On Books-The Used Book Store

I visited a brand-new local bookstore today.  It is named Rabbit Hole Books (https://www.facebook.com/rabbitholedayton/), a play on the Rabbit character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. There is a big picture of the Rabbit checking his pocket watch in the front window. A humorous and evocative image to welcome book dorks like me.

It is affiliated with the Dayton Book Fair (https://daytonbookfair.com/). The Dayton Book Fair is a large yearly book fair, one that I am sure exists in all cities of a certain size, having enough residents who read to warrant a yearly exchange of books. They depend on local donations for the books, and price the books cheaply.  The organization makes enough money to sustain their operations, the book hoarding bibliophile gets a chance to create space in the deep dark corners of their basement for more books, and other bibliophiles buy those books to occupy a brand new deep dark corner in their homes. It is a win-win-win.

The idea of the Rabbit Hole Books is a really good one. The Dayton Book Fair organization has enough books in their warehouses that they can curate the collection and sell those books year-round in a brick-and-mortar location. They had enough books to fill it up while still able to run the yearly book fair. The bookstore is an extension of the mission, and it lowers the warehousing cost, keeps more books in circulation, and gives readers a chance at many different titles, again: win-win-win.

The space occupied by the bookstore is very inviting, made so by, I imagine, the countless hours spent by the volunteers who put the location together. It is a street-facing storefront although I had to look a bit.  It is next to a parking garage if you are looking. They are planning on having a rolled ice cream shop that is collocated within the store.

The organization of the store is not unlike all the other bookstores: sections devoted to politics, general history, biography,  kids’ books, literature, fiction, foreign language books, humor, etc. The math and science section is obviously limited because their selection is dependent on the tastes of the people who donate and what they donate.

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between someone who is organizing the store and one of the new volunteers and found out that they will group nonfiction work of fiction writers together their fiction work, figuring that if people were interested in the author’s fiction books, they might also be interested in the author’s nonfiction works as well, which made good sense. There is a small section devoted solely to books on the craft of writing. A nice touch.

I had written two other articles on bookstores. One on the bookstore for everybody (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/09/on-books-confessions-of-bookstore-snob.html). A follow-up article on my favorite independent bookstores. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-books-confessions-of-bookstore-snob.html). This is the third kind of bookstore; this is the kind of bookstore that is extremely enticing and dangerous for my wallet.  I tell people that I am polymathic and curious reader, someone who is eager to read about many topics. In truth, I am just easily bored and too curious for my own good. The price is usually right in used bookstores. This place was no exception: every book is a dollar. Oh dear God! Win-win-win!

I only bought three books this time. They were somewhat eclectic in the subject matter. One is Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe a hardback by Sherman K. Stein. I had never heard of it. He was a mathematics professor at UC-Davis. It was published in 1976. The second book is paperback published in 2006, a Doris Kearns Goodwin tome about Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet titled Team of Rivals. The third book is a hardback by Milan Kundera titled Slowness. I was tempted by a couple of biographies of Gladstone, since I was just reading about the Gladstone Library in the UK and I realized that I didn't know that much about Prime Minister Gladstone, but they were quite hefty and I had already decided to buy Goodwin’s book, so I decided I didn't need another doorstop type of book. There was also a biography of Edmund Burke, the Conservative philosopher, yet another hefty tome. I thought I needed to learn about Burke since he is considered the father of the modern conservative ideology, a bit of opposition research as it were; but once again, I thought it was too hefty. I was also once again tempted by the fictional works of Iris Murdoch sitting on the shelf, even though I only know of her philosophical books. They even had her husband John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, but I was successful in resisting.

What makes this kind of bookstore so dangerous for me? First, the price is right. A buck a book. I believe any reader worth his salt would kind of figure: what's a buck, right? The other part of the seductive nature of the used bookstore is its serendipity: every time we go into this or any used bookstore is like entering a new bookstore, full of new surprises because the stocks turnover with regularity but with the exciting uncertainty of the books that one would find every single time. Finally, I enter the store with no expectations since I am not looking for anything in particular, I am playing with house money, no pressure, no wanton desires for a specific tome that I just have to own. I could walk out empty-handed, a very rare occurrence, although it has happened; or I can walk out with a very heavy box, or two,  which has happened much too often. Win-win-win.

My book buying habit has evolved into a specific algorithm: if I'm looking for a specific book on a specific topic, I would go to the many online used bookstores to look for them. I would inevitably find them. If I could not find a used copy, and I truly needed to get my hot hands on a copy, I would buy a newly published book from one of the many independent bookstores that are out there: Powell’s. Tattered Cover, or Carmichael Books.

But if I wanted to dawdle, to evaluate, to learn about the unknown, or to read bits of the book that I had picked out from the many unknown and unfamiliar books that sat in front of me. To borrow this used bookstore’s motif, I would jump down the rabbit hole, try all the potions, meet all the Cheshire Cats, Red Queens, White Queens, Carpenters, Walruses, and oysters, and have my own grand adventures while never leaving the store. I usually spend 45 minutes to an hour, maybe more on these journeys of exploration. The pressure of trying to find something specific is gone. It is now time to enjoy the uncertainty of the book shopping experience and the serendipity of the eclectic collection.  These are places where I find myself on my hands and knees looking at the bottoms of piles, hoping to find treasures that are hidden as I am also trying to hang onto my glasses with my mouth because I have old eyes. It is an adventure, an adventure that is gifted to me by me. It is also an investment of time, one that I love investing in, but rarely commit to because, you know, life.

I didn’t get to indulge myself  too much this time, but I will next time

Three books $3.00, tag on $0.23 in taxes, about $1.20 on parking; an investment of $4.50 for an hour and a half worth of my sojourn down the Rabbit Hole. It was well worth the investment. Which is what I think every time I go to a used bookstore.