Are you lucky enough not to live under the subway with cat-sized rats; or not have your face turned into a raisin by after school bullies; or not to be gawked at while you get assistance from the bus driver and the lift to get on the bus? No worries! New Yorkers will still lavish you with traumas. Like the rush hour asshole who tried to hold the train doors with his coffee. Like the crazy you shouldn?t be waking up with. Like the grifter who conned you out of twenty bucks, dressed like a cowboy and with a really believable story. Really. Like the bastard who buys your unwanted books for The Strand. No joke: if I ever take the time to map New York?s circles of hell The Strand and the Buyer will be pretty far down. Lower than ticket-happy transit cops and Penny Crone, The Strand?s Buyer is a creature apart.


God help you the day you realize you have too many unwanted books and that the solution means selling books to The Strand. To me, this is dreadful for a number of reasons. First, although it?s the closest place I can sell books, it?s not exactly close to my apartment; that means shouldering a duffel bag of books up the block, onto the train, and down Broadway a few blocks to get there. Then, inside the store it?s always sweltering, which aggravates a genetically-endowed sweating problem I have. But climate aside, the place looks like a circle of Book Hell, where poorly-thought-out books wail, trapped under dust and passed over by customers who might as well be looking for a specific skull in the catacombs. But the worst part comes at the Buyer?s desk. Too many trips there could make even the most peace-loving creature dish out a five-fingered sedative.


The transaction pays-out and tosses you back on the sidewalk inside the time of a flashbulb. Over necklaced spectacles, the Buyer slaps the books into piles and fans through them for damages. A pile of 20-30 books takes under two minutes. Then a receipt needs a signature. The signature is very important. Whichever mousey lackey is at the register hands over cash. Then, scram. In principle this doesn?t sound all that bad. It?s efficient. It?s prompt. But so were the trains under the Third Reich.


And no matter how crappy the deal might have been wherever else you could have sold your books, you leave The Strand with the feeling that you?re a gargantuan dupe for taking the Buyer?s offer. This man speaks with the reluctance of a being made of Cray paper; as if interacting with a customer would blow him apart. The amount he offers for your books is virtually all he says. A kind of disappointed albino, the palate of body-language and expressions accompanying the Buyer?s slight frame suggest the tightly-wound movements of a cartoonist at his scribbling table. And the selling process branches from him onto lackeys who bustle you up to then away from the counter and shove the receipt and a pen at you and hand the cash to the countertop and move to the next customer. The Buyer?s coiled, abruptness infects the players surrounding him the way a ringmaster magnetizes the spirit a circus casts over the crowd.


He passes like a vole through the pages of your books, stacks them into little towers and ticks up their spines, totaling his offer, which drops, cool and unimpeachable, from Sinai.



Exhibit A:

?Twelve.?

?What??

?That?s what these are worth.?

?Twelve dollars??

?Do you want it or not.?

?But that?s all, don?t you think that this one?s??

?Sir. Are you trying to barter with me??

?What??

?Twelve or zero.?



Count him among the inexplicable pockets of ?why?? here and there around the city. Why are there five Citibanks all right near each other and then none for another twenty blocks? Does the newsstand guy at Fourth and McDougal really know me or does he seem to really know everyone? Is Janeane Garofalo ever not walking her dog? Why did he buy Robert?s Rules of Order today and reject it last week? Did he read the title wrongly? Was there a run on the inventory? Or a change in policy? A robbery?


The process is baffling. The Buyer?s brusque. And by the end you?re thrilled to be out of there with whatever they paid for the books. And for me this raises the question, what?s gone wrong with that place?


See, whether they?re librarians, professors, writers, collectors, antiquarians, or just readers, I like book people. I like that they?re unconventional in an odd way; that they are subtle; that they are anonymous until you stumble on one. And then they turn out to be polite, calm, inquisitive people and have an enthusiasm that tends to be contagious. And (even the oddballs) have interesting enough things to say so they can keep you in stores, at reference desks, or in English department offices all wrapped up in a conversation that?s a treat because it feels like it found you. This is one reason that the Buyer?s such a bastard. His line of customers is nearly out the door but he?s gruff, antagonistic and grossly disinterested in what he?s buying. And it?s not to say that I expect him to pump my hand: thanks for the volumes of Derrida! Oboy were we ever looking for these. Not at all. But every time I?d leave the Buyer?s desk, screwing my face into a walnut, got me thinking about the relative value of the junk I was selling to him.


Walter Benjamin has a niceish essay about unpacking books in which he?s all jazzed because ?Once you have approached the mountain of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day . . . what memories crowd in upon you!? I think this is true, but in two different ways. There?s what Shaq, Karl Malone and Jason Kidd tell us during the NBA?s commercial breaks about the magic of reading and how a great book can shake your brain loose inside your skull. These books The Strand will have over my dead body.


But then there are the booby-trap books that don?t matter because of what?s inside them, but because of what they bring to mind. One of these books leaps from the pile flaring a story, a moment, an attitude from between covers forgotten inside some box or attic or mask of dust. Or like a song that triggers a summer years ago every time it plays, these books mean more because of their context than their content.



Exhibit B:

The History and Social Influence of the Potato: an insomnia corrective assigned for Prof. Scally?s Modern Irish History, Spring semester 1997. The Tunnel: unreadable during a hospital visit over the weekend news of JFK Jr.?s death broke. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: company on a train ride to Connecticut and a bungled seduction. Poppy?s Children: a spanking aid my mother used to teach me not to draw in books.


The Buyer rejected all these books, the last, corporally traumatic, one he slid back to me with Contemporary Linguistics, and Ferrets for Dummies. He said, ?these are worthless.?


The Oxford English Dictionary said, ?worthless: 1) Of things: destitute of (material) worth; having no intrinsic value. 2) Of persons: lacking worth or merit; destitute of moral character; contemptible, despicable.?


Of things. Of persons. Books too sour for The Strand?s cobwebbed belly bring up a strange intersection that?s there between unwanted books as things and unwanted books as they?re connected to people. As things they no longer have value so they should go, but as artifacts they?re scratched up with marks from Back Then. And even if I?d rather not have remembered fucking up Prof. Scally?s class; how I learned not to write in books; the trip to Connecticut; and my hospital stay, the books associated with those moments assume the kind of worth that Oxford?s talking about in the second definition of ?worthless.? In other words, regardless of material worth, their value stems from whatever memories they recall.


So when the Buyer calls your memories of spankings and Connecticut worthless and you damn him to hell and have visions of wild skeletons overwhelming The Strand, it?s (hopefully) not because you?re nuts. Rather, books (like records, films, and other works of creativity) are the kinds of objects where these two kinds of ?worth? can intersect. They may be worthless, because whatever was interesting or useful about them has drained away. But they sponge up parts of your life that spilled over the rim of memory and hold them until stick your head into the box holding them and (hello) there?s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold that sat unopened on your lap the whole train ride back from Connecticut (where Chloe had put her hand on your cheek and said ?no?) while you stared at the scaffoldings and sheds and telephone wires passing through the phantom of your reflection in the window.