The winter of 2000 was my junior year in college. It was a nocturnal, cloistered, literary year, and I lived in a triangle between Carnegie Mellon’s English building, the 61C coffee shop on Murray Avenue, and Three Penny Books, a used bookstore next door to the cafe. Its owner was an insomniac who kept the store open well past last-call, and he drew most of his business from a late-night crowd of students and the neighborhood’s sleepless old men. On my way home from studying, if the bus schedule allowed, I’d peruse the sidewalk cart in the glow of the front window’s Christmas lights, or go inside and examine the serpentine trail of novels that rounded the baseboards.
Two years later, after a series of semi-connected events that included 9/11, graduation, a cross-country move to Oregon, and quitting a dead-end job, I started my book editing business. In honor of Three Penny Books, I called it The Threepenny Editor. And at Christmastime, I went back to Pittsburgh for a visit and had my first real conversation with the owner; I gave him my card and told him how much his store meant to me. In one of life’s sad synchronicities, he told me that he was closing the store in a few weeks; like so many booksellers, he was pulling up stakes and moving his shop online.
We became friends. We started a thing that didn’t go well. But when he dispatched the last of his inventory, he made a generous gift that ranked among one of the best I’ve received in my life: the Encyclopedia Britannica 11, a noiseless Remington portable typewriter, a 1936 Royal typewriter, and a bookshelf of Orientalist relics ranging from Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta to Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples to N.M. Penzer’s The Harem.
Fast forward again, to five homes and four states later. These artifacts of Three Penny Books sit about six feet from my desk. They look nice but I usually don’t think about them. I have a business to run; and until my wife finishes medical school, I do all the cooking and housekeeping. Although people remember Sisyphus for struggling eternally with his boulder, he should have been glad not to have the task of cooking for two marathoners. I find that the mundane has a way of fogging up days at a time, and I wonder what my twenty-year-old self would think about living in San Antonio and being known among friends mainly for the quality of her stuffed mushrooms.
Literary ecumenicalism is stamped all over my memory of that bookstore, twisted into its front-window Christmas lights, inseparable from memories of college and coffee and walking home with a messenger bag full of books at midnight in a rainy Pittsburgh winter.
And I realized this made me sad. So yesterday, I turned off the computer. I watered the garden. And then, purely for the hell of it, I pulled N.M. Penzer’s The Harem off the shelf. I discovered that the illustrations among its broad, yellowed pages fold out into maps of the sultan’s palace, and that all male heirs to the throne were educated and imprisoned in a royal school called The Cage. But mostly, the book evoked Pittsburgh winters and being twenty and so absolutely excited about a brilliant, unknown future that I could afford to take my optimism about it for granted.
You know what I love about books? As easily as a map unfolds from the leaves of a forgotten volume, the right one at the right time can relocate one’s sense of curiosity and optimism. The uncharted world of a new manuscript is one of the few pristine frontiers left to explore. So today, on this first day of fall, I’m putting aside the spiritual catatonia that always descends between novels, and resolving to outline my next project by the end of October.
I’m reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. If you know it, you can guess why I am thinking about backstory and flashbacks. If you have not, it is a novel about a Greek hermaphrodite coming of age in industrial Detroit. Its plotting is an eccentric web of history and characters, and evokes shades of John Irving.
