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| Photos of vintage Christmas post cards by Suzanne Currie |
THE VERY STRANGE AURA OF A BOOK PROUDLY CARRYING ITS PROVENANCE TO A NEW OWNER
A PREAMBLE TO TODAY’S POST
BY TED CURRIE
Here it is only three days and change from Christmas 2021. What a wild year. What a crazy year and three quarters it has been in the clutches of the Covid pandemic. Today we witnessed a huge, almost day long line-up of vaccine-seekers, wrapped around the corner of a local drug store on the Main Street of Gravenhurst, as worried citizens were looking to get their booster shots, to prevent serious illness with a new and highly transmissible strain of Covid, reeking havoc in our province. It has been a dangerous period of our lives, for certain, and it has, as a fourth wave of the lingering pandemic, come once again at Christmas, as would the Grinch, to steal away the peace and goodwill inherent of the season. It is hard for folks to settle down for the holidays with friend and family because of restrictions on size of gatherings, and the dangers of just going out of the house for groceries and to do a little Christmas shopping. It won’t be a year we will forget, but it will eventually pass, and life will get back to normal. Hopefully soon, as vaccination rates accelerate with this new urgency, and of course the booster losses. But Christmas can be a great healer, and it is what we are counting on, as we get closer to the bid day. I hope you can all find happiness despite the unfortunate circumstances of this latest health scare.
As a kid, my mother encouraged me to read. She was an avid reader as was my father. My mother, who came from a well off family with deep roots as United Empire Loyalists, in Upper Canada, and amongst the Dutch settlers in the early years of New York, (state and soon to be city), and had access to a nice library of old books that her father Stanley, had collected from various sources through his years spent on the original family homestead near the Bay of Quinte. Merle read pulp fiction in my presence, and Ed was a big fan of Mickry Spillane mysteries, and any stories based on crime and rough living. During my need-to-read years I only had three books in my wee library, and they included a book of Mother Goose fairy tales, a cheap copy of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” and another in the same cheap packaging, related to the television series “Bonanza.” I liked the show, but hated the book. I liked the work of Mark Twain, but the book was in tatters, with a failing spine, and it just bothered me, the budding bibliophile. The Mother Goose stories were okay but I got bored reading and re-reading the text. I just opted for other forms of entertainment back then, until I got my first library card, and was able to order some inexpensive books through the Bracebridge Public School library. I didn’t have a lot of mad money back then, but I usually could afford about six catalogue picks throughout the year. I felt like a major book buyer back then, and well proud of myself for building up a solid shelf of my books before I hit high school; and gained access to a much larger collection of books available free of charge. But I still wasn’t much of a reader, as compared to the present, and sports took up most of my free time, and game boards and my table top hockey game sucked-up a lot of free time; to the point that I did, of course, lose a great deal of interest reading anything more than the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast, and the few ripped and soiled Archie comic books someone had given my mother, for my consumption. I could never get into comic books, like my artist / friend, Ross Smith, of Bracebridge, who used to show up at Elliots variety store on Manitoba Street, at the precise moment each week that the new arrivals were placed by staff in the coming racks just inside the front doors. I used my allowance money to buy candy at the corner stores up on Toronto Street instead. Ross never had bad trips to see the dentist either. He told me some time ago, as we shopped around a local thrift shop, that he still had his comic collection, but didn’t spend a lot of time re-reading them, as he had once obsessed as a happy-go-luck kid at the family’s Camel Lake cottage.
