The first books I ever loved were used. Pre-owned, well-loved, with pages soft as butter and covers that threatened to fall off if you looked at them wrong. I discovered them in the corners of our house, left behind by the previous inhabitants, usually children’s books populated with dragons and ghosts and Victorian children. My first experiences of reading stories were with these books, all the more valued because they felt like buried treasure I had found myself.
Those books, I’m sorry to say, also inculcated in me a lifelong habit of dog-earing pages, cracking spines and leaving books facedown. What were they going to do, get more beat-up? Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was not allowed to do this with library books.
As I got older, I started to appreciate how beautiful a new book could be, as opposed to the ancient tomes that decorated my childhood. I became obsessed with collecting shiny new volumes, lining them up on my bookshelves in order, arranging and rearranging them by date, color and preference. It goes without saying many of these featured very similar plots and generally fairies or unicorns or both. They are still sitting on our bookshelves at home, and I have still not allowed my mother to donate any of them, because old habits die hard.
There is something intoxicating about a new book, about running your hand over the cover, and the crackly sound the spine makes when you open it. New books are almost intimidating in their own right. It feels somehow wrong to dog-ear a page, or scribble a note in the margins, or leave it outside to bleach in the sun.
And the book industry has taken full advantage of this feeling. New, special editions of books have sprayed edges, are bound tastefully, have special artwork and maps and textures. They’re a wonder to behold, and they look beautiful on the shelf. Why buy anything but them, forever?
I thought this way until I made it to college, and then suddenly I had to worry about money and space a lot more. Gone were the days of being able to use all my pocket money for the latest, fancy version of a classic, or buying as many books as my shelves could hold. Now I was weighing the merits of a paperback in terms of how much space it would take up in a suitcase.
And to make matters worse, those precious books that I spent so much time rearranging back home were being slowly and systematically squirreled away by my mother, who knew (rightly) that I would never even notice if half of them disappeared. But to me, it felt like the foundation of my life was eroding before my very eyes.
I realized suddenly that I could not afford to have as many new books as I wanted, and also that I could not survive without them. And so I had to redefine what a book was. It was the physical object, yes. Those were hard to let go of, expensive to get and a nuisance to carry around. Beloved, but a total pain. But the books I carried with me in my mind and my memory, I realized, were just words. Who cared what package they came in? And so I went back to when I didn’t know that books could even be bought; I went to a used book store.
Amaranth Books is a small store right by the L, visible from the Davis Station. It’s small, and is ostensibly closed most of the time. But in the few precious weeks when I visited, it was always, miraculously, open. All it sells are used books. Some of them are old, some of them are lightly used and, best of all, many of them were on the $1 shelf.
I must have gone there every week for months, combing the shelves for just the right book. I brought home a book or two almost every time, usually for less than five dollars. I accumulated another lively collection, got into classic literature (almost always cheaper and more plentiful) and sneezed a lot more, due to the accumulation of dust in my dorm room.
A used book is not just a book; it’s not even a product. A used book comes to you with a history. Someone else has paged through it, maybe even read the entire thing. I would come across small notes jotted throughout my new books, sometimes as small as a “!!” or, in books people had to read for class, entire lists of characters and thematic notes.
A used book has someone else’s bookmarks, dog-ears, favorite parts. When you read a used book, you’re reading the words, but you’re also getting to interact, in some small way, with the people who read the book before you.
So I was happy with my little (or not so little) library. But again, tragedy struck! With graduation imminent, I realized that carting over 50 books cross-country was simply not feasible if you aren’t a literal billionaire. So I redefined the terms again.
A book is a collection of words, but it’s also your book. You possessed it for a time, and both you and the book are both irrevocably changed by this; the book is worn and read, the pages buttery-soft. And you, too, are different. Maybe it had ideas you disagreed with, or expanded your horizons. Maybe it just made you laugh.
Regardless, your world before the book and after it are not the same. But, like all things, the relationship has to come to an end. It’s better, I decided, to be intentional with my books, to give or sell them to people that might enjoy and read them, and in some small way, understand what it was like to read them for me.
Buying a book is just the first exchange in a conversation that is meant to be continued. When you give a book to someone else, they get a piece of you; whether it’s your greasy fingerprint on the title page, or a dog-eared page from when you had to stop and write an essay (or a column!) or that receipt for noodles you used as a bookmark and then lost. If you’ve annotated your books, they might get your thoughts in the margin. But you also keep the book with you, in memory, and gain the knowledge that someone else might be benefitting from reading the same words you did.
If you spend enough time in used book stores, and the people you give those books to are the kind of person you are, you just might find that same book again. A little bit greasier, a little more rough for the wear, but those same words you fell in love with at first. And you get the chance to fall in love all over again.
If you have a pressing problem you need advice on, or a response to this, email [email protected] with “Best Guess” in the subject line.
Mika Ellison is a Medill senior. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
