Bibliotherapy

In PopMatters, Secondhand Wonderland: The World of the Used Book.

From the story:

Oh, new books have their pleasures. The uncracked spine, that Chip Kidd design, the author beautified in a portrait by Marion Ettlinger or Brigitte Lacombe. But they are so breathtakingly expensive, like gasoline. And they will not tell you the cauliflower cheese pie was “very good better the next day”. Nor will you find a new paperback called Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, translated before the hit film and the smoothing hand of translator Tina Nunnally. My 1950 edition of Madame Bovary contains line illustrations and, in lieu of a dustcover, a protective box. Fourteen bucks. My 1937 Marie Curie has no dust jacket, but carries the inscription “To Mom—with love—1939.” Six dollars. Six dollars for a book predating Israel, Iraq, the fool in the White House, television. The recipient is probably dead now. The giver, too.

I want these books, I need them to feel marginally human, and I can only get them in used bookstores, where the thick smell of paper commingles with dust and endless pages of nine-point font that make me squint though my trifocals.

I need used bookstores to pull me back from the edges, from where I reside, out on the furthest ends of the lonely long tail, geeky, still solitary. Only in used bookstores am I among my kind, people irresolutely stuck on prose, people who, like me, willingly navigate the Internet or try their own hands at novels, tapping, as I am this minute, into laptops smaller than magazines. People who return, with relief, to the calming sight of shelves and shelves of books, that soothing paper scent. We are as junkies amid a field of opium poppies, hopping amongst the blooms, Molly or otherwise.

And, as a brief point/counterpoint...

Why I Hate Second-Hand Books.