{"id":41358,"date":"2012-12-28T14:30:32","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T19:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=41358"},"modified":"2013-02-03T15:40:40","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T20:40:40","slug":"book-shopping-with-the-best-read-man-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/28\/book-shopping-with-the-best-read-man-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Shopping with the Best-Read Man in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

I was dragging my five-year-old daughter through the musty stacks of my favorite used bookstore last spring when a middle-aged man, squatting in the Sci-Fi section next to a brimming cardboard box, caught my eye and reminded me of someone.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcuse me,\u201d I asked, \u201care you a writer?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am,\u201d he said, standing up and straightening his glasses. His eyes were deep set and hard to read. He was bashful.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you Michael Dirda?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was him: the book critic and author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, known apocryphally as the best-read man in America, whose essays had enticed me to read everything from Little, Big<\/em> to Three Men in a Boat<\/em>\u2014and here he was, squinting his way through the lowest shelves in the same crusty bargain dungeon I came to all the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazing. Nina, this is the man who wrote that little letter that we have in your George and Martha,\u201d I told my daughter. Nina was nonplussed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was eight, in 1992,\u201d I explained, \u201cI wrote a letter to the Washington Post<\/em> when James Marshall died and you printed it in the Book World section and even wrote a sweet little response. And her grandpa put a photocopy of that letter in The Complete George and Martha<\/em> for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s incredible.\u201d He kneeled down to talk directly to Nina. \u201cDo you like those books?\u201d She buried her face in my leg. \u201cWell, I love them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I told Dirda that I write about literature as well, mostly online and only semiprofessionally. He seemed amazed that a person half his age would recognize him by sight. But I had. Dirda is the kind of critic I aim to be whenever I write reviews\u2014expert, excitable, and possessed of a catholic taste. This is of course how every book reviewer thinks of him or herself, but Dirda has the widest-ranging interests of any reader I know, and his unadorned yet eloquent style foregrounds the sheer pleasure of reading more than any critic alive.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t so bizarre that we should run into him: the Post<\/em> has been his bread and butter for decades, and my family lives in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. That store, in the basement of the Wheaton Public Library, is also a magnet for any reader in the vicinity; the stock turns over constantly, the volume is overwhelming, and most books go for two dollars or less. I\u2019d whittled away at my income ever since we moved to the area. But Dirda? The man who seems to have read everything, and then read everything about everything? What could have possibly been in that box? I sat in bed that night and thought that if you could poke around a book-hunter\u2019s paradise like that with a guy like that, you\u2019d have a fine view of what the farthest-ranging literary mind looks like in its natural habitat.<\/p>\n

A few months later I broke down and asked him by email: Want to go shopping?<\/p>\n

He was already in the store, browsing the lonely shelf of VHS tapes, when I arrived at our appointed time, four thirty\u00a0P.M. We were dressed so similarly I worried other people might think I was some kind of acolyte: nice suburban earth tones, green Eddie Bauer\/L.L. Bean coats. In our emails Dirda had seemed bemused that anyone would want to follow him around as he shopped, but he went to work once we said our hellos.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s go over to the entrance, pretend we walked in together.\u201d He walked fast.<\/p>\n

We stopped first at a tall, narrow shelf along the arterial walkway of the store, a shelf I\u2019d never noticed before. \u201cI always begin at the classic editions,\u201d Dirda said. He scanned deliberately, pulling out any volume whose spine was blank just to make sure it wasn\u2019t some hidden gem. I asked if he stuck to the same itinerary each time he came here.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, more or less. Sometimes I skip a section.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how often did he shop at this place anyway?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEh, about once a week or so. I work from home so this is my break.\u201d He browsed as he talked, pulling out illustrated volumes like The Green Fairy Book<\/em> and Morley\u2019s The Haunted Bookshop<\/em>. Nothing worth hanging on to, but still he bent down to complete the stack.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlways bend down,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s how you find the sweetest strawberries.\u201d And there it was, the day\u2019s first catch: a German edition of Hamlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Schlegel and Tieck translations are classics in themselves.\u201d He put the book under his arm.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just a sucker for pretty books,\u201d Dirda explained as we turned into the kids\u2019 section. \u201cAnything glossy and new is probably not interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how many of these pretty things does he own, anyway?<\/p>\n

