by Jerry
They’ve all got two or three restaurants and a deli, a hole-in-the-wall shop selling electronics, and another one selling Yankees baseball caps and Statue of Liberty pencil sharpeners and Radio City Music Hall magnets. There’s a Duane Reade and a newsstand and a branch bank or a fancy-dancy pet store or a shoe repair. And there are always hoardings, those board fences they put up around construction sites, so that you have to walk half the block between plywood plastered with ads for Metallica or Hamilton or the Sels-Floto Circus. And maybe if you’re a local you can tell the difference between Petronelli’s and Antonelli’s and Antonio’s Pizzeria, but to an out-of-towner like me, they all look as much alike as the Starbucks on every corner.
Which means even if you do happen on that great little antique store or bakery, you have no idea where it was and no way to find it again, unless it happened to be next door to Radio City Music Hall. Which it wasn’t. Or unless you noted the cross streets. Which I didn’t.
I was in New York doing publicity for my blog, Gone for Good, and meeting with editors about publishing it as a book when I found the bookstore.
I’d just finished doing an interview on Backtalk on WMNH, and Brooke had called to tell me the editor at Random House I was supposed to meet with canceled our one-thirty appointment.
“Probably because he heard that train wreck of an interview and doesn’t want Random House’s name connected with a book-hater,” I said, going outside. “Why the hell didn’t you warn me I was walking into a set-up, Brooke? You’re my agent. You’re supposed to protect me from stuff like that.”
“I didn’t know it was a set-up, I swear, Jim,” she said. “When he booked you, he told me he loved your blog, and that he felt exactly like you do, that being nostalgic for things that have disappeared is ridiculous, and that we’re better off without things like payphones and VHS tapes.”
“But not books, apparently,” I said. The host hadn’t even let me get the name of my website out before he’d started in on how terrible e-books and Amazon were and how they were destroying the independent bookstore.
“Do you know how many bookstores have gone under the last five years in Manhattan?” he’d demanded.
Yeah, and most of them deserved to, I thought.
I hadn’t said that. I’d said, “Things closing and dying out and disappearing are part of the natural order. There’s no need to mourn them.”
“No need to mourn them? So it’s fine with you if a legendary bookstore like the Strand, or Elliott’s, shuts its doors? I suppose it’s fine with you if books die out, too.”
“They’re not dying out,” I said, “but if they were, yes, because it would mean that society didn’t need them any more, just like it stopped needing buggy whips and elevator operators, so it shed them, just like a snake sheds its skin.”
He snorted in derision. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Necessary things disappear every day. And what about all the things we don’t realize are necessary till they’re already gone?”
“Then society brings them back. Like LPs. And fountain pens.”
“And what if we can’t bring the thing back? What if it’s too late, and it’s already gone?” Like the chance to have a decent interview, you mean? I thought. “That isn’t how it works,” I said, trying to keep my temper. “Bookstores aren’t disappearing, they’re just changing form. And so are books,” and I tried to explain about e-books and print-on-demand and libraries going digital.
“Digital!” he said. “How do you know all these digitized books won’t be accidentally deleted. Or disappear into the ether, never to be seen again?”
“That’s what the Cloud’s for,” I said. “It can store every book ever—”
He snorted again. “You’ve obviously never heard of Wheeler Field.”
Wheeler Field? What the hell was Wheeler Field?
“Wheeler Field was an Army airfield in Hawaii during World War II,” he said. “They got worried about sabotage, so they parked all the planes in the middle of the field. And when Pearl Harbor came along, one Japanese bomb took out the whole thing, bam! just like that. And according to your reasoning, that was proof we didn’t need those airplanes.”
“That isn’t what—”
“And I suppose you don’t think we need forests either. Or polar bears. I suppose you think closing one of the best bookstores in New York City is just fine?”
