Posted 6:51 PM by Blah blah

Used Bookstore

Yesterday I went rollerblading, as usual on Sunday morning, then I took off for Santa Cruz, near the beach. It's been ages since I hung out in Santa Cruz, with their surfing contests, skateboarders with noserings, street violinists, and cafes. Boy did I feel at home! Sigh...

I really miss used bookstores. Here in San Jose you almost never see them, surrounded by Barnes & Nobles and the latest commercial releases. But only in used bookstores can you find really obscure stuff like Chinese Military History or Deconstructionism or Science Fiction Comic Book Covers, that no one might read in ten years. And that's exciting. My parents' house is crammed with them, bookshelves piled on bookshelves of junk my mom got for 50 cents a book. Not because she ever reads them, but because she wants to surround herself with books and absorb all that knowledge into her skin pores, like Vitamin D or some Chinese herbal medicine. Sometimes she'll buy a book, and I'll say "Mom, we have two other copies of the same book already!" She doesn't care.

I have somewhat of an addiction to used books. It started with my mom. Every time she came home with a bag, I had to feel, smell, and flip through all of them, read their back covers, look at the unattractive morgue shots of their authors and try to imagine myself sitting at a party with each. The older and more yellowed the pages, the more like an archaeologist I felt. I read the little notes or receipts owners had left in their forgotten books fifty years back, trying to open a channel to all these long-dead people who had been so so alive.

Yesterday, I found so many treasures in that shop, Logos Books and Records, 1117 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. I found a Frank Miller book. He's one of the top comic book writers and artists in America. It was a Daredevil book (the Ben Affleck movie comes out this Friday), about Elektra, who is both Daredevil's great lover and great enemy. Inside the cover, someone had written in red ink:

Dear _________,
To the biggest Elektra fan,
Happy Birthday!
Thank you for being
My lover, my inspiration, and my best friend,
Love,
Matthew (Dated 1992)

I felt like a voyeur. I wondered how long their relationship had lasted before someone bundled up this love token and tossed it into the sea of anonymity.

Here are the books I bought:

1. The Art of War for Executives, by Donald G. Krause. Applies Sun Tzu's famous, ancient Chinese military treatise, The Art of War, to the business world.
2. Business: The Ultimate Resource (reference book). This 2,200 page book is as thick and authoritative looking as a medical book. All about business concepts and trends, with many essays, practical checklists like "How to Do a Disciplinary Interview" or "How to Calculate a Balance Sheet," summaries of the top business writers' philosophies, an entire business dictionary, bios of the top businessmen in the world, and an economic profile of every country in the world.
3. Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women, by Lydia Flem. Fascinating distillation of Casanova's autobiography, History of My Life. Casanova, if you've been hiding under a rock, is the most notorious lover and seducer in history. Flem adds her own summaries and comments on his life to quotes from his own writing.
4. The Best of The Journal of Irreproducible Results, edited by George H. Scherr. The Journal of Irreproducible Results is an actual scientific journal. The only problem is ALL of its articles, while written by scientists, are FAKE. It's all done in a dense jargon-filled scientific style, but it's a complete joke!
5. Houdini on Magic, by Harry Houdini. Articles and essays on the secrets of his magic and adventures, by history's most famous magician. I was DELIGHTED to find this! Dover Press prints all sorts of fantastic books you never find elsewhere, by scientists on How to Make Bubbles, and stuff like this. Houdini, of course, is most famous at ESCAPING from things: jails, handcuffs, underwater torture chambers, etc. He reveals some of the tricks he felt were more "elementary." Of course, certain secrets he never revealed.
6. Making Videos for Money, by Barry Hampe. "Planning and producing information videos, commercials, and infomercials." Since I'm very interested in the TV biz, I snapped this up. It's for TV producers or people who want a producers' big picture view. The author has owned several production companies.
7. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis. I gasped when I saw this. I fell in love with Kazantzakis's writing when I was in college but have never seen his books since. He is one of the best writers of the 20th century, from Greece. In this 1958 masterpiece, he actually wrote a COMPLETE sequel to Homer's Odyssey, completely in poetry! Twenty-four books (chapters) of it. He followed Homer's original format and his language is equally rich and filled with vitality. I read Homer's Odyssey in high school and loved it---the sheer adventure, the lyrical poetry, the moral dilemmas and character of Odysseus. It was a thrilling beautiful yarn, period. For Kazantzakis to be a modern-day Homer is like someone trying to write a follow-up to Mozart. If you've never heard of him, run and check out his works, which are translated from Greek. Some of his books were made into excellent movies, like Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which I saw.

Total price: $52.44. A damned good bargain.