoticed and therefore unsegregated to a special shelf, and occasionally even something rare.

Like the value of our change and single dollars, the value of all things seems to be receding. Therapy, self-soothing, medicating, self-production via screens: these are the less venturous adventures of now in which little is ventured. Those old shops were, in part, a dialogue with ancestors, a conversation with a gallery of all types,  a step around the frenetic oligarchs who always need us to press a button NOW — the chicken littles for whom the sky is always falling. Remember the wideness of Chesterton’s comment:

“Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

I still have a couple of old first editions of the essays of G.K. Chesterton, a buck-fifty each, found in those shops, hardcover. I remember especially enjoying an essay, “On Pigs as Pets.”  Would that pigs were only our pets as opposed to our overlords. See what old volumes of Plato and Chesterton do to a man, make him critical of suggestions that we build a tower rather than staying on the ground.

Old bookstores are like graveyards: each have their own contemplative charms, quiet and solitude, made for walking feet and tablets inscribed with poetry and history, often monuments to hope, each with their own remembrance of others. Both kinds of spaces now being cast off, leaving nothing in the leaving. Long readings are exhausting for shrunken heads, small minds, and the over-therapied. Graveyard? I prefer to remember Auntie how she was, so we threw her dust to the wind.

Amidst our interminable fixation with new, now, next, and mine, we forget the commandments:

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. (Deut. 32:7)

And:

Stand ye in the highways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way; and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk therein.” (Jer 6:16)

Instead, we go wandering, even while sitting, conversing with snakes.

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Gerald Coleman writes from Maryland.

Courtesy the Lydwine archive