“Yes,” I said. “If it has outlived its usefulness.” And things really went downhill from there. By the time the hour was up, he’d accused me of everything from promoting illiteracy to setting fire to the Library at Alexandria.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Brooke said. “I thought you made some good points about how there are some books we’d be better off without, like Fifty Shades of Gray and Meditate Your Way to a Wealthier You. I loved that!”
“If I was so great, then why did Random House cancel the appointment?” I asked. “Because he’s leaving for a big meeting in London. There’s supposed to be a huge storm coming in tonight, and he moved his flight up a day to beat it.”
Which was probably just an excuse. The sky, or at any rate the slice of it I could see between buildings, was devoid of clouds.
“He’ll be back Friday,” Brooke said, “and he wants to see you then.”
“Okay,” I said grudgingly. “But don’t send him the podcast of that interview.”
“I won’t. Oh, by the way, Harper Collins said they’d like to meet you for drinks before your dinner meeting with Tor. Will that work? Five-thirty at Fiada’s?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Great. And till then, kick back. Or go see the city—the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or something.”
That wasn’t a bad idea. Not the Empire State Building part—I had no desire to spend the afternoon standing in line with a bunch of idiot tourists—but I hadn’t seen anything of Manhattan except what was visible through the window of a taxi.
Now, with my Random House appointment canceled, I’d have time to walk back uptown to my hotel and see some of the city along the way. It wasn’t particularly cold for November, and, according to the map on my phone, it wasn’t that far.
Wrong. The blocks between the avenues are three times as long as the ones between streets, and it was getting steadily colder. The sky had turned a leaden gray, and the wind whipping through the skyscraper canyons was really nasty. I decided to get a taxi and go back to my hotel after all, but they’d all unaccountably disappeared, and before I’d gone another block, it began to rain. And not an ignorable sprinkle—the cold, coat-soaking kind.
I spotted a guy one corner down selling umbrellas and ran over to buy one, but he was out by the time I got there. I had to walk forever before I found a newsstand that had some, and then wrestled for several blocks to get the damned thing up and then to keep the wind from turning it inside out, the net result being that I have no idea what street I was on. It might have been Thirty-sixth or Fifty-second, somewhere between Broadway and Madison Avenue. Or not.
At any rate, I was messing with the damned umbrella when the rain turned into a downpour, and I ducked into a recessed doorway and saw it was the entrance to a bookstore.
The old-fashioned kind of bookstore, about a foot and a half wide, with dusty copies of some leather-bound tome in the front window, and “Ozymandias Books” lettered in gilded copperplate on the glass.
These tiny hole-in-the-wall bookstores are a nearly extinct breed these days, what with the depredations of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Kindle, and this one looked like the guy on WMNH would be ranting about its closing on his next program. The dust on the display of books in the window was at least half an inch thick, and from the tarnished-looking brass doorknob and the pile of last fall’s leaves against the door, it didn’t look like anybody’d been in the place for months. But any port in a storm. And this might be my last chance to visit a bookstore like this.
The inside was exactly what you’d expect: an old-fashione
d wooden desk and behind it, ceiling-high shelves crammed with books stretching back into the dimness. The store was only wide enough for a bookcase along each wall, one in the middle, and a space between just wide enough for a single customer to stand. If there’d been any customers. Which there weren’t. The only thing in the place besides the guy sitting hunched over the desk—presumably the owner—was a gray tiger cat curled up in one corner of it.
The rest of the desk was piled high with books, and the stooped guy seated at it had gray hair and spectacles and wore a ratty cardigan sweater and a 1940’s tie. All he needed was one of those green eyeshades to be something straight out of 84 Charing Cross Road.
He was busily writing in a ledger when I came in, and I wondered if he’d even look up, but he did, adjusting his spectacles on his nose. “May I help you, sir?” he said.
“You deal in rare books?” I asked.
“Rarer than rare.”
Which meant wildly expensive, but a glance outside showed me the rain was coming down in sheets, and it was still two and a half hours to my dinner appointment. And it wasn’t as if I had to actually buy anything. If he’d let me browse, which if the books were that expensive, he probably wouldn’t.
