Plopping my chair down in my siege and doing some writing

Yesterday and the day before, at the book sale, as I helped to move the overstock outside, and then inside, and then back outside and back inside again, and shuffling around the books and making them presentable, I’d been thinking about something Paul Collins wrote in Sixpence House about certain books that just won’t sell. His employer, Richard Booth, has complained that his castle is stuffed to the ceiling with them, and he stalks off. Yet, writes Collins:

the great thing about Booth’s is that it is full of stuff that won’t sell in a thousand years. You need to keep your ratio of the utterly obscure and the instantly familiar in careful balance: have too much of one or the other, and bankruptcy or insipidness is sure to follow. You need some odd “worthless” books because, like bending back lines to a vanishing point in a painting, the vanishing recognizability of a few titles in your stock gives the whole selection an appearance of depth. And there really is no telling what people might actually want. [...] Still, some titles truly are worthless, cannot even be given away. Among the many banes to a secondhand dealer’s existence, four unloved genres reign supreme: textbooks, theology, celebrity autobiography, and military history.

That list made me laugh; even the Friends of the Library won’t take donations of textbooks, and there are other genres that I imagine would sell as slowly as the above, like outdated computer manuals. But in all it seems like a pretty complete list. It makes me very glad that where I work, we evaluate every book offered us, so these genres aren’t the problem they seem to become when you purchase books by the ton. Our sale was basically made up of great books that we just hadn’t found a new owner for yet — I picked up a couple for myself, one of which was Vermeer in Bosnia (hardcover), and there were many, many more I would have bought were I not practicing restraint.

But when I read “military history,” I did think of one amusing book I’d seen inside the store. I don’t remember the title, but its cover proclaims that the study “puts sieges back where they belong: at the center of English history.” Every time I see it I smile, not just because of what that blurb posits — an army of scholars laboring under the misguided belief that sieges are of tangential significance in English history, and finally! here’s a book to set them straight — but also because, since the Normans laid siege to England, and they were French, I always think of the French siège, which means chair, and I think, yes, the chair indisputably belongs at the center of English history, who could ever have thought otherwise? On the other hand, the French chair means flesh. Make of that what you will.

As Collins observes, though — who knows? One day somebody might see that book and buy it, thinking: “You know, they’re so right, sieges just aren’t given their due!” Or: “Hm! Intriguing theory; I’d always found sieges to be of tangential significance!” And they might buy it to read that evening. To be honest, I was tempted myself, the first time I picked it up. But I knew I wouldn’t read it.

I finished reading Sixpence House the other day, and I have some more quotes I want to share here, but now’s not the time; I have some other writing I want to do. Last night I got around to watching the new documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is going to open theatrically in San Francisco in a couple weeks. A brief review will appear on the Rumpus on September 2nd and I’ll link to it then, but for now I’ll just say: it’s on the rough side and has some other minor flaws, but it’s really worthwhile. If you don’t know anything about Basquiat, it’s a great introduction; and if you have more knowledge, you’ll learn of details you didn’t know before. Plus, I felt, it gives just enough screen time to just the right number of works — a lot of documentaries about artists really fail at this, either presenting you with too much too fast, or with too few works at exaggerated length.

posted: 10 August 16
under: Open Folio