Having never had bought a book through the Internet

Books, those magical objects that neatly contain whole worlds, have shaped and changed me just as much as has my movement through Space in Time. Certain books have detonated like a mortar in my brain, shattering ideas of what was real and opening up infinite possibility.

I have carefully built collections of books and sold them time and again. I have owned beautifully designed books printed with the finest of paper, with mounted illustrations and bound in soft leather, and I have owned cheap paperbacks with the covers ripped off. At one point I covered each and every book I had in plain, brown paper so I could not see the author or title. At this point my collection was so fine that I could grab one off the shelf and say to myself, “today I will read a slim book, and a tall one tomorrow”. It was my encounter with the books of Jean Genet that first showed me the true, transformative force that writing can be, and since then I have sought out literature, prose, poetry and memoir of equal beauty and strength.

There are shops whose shelves I have combed in cities across America and Europe. I can recall one, rainy afternoon in a bookshop dedicated to books on film in Dublin as easily as I can finding shelter from the fierce sun in Athens in a cool, dark shop. Some shops are rich like a stew, thick like nectar, as neat and orderly as a plate of sushi, or as indiscernible as a pot of thrice-cooked jambalaya.

Twice I have traded one continent for another, both times losing by collections and starting again. Now living again in the town I was born in, I am slowly excavating the thoughts of others and growing my own through the shops of this city. Powells bookstore is a thoughtless, dimwitted giant where a good book might be found like a polyp clinging to a colon, yet this store seems to be revered like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

My shock however was great when I recently visited Mother Foucault’s bookshop the other day. I said once of Paperback Traffic, A shop I worked at owned by Margaret Cho’s father, which you could go in blindfolded and whatever book you touched would be an excellent volume on whatever subject. The same could be said of Mother Foucault’s

My heart raced as I spied books I long ago read as if I were seeing dear friends from times gone, such it was like watching a home movie on super 8 film, or taking a walking tour through the history of my brain. The store is charming and welcoming, seemingly designed after the principles on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space with each corner and crevasse loaded with intimacy and image.

I purchased two books, Trio by Robert Pinget and Juan Goytisolo’s Space in Motion, and in the quiet of my car not an hour later I found the following sentence in the latter book, a sentence referring to the author Jean Genet mentioned earlier;

‘who transmutes the inner impulse into a manner of intuiting and revealing an alien oppression, which up until that point has never found a literary expression. The alchemy through which passion is transmuted by a body—a physical and cultural model of a body—into a voracious form of knowledge, capable of turning a lover into a linguist, a researcher, a scholar, a poet; of making him leap from the individual to the collective and opening the eyes to history and its tragedies and injustices…’