\u201cImpossible to say,\u201d he said, reaching for a hardcover of The Wind and the Willows<\/em>. \u201cMaybe ten thousand? Most are in boxes. I have a storage unit, too. I keep the ones I haven\u2019t read on the shelves in my living room to pressure myself.\u201d I\u2019m familiar with this tactic. The largest shelf in my office at home is filled with unread books, most purchased at this very bookstore.<\/p>\n

The Grahame didn\u2019t hold his interest, so we turned around and started on the picture books. He lingered at the Sci-Fi\/Series shelf, where yellow and blue Hardy Boys hardcovers dominated. He sighed. \u201cI check every time for Rick Brant\u2019s \u2018Electronic Adventure\u2019 series and usually get nothing. Also anything Tom Swift. I love that stuff. Boy heroes.\u201d Having exhausted that shelf, he led me down the walkway toward the classics.<\/p>\n

Without a pause he found Arnold Bennett\u2019s The Card<\/em> in a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic edition, the kind with the mint-green spine. This was a book Dirda had read before, and the kind of glossy candy he\u2019d just advised me to avoid. He studied it for a moment; then it went under his arm.<\/p>\n

As if he hadn\u2019t just notched a trade paperback in his elbow, Dirda expressed a fondness for \u201cproper editions,\u201d not necessarily first but something close, the better to protect the \u201cglamour\u201d of the book. He prefers hardcovers, a point on which we disagree strongly, though I didn\u2019t bother to argue.<\/p>\n

We continued down the Classics section. \u201cIf you haven\u2019t read Pym<\/em>, this is the one,\u201d he said, picking up an orange-spine pocket-size Penguin edition of Poe\u2019s only novel. \u201cIt\u2019s edited and annotated by Harold Beaver, whose work with Moby-Dick<\/em> is also great.\u201d\u00a0 Whenever I looked at a recommendation and put it back he seemed disappointed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He paused at Stendhal, who in a couple different interviews he\u2019s identified as his favorite writer. A clothbound, jacketless copy of The Private Diaries of Stendhal<\/em> caught his eye and he began to flip through. Then he stuffed it back on the shelf dismissively and pointed out the librarian chickenscratch added to the spine in white marker. \u201cYou never want to have a book that ugly,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

Dirda zoomed through the classics, picking up mainly things he\u2019d already read just to revisit them. He was compelled to flip through a hardcover of Twain\u2019s Letters from the Earth<\/em>, an edition he remembered reading as a young man. It was edited by Charles Neider, who compiled the first published edition of Twain\u2019s autobiography, and according to Dirda, \u201cAnything Neider is suspicious. He plays fast and loose.\u201d Nevertheless, Letters from the Earth<\/em> went under the arm.<\/p>\n

So this is how a man acquires 10,000-odd books, more than he could ever display or read. It\u2019s a combination of maniacal persistence and utter nostalgic whimsy. You have to be willing to search high and low for a potential beauty, but most of the time you\u2019ll take a Book Club hardcover of a book you don\u2019t like if it reminds you of something from your past.<\/p>\n

As if to illustrate the point, Dirda found a mass-market paperback of Black Alice<\/em>, by Thomas Disch and John Sladek. Dirda was a friend of Disch until the sci-fi author killed himself in 2008. \u201cHe was a wonderfully cynical man,\u201d Dirda said. \u201cI have a first edition of this but I\u2019ll get it anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another nostalgic goldmine: M.F.K. Fisher\u2019s Two Towns in Provence<\/em>. \u201cAn incredible writer,\u201d he said. \u201cI reviewed the Marseilles book at the Post<\/em> and I read the Aix-en-Provence book to prepare. She roomed in Aix with a Madame Wytenhove, who I also lived with, back in 1968. So Fisher and I shared a bed, albeit twenty years apart.\u201d Despite all this, he left the book behind.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, and here\u2019s the greatest book ever,\u201d he said a minute later, pulling down a trade paperback of Joseph Mitchell\u2019s Up in the Old Hotel<\/em>. \u201cI use it when I teach writing.\u201d I couldn\u2019t resist that recommendation, matched as it was with years of guilt for never having read Mitchell.<\/p>\n

