Bound to Last

My desire was fierce enough that when we first got into the city—to save money and provide ourselves with some other attractions, we were staying in one of those knotty-pine cabins on Lake Champlain, and driving the hour back and forth to the Fair—I actually maneuvered my way into a phone booth and talked my father into waiting while I checked the yellow pages for likely toy stores. I even called one or two that sounded plausible, but once they informed me that they weren't within rock-throwing distance of the street corner on which I stood, it became clear that my father wasn't going to, as he put it, drive all over the god-damned city looking for them.

In fact, he'd shied away from even driving into the city—who knew what kind of exotic street signs or miserable traffic he'd encounter?—and had parked at one of the Fair's designated outer lots, served by the city's Metro system.

So there we were, on our way home on the Metro after a long day's Fair-going, riding dully along, when suddenly at God knew what stop I looked up through the car's doors to see the dazzlingly lit and glittering toy store of my dreams. Rows upon rows of tiny, hand-painted figures, and not just the usual Napoleonic types but also Romans and Vikings and Greeks! I floated from the car in the direction of that amazing display window. I stood before it for some impossibly short amount of time. And then my father, who'd been shouting for me in an impressive panic, finally got my attention. He was in the Metro car's doorway, holding the doors open. He continued shouting until I got the idea and ducked back under his arm and into the car again.

What the Christ had I thought I was doing, he wanted to know for the next few stops. It was only then that I revived and asked frantically what stop that had been. Of course he didn't know. And then we came to our stop, and he hustled me out onto the platform.

It probably goes without saying that I never found the place again. On all my subsequent trips on the Metro, I stayed glued to my window each way and still never saw it. None of my family had seen it in the first place, as focused as they'd been on my apparent decision to get myself lost in Montreal's Underground. Were we now somehow on a different line? Had it all been a hallucination? Your guess is as good as mine. It remained in my psyche, though, as an example of how the world worked: There were amazing things out there, and every so often they appeared, in order to be all the more quickly swept away.

Two of the compensations for having accepted a tenure-track job way out in the woods of northwestern Massachusetts, I decided, were that first, and nearly instantly, I could get a dog, and second, and more gradually, I could start to collect hardcover—better—copies of those books I loved. Like most people just out of graduate school, I had a library that consisted almost entirely of paperbacks that were beat to shit, to use the technical term.

This was of course before Alibris or Amazon or any sort of Internet shopping, which meant that the only place to find a hardcover book that was not brand new was either by mail order, which seemed to me a course reserved for shut-ins, or in used book stores.

I met a new friend who was dweeby enough to have compiled a list of all the used book stores in a four- or five-hour radius, and we started hitting those places on road trips. It was a lot of fun—we'd usually end up in some ptomaine palace of a diner on the way home—but we were very quickly struck by how often we came across the same books, and how rarely we scored one of the books on our Most Wanted lists.

Every so often we'd check out such places alone, as well, and at one point it transpired that I was driving with my mother to Manhattan, and though my friend couldn't go, he had pointed out that I'd be passing right by a bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson about which he'd heard excellent things.

It was easy to locate and looked promising at first but then nothing in particular materialized, in terms of finds. A few somewhat interesting things, but nothing I hadn't seen before. I was drifting into the nonfiction aisles in that vaguely disappointed way I would when a bookstore hadn't worked out, in the hopes that I'd still score something weird in some unexpected subcategory, when my mother, who almost never went into bookstores (I was the first in my family to go to college, and outside of work, she and my father almost never read anything other than stop signs), figured she might as well speak up for her son, since she knew her son wouldn't speak up for himself. She asked the guy behind the counter if he knew he had an author in the store.

My mother was born in southern Italy and has a voice like Anna Magnani, so even in the nonfiction section I heard her and cringed. I was cringing because I knew why she was bringing this up. Once it was established that I was an author, she was going to ask if that qualified me for some kind of discount. Everybody in the world was getting a free handout on something except her family, she believed.