Then came the years that I felt the need to write more than I read. I read enough to get through university assignments, but once I took my first job as a staff writer with Muskoka Publications, I was totally dedicated to writing every day into the wee hours, in order to improve my qualifications should a magazine or daily newspaper editor need my services. Now this was, of course, wrong thinking on my part. It is “reading” that makes for a better writer. I needed the broadening lessons that were taught by the great authors of our world, and here I was, trying to be a great author without any of the qualifying credits a true professional needs to advance a career as an author. It wasn’t until I allowed the antique business to morph into antique and out of print books, to broaden out my market appeal, that I started to turn-on to the very great value of being surrounded by actual published authors from antiquity; and rather than remain ill informed about their accomplishments, I gradually became a book collector / dealer through our antique shop, and a writer-in-residence in between customers. I read everything I could, of my newly acquired collections, and in between customers, (which back then gave me a lot of free time due to low attendance), I would sit and write short stories and some minor regional histories, and eventually a published column in the local press, which began as “Sketches of Historic Bracebridge,” which changed in title numerous times over the eight or so years it ran weekly. All of the weekly columns up to the mid 1990’s, were written on the sales desk of a very quiet antique shop, and while it didn’t help me much financially, the solitude on the Main Street of town, and being in an historic commercial building (former W.W. Kinsey funeral parlor and furniture outlet), the historical pieces came fast and furious, and it launched me into a co-operative relationship with The Muskoka Sun, of which I had been a former feature editor, and alas, I was in a writer’s half-heaven. I had more circulation in several publications than I had enjoyed as a full time staffer in the 1980’s. Why so? In our basement shop, I was surrounded by history, and much of that came in the form of really old books and lots of ephemera (paper heritage), and when I got stuck for a story idea, or needed some quotations to support my editorials, I could pretty much stand, and stretch a little to the left, right, or centre, and pick out a book to companion my work. It has been this way ever since, and even now, as I write today’s post, and beside the Christmas tree all lit-up and seasonally magnificent, and pick several of my go-to texts, to enhance this pieces; that truth be known by you, the reader, could use a little spice to fire up some literary fervor. So my penchant to over-collect books, and my life-long investment in writing as a journey-man, have nestled together for long and long, and I can’t see any reason why I would change now, from the kind of old habits that have taken years and years to, well, “mature,” into something that works well despite it being “old.” When someone asked me if I would like to be known, after my demise, as a writer or an antique dealer, I have answered previously, that I would prefer to be known as a writer who made a life’s business out of selling the literary achievements of others. I’m okay with that, and there isn’t a day that goes by, that I don’t feel thankful for my combined interests, which in the communing sense, has enriched my existence; and this brings me to the continuation of the look back at the amazing life and literary associations of Paris book shop owner, Adrienne Monnier, who indeed enjoyed a very rick, cultured life, communing with some of the most accomplished and brilliant writer / artists of the time. Here now is part two of three.
THE VERY RICH HOURS OF ADRIENNE MONNIER IN PARIS
Adrienne Monnier the owner of the bookshop, "La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the legendary book store, "Shakespeare and Company," across the road from one another in Paris, France, were champions of literature, in their own country, and abroad. They were considered kindred spirits to well accomplished authors, and their shops were havens to escape the burdens of two wars and the Great Depression. They housed, encouraged, supported, financed, and promoted the writers they came to know, and they provided sustenance, to those who were rich in accomplishment but low on funds, and shared the meagre provisions they had, with those who would help them build their respective businesses; by offering their newly published books for the collection. There is an overview that was written by Adrienne Monnier, about the nature and intent of her business enterprise, and it is so eloquently and effectively written, that it summarizes what most of us, who sell old and new books every day, feel about the shop atmosphere, and the importance of offering books to "the eager and the passionate amongst us." Now in her words:
"We founded La Maison des Amis des Livres with faith; each one of its details seems to us to correspond to a feeling, to a thought. Business, for us, has a moving and profound meaning," Monnier writes. The description of the business, translated from French, is included in the text produced by Richard McDougall, entitled "The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier," published by Charles Scribner's Sons, of New York, in 1976.
"A shop seems to us to be a true magic chamber; at that instant when the passer-by crosses the threshold of the door that everyone can open, when he penetrates into that apparently impersonal place, nothing disguises the look of his face, the tone of his words; he accomplishes with a feeling of complete freedom an act that he believes to be without unforeseen consequences; there is a perfect correspondence between his external attitude and his profound self, and if we know how to observe him at that instant when he is only a stranger, we are able not and forever, to know him in his truth; he reveals all the good will with which he is endowed, that is to say, the degree to which he is accessible to the world, what he can give and receive, the exact rapport that exists between himself and other men." Monnier notes that, "This immediate and intuitive understanding, this private fixing of the soul, how easy they are in a shop, a place of transition between street and house! And what discoveries are possible in a bookshop, through which inevitably pass, amid the innumerable passers-by, the Pleiades, those among us who already seem a bit to be 'great blue persons,' and who, with a smile, give the justification for what we call our best hopes. Selling books, that seems to some people as banal as selling any sort of object or commodity, and based upon the same routine tradition that demands of the seller and the buyer only the gesture of exchanging money against the merchandise, a gesture that is accompanied generally, by a few phrases of politeness.
"We think, first of all, that the faith we put into selling books can be put into all daily acts, one can carry on no matter what business, no matter what profession, with a satisfaction that at certain moments has a real lyricism. The human being who is perfectly adapted to his function, and who works in harmony with others, experiences a fullness of feeling that easily becomes exaltation when his is in rapport with people situated upon the same level of life as himself; once he can communicate and cause what he experiences to be felt, he is multiplied, he rises above himself and strives to be as much of a poet as he can; that elevation, that tenderness, is it not the state of grace in which everything is illuminated by an eternal meaning? But if every conscious person can be exalted upon his every thought of gain and work that is based upon books, have loved them with rapture and have believed in the infinite power of the most beautiful."
