A Passion for Books

by Harold Rabinowitz

  My list is designed to suggest the collection of other books by the same author, or similar books by various authors. Zuleika Dobson never had the success of David Harum, but it will be read when David Harum is forgotten, on account of its enduring fantastic charm; and if Beerbohm’s novel leads the reader to collect Max, it will have earned its place in this list. It will be observed that only one book by each author is indicated: a better and less interesting list could be made if some authors were permitted two or more books. There are one hundred great novels in the English language, but there are not a hundred great novelists—not by any means.

  If I were asked how these novels can be obtained, and how one is to tell a first from a second or twenty-second edition, I should reply: Consult the booksellers’ catalogues. It won’t be long before the arrival of a catalogue will mean a pleasant thrill, especially if the catalogue has been compiled with care. The secondhand booksellers of London and the English provinces will be found the cheapest, but one may read many catalogues before coming across a book which he will care much to own, and by the time the order is received on the other side the item will almost certainly have been sold. On the other hand, not only are most of the catalogues published in this country well printed, but they are mines of bibliographical information: they may, indeed, be regarded as textbooks of literature, and as such they may be profitably studied. Even with good catalogues, you will make mistakes at first: we all do, but keep right on, studying as you go.

  I put Dickens at the top of my list of novelists, but for steady reading Trollope gives me more pleasure. With no single masterpiece to his credit, he has written a greater number of thoroughly readable novels than any other English author.

  I do not undervalue humor; it is only too rare. It is easy to be tragic; tragedy lives just around the corner from most of us. I am, with Sterne, “firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles—but much more so when he laughs—it adds something to this fragment of life.”

  It is very sad to think that, out of our population of over one hundred and ten million people, it has been estimated that only about two hundred thousand are consistent book-buyers. Too few people understand the joy of buying books, and too few people know how to sell them. People are taught to sell bonds and automobiles and washing machines, but books are supposed to sell themselves. Bessie Graham should be teaching the art of bookselling, not to fifty people, but to five thousand. A correspondence course could be instituted: let the publishers club together and establish a School of Bookselling.

  Too many people believe that it is an extravagance to buy books. “He has a book; in fact, several”: well, the more he has the more he wants, usually. Too much that has been written about books is very “high hat” indeed. “A book is a window through which the world looks out”: such a statement only bewilders the average man. Lord Gregory of Fallodon voices my opinion very simply. “Books are the greatest and most satisfactory of recreations. I mean the use of books for pleasure: without having acquired the habit of reading for pleasure, none of us can be independent.”

  As life tends to become more and more distracting, let us firmly hold on to books. We move to the country to escape interruptions of the city, and the damned telephone keeps ringing all the time, and now the radio has added to its distractions. For myself, I have no desire to hear a political speech, a concert, a sermon, some cheap jokes, and a lot of “static,” all in one evening—or, indeed, any of them in any evening. I prefer to live behind the times with a good book— not too far from a wood fire in winter, in the shade of a tree in summer; but it is difficult to read out-of-doors: Nature, in her quiet way, has a way of interrupting us.

  To come back to my list of novels. I have changed it again and again; it is not right now and never will be. There are fashions in novels as there are in plays; a twenty-year-old play is rather silly: “it dates,” we say, meaning thereby that its machinery creaks. At a recent revival of The Two Orphans, girls whose knees were “overexposed” as the photographers say; with bobbed hair, and whose skirts were a mere flounce, laughed at scenes which had caused their mothers to weep copiously—mothers whose crowning glory was their hair and who wore bustles to make their skirts “hang”—who upon leaving the theatre covered their red and swollen eyes with a veil, that no one should suspect how thoroughly they had been enjoying themselves.

  Old Father Time, with his scythe and his whiskers, has seen so many things come and go that he is reluctant to express an opinion as to what is permanent. The novel of today is gone tomorrow: at the moment it is the fashion to praise The Bridge of San Luis Rey; where will it be in six months? I should have found a place in my list for a novel by Ouida; for All Sorts and Conditions of Men, by Besant; for The Manxman, by Hall Caine; for John Inglesant, by Short-house . . . There are certainly forty novels just as good as those to which the reader will append a question mark or an exclamation point.

  One final word to collectors: Avoid artificial rarities, most private press books, masterpieces of printing, reprints of famous books in expensive and limited editions. Stick to first editions; don’t be afraid to pay a good price, a high price, for a fine copy of any important book, but be sure that it is important. The better the book, the higher the price, the better the bargain. And a good rule for a beginner is to read every book he buys: this will slow down his purchases somewhat but will make him a better collector in the end.

