OK, I’m going to take a guess….you love books, huh? I’m not going to ask you if you prefer e-books to physical books, or vice versa, but two things recently got me thinking about book buying.
First up was the unexpected discovery of “bouquinistes” in Niort (I’ve only ever encountered this selling books from wooden boxes fastened to the wall at a the side of a river in Paris….didn’t know it happened anywhere else)
And the second was reading a fabulous essay by Gustavo Faverón Patriau about reading Borges and buying books. (Click through that link there, and read it, it is a treat)
He talks in that essay of buying books from a street of second hand booksellers in Lima and here’s the point he makes about buying the same books later in the US –
During these years, in Ithaca, New York and Brunswick, Maine, where I live now, I have bought once again many of the books I bought in those remote years, in different versions and editions, books that arrive by mail from unknown bookstores that I suspect do not exist, in parts of the country I have never been to, with yellow “used” stickers, impersonal, books that no human hand puts in mine, books without a context, that seem to materialize at my door. I read them and remember the first time I read them, how they impressed me, and I think of how, in my new copies, they seem to be different books, with different meanings. Now they tell me other things, or they do not tell me anything at all, certainly not what they told me then. The words seem weaker, immaterial, vague, powerless. What a contrast compared with the thrill they provoked in me when I saw those words in the yellow pages of the volumes I bought on Grau Avenue, in the second-hand copies I used to start reading while walking down the street or climbing on the bus, books that, later, when I placed them in my bookshelves at home, used to retain the smell of the street.
Have you ever had an experience like that?
Do you think that where you actually bought a book influences your reading experience of that book?
Heroes Not Zombies 
I wish I could recount a similar atmospheric tale about my first encounter with Borges. During a creative writing class I first heard about Borges from an enthusiastic young writer and my first copy came via Amazon. Nonetheless impressive and treasured. Believe it or not my first writing was about a mystical being called Wei Wung who is still a work in progress. Who knows what reading Borges did to my thinking?
Are we not all influenced by all that we read, hear and absorb from our experiences, even the smell of the books and their origin? All as Larry Dossey describes in One Mind where he says his thoughts are not ‘all his own but flow from an invisible company of informants’.
The where and when both influence my relationship with a book–but I suspect that it is the overall life environment making its mark. The books I treasure most with few exceptions date from my teens and twenties, and are associated with whatever was going on in my life at the time. For me, it’s the link with New York City and the West Village back before it got all cleaned up and gentrified, and while my mind was fresh and wide open–pure magic on every page.
Thank you Liz and Nan. Thanks for sharing – heart felt responses!