"Oh really?" the guy said, polite but uninterested. "What's his name?"

My mother told him. It turned out that he was a fan, which was startling. Back then, pretty much unprecedented.

She led him to me. He shook my hand, told me how much he'd loved my third novel (which had plummeted out of print almost before my closest friends had read it), and asked if I'd sign the two books of mine that were in the store.

While I was signing them, he asked what I was looking for. I told him. He got the kind of look in his eye that Captain Nemo must have gotten when people asked him if he'd ever seen a craft that could sail underwater. "Come with me," he said.

He walked me over to a derelict-looking building across the street. He unlocked the padlock on the door, led me up the stairs and along a corridor, unlocked another padlock on some steel inner doors, and ushered me into a loft that to this day causes my breath to catch when I think back on it.

Extending in all directions were ranks of grey metal storage shelves, head-high and spanning out around me, filled with hardcover books. Think of that famous crane shot at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which we realize that the crated-up Ark is now just a needle in some staggeringly large government haystack of a storage room, and you get the idea. But it got even better: Once he led me to the half of the room that held the fiction and I started heading down the rows, it was that childhood moment from Montreal all over again, only this time without the Metro's doors closing.

I not only immediately spotted pristine hardcover copies of books I'd been hunting for years—Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, J. M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, and Flannery O'Connor's Collected Stories—but also registered that there were multiple copies of each, as though the store in some gently comic way wanted to flaunt its greatness. On top of that, everything seemed priced to buy: between ten and twenty dollars. After I'd checked and double-checked those merciful numbers, I started making a pile in my arms. Very quickly I started setting my piles down in order to begin new piles. Sometimes I'd put a book back when I found two others that excited me even more. Eventually it got to the point where I thought I absolutely had to stop, even though so many more rows remained to be explored. By the half-assed running tally that I'd been keeping in my head, I figured I was now up to around five hundred dollars.

It turned out to be a little less. And in five shopping bags waiting to be toted out to the car I had thirty-eight hard-to-find and beautiful books. On what I would have previously considered a hugely successful outing to a bookstore such as this, I might have landed only one.

"I certainly hope you're going to give him a discount," my mother told the owner. He knocked off another 20 percent, making her day.

One of those shopping bags held two of the hardcovers for which I'd been searching the longest: William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Gass's story collection in hardcover was compact and, in its matte-brown dust jacket with muted yellow and orange lettering, appealingly unassuming in a way that was apt and therefore aesthetically satisfying as an object. Pynchon's novel was in some ways even more unassuming in its initial aspect. Whereas the paperback had featured a Peter Max-like cartoon illustration that seemed to want to evoke from five hundred yards The Swinging Psychedelic Sixties, the hardcover offered on its dust jacket a monochromatic image of pavement, graffitied with the loop, triangle, and trapezoid that form the muted post horn of the possible secret society. Which was the more satisfying to hold in my hand? I didn't have to decide. Each had been priced as though I was the one doing the pricing.

I felt, once I'd gotten home, as if I'd rubbed the bottle and been granted thirty-eight wishes. I reread all or at least parts of each of the books, just to feel at leisure the heft of each in my hand. And of course I was very soon anxious to get back to that store. But I was heading into a brutally busy semester. I went back the first time a few months later and the store was closed, for whatever reason, and then one thing led to another and I didn't manage to return until six months or so after that.

You can see where this is going. The storefront was boarded up, the space inside empty. I asked at the local diner and was told that the owner had died and the bookstore had closed. What had happened to all of the books stored across the street? The guy at the diner hadn't known there were books stored across the street. Was there anybody I could reach to talk to about where everything went? The owner's family, the guy guessed. Did any of them live around here? Not that he knew. Did anyone know how to get in touch with them? Not that he knew.