We crossed the walkway and entered the Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy, and Mystery stacks. Here is where Dirda really came to life. He first pulled down a copy of his friend Alberto Manguel\u2019s brick-sized omnibus Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Fiction<\/em>. \u201cAbsolutely brilliant,\u201d he said, and though it looked like a ton of fun, the spine was cracked in multiple places, so I demurred.<\/p>\n

Near the floor, Dirda found a third-edition hardcover of Bradbury\u2019s The Illustrated Man<\/em>. He was enchanted. It went on the top of the pile, which was now resting nearby on the cement floor. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about him since he died, but I haven\u2019t read Bradbury in a while,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill you be able to read that soon?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

He laughed at the very idea. \u201cNo, definitely not.\u201d<\/p>\n

He found more books by Disch and three hardcovers by L.P. Davies, which he studied for a second and then tossed in the pile.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI like pretty much any kind of sci-fi,\u201d Dirda explained, \u201cBut especially nineteenth-century lost civilization novels.\u201d He then found a gleaming copy of The World\u2019s Best Science Fiction Vol. 2<\/em>, which looked like it hadn\u2019t been read or touched since the late 1960s. \u201cIt looks and feels English,\u201d Dirda said, running his fingers along the edges of the cover. Indeed, it was a little narrow and tall for a typical American hardcover. He took it. Then another, more beaten-up hardcover: a first edition of John Brunner\u2019s Stand on Zanzibar<\/em>, which he said was stylistically equivalent to Dos Passos\u2019s U.S.A. trilogy. He took that too.<\/p>\n

Dirda\u2019s haul had become unwieldy. \u201cAt this point, I get a box,\u201d he said, and then disappeared around the corner, leaving me amid the walls of neon fonts and cartoon rayguns. When he returned he held up the old cardboard and explained, sage-like, \u201cAlways get one with handles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dirda found a copy of The Voyage to Arcturus<\/em> and held it out to me, calling it a \u201cgnostic fantasy.\u201d This particular copy featured an introduction by the nature writer Loren Eiseley, whom I love; I was glad to see a familiar name. \u201cEiseley\u2019s so wonderful,\u201d I said, hoping Dirda might agree. But his mind was elsewhere, namely a group of mass-market paperbacks at knee-height.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, here we go,\u201d he said, kneeling down quickly. They were the six volumes of Fritz Lieber\u2019s \u201cSwords\u201d series, apparently. \u201cI have these books, so I shouldn\u2019t even be holding them,\u201d Dirda said, staring at them longingly. Then he put the whole group in the box. I was beginning to suspect that, if freed from obligations to family, career, and basic sustenance, Dirda would gladly lock himself in a room full of yellowing paperbacks with spaceships on the cover. I asked him if there was any variety of pulp he couldn\u2019t abide.<\/p>\n

\u201cWesterns,\u201d he said immediately. \u201cIt\u2019s the one genre I don\u2019t know much about. Though I love the best ones: Little Big Man<\/em> and Lonesome Dove<\/em>.\u201d More books came dancing out in his hands: Jan Potocki\u2019s The Sargasso Manuscript<\/em>, Tim Powers\u2019 The Anubis Gates<\/em>, a compilation called Nightmare Age<\/em> edited by Frederik Pohl, Thorne Smith\u2019s Night Life of the Gods<\/em>. He then found a copy of Russell Hoban\u2019s Riddley Walker<\/em> and held it in the loving way I was beginning to recognize. \u201cNow this,\u201d he said, \u201cthis is one of the great books of our time.\u201d I have a copy at home, bought years earlier on the strength of a Dirda essay. For probably the fiftieth time, I resolved to it read it imminently.<\/p>\n

