Dominic Mercier
“We took a look. We saw a nook.”
Thoughts in a bookstore.
1. In 1935, the year that Elvis Presley was born, and his twin was stillborn, the year that Heinrich Himmler founded the Lebensborn project, a man named Sir Allen Lee revolutionized publishing by founding Penguin Books, inexpensive paperbacks that sold for a sixpence. Before Penguins, paperbacks had been the stuff you’d hide from your mother, lurid, slasher pulp. Penguins brought the work of serious writers to a wider audience, the folk who could not afford leather bound volumes might now posess their own copies of Homer. Look at these shelves the orange spines leap out at you.
2. There was once a redheaded guy called Gabriel who worked in a secondhand bookstore. It was a life of dust and gentle whispers. At twenty years old he felt certain it was all he’d ever need. Eventually somebody who loved him abducted him, and dragged him out into daylight. Love was sweet, the daylight stung his eyes.
3. On either side of Queens Road in Brighton, England, halfway between the railway station and the sea, there was a book shop. The same bookshop, but in two places, severed by traffic like a cracked spine. Both sides of the road the books were squished and tumbling like netted sardines, but the manager could magically tell you exactly where to find any volume you wanted. The art was in finding the manager.
4. In 2011 at the Jardin de Metis garden festival in Quebec, the Jardin de la Connasissance was built from huge stacks of unwanted books. Woven through the Canadian forest there were pathways and patios, benches and walls, The garden designers had prepared by spraying them with fungi months in advance so that by summertime the pages were nurturing mushrooms. Alone each book had been trash, passee stories, words no longer wanted, replaced by Kindles; brought together they became a monument.
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