I love the must and the dust and the riot of used book shops—the ones that open at indeterminate hours and close when the proprietor is done for the day. Walking distance from my Greenwich Village apartment is one such shop. The aisles are dimmed not by poor lighting but by books stacked to the ceiling. Crates that arrived no one knows how long ago and have yet to be shelved litter the floor and allow a path between the stacks the width of your shoes.
Three years ago, I dropped out of my Master of Fine Arts program. I had lost hold of the ability to imagine and invent. To try to get it back, I immersed myself in the books heaped to the rafters at the secondhand bookshop down the street. Then, to pay the rent, I struck a bargain with the owner: I would empty the crates, and when I came upon something marketable, I would sell it online, and we’d go half/half.

Six months in, one crate yielded the treasure that returned me to grad school. It was buried under boxes filled with leather-bound editions from Heritage Press, a set of Harvard Classics, Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, etc. In a bin at the bottom of the heap, I found a collection of journals. I brought them home and began reading and kept reading. They sparked my imagination and became the basis for my thesis. Then I set out to find the author. At last, I located someone who thought they might know him, and they agreed to forward a letter.
Can we meet?” I wrote. “I have a thousand questions and would love to fill in the gaps.”
His reply: “You’ll imagine it so much better than I could ever tell it.”

 

Judd Grayson
September 2023