We entered the Mystery section. \u201cI\u2019d love to see more fifties paperback originals in this place,\u201d he said, scanning. Then he happened on an ancient jacketless black artifact on the highest shelf, Dorothy Sayers\u2019s\u00a0Omnibus of Crime<\/em>. Of all the books I looked at that night, this was the one that Dirda sang the highest praise for. I thought he might sit and read all of its 700-odd pages right there in the aisle. \u201cIt\u2019s half thriller stuff, half horror,\u201d he said, with the kind of disbelieving glee that I remember feeling when I first discovered you could mix Slurpee flavors.<\/p>\n

He lamented that contemporary authors didn\u2019t read Agatha Christie\u2014\u201cThey could learn how to plot\u201d\u2014but for the most part Dirda was quiet in these stacks. His most recent book concerned Arthur Conan Doyle, and he said he was currently reviewing a new collection where crime authors pick their favorite novels. For this reason I suspect that the Mystery section was as close as I got to seeing Dirda work. He was leisurely but intent, offering a quick summation of nearly every author\u2019s career as we moved through the alphabet. He made recommendations, of course: Josephine Tey\u2019s The Daughter of Time<\/em>, Harry Kemelman\u2019s The Nine-Mile Walk<\/em>, dozens more, mostly British stuff from the twenties through the forties. He liked \u201cGolden Age mysteries,\u201d he said, \u201cbooks with a serious puzzle.\u201d He made a forceful case for Ross Thomas\u2019s Chinaman\u2019s Chance<\/em>, even recalling its byzantine opening line from memory before opening the book to check himself. Out of respect for that display of belle lettristic muscle, I took the ex-library, shifted-spine hardcover under my own arm as we moved toward the History section.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Looking at The Oxford Book of Exploration<\/em>, Dirda mused, \u201cAny Oxford book of this-or-that is worth getting, though I don\u2019t care much about exploration.\u201d At which point a mustachioed man appeared and greeted Dirda. \u201cHi, Dan,\u201d Dirda replied, as if he\u2019d seen the guy ten minutes ago. \u201cJohn, this is Dan Smith. Dan, John.\u201d It turned out that Dan was a fellow collector and seller, also scavenging. They\u2019d both worked at the same crummy D.C. bookshop decades ago. \u201cNo money, we worked for trade,\u201d Dirda explained. I took this to be the book-addict equivalent of being \u201cin the shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan was disappointed by the stock these days. He\u2019d been looking for first-edition early John McPhee, stuff like Oranges<\/em> and The Headmaster<\/em>. \u201cI did find a good Zola bio that you might be interested in,\u201d said Dan. \u201cLeft it over there for you.\u201d Dirda didn\u2019t look up from a first-edition hardcover of Edward Sevareid\u2019s World War II reportage. \u201cSelection\u2019s always spotty in a place like this,\u201d Dan continued. \u201cYou\u2019re stuck with whatever\u2019s left after the employees take the first look.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the lay of the land in these places,\u201d Dirda agreed. They sounded like veteran border patrol cops looking at a lawless Mexican town through the chain-link.<\/p>\n

We went to Biography\/Memoir, where Dirda plucked out a few things without taking them: Kenneth Clarke\u2019s Another Part of the World<\/em>; The Man Who Knew Infinity<\/em>; a biography of the author of Goodnight Moon<\/em>; a charmingly decrepit copy of Goodbye to All That<\/em>. Toward the end he saw Dan\u2019s Zola bio. It was a hardcover, kind of drab. \u201cIt\u2019s a nice book for a short life,\u201d Dirda said noncommittally. \u201cI think I reviewed it.\u201d Then he tossed it in the box.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d left our piles back in Mysteries, and since Dirda appeared to be slowly accepting the fact that we\u2019d picked all we could, he led me back. I asked him what went into his final considerations.<\/p>\n

