In “The Falling Girl,” Marta, a woman of nineteen, is looking over the roof of a skyscraper. Before that, inventory control was an index card. Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? In those days, Barnes & Noble cashiers would ring up each ISBN manually. Imagine a world in which nothing can be scanned. But I just checked online and that’s the first U.S. I must have splurged and didn’t know what I was buying except that I liked Italian literature. Twelve dollars was a lot to pay for a slender trade paperback in June of 1983 but it was a quality North Point Press book. The sticker reads “BARNES AND NOBLE NO REFUND W/0 LABEL 6 83 12.00”. For all I know, I had stamped the book myself. My copy of Buzzati has a yellow Barnes & Noble sticker on it from when I worked there. It’s like passing through an old back alley of literature, where you haven’t been seen for years. But those old books, that wouldn’t be worth five cents at the Strand bookstore, are the ones that I love the most. Sometimes they’re almost invisible between five and six hundred page/pound masterpieces. Those trash-me-please books are easy to miss. But when you buy a trade paperback, it’s your own imagination that’s telling you what’s important. Maybe with the big sets it’s the publisher telling you what’s important. While interspersed among them are these battered old trade paperbacks that I couldn’t bear to get rid of. I don’t know why but it’s often the big glossy library sets in my bookcases that go untouched.
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