The lives of secondhand books

‘Books, like lovers or friends, mark and change us. And we, in turn, mark and change them.’ Melbourne novelist Cath Crowley writes about her longtime love of secondhand bookshops, and how the histories she found and imagined there led her to write Words in Deep Blue.

I’d been writing the end of my father without knowing. At least that’s what it felt like, when, during one of the many drafts of my novel, I received the phone call. Cured of cancer, he’d had a stroke the next day, leaving us slowly in the week that followed.

He’d been helping with my novel for years by that stage. A poetry-loving economist, he’d searched for the logic of my book. ‘What is it about?’ he’d ask. I’d read from my research, tantalising scribbles I was certain held the answer.

‘The skin of old books, the smell of newspaper but sharper, age spots on paper, books ageing differently, ageing like humans with lives on their skins, history,’ I’d said. ‘It’s about the history held in secondhand books.’

‘Yes, but what’s the story?’

The answer was somewhere in the secondhand shops I’d visited – The Known World Bookshop in Ballarat, and Alice’s Bookshop in Carlton North. It was somewhere in shelves aching with history, in loved copies of Dickens dusted with dreams.

While writing this piece, I looked over my notes from Alice’s Bookshop. My research for fiction isn’t ordered. There are no dates; past and present blur. Time feels loose, I’ve written in my journal.

Without dates, I can only write that I met Ellen, then co-owner of Alice’s Bookshop, years ago. She sat behind a glass counter containing delicate books. I didn’t learn her name on that visit. I don’t learn it until I return to say I’ve finished writing my novel. By that visit, Ellen and her husband, Josh, will be living overseas, having sold the bookshop to Luke Terbutt and Selina Braine.

It will be bookseller Ruth Gamble behind the counter. Ruth, who answers the question that lingers from the day I met Ellen: What does the front counter remind me of? She will tell me that the counter ‘makes the books look like cakes’, that it looks like a patisserie. With her careful way of speaking, pausing as if to pluck the words needed from the books around her, it will be Ruth who informs me of the shop’s changed history.

But first, there was Ellen Boyd Green, who spoke passionately about her love of ephemera, a thrilling conversation about books being vehicles for history. About her search of every book, selling them on with the memories she found still inside.

After I met Ellen, I became more obsessed with secondhand books. I located my old copy of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, to see again the line drawn around Hart Crane’s quote from ‘The Broken Tower’ – ‘And so it was I entered the broken world …’

I knew the stranger’s marking around the broken world was the answer. Books, like lovers, mark and change us, and in turn, we mark and change them. Rachel, the main character in Words in Deep Blue, emerged as a girl overcoming grief by finding her lost brother in books.

After such certainty, I felt a fraud when that call arrived and I turned away from my father’s books. Afraid of his memory trapped there – tobacco, small strings of my mother’s wool, his thoughts – I hid them from myself.

Rachel seemed ridiculous. I might love the idea of loose time, but poetry doesn’t return our dead. I abandoned secondhand bookshops. I read shiny-covered novels.

Months later, I met a bookseller who, unbeknown to me, would later become my husband. He spoke to me of bookshops, of the humour and love in them. He spoke of ideas that could travel through time.

By coincidence, perhaps, my mother called soon after to say that she had found the cards written by her to my father, hidden in the pages of his books. Listening to her, and a man I didn’t yet know would be my husband, I was ready to open his books again.

When I saw my father’s handwriting on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, sharp with gentle edges, the way I viewed time changed again. There seemed a comforting thickness to it, no longer loose, there was now enough strength in time to hold memories. My father was held tight by the books he loved.

I asked Ruth to predict the future of secondhand bookshops. When she wouldn’t answer, I asked what she loves about them. ‘There’s an archaeology of soul in a bookshop,’ she said. ‘They are layer upon layer.’ I remembered that it was Ellen who told me about an encyclopedia of plants. She’d found pressed flowers in it, marking the pages of a stranger’s loved flora. On this visit to Alice’s Bookshop I imagined, as I did the last time, those flowers surviving as skeletons.

Ruth told me before I left that she’s not even entertaining the end of secondhand bookshops. ‘The poets are going to save the world,’ she said.

There was agreement from the other customers, and me, that they would.

Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley is published by Pan Macmillan.