\u201cCost. The likelihood that I might read it. Scarcity,\u201d he said, in no apparent order of priority. Lording over a pile of a twenty or thirty books, he told me, \u201cI haven\u2019t found anything extraordinary.\u201d Dirda held up two copies of A. Merritt\u2019s Dwellers in the Mirage<\/em> and admitted, \u201cIt\u2019s a question sometimes of whether I like the covers.\u201d He opted for the more classic block-letters-and-lunar-hellscape edition. When he went to reshelve the other we suddenly began browsing again, like partiers grabbing a cocktail after putting their coats back on. I recognized this junkie crawl, the last-ditch attempt to find some astonishing rarity before quitting for the day.<\/p>\n

But this time I felt armed with expert knowledge. I ended up selecting some books I\u2019d never heard of an hour before but which I now recognized as masterworks: Trent\u2019s Last Case,<\/em> by E.C. Bentley; an Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop<\/em>;\u00a0and a wonderfully titled novel, The Three Coffins<\/em>, by John Dickson Carr. When Dirda put his paperback of Black Alice<\/em> in the no-go pile, I swooped it up and exchanged it with Chinaman\u2019s Chance<\/em>. Dirda disapproved. \u201cChinaman\u2019s Chance <\/em>is the better novel,\u201d he said, a little sad for my bad judgment. But I had a real strategy in mind here: a handful of classics, all in old but solid editions with lovely cover art, and an attractive odd duck thrown in just to feel adventurous. I felt good. It would be eight dollars well spent, including Up in Old Hotel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was past seven o\u2019clock. Dark had fallen and the shop would be closing soon. Dirda\u2019s final pile included the Bradbury, Davies, Twain, the Zola bio, and an extremely handsome book of C\u00e9zanne prints that he\u2019d poached, in passing, from the Art shelf. There were others, things I didn\u2019t recognize and things that looked, in all honesty, like juvenile garbage. But if I\u2019d learned anything by following him around, it was that you don\u2019t get to be the best-read man in America by giving a damn about someone else\u2019s taste. You buy and read books that entice you for small reasons like a good cover or an intelligent introduction, books that appeal to your eccentricities. You keep as many books as possible nearby because they are in fact the very record of your eccentricities.<\/p>\n

“Are you hungry?\u201d Dirda asked as we lined up to pay. But I had to decline and get home to my family. So I waited for him as he made his purchase, then walked him out to the parking lot and thanked him for letting me eavesdrop on his off-time. He was grateful as ever but couldn\u2019t shake my hand; he was holding both box handles and leaning toward his car. Time to welcome the new beauties home.<\/p>\n

John Lingan’s writing has appeared in <\/em>The Quarterly Conversation, <\/em>Slate, <\/em>The Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>The Awl, and other places. He’s working on a memoir about becoming a father in college. Follow him @busybeinglingan<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! I was dragging my five-year-old daughter through the musty stacks of my favorite used bookstore last spring when a middle-aged man, squatting in the Sci-Fi section next to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":435,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6567,9140,9133,5893,17,2574,9135,1759,9142,1320,9134,4083,9137,9141,5892,9138,1766,9128,5029,9131,948,711,9136,9129,9132,9139,7246,9130],"class_list":["post-41358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-agatha-christie","tag-alberto-manguel","tag-arnold-bennett","tag-big","tag-books","tag-bookstores","tag-charles-neider","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-franz-lieber","tag-hamlet","tag-harold-beaver","tag-herman-melville","tag-john-sladek","tag-l-p-davies","tag-little","tag-m-f-k-fisher","tag-mark-twain","tag-michael-dirda","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-rick-brant","tag-shakespeare","tag-stendhal","tag-thomas-disch","tag-three-men-in-a-boat","tag-tom-swift","tag-up-in-the-old-hotel","tag-washington-post","tag-wheaton-public-library"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBook Shopping with the Best-Read Man in America by John Lingan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 28, 2012 \u2013 We\u2019re out this week, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we\u2019re away. 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