Living in a small town you wouldn't expect much goings-on with books. Maybe a book store or two but nothing out of the ordinary. But without leaving my hometown, I've experienced quite a few "surreal" book experiences.
I began my bookselling ventures by working in a rare book store on an abandoned looking street in the "downtown" area of a steel working neighborhood. This street could be the "main street" of this particular area and the shops that lined the street suggested such. You had the pharmacy, the florist, the local performance theater, the movie gallery and right smack dab in the middle---a rare book store. It's unassuming windows has a bookworm painted on by a local painter woman and shelves stand straining under the weight of old books.
I walked in one day and approached the owner inquiring about an apprenticeship of sorts because I was thinking about going into the book business. The man said he did in fact need someone to help him organize the place and thought I look capable and decided to let me have a go. Little did I know at the time, that this dusty, unalphabetized, unassuming, mousetrap of a book store would in fact turn out to be an backwater Alexandrian library.
In my futile attempts to alphabetize the random, jumbled assortment of books, I found to my astonishment, books that had no business being stuck in this small town.
Did you ever see Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space? Remember Criswell, the would be psychic?
Well, sitting among dusty, forgotten tomes I found "Criswell Predicts from now to the year 2000!" First Edition and Signed by the "great" psychic himself.
The inscription reads: "For Fritz Good Fortune! Criswell 1973"
Maybe this isn't as impressive to some, but for my husband, an avid Ed Wood fan at the time, this was gold.
One day while I was bumbling around stacks of books the owner called me to the front of the store. He opened a drawer behind the desk (the store was filled with amazing old pharmacy shelves that still had the Latin inscribed marble pulls) and he hands me a book saying, "Hold this." I hold out my hand and into he places a simple psalter from 1311. Yes, 1311. The pages are thick paper and slightly buckled. The boards are thick leather. And here I am standing holding an ancient psalter with my bare hands! No gloves, no museum sterility but in a dust-filled, unorganized bookshop. After we talk about the book for a few moments, he takes it from me and puts it back into the little drawer and we go about our business.
Here also were books from Egypt with jewel encrusted covers, books illustrated by Arthur Rackham and probably many other well-known authors and illustrators if I had known what I was looking at.
Only later did I realize that this man also owned other "empty" stores on this street and they too were filled overflowing with old books and periodicals. Who knows what treasures were and are hidden there?
Who knew that a little rare bookshop in a small town could hold treasures like Alexandria and no one would even know?
