{"id":1810,"date":"2009-06-02T23:42:03","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T06:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=1810"},"modified":"2009-06-02T23:47:32","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T06:47:32","slug":"saving-books-and-finding-a-rare-don-quixote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/06\/02\/saving-books-and-finding-a-rare-don-quixote\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Books and Finding a Rare Don Quixote"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My wife and I were knocking around New York City last week because we visited the excellent show of Picasso paintings and etchings at the Gagosian Gallery<\/em> on West 21st Street.\u00a0 Afterward, we stopped into The Strand<\/em> bookstore in Greenwich Village.\u00a0 They were selling the book that accompanies the Picasso show for a full twenty dollars less than the gallery.\u00a0 We decided to go next door to the store’s rare book department where they keep their very valuable and dusty old tomes for the serious collectors of New York.\u00a0 We went through the steel door and felt that we were entering the high-security wing.\u00a0 The smell of decaying literature was immediate and sort of relaxing as all rotten literature should be.\u00a0 We walked around quietly as the employees set up tables of wine glasses for a publisher’s party that would be starting shortly.<\/p>\n

I soon found myself strolling down a narrow aisle toward a large window with a massive old air conditioner cranking away near the ceiling.\u00a0 I could feel the cold air flowing past me and after walking all over the Village it was a welcome respite.\u00a0 I came to the shelf near the window and noticed a wonderful illustrated volume full of Shakespeare’s history plays.\u00a0 I pulled it out and began to flip through and was amazed to find a picture on nearly every page.\u00a0 I wanted it.\u00a0 I was also enjoying the cold air and the nice fine spray of water droplets on and about my head and shoulders.\u00a0 ‘Ahh, misters,’ I thought to myself languidly.\u00a0 ‘They must think of everything here because of the serious collectors who come through each day.\u00a0 They must be kept comfortable in the heat or they will go elsewhere.’<\/p>\n

So I continued to flip through Henry the Fifth<\/em> and wondered if one hundred and twenty-five dollars was a lot to pay for the histories.\u00a0 But I didn’t want to leave the misters yet because they were cooling me very nicely… ‘Misters?,’ I thought.\u00a0 ‘Misters?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Water spraying about my head in the rare books department?\u00a0 What on earth kind of idea is this?’ I looked up at the air conditioner and was met with an increased volume of cold water against my face.\u00a0 Then I looked down at the shelf of rare books beneath the windowsill and saw a large puddle of water on the shelf and droplets of water spattered far and wide over an intimidating selection of fine rare books.\u00a0 ‘This just can’t be right,’ I thought as I backed away quietly.\u00a0 I had a bizarre impulse to gather my wife silently and flee.\u00a0 But I could find no apparent wrongdoing in my situation so I halted.<\/p>\n

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I turned and walked toward the nearest employee who was researching something at a desk.\u00a0 ‘Excuse me, but… um… there is water pouring out all over your old books back here,’ I said.<\/p>\n

‘I’m sorry?’ the woman said, looking up from her work.\u00a0 ‘Water?’<\/p>\n

‘Yes.\u00a0 There’s a big spray of water coming out of the air conditioner and a puddle and wet books,’ I said.<\/p>\n

She stood up slowly and stared at me as if I were a lunatic.\u00a0 Then she turned away from me and called out to a man far up an aisle, ‘Hey, this guy says there’s some water pouring out all over the books.’<\/p>\n

The man yelled, ‘What?\u00a0 Water?\u00a0 What?’\u00a0 He ran toward the window and screamed, ‘Oh god!\u00a0 Oh no!\u00a0 Oh my god!\u00a0 Water!\u00a0 There’s water everywhere!’<\/p>\n

Within seconds, six or seven people were milling about with towels, yelling at each other, blotting at puddles and spatters, and pulling books out of the shelves to remove them from harm’s way.<\/p>\n

I walked up to the manager and said, ‘I guess I caused a shit-storm.’<\/p>\n

He was not even remotely interested in my asinine humor and growled, ‘Well, we’re just taking care of the problem.’<\/p>\n

Then my wife asked someone if perhaps they had any old copies of Don Quixote<\/em> lying around.\u00a0 They did.\u00a0 They had this wonderful English translation by Charles Jarvis<\/em> that was printed in 1809.\u00a0 It was cheap because of a replaced front cover on one of the volumes.\u00a0 So I bought it.\u00a0 It was from a dry section of the bookstore.\u00a0 It’s the one in the little video.\u00a0 If you want to know what literature is for, just read Don Quixote.\u00a0 It’s a book that’s filled with every bit of humankind’s love for books and stories.\u00a0 It’s about the obsession with literature that can turn one’s entire world into something that no one else understands or even sees.\u00a0 It’s about how imagination is life itself.\u00a0 It’s about how the misguided man at the complete mercy of his own imaginings and his total belief in the stories he reads actually lives a life of profound interest and deep connection to the world that most people miss by being trapped in a world of normalcy and the rational mundane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife and I were knocking around New York City last week because we visited the excellent show of Picasso paintings and etchings at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street.\u00a0 Afterward, we stopped into The Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village.\u00a0 They were selling the book that accompanies the Picasso show for a full twenty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,78],"tags":[439,438],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literature","tag-cervantes","tag-don-quixote"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1818,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions\/1818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}