The bookshop owner reports that, "Some mornings alone in our bookshop, surrounded only be books arranged in their cases, we have remained contemplating them for moments on end. After a moment our eyes, fixed upon them, saw only the vertical and oblique lines marking the edges of their backs, discreet lines set against the gray wall like the straight strokes drawn by the hand of a child. Before this elementary appearance that is charged with a should made up of all ideas and all images, we were pierced through by an emotion so powerful that it sometimes seemed to us that to write, to express our thoughts, would solace us; but at the moment when our hand sought for pen and paper - somebody entered, other people came afterward, and the faces of the day absorbed the great ardor of the morning. We have often felt that 'all grace of labor, and all honor, and genius,' as Claudel says in 'La Ville (The City),' were granted to us; in that work there are many other words besides that seem written for us, and we can say with Lala….'As gold is the sign of merchandise, merchandise is also a sign…..Of the need that summons it, of the effort that creates it,……And what you call exchange I call communion'."
"When we found our house (shop) in November 1915, we had no business experience whatsoever, we did not even know bookkeeping, and along with that we were so afraid of passing for paltry tradespeople, that we pretended without end, to neglect our own interests, which was childishness besides," records Monnier. "It is ordinarily believed that life extinguishes enthusiasm, disappoints dreams, distorts first conceptions, and realizes a bit at random what has been offered to it. Nevertheless, we can declare that at the beginning of our undertaking, our faith and our enthusiasm were much less great than they are today. Our first idea was very modest; we sought only to start off a bookshop and a reading room devoted above all to modern works. We had very little money, and it was that detail that drove us to specialize in modern literature; if we had had a lot of money, it is certain that we would have wanted to buy everything that existed in respect to printed works and to realize a kind of National Library; we were convinced that the public demands a great quantity of books above all, and we thought that we had much audacity in daring to establish ourselves with hardly three thousand volumes, when some reading-room catalogs announced twenty-thousand volumes, fifty thousand, and even a hundred thousand of them! Truth is that only one of our walls was furnished with books; the others were decorated with pictures, with a large old desk; and with a chest of drawers in which we kept wrapping paper, string, and everything we did not know where to put; our chairs were old chairs from the country that we still have. This bookshop hardly had the look of a shop, and that was not on purpose; we were far from suspecting that people would congratulate us so much in the future for what seemed to us an unfortunate makeshift. We counted upon our first profits to increase our stock without end. These first profits were above all based upon the sale of new and secondhand books, for we did not dare to hope to find subscribers to our reading room until after several months."
She suggests, "One of the great problems of our commercial beginnings was the construction of an outside display stand for the secondhand sale. This operation required our presence for more than five minutes, during which we were exposed to the looks of the passers-by; we had to carry outside the trestles, the case, then the books and the reviews, which were old things that had come for the most part from family libraries. The first time that we made that display we were aroused to the point of anxiety, and when the last pile had been arranged, we escaped hurriedly into the back room of the shop, just as if we had played a bad trick on the passers-by; we looked through a gap in the curtain at what was for us an extraordinary spectacle, the formation of a little group in front of the books; the faces that appeared behind the shop window sometimes made us burst out laughing, sometimes shiver with apprehensions; if those people were to come in, address words to us! And here was an old lady who took a volume from the display and prepared herself to accomplish that grave act of becoming our first purchaser; one of us decided to emerge from the back room and stammered a ceremonious good day to the lady, who, with a very natural manner, showed what she had chosen - it was Henry Greville's 'L'Avenir d' Aline (The Future of Aline)' marked at seventy-five centimes; she had the kindness not to haggle; if she had haggled the situation would have become painful; we would have been torn between the temptation to give her the volume so that the deal might be more quickly settled and the duty of maintaining our really very modest price to show her that we were serious booksellers who did not charge too much. It was necessary all the same to wrap the book, tie it up with string, take the money, give the change out of a franc; thank effusively. That old lady, at last perceived the extraordinary emotion that she was provoking; she went away more troubled than she wished to let it appear and did not come back."
I will make another return visit to see Adrienne Monnier, in tomorrow's blog, and I would like to highlight some of the meetings she and Sylvia Beach had with famous writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliott, and James Joyce. It's enough to make you want to open your own bookshop.
There are times these days, when it seems the printed hard copy book is on the way out, so to speak. I am a loyalist, who while embracing the advances of technology, will never, ever, abandon a real book for an electronic device that claims to be its equal. Like a real Christmas tree…..there's a beautiful aroma of print, paper and binding, that just doesn't emit from an electronic device. My favorite book related movie, of course, was "84 Charing Cross," and to be in the book shop that was depicted in that movie……the dream of dreams. To be the proprietor of a shop of that calibre……well, a fellow can ponder the possibility…..can't he? Hope you can find some time to visit again tomorrow, as we make another visit to La Maison des Amis des Livres, in Paris, via the words of shop owner, Adrienne Monnier.
Thanks for showing your support for book sellers, antique dealers, collectors and all the others, who love history and all the wonderful relics it leaves behind to cheerfully hunt and gather. Books? Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg? There's just so darn much to collect.
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