  Books are intended to be read; the collecting

  of them is only an incident in their

  lives as it is in ours,

  saying which,

  in the words of William Blake,

  “The Scribe of Pennsylvania casts his pen

  upon the earth.”

  Top 100 English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century

  BY THE EDITORS OF THE MODERN LIBRARY

  Ulysses, James Joyce

  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

  Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

  Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

  The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

  Catch-22, Joseph Heller

  Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

  Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

  The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

  Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

  The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler

  1984, George Orwell

  I, Claudius, Robert Graves

  To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

  An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

  Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

  Native Son, Richard Wright

  Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

  Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara

  U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos

  Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

  A Passage to India, E. M. Forster

  The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

  The Ambassadors, Henry James

  Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell

  The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford

  Animal Farm, George Orwell

  The Golden Bowl, Henry James

  Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

  A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

  As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

  All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

  Howards End, E. M. Forster

  Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

  The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

  Lord of the Flies, William Golding

  Deliverance, James Dickey

  A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell

  Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley

  The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

  The Secr
et Agent, Joseph Conrad

  Nostromo, Joseph Conrad

  The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence

  Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

  Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

  The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

  Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

  Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

  Light in August, William Faulkner

  On the Road, Jack Kerouac

  The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

  Parade’s End, Ford Maddox Ford

  The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

  Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm

  The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

  Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather

  From Here to Eternity, James Jones

  The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever

  The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

  A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

  Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

  Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

  Main Street, Sinclair Lewis

  The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

  The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

  A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes

  A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul

  The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

  A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

  Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

  Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

  Kim, Rudyard Kipling

  A Room with a View, E. M. Forster

  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

  The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

  Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

  A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul

  The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

  Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

  Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow

  The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett

  The Call of the Wild, Jack London

  Loving, Henry Green

  Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

  Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell

  Ironweed, William Kennedy

  The Magus, John Fowles

  Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

  Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

  Sophie’s Choice, William Styron

  The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

  The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

  The Ginger Man, J. P. Donleavy

  The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington

  91 Chambers Street

  BY EDWARD ROBB ELLIS (MAP OF FOURTH AVENUE BROADWAY BOOKSELLERS BY MAHLON BLAINE)

  Ellis began writing his diary at the age of sixteen in his native Illinois, and continued to his death in 1998, creating a diary that wound up in the Guinness Book of Records as America’s largest. As an active journalist for, among others, the New York World-Telegram, Ellis was a keen observer of the times and an honest chronicler of this world. In this entry from his 1995 collection, A Diary of the Century, Ellis captures the atmosphere of a used-book shop, one of many that flourished (or floundered) in lower Manhattan in the 1950s. How many booksellers? In the middle of the entry we’ve placed Mahlon Blaine’s 1958 map, a promotional piece for the “Fourth Ave. Broadway Booksellers’ Association,” identifying nineteen shops (in an area that also included a dozen non-members). Steve Seskin’s bookshop on Chambers St. was a few blocks south of the area covered on this map.

  THURSDAY, MAY 15, 1958

  Steve Seskin and I were alone in his book shop at 91 Chambers St. The front door was open invitingly, almost beseechingly, so I kept within my trenchcoat against the chill gusts prowling this gray day. A moment after I entered, [my wife] Ruthie phoned Steve to order a book for her boss, and my eyes met his laughingly. After hanging up the phone, Steve turned to me. The laughter had drained from his brown eyes and his face became cloud-gathered.

  “Eddie,” said Steve, “I’ve come to a decision.”

  I waited, my eyes on his.

  “I’ve decided to sell out. I’m putting an ad in the Sunday paper.”

  The moment I had dreaded was upon me. Turning on my heel, I muttered “Jesus Christ!” and strode away, walked several paces away with my face averted, snorted “Jesus Christ!” and stalked back, wheeled again to pace and pace and heavily breathe. “Jesus Christ!”

  Finally, drawing up in front of Steve, I stopped and faced him. Steve fumbled with lean fingers in his tobacco pouch.

  “I’m defeated,” he said. “I’ve had it. I’ve come to the end of my tether.”

  The words I spoke seemed forced through my pores: “What do you plan to do, Steve?”

  “Oh, teach school, I guess.” I knew that he had a master’s degree. “Guess I’ll get a job as a high school teacher—that is, if they’ll have me now.

