The
Used Books Shelf
Neeman
Sobhan
AN
ideal way to spend a few unmarked hours, in my opinion, is to
browse around a second-hand books store or rummage in the used
books shelf of a bookshop. The pleasure of a hand-me down book
is so much more than that of a pristine one. A used book carries
the history of the other owner with it in its underlined words,
scribbled over pages or personalized scrawls on the flyleaf;
which is an added story within the story: "Tabby being
sick, Bethesda Hospital, July, 1979", "Snowbound at
Logan, Christmas Hols, 1998" and once, pressed within the
pages of an Anita Brookner novella a note saying "Meet
inside courtyard of Villa Giulia at 10. D". Since then,
I have never been able to step inside that Etruscan Museum in
Rome or look at that particular Brookner novel without wondering
if D's meeting went well. I also hoped Tabby got better and
that the flight at Logan was not further delayed. Second-hand
books enter your life in deeper ways than new ones.
Then, you
never know whom you might meet on the used books shelf as you
rummage among cheap thrillers, pulp romances, self-help manuals,
diet cook books, the horoscope for Virgo for the year 1985 or
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, when… suddenly: a treasure!
This is how some of my favourite books came into my life, floating
among the detritus of the publishing world. It makes you cherish
your finds more.
This is
how I found, during the Palaeolithic era of my teen years, the
one book among a select few that till today, works on me like
medicine when I'm depressed: '84 Charing Cross Road' by Helene
Hanff., which also happens to be the definitive book for second-hand
book lovers.
Surely even
ordinary book lovers who love a good read know this funny, heart
warming true story in epistolary form of the love affair between
a New York based writer and a second-hand bookshop in London?
If not beg-borrow-steal a copy immediately and settle down with
a cup of tea to chuckle over this delightful exchange of witty
letters between down-to-earth Helene and the anonymous and very
English 'Messers Marks and Co. Antiquarian Book Seller' of Charing
Cross Road, London. Spanning 20 years, the correspondence nurtures
an unlikely friendship between Miss Hanff and Frank Doel of
Mark and Co that grows into a relationship of affection that
outstrips the narrow definitions of love as in romantic love,
and slowly encompasses the whole shop bonding them like a family.
I have only
to curl up with this slim book to feel my smile return. The
edition I possessed contained a sequel about her trip to London
two decades later to finally see the shop and her old friends:
the surviving staff. Over the years of having had to content
myself with re-reading these two whenever I required emotional
sustenance, I had always wished there was more of Helene Hanff.
Then the
other day, while browsing among the used books section of a
local English bookshop in Rome my eyes prised out a slim, faded
volume that said 'Q's Legacy' on the spine. I almost passed
it by when I glanced again. It said Helene Hanff. I grabbed
it as if it were a letter from an old friend. I didn't even
stop to find out what it was and bought it, starting to read
it, as is my wont, even as I walked out of the store. I couldn't
believe what I had discovered. This was the behind-the-scene
book about the chain of events that led her to write '84 Charing
Cross Road' (made into a play and a film) which earned her fame
and money. It traces her lifelong affair with books starting
with her chance discovery in a library of a volume in a series
of lectures on literature and books by a Cambridge don, Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch ('Q'), which sent her looking for the books
he recommended. This caused her to order some of the books at
the second-hand bookshop in London.
I came from
a book-devouring family and even as young girls my sisters and
I had a tradition that on our birthdays, we would treat the
birthday girl to a trip to the book store to buy a book from
each member of the family. I remember the 'Goshaa-e-Adab' on
Jinnah Road in Quetta, and buying Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca'
for my 16th birthday there. It was my favourite book that year
and soon I read up everything that Du Maurier wrote, including
the story 'The Birds' filmed by Hitchcock. Still, 'Rebecca'
always remained special with that haunting first line 'Last
night I dreamt I was in Manderley.' I made the mistake of re-reading
it recently. Alas! The uncritical sixteen-year-old reader had
disappeared; the prose seemed overwrought; the magic was broken.
I tried to glue back the fragile vase of my remembered enchantment
and pretended that I had not gone back to Manderley. Then, last
year, in Bangkok, while cooling off in the air-conditioned haven
of Asia books, I was prowling among the discarded titles on
the discount shelf when I met old friend Daphne and her Rebecca
again. But this time she came with the express purpose to restore
to me an old enchantment in an acceptable form, as a writer-to-writer,
not writer-to-impressionable reader. The book in my hand was
called 'The Rebecca Notebook and other memories' and comprised
the sort of thing I love to read, the anatomy of how she came
to write her best seller, the chapter outlines, the notes she
made while researching the house on which Manderley was based
and a rejected version of the ending of the novel. This was
a writer talking to you as a friend, and the sort of encounter
I could only find in the used and by-passed books section of
the shop.
Second hand
bookshops are magical places even if they are not 'Antiquarian'
and even if it's just a pile of old books on a sidewalk or a
fair stall. I have a strange, magical story about some second
hand books that turned out to be prophetic. Many years ago,
at the DIT market in Gulshan, there used to be a tiny second
hand bookstore, which was a special haunt for me. I was an unmarried
girl, still in my teens, browsing an afternoon away among the
piles of used books. I had already acquired a fine collection
from this shop of unexpected treasures. But that day, I hit
jackpot. I found at least a dozen books that seemed to be just
waiting for me. At home, when I started to sign my name on the
flyleaf, I saw from the name already stamped inside the covers
that they had all belonged to one person, who had the same taste
in literature as I did. I wondered how the books had gotten
here: stolen or sold off? Anyway, I wasted no time in signing
under the previous owner's seal, my maiden name: Neeman Ahmad.
I didn't get time to read any of the books because just a month
or so later, and quite unexpectedly, I was swept away in a whirlwind
marriage. Sometime afterwards while I was packing my books to
take me with me to my new home in the U.S. I opened those recently
acquired new-old books. Suddenly I noticed the name of the previous
owner that now winked at me from the top of the flyleaf, and
then I started to laugh: "Well, it seems my fate was sealed
in these covers all along!" I grinned, welcoming home the
books into my life, all of which were uncannily stamped 'Sobhan'!