The subtitle of Readings , my favourite Michael Dirda book, is ‘Literary Entertainments’. A nice subtitle for his new collection, Browsings , could well be ‘Bibliophilic Entertainments.’ In other words, ‘a year of reading, collecting and living with books’. Browsings (to come out in August 2015 from Pegasus Books) gathers his columns from The American Scholar — meandering, personal pieces about bookish subjects, from shout-outs to out-of-print popular fiction to describing a day in the life of a bibliophile (scoring at book sales, re-reading, then on to more book hunting) to bookish pets. Like many columns published in book form, some are hits and some are misses. For every few pieces that don’t absorb you, there are several that do. The pieces are light, very short, and conversational.
“Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read?” Dirda begins, echoing the sentiments of many a veteran bibliophile. “A season’s blockbuster will come out — whether Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Stephen King’s 11/22/63 — and the world will rush off to the bookstores. More often than not, I dawdle instead, take my own sweet time… Maybe I’ll acquire the new book, maybe I won’t.” Maybe mostly yes, because poor Dirda may have to review some of them for The Washington Post , though what he really wants is what many of us hanker after: to be left alone to read old books; books that are not fashionable or hot but are fun and irresistible and personally fulfilling.
The pieces I picked out instantly to read are the ones that chimed with me: book talk about second-hand bookshops, physical books, blow-out book sales, in praise of small presses, Anglophilia, making personal book lists and the occasional bookish rant. “Books don’t only furnish a room, they also make the best holiday gifts. Note that I said ‘books’. Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts, but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books. Come Christmas morning, what do you tell your significant other? ‘Darling, I can’t thank you enough for this download of The Hobbit for my e-Reader.’ I don’t think so.”
One of his recurring witticisms after a particularly good bookshop-browse is asking the reader, “What did I buy? I thought you’d never ask. In no particular order, I bought…” How many of us have wished we could likewise pour our bookish joys into some sympathetic, captive ear and parade our book finds. One of the most engaging and relevant pieces here is about how book collecting and book selling changed after the Internet. “In those pre-Internet days,” he notes, “each week the postman would deliver one or two book catalogues. Mail-order houses, specialty dealers, remainder outlets, the Strand in New York — once you were on the mailing lists, many happy evenings could be spent sipping a glass of wine and checking off the titles of the books you’d like to buy, if only you had a bit more money.”
“Since the rise of the Internet…you can easily acquire almost anything — if you have the funds — with just a keystroke. But where’s the fun of that? Where’s the serendipity? The thrill of the hunt? As Terry Belanger, the retired head of Rare Book School, ruefully remarked: ‘that’s not collecting, that’s shopping.’ Well, yes and no.”
I think that’s the key phrase in this Dirda piece — ‘yes and no’: not to forget that there’s profit, pleasure, the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of buying and selling in both kinds of bookshops.
Lastly, here is our bookish journalist, on what transpires in a bibliophile’s mind (and pocket) when, in retrospect, one takes stock of the loot after the excitement of a blow out book sale is over. “And come the evening I’ll wonder what ever possessed me to shell out good money for half the books in my trove — though a month later I’ll congratulate myself on having been so wise as to secure all these really quite remarkable treasures. Memory of their cost will have long vanished. As book collectors know all too well, we only regret our economies, never our extravagances.”
