Lost … and found

National Review, Sept 28, 1998 by Richard Brookhiser

EVEN as the city is the capital of American book publishing, it is a center of used-book selling. Books begin their lives here new and hopeful; then, their hour past, they enter the afterlife of second-hand: not the eternity of Heaven but an interlude, like Valhalla, between death and extinction.

The largest of the city's used-book stores is the Strand -- ''8 MILES OF BOOKS'' -- on lower Broadway. That stretch of Broadway, plus nearby Fourth Avenue, was once lined with used-book stores; in 1924 Whittaker Chambers found Lenin's The Soviets at Work in the neighborhood, and began his long journey. Now the Strand is almost the only one left. Strand T-shirts sell at the check-out counter, and the clerks use computers, but the rest of the store looks unchanged from the days of the Soviets. Fluorescent tubes supply the light; fans with black blades move the air and the mold spores. The books rest on oversized shelves ten feet high, like dream furniture. The decorator must have liked brown linoleum, or maybe it was white once.

The selections range from dingy paperbacks, offered at five for two dollars -- sediment from high-school reading lists and corporate giveaways -- to pretentious multi-volume sets (lots of Carl Sandburg on Abraham Lincoln). Reviewers' copies, unloaded after a bored and hostile flip-through, are displayed up front. New York authors learn early: do not visit the Strand around pub date.

An eccentric friend of mine deals with the anxiety arising from this profusion with a system of randomized shopping: he rolls dice to pick an aisle, a shelf, and a volume (located by its distance from the shelf's end). By this means he once bought an Indian Five-Year Plan from 1959. ''You read that?'' I demanded.

''It went fast,'' he explained; ''there were lots of charts.''

The stock is not a mere reflection of all that has been published, however. If that were so, romances, detective stories, and evangelical literature would predominate. But those books sell to special audiences, which want one story told, repeatedly. Since they always get the same tale, whether of passion, crime, or salvation, they might as well buy something new and clean; and without a market for resales, such works do not wash up at the Strand. The Strand aims at that elusive being, the browsing general reader.

Washington Irving wisely compared the death of books to the yearly death of vegetation: if it weren't for frost, nothing new could ever grow. Still, it's hard on the vegetation. A writer toils for vanity, money, or maybe even because he has something to say. He jumps through the hoops of submissions to agents and submissions to editors; of galleys and page proofs. Perhaps he throws himself a party. The process makes him feel as if he is rising, to air and flight. But his book emerges in a heavier element, like water. Most founder immediately; a few sail along for a ways. The Strand is an eddy where they collect, like twigs, water striders, and last year's leaves. Egomaniacs dream of Homer, pleasing and shocking after three millennia (think what he could have made on foreign rights). Cyril Connolly proposed the more realistic goal of writing a book that would be read after ten years. Most of the books in the Strand are more than ten years old. Worse, so are their jackets: ''A startling up-to-the-minute look'' -- at Dwight Eisenhower, by John Gunther, in 1952.

Appropriately enough, the best books I ever found in the home of lost books were about a lost world -- the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These volumes appeared in 1910 - 11 and were dedicated, ''by permission,'' to His Majesty George V and to William Howard Taft. It was a high moment of Anglo-American civilization, with the emphasis still on the ''Anglo.'' Most of the contributors, briefly described at the head of each volume, have biographies like this: ''Chaplain, Oxford Diocesan Mission to the Deaf and Dumb''; ''Principal Music Critic for Daily Telegraph''; ''In charge of the collections of Reptiles and Fishes, Department of Zoology, British Museum.'' Occasionally there is a foreigner --''Chamberlain of H.M. the Emperor of Austria.'' But the Titanic has not sailed, and H.M.'s son has not gone to Sarajevo.

After a century of intermittent peace and seeming progress, the editors of the Britannica wanted to know everything, and put it in these green-backed volumes. If what you want to know didn't happen after the birth of Ronald Reagan, it is here, more thoroughly described than in any modern reference work (65 pages on ''China,'' for instance). Of course there are prejudices. ''Like all the other inhabitants of the Caucasus, the Circassians were distinguished for two very opposite qualities -- the most generous hospitality and implacable vindictiveness.'' ''General Tiresias Simon Sam followed and ruled [Haiti] till his flight to Paris in 1902. The usual civil war ensued . . .'' Every age knows everything, but many ages derive their knowledge from extrapolating revelations. The spirit of confident and fair-minded inquiry on which the age of the 11th edition relied looks, in retrospect, both admirable and limited. ''Though anti-Semitism has been unmasked and discredited, it is to be feared that its history is not yet at an end.''