I don’t know who Mark is, but I want to go to coffee with him
The weekend before last I was at Brookline Booksmith, just poking around. I’m well aware my unread book stack is nearly a shelf at this point, but I just can’t help it. I love bookstores. I love that they are places where ideas rub together, where I never know what I’m going to find, where I might unearth some treasure. It’s like a living, breathing version of the old Zelda game on SuperNES — you never know when the rock you pick up will have a special, fantastic item underneath it.
Okay, enough self-justification about my crack-like addiction to need to spend quality time in bookstores. Booksmith, in its increasingly clever battle to if not beat the likes of Amazon, provide an awesome physical experience for book shoppers and browsers, has added a customer recommendation section. Here, there is a little card with a person’s name on it, a short blurb from them about reading, and some books they’ve picked out. Bookstores have been doing staff recommendations like this for awhile, but this was different — this was other readers. Book buyers, not just book sellers.
I noticed one person had picked Miranda July’s book, plus Pastoralia by George Saunders. Those are both pretty odd and wonderful books, and I loved ‘em.
That’s when I noticed that Mark’s blurb (these were his picks) was all about short stories. A couple of his other choices were books of photography, and on a quick look they seemed to be heavy on the polaroids. Vernacular, not fancy high Art with a capital A type of thing. I thought including these books with the short stories was just genius. I took a closer look at the other books Mark picked — there was St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I’d seen before, and thought looked interesting. I wrote a few titles down in my trusty little notebook, and then I walked away. See, I was trying to be good. To be mindful of the giant pile of unread books already in the house. Of how much I’d already spent on our recent vacation.
This worked for one whole week.
Those photo books just nibbled away at my brain. I might be living under a rock, because I wasn’t familiar with Jason Fulford or Mike Slack, but their books… well, they just seemed irresistible as objects. Printed in that hardcover style I remember from school library books (right down to the font for the ISBN number on the back covers) they seemed different and real and reaching for something, I’m not sure what. I was entranced.
So I talked Lisa into going back. (I didn’t have to try very hard, either — we brought some books to sell back to the used book department in the basement, and went for the store credit option.) At first I was disappointed, because the photography books weren’t with Mark’s selections anymore. I figured they sold them. I saw a few more (restocked?) picks, including a Sherman Alexie. Yet another author I had in common with this mysterious Mark person — making those photography books even more enticing — so I went from disappointed to dejected.
Then I thought, maybe they moved them to the tiny photography section. Maybe. It might’ve been the sheer force of my hope and will that caused Slack’s OK OK OK and Fulford’s Crushed to appear on the shelves.
It was probably that Mark guy, though. Oh, how I wish there had been a little printed URL under his name so I could find him online and drop him an email. (Otherwise, I’m happier this whole series of events happened in meatspace: I like the idea that Mark has been to the same store, and probably picked up some of the same books I have.) I’d tell him thanks. Maybe even see if he wanted to meet for coffee around the corner from Booksmith, and we’d talk books and the magic power of stories.
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