This weekend I had a glimpse into a different world: the Old Book & Paper Show.
Imagine an indoor market, four long rows of tables laden with vintage paper products of all kinds. Advertisements, magazines, maps, trading cards, postcards, comic books, WWII propaganda posters, concert programs – ephemera, they’re called, the sort of thing that most people would throw away, that might gain value after years. (The nightmare of a person already prone to keeping clutter, or perhaps more accurately the nightmare of the person who shares a home with her…)
These collectibles made me curious as I passed other browsers flipping through boxes of advertisements catalogued by type (for example, televisions that looked like chests of drawers and promised the very latest in black-and-white picture technology). What were they looking for? What did they collect? How did they display it?
I may keep a lot of stuff, but not systematically; I’m not a collector of anything, unless you count Internet bookmarks. One of my passions, besides writing, is facts about anything and everything. (That’s par for the course for a writer. See KD Sarge’s post on this very blog, Hey, Mister, Got a Fact?) What tickles my brain is knowledge generally, not any one field – hence my fascination with more focused collectors.
Besides the ephemera, the market also featured books. I saw everything from a first-edition Sherlock Holmes anthology (priced in the upper three digits, alas) to crumbling mid-century pulp mysteries and science fiction. Somewhere in between, I spotted a history book bearing a flyleaf inscription in fading ink: it had been given to a boy for being first in his class in Latin, sometime in the late nineteenth century. There was a 1937 science fiction novel entitled The Moon Colony, complete with unlikely cover art of aliens riding giant grasshoppers; slim books about the histories of small towns; a set of Victorian poetry anthologies in English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian that had me wondering how many of the writers in them are remembered today and how many are (deservedly or not) lost to time.
I would dearly love a library full of old books like these, leather-bound nineteenth-century novels and histories with gilt edging and sewn-in fabric bookmarks. I dream of a library like Belle’s in Beauty and the Beast, or those that come up in online slideshows of “world’s most beautiful” libraries (more) and bookstores.
Sadly, I do most of my reading while I’m out and about, meaning that I’m much more likely to read a paperback or an e-book than a beautiful hardcover work of art. And I’m not currently in a position to acquire books just for the eye candy. But for a little while, I was able to imagine that they were mine. And it was glorious.
Have you ever wandered into an unfamiliar subculture? What would your dream library look like?