I stood in the middle of the street, my hands on my hips. Yet for all of my disappointment, I wasn't anywhere near as bereft as I'd been in Montreal. Not only because I'd matured—Ha!—but also because in this case I'd been allowed my time inside the charmed circle. I'd carried away all of those beautiful fictions as a result. I'd not only been allowed a glimpse at the entirety of that bounty but I'd been granted my portion, as well, if not more than my portion. That's what the physical object of a book that I love can evoke for me, and that's all anyone can ask.

Being the sort of person who, in cases like this, most often assumes the worst, I searched with rising panic and growing hopelessness, increasingly convinced that the book was gone forever. (I should explain that my library is spread out over two houses and numerous bookcases, which at that time were not arranged in any logical order. The summer before last, I finally organized some of my books according to a system that at least occasionally allows me to locate something.) Certain that the book was gone, I felt the pain one might feel when a cherished keepsake, a ring or watch, the sole remaining memento of a loved one, has, like its original owner, been lost. It hardly seemed possible that something I'd saved for fifty years could have just disappeared, but books have wills of their own. They migrate from room to room, they lend themselves to friends, they fling themselves off a shelf at us when they suspect that we need them. And if a book could vanish, Andersen's Fairy Tales seemed a likely candidate to have mastered that magic trick.

I missed the book more than a keepsake. I grieved for it as if for a person.

The Andersen was illustrated by Arthur Szyk. After so many years, I remembered the images with startling clarity, and I knew that my longing for the book had as much to do with the illustrations as with Andersen's text. I wanted the Proustian moment of experiencing once again the effect that had been produced on me by the alchemical combination of the strangeness of the stories and the bright exotic pictures. I wanted to touch the object that I had so often touched as a child.

Though nothing could have consoled me for the loss of my book, it was a comfort that, with a few mouse-clicks more, I discovered that several copies were available, none of them very costly. It seemed like a bargain, a few dollars plus postage, in exchange for the restoration of a missing piece of my life.

I ordered two copies, just in case, one from each of two booksellers.

In a week or so, they arrived, encased in the padded envelopes, the bubble wrap, the unique signature of an individual's consciousness and care that is among the rewards of buying from online sellers of used books, and from eBay.

If the cover was sweetly familiar, with its wheat-colored weave stamped with green line drawings of storks and brown letter A's, the endpaper was jolting, at once intimate and alienating. Seeing it was like suddenly coming upon a photo of the house in which I grew up. If so, it was a strange house, crowded and floating in space. The image has no background but a flat pale ochre behind the teeming group portrait of the principal figures with which Szyk populated Andersen's stories. On the top left is the Snow Queen, mysterious, aloof, and appropriately larger than anyone else. Beneath her is the toy ballerina, the adored love object of the Steadfast Tin Soldier, while a gremlin resembling a highly animated tree root reaches over a low wall, behind the Emperor and the Nightingale hovering like the holy spirit. On the right, past the rather attractive Ugly Duckling, sits an old man in a chair, holding a book, presumably the author, though his face more closely suggests a Polish-Jewish relative of Szyk's than the odd-looking Dane who stares at us so unhappily from photos of Hans Christian Andersen.

Szyk's images evoke medieval manuscript illumination and the miniature paintings of India and Persia. There are the same jewel-like colors, the stylized grace of the figures, the condensed fanciful narratives, the extravagant decorative patterns. In the illustration for "The Marsh King's Daughter," the part Egyptian, part Art Nouveau Princess sways her shapely arms in the huladancer tribute of an altarpiece angel; in the background are two large storks, with three more in the air, all of which could have been plucked from a row of hieroglyphics on a Pharaoh's tomb. The East Wind from "The Garden of Paradise" is a Chinese aristocrat in silks and brocade, flying diagonally up the page and bearing on his shoulders a prince from a Netherlandish family portrait. The cowherd in "Great Claus and Little Claus" could be walking across a field in a fourteenth-century Book of Hours, while the insects and forest creatures menacing "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf " seem like visitors from one of Bosch's night-mares. Often Szyk's birds look especially bright-eyed and crazed.