  “You know, Eddie, everything I’ve done seems wrong. This business is a failure. I’m a failure—”

  “Goddamnit!” I interrupted. “Now, none of that! You’re not a failure, Steve. Don’t ever let yourself think that.”

  “And why the hell not?”

  I said: “Look: So you’ve been in the book business twenty-five years and so you haven’t made any money. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just that your values don’t happen to be the standard values of this particular civilization—the goddamn businessman’s civilization!”

  As though not hearing me, Steve spoke, his saddle-brown eyes vacant: “The truth of the matter is, Eddie, I’m suffering from a deep malaise. You know what this means. Here in this shop I tried to create a little cultural center, you might say. I threw out all the goddamn cheap paperback novels of crime and lust so that I might give the public the worthwhile books. I didn’t want to cheapen myself by handling that kind of trash. Culture? There is no culture in America! I don’t know why I should be so proud as to try to sell the books I have here. The hell with it. Better yet I should turn this into a schlock house and sell whatever goddamn trash the people want.”

  “You couldn’t,” I said.

  “I know I couldn’t,” he said hopelessly. “But the fact remains, Eddie, that I’m a failure.”

  “Like hell you’re a failure!” I snorted, glaring at him. “Now, I know this won’t solve your problems or put any money in your pockets, but some day you may remember this: You may remember that one day a guy named Eddie Ellis looked you in the eye to say: Steve Seskin, you’re one helluva nice guy!”

  From a pocket, Steve extracted a Kleenex and put it to his nose.

  “So I’m a nice guy,” he said in a hollow voice, and his cheeks appeared even more sunken.

  “Yes, you’re a nice guy,” I repeated.

  “This malaise . . .” Steve mumbled.

  “You tried,” I said, and the words sounded like mockery in my own ears.

  By this time, to get off my broken foot, I had taken that chair I often use in Steve’s store. He stood behind his counter, a man of forty-six, middling height, lean, his hair whitening, dapper moustache, neat in appearance, a victim of America’s bitch goddess Success, his heart laid open on her altar, the red oozing out in a meaningless sacrifice.

  “I wish I had words of wisdom,” I tried again. “But I haven’t. I can’t be a Pollyanna.” I sighed. “After all, Steve—it’s all a lot of shit!”

  He knew that by this I meant—Everything. “Yes,” he nodded, animated for the first time, “it sure is all a lot of shit! You work and you plan—why, how long can I go without a vacation? In a one-man operation like this, I get up in the morning and I don’t feel too well and then I worry about what happens if I can’t get to the store, because there’s only me. It’s—Look: Twenty-five years in the book business, and now I come to this!”

  The phone rang. As I later learned, it was Steve’s sister, Selma. “Yes,” he was saying, “I’ve decided to sell out. . . . Yes, I’ve talked it over with Helen . . .” He meant his wife.

  I walked and cursed and curse
d and walked, and with curses on my lips there was very little in my brain. After Steve got off the phone we spoke mostly in silences.

  “Did I mention how much I’m asking?” Steve said.

  “No. No, you didn’t say.”

  “Well, I’m asking for only $15,000—although my stock alone is worth at least $20,000.”

  “What happens if you don’t find a buyer?”

  “Well, my lease has a year or so to go. Way I feel, maybe I’d do something unethical, really compromise. Such as, for instance, stop buying any more books, just sell what I have here, then get out.”

  “What’s unethical about that?”

  Steve hesitated. “There might be some creditors left.”

  “You owe some money, Steve?”

  “Every businessman owes money.”

  Then he said: “If I can’t win fighting fair, maybe I’ll fight some other way.”

  “Hell,” I snorted, “and have ulcers again in six months!”

  “A man has to compromise.”

  “Sure,” I agreed, “sure a man has to compromise—but within limits. I compromise every day and I hate it. But life is compromise. As I said, though—within limits.”

  “I’m tired,” Steve said. “I’m tired of fighting. I can tell you, Eddie, but I couldn’t even tell Helen or Selma: This malaise of mine . . . truly, it’s a deep-seated thing.”

  “I know,” I said, and I really did know. “I’m like you, Steve. I’m a confirmed pessimist. That’s why we agree it’s all shit.”

  For a while we didn’t talk. Steve tamped his pipe and struck another match. Trenchcoated, I leaned my elbows on the counter. After long thought I raised my chin.

  “Steve, if you’re really going to sell out—all at once, to one man— which way would it help you more: If I bought some books from you, I mean if I came in with a check for $200 or $300 and bought some titles I’ve been wanting, or if this man, whoever he is, if he came in and bought it lock, stock, and barrel?”