In Praise of the Book Table Guy

It is too cold for the book table guy, apparently, because I wanted to go buy a book from him and he's not there. The book table guy -- or, I might say, my book table guy, because there are others -- is a guy with a van who sets up several tables of books along West 4th Street, near the NYU library, and sells them to you for smallish amounts of cash. I don't totally understand his operation; there are five tables, and some of them seem to have their own dedicated workers: I do not know whether these men are his underlings or his competition. And his level of knowledge of his wares is uncertain: sometimes he seems very excited to sell me books (he knew an awful lot about the Man in the High Castle) and other times it appears to be just another transaction, commodities for dollars.

There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.

Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.