The Forest of Used Books

As I walked through the forest of used books, I gazed at the beauty around me. The forest was towering with books of all shapes and sizes, beleafed with words uncountable.

Some of the forest was old growth, some of it new growth where old burns had happened, leaving behind charred best sellers and self help slash piles. At times I stumbled on the stump of a fallen Time Life series, or a thicket of foreign language dictionaries. But I was always in awe.

I lingered in a grove of WWII histories, and lollygagged in a stand of poetry. The wind tinkled the words of cowboy poets and modern poetry anthologies and Rod McKuens and the words spoke to me. Down by the stream, the heavy laden art book trees creaked under the weight of their knowledge, and I picked some of their fruit. The trees sighed happily of Van Gogh, the Impressionists, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, Manet, and all others unnamable, so familiar they are to me.

I was a botanist in the land of all recorded writ, and it pleased me. I was an archivist of lumber, if lumber was a lexicon. I was a librarian of the trees.

Presently, I came upon an obscure patch of the used forest, and lingered.

I stroked the trunk of Jack Dennis’ Western Trout Fly Tying Manual, which first took seed in 1974 and is now a long forgotten species. I was delighted by the ridiculous look of this book, with Jack Dennis himself mugging on the cover as he tied a trout fly. I lingered near The Gun Digest Book of Exploded Firearms Drawings (Expanded 3rd Edition), marveling that a living thing so ubiquitous was unknown to me.

The Piper Cub Story by James M Triggs creaked in the wind, as did San Francisco, A Profile with Pictures, Barnaby Conrad. A rare species of outdated and even hideously alluring Panasonic the Genius Microwave Cookbook conjured a nostalgia so deep it was nihilistic.

I continued on.

DJ Bartholomew and EE Bassett’s Let's Look at the Figures, The Quantitative Approach to Human Affairs stood in my way. I almost forgot how to go around it, until I realized that it was an organic thing made by a creator, thus rendering it palpable and passable. So I passed. Beyond this stood the Register of Erotic Books, deceitfully luring one into leafing through its pages, only to find the titles of erotica, with no pictures. Vaguely disappointed, I went on my way.

In a copse of second hand discounts were many different varieties of books: Fifty Years ago, Darkness Before Dawn, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had once been so widespread that it had become subjected to modern deforestation practices, apparently. It stood pale and proud amongst others of its kind: The Cross Country Skiers Bible, Illustrated Guide to Southern Africa, Fill the House with Quilting, The Bookshelf for Boys and Girls (The Manual of Childhood Development), Furniture Treasury/Two Volumes in One, Bone and Joint Imaging, and An Introduction to Drawing Flowers.

I soon realized that I was lost in the forest of used books. Not one to despair, I looked for a frame of reference and saw the mighty Dwight D Eisenhower, A Gauge to Greatness, but this was no help to me. I only grew more bewildered by Housekeeping Made Easy, and its twin trunks Home Nursing & First Aid and The New Book of Etiquette. Hints from Heloise made it even worse. Yet, even here, in the bottomlessness of lost words, was strange comfort: a German Bible from 1895,‘Der Bibel’ rose high in the sky, though I could not comprehend it because I do not speak (or read) German. Within its branches were birds nests of homemade bookmarkers and pressed 4 leaf clovers that must have been as old as the tree itself.

It was only when I saw the somewhat familiar limbs of Oakley Hall’s The Art & Craft of Novel Writing that I knew I would find my way once again, and sure enough, twin volumes of The Collected Poetry of William Carlos Williams by New Directions Paperbacks led me back to the poetry section.

I chopped down the William Carlos Williams volumes, gathered some Pablo Neruda, and collected the once thought to be extinct The Bicentennial Almanac as proof of my visit to this lost land.

Then I returned home to tell my children of the vastness of all words in the forest of used books, and regale my wife with tales of Jack Dennis tying trout fishing flies all alone next to an exploded gun manual fifty years ago. I knew she wouldn't believe me, but you and I know it is true.

And we have the Register of Erotic Books to prove it.

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