Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared in the summer 2011 issue of the Montana Quarterly. We are publishing it today on Last Best News because it is included in a new anthology, “An Elk River Books Reader: Billings and Livingston Area Writers,” which is officially being released tonight at Elk River Books in Livingston.
File photo by Acroterion/Wikimedia Commons
The Mai Wah, about how it would have looked in the mid-1980s.
The Mai Wah Building on Mercury Street in Uptown Butte is a Chinese cultural museum these days, but when I lived in Butte in the early 1980s, the main room on the ground floor housed a junk shop. The first time I saw it, the store was closed, so I pressed my face to the window to see what was inside. What I saw, amid the heaps of tools, battered home furnishings, tennis racquets, bottles and decomposing rugs, was a small collection of books.
To me, there is nothing more promising than a collection of old books, especially when seen like this, dimly, from a distance. At that moment there is always a chance, however infinitesimally small, that one of them is a first edition of “Moby Dick,” inscribed by Melville, or, since we’re in Butte, maybe a journal that belonged to Wobbly martyr Frank Little, murdered by gun thugs in 1917. Or — and why be restrained in that first wild moment of imagining — what if I stumble upon the lost book of Cicero, that single manuscript once owned by Petrarch, lent to a friend and never seen again?
You never know. Even after decades of disappointment I still allow myself to hope.
A sign in the window said that if the shop was closed, to knock on the door at the top of the stairs, which were just to the left of the main entrance. As I began to make my way up, the first couple of stairs creaked under my weight. In response, from behind the door above, there erupted a furious racket of barking and snarling, as if somebody had touched a cattle prod to a dog already predisposed to unpleasantness. He attacked the door, too, throwing his body against it and tearing at it with his claws. I stood there frozen, wondering if I should proceed. The door didn’t look particularly strong. What if the dog broke it down, or pushed it far enough to slip out? All indications were that I would be ripped to pieces before I could even turn around.
But those books. … You just never knew. And so I kept climbing, clutching the railing to support my trembling legs. With each step the dog reached a new pitch of fury, but I made it to the landing at last and timidly knocked on the door, as if the junk shop owner, if he were home, hadn’t been sufficiently alerted to my presence already. When he did finally come to the door, he didn’t open it, but shouted out, “Who’s there?”
“Nobody,” I said. “I mean, nobody you know. I just wanted to look around your shop.”
We were both screaming to be heard above the barking of the dog, and when the man wasn’t speaking to me he was cursing at the dog.
“My shop?” he shouted. “What do you need?”
“Well,” I said, feeling as if I had already let him down somehow, “I just wanted to look around.”
There was silence for a moment, then another communication.
“I’m busy right now.”
Busy? I said to myself. Busy? What, making a bomb? Butchering some unfortunate urchin?
“Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Noon.”
Once more into the breach
So, I went back the next day, repeating the whole terrifying scene. The dog seemed even more enraged than the day before. But I knocked again and told the owner, whom I still hadn’t seen, that I was the fellow he had told to return today. He seemed doubtful, but eventually he opened the door a crack, a crack into which snarling dog inserted his snout, slobbering, growling and barking. The man whacked the dog on the head and then pushed him away with his foot as he slowly squeezed himself through the slightly open door, all the while swearing and threatening. He got through at last and slammed the door shut, and the dog, as if this were a game with regular rules, immediately stopped barking.
The man before me was tall and very lean, hawk-faced, with black glasses taped at the extremities, intense blue-gray eyes, and a jaw so distinct and angular that it looked detached, like something from an archaeology dig.
“I’m sorry about Scout,” he said. “He doesn’t like people. Hell, he doesn’t even like me. Now, what it is you were interested in?”
“Books,” I said, looking up at him from a couple of steps below the landing. “I like books.”
He eyed me sharply, as if he thought I was being funny, or trying to pull something over on him.
“I don’t have many books. But I suppose you can have a look. Come on.”
I let him pass and he led the way downstairs. He opened the door to the junk shop with an old skeleton key, held it open and motioned me inside. As soon as I got within a few feet of the small shelf of books and had a better look, I figured it was hopeless. They all looked like books that had suffered some water damage and then been stored somewhere very cold, somewhere susceptible to mold. But I felt obliged to look at each title, and to pull a couple of volumes off the shelf for closer inspection. I was getting nervous because after putting the owner to so much trouble, it would have been awkward to leave without making a purchase. Then I saw a title I was actually interested in: “Among the Nudists” by Frances and Mason Merrill.
Mildewy and moldy, but with an irresistible title.