“Were you looking for anything in particular, sir?” he asked.
“No” was obviously the wrong answer, but if I named some title, it would be just my luck that they’d have it, and I’d be stuck paying two hundred bucks for some tattered, mildewed copy. “I just thought I’d look around,” I said.
“Be my guest.” He waved a hand at the shelves. “We’ve got an enormous selection, I’m afraid.”
Yeah, I thought, looking at the titles on the nearest shelf. And if it wasn’t all stuff like Surviving the Y2K Apocalypse and Gibbon’s History of the Liberty of the Swiss and The Vagabond Boys Go to Bryce Canyon, you might actually be able to move some of this merchandise. “Thank you,” I said, and he nodded and went back to writing in the ledger.
I started back along the narrow aisle, looking at the books. Rare? Obscure was more like it. I didn’t recognize a single title in the whole first section and only a couple of authors. Most of the names—Richard Washburn Child, Ethel M. Dell, George Ade—I’d never heard of. The books didn’t seem to be arranged in any particular order. A dark-red Moroccan-leather-bound copy of Nothing Lasts Forever: A Tale of Pompeii stood next to a torn paperback of The Watts Riots: What’s Next?, a 1950s anthropology textbook, a dozen Harlequin romances, and a fancy illustrated copy of Fairy Tales for Wee Tots.
Obviously not grouped by topic or by author. By title? No, Promise Me Yesterday was cheek by jowl with A Traveller’s Guide to Salisbury Cathedral, Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross, and a 1928 Brooklyn phone book.
By price? I pulled out the Melville, but there was no slip in it and no price penciled lightly at the top of the first page, and nothing inside either Promise Me Yesterday or the Salisbury cathedral guide. Which must mean really expensive, though I refused to believe it or the phone book was worth more than a couple of dollars, to say nothing of Finlay’s Common Diseases of Holstein Cattle. And The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood.
Maybe the owner was an eccentric who was actually only interested in collecting books, not selling them, but the shelves were too neatly arranged, and as I worked my way toward the back, the books became less dust-covered and somehow newer looking, though the titles didn’t bear that out. Here was Ocean to Cynthia by Sir Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson’s Richard Crookback.
There still didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the books’ arrangement. There was a Nine Steps to No-Effort Weight Loss on the same shelf as the Raleigh, and The Corpse in the Larder stood next to Grace Holmes’ Junior Year at Rosetree College. And a Tiger Beat picture bio of Leonardo DiCaprio, circa the movie Titanic and cashing in on his then heartthrob status.
That could not possibly be considered a rare book by any definition, and I was about to take it up to the front and ask the guy at the desk how much they wanted for it when a beautiful blonde in a black pencil skirt and high heels brushed past me, heading for the front. I was suddenly really glad I’d taken refuge at Ozymandias’s.
“Has Jude come in yet?” the blonde asked the guy at the desk, which meant she must work here, though she didn’t look the part. She looked like she should work at Bloomingdale’s. Or Vogue. And Ozymandias’s didn’t look like it could afford any staff at all, let alone three people.
“Have you heard from her, Arthur?” she asked. “We’re swamped back there.”
Back where? I couldn’t see anybody else at the back of the store. And come to think of it, where had she come from? There was no door to a back room that I could see, just more shelves lining the rear wall, and if she’d been in the aisle, I’d definitely have noticed her.
“Jude said she’s going to be late,” Arthur was saying. “There are delays on the subway.”
The blonde made a sound of disgust. “Of all days,” she said. “Bryn Mawr had their annual book sale yesterday, and Lucille DePalma died.”
What that had to be do with being swamped with nonexistent book-buying customers I didn’t know, but their being engaged in conversation gave me a chance to go look at the back of the store.
I’d been right—there wasn’t a door. The shelves went all the way to the back wall and then turned the corner. The middle aisle of shelves ended a couple feet short of the wall, and I crossed over to the other side, but there was no door there either, just a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor and a sign with an arrow pointing up that read, “More books.”
