Or maybe 2028, it's complicated

When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world. Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice… read article

Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Booksellers in Chicago. More than forty years ago I visited that shop near the University of Chicago and purchased a partial set of Conrad for a decent price. They bundled the books and I carried them back to Ohio on the train. The card suggests a seriousness of purpose often missing from bookstores today:   “Chicago’s Oldest Bookstore Established 1882 200,000 Titles in Stock Used Books Bought & Sold Small Collections or Complete Libraries No Quantity Too Large – House Calls Made”   Smaller copy says O’Gara & Wilson carries books “in almost all fields, but we are especially interested in American history, art, Balkan and Central European history, English and American literature, Greek and Latin classics, medieval history and literature, military history, philosophy, religion & theology.” In other words, a serious bookstore for serious readers. This is not Harlequin Romance country.   Joseph Epstein’s great friend, the late sociologist Edward Shils, who taught at the University of Chicago, published “The Bookshop in America” in the winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. In it, Shils calls bookshops “an almost indispensable part of life. Like libraries, one goes to them for what one knows and wants and to discover books one did not know before.” He continues:   “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”   He speaks for me. I have gone to bookstores I knew from prior sad experience were lousy, just to wander among the shelves, hopelessly hoping for treasure. In such places, I have been tempted to buy books I already owned just to salvage something tangible out of disappointment. Shils formulates a theory of good bookstores contrary to conventional economic sense:    “A bookshop, in order to be good, must have a large stock of books for which there is not likely to be a great demand but for which there will be an occasional demand. This means, unlike the retail trade in groceries, or the practice in industry to produce on order, a bookshop must render its capital inert by putting a lot of it into slow-moving lines.”   Shils is writing, of course, long before the Age of Amazon. I looked online to see if O’Gara & Wilson is still in business. It is, but relocated to Chesterton, Ind., fifty miles southeast of Chicago. I wish I could visit. More power to the new owners Doug and Jill Wilson. Shils writes:     “The wonder is, given the unremunerativeness of the business, that bookshops exist at all. It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or who can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop, or put his money into the stock market? The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books.”

Italy's Matera as a case study for revitalizing small governments and creating a future of interconnected villages.

One needn’t be a fetishist or even a book collector – reader is close enough -- to prize an “association copy,” a term neatly defined here: “A book that belonged to or was annotated by the author, someone close to the author, a famous or noteworthy person, or someone especially associated with the content of the work.” The full title of the volume in question is The Poetical Works of George Herbert. With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan, published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y., in 1854. The front end paper is signed in black ink: “Helen A. Pinkerton 12-1945.” Poet, scholar, one-time student of Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, Helen gave me the leather-bound volume in 2015 and died two years later.  The only marks Helen left in the book are minute dots and checks beside the titles of eleven poems in the table of contents, including my favorite Herbert poem, “The Flower,” with the beginning of the sixth of its seven stanzas:   “And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write.”   Herbert renders encouragement to late-bloomers and anyone else who has been stalled, tired, sick, preoccupied or otherwise blocked by life. In 2019, just months away from his death by cancer, Clive James was introduced to “The Flower” by a friend, a gift he wrote about in an essay:      “[B]ack there in the middle of the 20th century I somehow missed it, when I was first reading Herbert in the Albatross Book of Living Verse, which we used to call the ‘Book of Living Albatrosses.’ How I ever missed anything in Herbert’s prolific output is a puzzle. He fascinated me from the jump, almost as much as Marvell. I blame Herbert for not calling himself Marvell every time. A poet called Herbert will occasionally be overlooked; call yourself Wonderful and everything will get into the list of contents.”   Herbert was born on this date, April 3, in 1593 and died in 1639 at age thirty-nine.