It was mildewy and warped and the orange cloth covers were in bad shape, but it looked too odd to pass up. It turned out to be an examination of the culture of Nudism, published in 1931 and illustrated with black-and-white photographs of naked men engaged in a tug-of-war, naked families playing with enormous medicine balls and circles of naked men and woman cavorting in a glen. Except for the nakedness of all present, the photos looked like something out of a Soviet compendium of healthful proletarian pursuits. A few samples showed the prose to be very serious and sober-minded, deliberately avoiding the least hint of titillation or salaciousness. I was almost certain I’d never read it, but I also knew it would make a great conversation piece, especially since I had more or less risked my life to look at it.
“How much for this one?” I asked, and when he saw the title he looked at me funny again, trying to decide whether I was a wise guy, or whether, God forbid, I had something more unseemly in mind. I hoped he wasn’t considering siccing his dog on me. But at last his instincts as a merchant overcame his doubts and he said, “Three bucks.”
At that time, three bucks was too much for a book in that condition, and three bucks would have bought me two beers in the Silver Dollar Saloon next door, but I had to make a purchase and this book was the only one I wanted. So I paid up, we walked outside, he locked the door and then he went back up the stairs, back to his rabid companion.
Healthful pursuits.
It was one of the strangest transactions in what is now a 40-year hobby of buying used books, but it was also a good reminder of why I collect them. I spoke above about the possibility of finding something rare and valuable in the junk shop, but there’s more to it than that. I just happen to love old books, the way they look and feel and smell. I don’t scorn paperbacks, but generally speaking I want to have in my hands a book that is worthy of its contents. There have been certain great works of literature that I could not bring myself to read for many years, until I managed to find them in suitably attractive editions. They are easy enough to find these days — just a click or two away on eBay or Amazon. Too easy, I think. I still enjoy the hunt, the anticipation, the idea that any odd collection, whether in a junk shop, garage sale or thrift store, might hold a book that has been waiting for years, just for me.
All in his head
Even not buying a book is sometimes an adventure. Not far from the Mai Wah in Uptown Butte was a secondhand store run by a fellow known as Tony the Trader. He had a huge collection of curios, treasures and oddball collectibles, including some good books. But nothing, as I recall, had a price tag on it. If you asked, Tony would rap his finger on his noggin and say, “I got all the prices right here.” So I’d ask him, “How much for this book,” knowing the volume in question was worth maybe five bucks, and Tony would hold it up, squint at it, scratch his head and say, “That one’s $37. It’s a good book.”
And so it went with every book, and I never bought a thing from him. Though I don’t know for sure, I assume he was like that with everything in the store. I would find out in time that it’s not unheard of in the secondhand business for merchants to be unwilling to part with their wares. Some of them are collectors who open stores to convince themselves they are not hoarders, or perhaps to convince their spouses of the same. Whatever the case, Tony’s books were in no danger of leaving the store. I will say this for Tony, though: At least he let me look.
There used to be a bookstore in downtown St. Paul, Minn., in which not even looking was allowed. The store in question was a jumble of dangerous-looking stacks of books, books that looked as though they hadn’t even been sorted, just tossed in at random from the front door. What made this establishment unique, as far as I know, was that the proprietor apparently wasn’t willing to let people in. I suppose there could have been something about me personally, but all I know is that I went there on at least three occasions and never got past the front door. The owner (I guess it was the owner) was a very large man, dressed in denim overalls and a white T-shirt, who sat in a folding chair right in the entryway, so there was no way around him unless he moved. He’d sit there smoking cigarettes and reading the paper, and if you walked up and stood in front of him, he’d wait a few long moments before looking up, and even then he didn’t seem to be acknowledging your presence so much as wondering what was casting a shadow on his newspaper.
The first time I went there, silly me, I thought I’d browse. Nothing doing. He said I couldn’t go in and look around. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said. I made something up, like, “The Grapes of Wrath.” He put his head down, ready to get back to his paper, and said, “I don’t got it.” I tried a few more titles, but his negative response came more quickly each time, in the last instance before he could possibly have known what book I was asking for.
That was a first: a store owner who didn’t want you, or me, at any rate, in his store under any circumstances. Was it a front for some illegal operation? Did the guy really have his merchandise memorized and was just trying to help? Was he stark-raving mad? I settled on stark-raving mad. I confirmed it a couple of other times over the years, getting no further either time, and when I went back for the last time, I think in the late 1980s, the store was gone.
The chances of his having anything worth a damn were slim, but it galled me that I never got a chance to browse. I suppose I could have broken in after hours, but that seemed a little extreme, or tried showing the guy some money or attempted to get a court order on the grounds that the proprietor was discriminating against persons of German-American heritage, but I let it go.
There were things I was not willing to do to satisfy my craving for used books. I would not pay the outlandish prices demanded by an eccentric, nor challenge the dominion of an apparent mad man. But to overcome the terror of a ferocious dog, not once but twice, to take myself up a steep flight of stairs not knowing if I would ever come down?
I could do that, and I might even do it again.