The blonde was coming back. I hurried back to where I’d been, grabbed a book off the shelves, and pretended to be looking at it. She passed me without a glance, walked over to the far side, and shot up the stairs, heels clattering on the metal steps. After a minute, I heard a door slam, and, curious, I went up the spiral staircase. The second floor looked exactly like the first except that the back wall was only half-covered with bookshelves. The other half was a door marked “Storeroom. Employees Only.”
Which explained the “back there” comment. Except an upper floor was a peculiar place to store books, which are notoriously heavy. And what exactly would they be swamped with? Not preparing books for sale, since they didn’t even bother to put a price in them, and I refused to believe they were swamped with orders. There hadn’t been a computer—or even a phone—on the desk up front.
But she had made Jude’s arrival sound desperately needed, and Arthur hadn’t pooh-poohed her. What if Ozymandias’s was a front for something else—a smuggling operation or a drug ring or black ops? That would explain how it could survive in the middle of Manhattan on the sale of fusty old copies of antiquated boys’ books and Rex Stout mysteries. But if that were the case, Arthur would have discouraged me from looking around, wouldn’t he? And the blonde wouldn’t have advertised where she was going by slamming the door.
As I stood there trying to figure it out, I heard another door slam. It was somewhere behind this one and below it, and I wondered if instead of a storeroom behind the door, there was instead a stairway and the storeroom was down on the first floor after all, or in a basement. But why would the door to it be up on the second floor?
Maybe there was a door downstairs, but it’s blocked by bookshelves, I thought. That was certainly more likely than some clandestine operation. And maybe the blonde always sounded urgent, and the work that was swamping her “back there” was a copy of The Vagabond Boys Go to Carlsbad Caverns that needed to be boxed up and taken to the post office.
But she’d said “we’re” swamped, not “I,” and she didn’t look like the histrionic type. Her walk, her manner, her no-nonsense tone of voice had all denoted efficiency and organization. Boxing up the entire bookstore wouldn’t have fazed her.
No, something else had to be going on, and after another minute, my curiosity got the best of me and I put my ear to the door for a moment, listening, and then tried the doorknob.
&nbs
p; I’d expected the door to be locked, but it turned easily. If it is a storeroom, and she’s inside, I can always say I thought this was the bathroom, I thought. But the shutting door I’d heard made me fairly sure she wouldn’t be there.
She wasn’t, and I was right, it wasn’t a storeroom. The door opened onto a stairway leading down, and just the kind you’d expect behind a bookstore like this: a narrow, rickety, poorly lit, Dickensian staircase with open wooden risers so you could see between them all the way down to the bottom. Where there was another door, just like I’d thought.
But I’d been wrong—the door didn’t lead back into the bookstore. It was on the other side of the staircase, leading into whatever building lay behind the bookstore, and it wasn’t on the first floor. The stairs zigzagged down at least two full floors between landings to reach it. And the blonde wasn’t the one who I’d heard slamming the door, because she was still in the stairwell, standing in front of the door talking to a chubby guy in a T-shirt and jeans. “When’s Jude getting here?” he was asking.
“Soon, I hope,” the blonde said, glancing up at the door behind me.
I ducked out of sight, thanking God I’d thought to shut the door and that the staircase was so dark, and crouched there, listening.
“She should be here in the next fifteen minutes or so,” the blonde told the chubby guy. “Why? Did something happen?”
He nodded. “Tornado,” he said grimly. “In Alabama. Town museum and the library.”
“Oh, God,” the blonde said, exasperated. “Just what we need. Was it a Carnegie?”
“Of course.”
She sighed. “Can Greg stay late?”
“I’ll ask,” he said and disappeared through the door.
The blonde pulled out a cell phone and punched in a number. “Fran,” she said into it, “Is there any chance you can come in? We’re completely overwhelmed. Adelaide Westport died last week, and her niece flew in yesterday to clean out her house.” A pause. “From Cupertino.” Another pause. “It’s in northern California.”