Obsolete bookstores

We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books. In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient way to buy books in the twenty-first century, and it is certainly the case that we have become creatures of efficiency and convenience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Keep in mind that the above lines were written by a bookstore manager, Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. His career depends on bookstore sales, yet even he concedes bookstores have become unnecessary.

In today's world. where efficiency and convenience reign supreme, stores of almost every kind have become unnecessary. Some people even buy their cars online. Some people get Amazon deliveries of products almost daily. Grocery stores and restaurants will deliver food to your door. Pharmacies do the same, or you can use a drive-through so that you never have to actually enter the store. Many jobs you can do from home. Doctors no longer make house calls. Otherwise, you almost never have to leave home.

But our focus here is bookstores.

I rarely purchase books through Amazon, but two or three times a year I will order relatively rare books I cannot find elsewhere. More commonly I order books from the catalogs of Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller, a company that seems almost as obsolete as a bookstore. Hamilton has a website, but searching through thousands of book titles online can be oppressive. Their catalogs — several each month — are more fun to browse through. Some books are new, sold at discount. Others are remaindered, meaning they did not sell in bookstores and are now available at more extreme discounts.

Then you list the books you want, write a check and send the order form through the U.S. mail, all steps that seem somehow old-fashioned but yet work perfectly well, even though it can take weeks for delivery, not like an Amazon truck showing up in a day or two.

Yet I prefer shopping in bookstores, those few that remain. I like the atmosphere of a bookstore — shelves full of books, tables piled high with books, people who love books, like me, looking for treasures in print.

Just as many of us would rather hold an item of clothing in our hands, try it on and look at ourselves in a mirror before purchasing it, rather that ordering it online and perhaps having to send it back, many of book lovers prefer holding books in our hands. We like to read the cover, leaf through the pages and perhaps read a few lines before making a purchase. I have placed books back on at the shelf simply because I didn't like how they felt.

As long as there are people like us — people who prefer shopping and eating at an actual business, rather than doing everything online and never having a reason to leave home — these businesses will hang on, obsolete or not. Bookstores included.

The wonder in literature

Bryce Canyon

We mostly associate the phrase "state of wonder" with the natural world. A starry night, a glorious sunset, our first glimpse of Bryce Canyon or even a walk through a woods on a perfect autumn day can give us this feeling of wonder.

European cathedrals or skyscrapers can do the same, as can extremely unlikely coincidences, the first glimpse of our newborn son or daughter and a few other experiences in life. But what of literature? Can we experience wonder when we read?

I think the search for wonder may be one of our main motivations for reading. When we read thrillers, for example, some wonder comes with each plot twist. Because there can be so many of them in one novel, thrillers are extremely popular. The fingering of the killer in a murder mystery, usually an unlikely suspect, gives us the wonder we have been reading the whole novel to discover.

In other types of fiction, wonder takes different forms. Often it is found in the perfect sentence somewhere in the midst of a novel where we discover what the title really means or what the story is actually about, when we had thought it was about something else. Sometimes we discover that a character is not the kind of person we had thought all along. Or it may come when the main character, at the end of the story, takes some action we had not foreseen. Sometimes a lovely metaphor offers wonder.

In fiction, revelation provides wonder. Surprise provides wonder. Beauty provides wonder. Not unlike Bryce Canyon

Voting for W.C. Fields

"Is it possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields?" Dick Cavett asks in his foreword to a 2016 reprint of Fields for President, a book Fields wrote for his mock campaign for president in 1940.

Well, yes, it is possible to be funnier than W.C. Fields. Even in his prime, Fields was not funny to everyone. And even those of us who have laughed at his movies over the years have not laughed at everything he did. He had hits and misses, like everyone else who tries to be funny.

His book, which undoubtedly has lost some of its humor over 85 years, has some of both.

Fields's "platform" for the presidency covers seven subjects: marriage, income tax, resolutions (or campaign promises), etiquette, physical fitness, the care of babies and business success. He devotes a chapter to each.

Regarding marriage, he says, "Never try to impress a woman! Because if you do she'll expect you to keep up the standard for the rest of your life." A hit.

On the income tax, he says, "In other words, the government fixes it so that you have a choice of (1) starving to death by having an income so low that you do not have to pay a tax; or (2) have an income high enough to pay a tax — and then starving to death after you've paid it." A hit.

As for kissing babies on the campaign trail, he writes, "I always carried a number of sterilized blindfolds, which I would casually place over each baby's eyes before I kissed it. This prevented its growth from being stunted through terror." Another hit.

The comic's misses tend to come when he gets wordy, as in a long story about a common house fly on the wall at Harvard Medical School that ends up getting a degree. What does this have to do with running for president? Not much, and the humor ends long before the story does.

Those who love W.C. Fields will find enough pleasure here to make reading the book worthwhile. Others should simply avoid it.