I don’t typically buy new books.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think there are good books being written and there are plenty of those on my to buy list, but I prefer to buy used books.
I am particularly weak when it comes to a parish book sale or a second-hand book shop. About a year ago my TBR (to be read) shelf started to thin out. So, when my parish had its annual book sale, I knew exactly what I needed to do: buy books. I must admit the haul was spectacular. I re-stocked my shelves and have been slowly working through them. Many gems have come across my eyes because of this practice of buying used books. It is true that the newest and sexiest ideas can be bought and sold at a discount from that monolithic online realtor, Amazon. However, just because something is new and sexy doesn’t make it valuable or interesting. In the same way that the democratizing nature of the internet has made it so that every joe-shmo (this one included) thinks that their voice should be heard, online retailers like Amazon have made it such that you can find and buy just about any book on anything, no matter how ugly the printing, cheap the binding, or vacuous the prose.
This gets me towards one of the core reasons why I like to buy used books. I am an aesthetic snob. There is nothing more disquieting than a bookcase full of boring books, with boring titles, in boring dust jackets that have never been opened. While my wife and I might agree on many things, we do disagree on the aesthetics of the deckled edges of a modern book. She thinks it adds charm. I think it is vulgar and adds a distinct petite-bourgeois facade to the simple and the boorish.
It is true, I am a snob.
I have opinions.
I try to buy from certain publishers because binding matters to me. Books don’t just contain beauty, they should be beautiful. A home library is a reflection of the soul of the people who inhabit that place. Mine is slightly dusty and overcrowded, with shelves that are double stacked, yet organized with peculiar care into genera and sub-genera: categories of my own making, and those preselected by the Library of Congress. My books are (almost) all embossed, so that if one where to ever borrow a book, they would know where it came from. But, most of all, my library is diverse in its contents. I have the peculiar luck of being the beneficiary of a recent library merger. When my wife, who is more of a bookish person than I am, and I combined our libraries into one we both benefited as our shelves were overfull, our literary horizons expanded, and our lacuna’s slightly less than before. Our library has art and music, periodicals and papers, hardbacks and soft-bounds, fiction and non-fiction, prayer books and poetry, and at least three complete sets of J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings, which is the bare minimum any civilized library should contain.
Beyond the purely aesthetic, another one of the core reasons why I buy used books is what Chesterton calls the Democracy of the Dead. Put simply everyone who has ever lived before you also has a voice in how things should be. In a spiritual way this is part of what it means to believe in the Communion of Saints. The great forerunners of our faith exist in fraternal charity with those of us here on earth, to borrow the language of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism goes on to state, “Exactly as Christian communion among our fellow pilgrims brings us closer to Christ, so our communion with the saints joins us to Christ, from whom as from its fountain and head issues all grace, and the life of the People of God itself." Now I am not here to debate some sort of deep point about life and communion after death, rather I want to point to a key insight that is brought out in Chesterton and in the Catechism: You are not an island (that’s also the famous refrain of a poem by Anglican poet and priest John Dunn).
We are no more enlightened than those who came before us. The thinking man might even suggest that we are becoming less enlightened than previous generations as we slip ever deeper into the cult of individualism and depravity that has sapped our morals, damaged our democracy, and with the advent of the ever-increasing technology of fascination, destroyed our ability to reason critically. All one must do look at the dominance of the genera of “self-help” in our (increasingly rare) bookstores to see the individual desire to self-diagnose in opposition to the history of communal education, discernment, and care.
“Okay Jonathan,” you might be thinking to yourself, “we get it, you’re some kind of technologically-skeptic critic of modernity who is committed to being that asshole at every dinner party. But what does that have to do with buying used books?”
First, I am indeed that asshole at every dinner party.
Second, this is directly connected to why I buy used books. Used books literally carry the fingerprints of the generations who have picked them up before us. This is just as true for a book re-visited decades later as it is for the books that you encounter for the first time. Marginalia is not simply an artifact; it is a dialogue. It is a reminder that people before us have wrestled with the world of words. The pursuit of truth is an eternal one. It is a noble one. It is a well-worn path. Why wouldn’t we want to engage with all the wisdom of the past?
Age is also clarifying. In this digital aeon there is an insurmountable amount of writing published every day. Now, with the introduction of “Ai-generated” filth that mountain will grow at an exponential rate. But when you walk into a used bookstore, or pour over the tables at a parish book sale, or peruse the shelves in your friends’ homes you allow the winds of time to blow away the chaff. Few books are generationally great, and it is rarely easy to tell what will stand the test of time. When the generations before have whittled down the greatest books of their time to two shelves, they play Virgil to our souls as we lean on their guidance to help navigate a foreign landscape.
So this is my commendation to you, find a used bookstore. Shuffle through the isles and allow yourself to be filled with wonder at the dusty covers and yellowed spines. Be reminded of a childlike state of wonder. Select from the shelves a title (or five) that you always wanted to read. If you don’t know where to start talk to the purveyor. Tell them what you are interested in. They are most likely there because they care about books and reading. Use their knowledge as a resource as you journey through the stacks. Once you have selected a book (or five) turn to your local pub, or brewery, or coffee shop and sit down with this artifact from the past. Attend to the marginalia. Attend to the ways that the pages feel in between your fingers. As you examine this work enjoy a pint or smoke nicotine (or both). For God’s sake the one thing to avoid is the intrusion of a screen. Resist the urge to commit sacrilege by invading the temple of knowledge with the profanity of pixels. Savor the cadence of words from a world that has been. Listen to the staccato of Hemmingway and Steinbeck; be comforted in the pastoral words of Cather and Greene; be confounded by the density of Dostoevsky. And if you will pardon the sacrilege “take and eat the scroll” for the world of words might just point us towards that which is beyond words.
Post-Script:
Some publishers I recommend for acquiring new books.
Cluny Media (Fiction and Theology) and Everyman’s Library (Classic Fiction) are my personal favorites.
The Cistercian Fathers series from Cistercian Press is both enlivening and well made.
Ascension Press has some lovely editions.
St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.