There’s a bookstore I went to once up in Barrie. I can’t remember it’s name, but I’ll never forget the place. Just piles and piles of books, stacks everywhere. They aren’t even on shelves, they’re arranged on their sides and stacked horizontally up like five feet tall. There has to be tens of thousands of books there for sale, and it’s impossible to go through them all in a single visit. It sounds like a book lover's dream, a paradise for bibliophiles.
But here’s the thing: most of them are junk.
I was thinking about this bookstore the last few days, after reading an article on CBC about a woman over in Cornwall who said she saved some 200,000 books from the landfill and plans on finding them homes. It sounds like a noble effort by someone who loves literature and wants to share her love of reading. After all, people generally have this idea that books represent something and pulping them is a shame or travesty. But that’s not really the case. Let me explain.
First things first. Like all things mass produced under late capitalism, books have a finite lifespan. I don’t know if they’re designed this way, or if it’s a mere side effect of being cheaply produced, but most paperbacks don’t hold up well to repeated reads. Pages get dogeared, covers start to bend and spines crack. And that’s if you’re a careful reader! I try to treat my books pretty well, but I’ve had reference books that I refer to often literally fall apart in my hands. I used to keep my copy of the Rough Guide to Rock held together with tape until it finally got so bad I had to recycle it. Another time, I carried a copy of an old Penguin Classic to a coffee shop and when I went to open it, the spine cracked right down the middle and I was left with two halves. It happens.
There are books that will last you a long time if you’re careful, but these are not the ones you find on the three-for-$20 table. Something that will, like a Library of America edition of Norman Mailer’s essays, will get you back like $50 or more. It makes sense if it’s something you expect to keep around for a long time, but let’s be honest here: how many people re-read the same book two times or more?
Indeed, a lot of reading habits - given the stock I see in thrift stores and the like - seems to be driven by popular trends. And there’s nothing wrong with that (one should read whatever they like), but it does mean you see a lot of copies of Water for Elephants kicking around. These are not books that will likely find a home on everyone’s shelf. You read them, get your $20 of enjoyment and move on to the next one. That’s how it goes with a lot of books. And when you’re done with it, you put it in a box and donate it to Value Village, and it goes on their shelf and maybe someone else buys it and the cycle repeats itself.
But even these cycles come to an end, and usually what happens is the book gets recycled because nobody buys it and it’s just taking up space, a spot that could potentially be used for a book that would sell. As I said above, we’re living in late capitalism, and everything is potentially for sale. And if that thing doesn’t have a value anymore, then it’s junk.
But what’s happened over in Cornwall is a disruption of this cycle. From the CBC story:
After five years of collecting unwanted books from local thrift stores that would otherwise be tossed in the local dump, Gaudet has amassed nearly 200,000 titles…
"If I don't take them, they go to the landfill. So I take them," she said.
"I just wish we could hang onto them long enough until the right person comes looking for them, because eventually — pretty much every book — someone will come looking for it."
So what’s happened here is that a book lover - who also owns a used book store - has kept over 200,000 books from going to the landfill and ending their cycle on this planet. On the one hand, I can see some people thinking this is noble and good, because it’s saving ideas from going into the trash.
On the other: she’s hoping to profit off of these discards by hoping people will buy them. From my reading of this CBC article, she isn’t paying for these books, but she is hoping to make money off them. Which, whatever, fine. We all have to make rent. But please keep in mind that this isn’t strictly a labour of love: this is a job, and she’s out there trying to make a buck at it. She isn’t running a lending library.
And what about the books themselves? I haven’t seen the stock at Red Cart Books, so I can’t speak to it specifically, but a lot of books are junk. It’s true. For every piece of great literature, there’s five self-help books from the mid 90s. For every engrossing history, there’s ten guides on accounting that are from before the internet. And for every pop read, there’s a dozen old hardcovers that have been rightfully forgotten.
There’s a little free library near my place, and every so often I’ll pop by and drop off whatever I’m finished with. And the contents of this library are usually pretty dire: beat up children’s books from the 1980s, hardcovers that are missing dust jackets and are falling apart, and, every occasionally, a trade paperback or two that’s worth reading. There’s one near my mom’s place that’s the same, and I bet there’s one near you along these same lines. These are, in so many words, junk. And they’re being given away for free.
And so, you’ve got to ask yourself: what inherent value do these books hold? Are they valuable as a timepiece, a look at how something was viewed in the 1950s? Are they keepsakes, or something that holds a specific interest for a collector? Or are they walking zombies, something that by all accounts should be dead and buried, but is making the rounds on the street?
Books are a lot of things. They’re a place to learn, a spot of entertainment and something to help you pass the long, lonely evenings in the winter. But they’re also objects and they don’t have any value other than what we assign to them. I might love my copy of Mystery Train, but to another person, it’s a pretentious piece of twaddle. In and of itself, it holds no actual value.
And when I read about Red Cart Books, or the bookstore in the Barrie mall or even see a pile of books in a house on Hoarders, it’s easy to project and think there’s something there for me. Maybe something I’ve been looking for forever. But, really, there probably isn’t. There’s a reason why these books haven’t sold, haven’t found a home and are waiting for their turn at the pulper. Treating them as some sacred object is the wrong approach entirely, and hoarding hundreds of thousands of them, hoping you can flip them at a profit, is just another symptom of life under late capitalism.