#culturalcomment

(This is a short aritcle by me using the key words that I think are emphasized in the original article)

I am a person with my own idiosyncratic view, which people thinks that I am little bit odd. Depends on how a person is living- how successful they are, people call one with all the different names. “sir”, “witch”,or maybe guy who is little bit “insane”. I want to be a venerable person who writes a memoir. However, to be a person with a glory in whatever way it is, that person should endure a very humdrum life, which can be extremely monotony at the same time. 

What We Gain From a Good Bookstore.

It’s a place whose real boundaries and character are much more than its physical dimensions.

“Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.” He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts- including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described a s Victorian”-have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds. Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their places. “I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery,”he writes. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “ more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.”

Kociejowski writes from the “ticklish underbelly” of the book trade a s a “factotum” rather than a book dealer. His memoir is a representative slice, a core sample, of the rich and partly vanished world of bookselling in England from the late nineteen-seventies to the present. As Larry McMurtry puts it, in his own excellent (and informative) memoir of life as a bookseller, “Books,” “the antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture,” rich with lore of the great and eccentric seller and collectors who animate the trade. Kociejowski writes how “the multifariousness of human nature is more on show” in a bookstore than in any other place, adding, “I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release inn ourselves. and what they becaome when we make them magnets to our desires.”

The bookseller’s memoir is, in part, a record of accomplishments, of deals done, rarities uncovered-or, in the case of the long-suffering Shaun Bythell, the owner of the largest secondhand bookstore in Scotland, the humdrum frustration and occasional pleasures of running a big bookshop, While Kociejowski recounts some of the high points of his bookselling career (such as cataloguing James Joyce’s personal library of briefly working at the fusty but venerable Magg Bros., the anitiquarian booksellers to the Queen), he above all remembers the character he came to know. “I  frimly believe the fact of being surrounded by books has a great deal to do with flushing to the surface the inner lives of people,” he writes.

Some of them are famous, like Philip Larkin, who, as the Hull University librarian, turned down a pricey copy of his own first book, “The North Ship,” as too expensive for “That piece of rubbish.” Kociejowski tells us how he offended Graham Greene by not recognizing him on sight, and once helped his friend Bruce Chatwin (”fibber thought he was”) with a choice line of poetry for “On the Black Hill”’ how he bonded over Robert Louis Stevenson with Tatti Smith, and sold a second edition of “Finnegans Wake” to Johnny Depp, of all people, who was “trying incredibly hard not to be recognised and with predictably comic results.” But more precious are the memories of the anonymous eccentrics, cranks, biliomanes, and mere people who simply, and idiosyncratically love books. “Where is the American collector who wore a miner’s lamp on his forehead so as to enable him to penetrate the darker in asking not for books but the old bus and tram tickets often found inside them? Where is the man who collected virtually every edition of The Natural History of Selborne by Reverend Gilbert Whitie? Where is everybody?” Kociejowski’s tone, though mostly wry, cerges on lament. “I cannot help but feel something has gone out of the life of the trade,” he writes.