GARDEN OF UNEARTHLY DELIGHTS

Miami Herald, The (FL)
January 26, 1997
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald staff writer.

The old man with the trim white mustache behind the counter at Jacksonville's San Marco used bookstore looked familiar. After 33 years, was it possible? No, surely not.

I decided to test him. “Do you remember a certain 1832 volume of Cicero's select orations, printed on rag paper in Turin, with the name of the former owner, Joseph Redlinger, stamped on the inside cover?” I asked.

John Blauer's face lit up. A true bookseller may forget a customer, but seldom a book.

“You remember my old shop,” he said. “We were across from the Florida Theater in 1963.”

At such times, handshakes are feeble and inadequate. I wanted to hug the old fellow. He didn't recognize my face, but I had changed more than he. Back then, I was just an empimpled milksop of a high-school sophomore, haunting the dim rooms of his store after school, while cooler classmates went out for football, or played in the band, or made goo-goo eyes at each other over soda fountain cherry Cokes.

The shop's name was simple and unforgettable: The Old Book Store. Blauer, now 73, had taught me more than many college professors, just by leaving me alone to browse, hour after silent hour.

“What a glorious time that was,” Blauer reminisced. “No Barnes & Noble, no Books-A-Million. My place and Cy Crawford's Book Mine were practically the biggest bookstores in Jacksonville.”

Aladdin's Cave

Sometimes you can go home again. Blauer's former shop was long-gone, and the building that housed it, with its lofty, tongue-in-groove wooden ceilings, had been torn down. But there stood Blauer himself, still in our midst, still practicing the only profession in which you can sell diamonds at zircon prices, and turn a profit: Bibliopoly, the used book trade.

“It's a very pleasant way to make a living, selling old books. I haven't gotten rich, but I've had a great time,” Blauer said. “The only time my blood pressure goes up, is when I find something really great. Selling books is fine, but finding books -- that's the real thrill.”

Reader, it is difficult to convey to you what a many-mansioned mindscape Blauer's old bookshop was, in those days. Jacksonville had a reputation as a blue-collar Budweiser and barbecue town, but Blauer's place was an Aladdin's Cave of dusty gems.

I remember buying a 13-volume History of Egypt by Prof. Gaston Maspero, superintendent of antiquities in Cairo, for about a dollar a volume, lavishly illustrated; and a three-volume edition of George Rawlinson's Ancient Near Eastern Monarchies for $5; I remember touching, but being unable to afford, a second edition of Lord Byron's Don Juan, priced at $15.

Some of the books bought in those days have flown away, as books will if they are not carefully watched. One that did not escape, however, is beside me as I write: The 1896 Century Atlas. In it, all of Africa is divided up into colonies, and much of China's coast is chopped into foreign concessions. Serbia is still called “Servia,” and Czechoslovakia is still part of the “Austrian Empire.” Imaginary volcanoes are located in Tibet, and the North Pole is largely blank, labeled “Unexplored.”

It was reassuring, at age 15, to see that I didn't have a monopoly on ignorance.

How did Blauer get into the business?

“I've been a reader ever since I was laid up with rheumatic fever as a child and read for nine months straight,” the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., native said. “I was selling furniture in Jacksonville, a real ho-hum job. Every lunch hour I would take my brown bag over to the Golden Fleece, an old bookshop across the street on West Adams. When the old man who owned it, Mr. Hall, retired in 1963, I bought his stock: 35,000 books, plus shelving, for $1,000.

“That sounds like a terrific bargain, but it was all the money I had. I was in real jeopardy of bankruptcy. I had to sell a lot of books fast, just to stay in business. You probably benefited from that,” Blauer answered.

Thrill of the Chase

“Benefited” is too pale a word. It is impossible to convey the keen, treasure-hunting thrill of browsing at Blauer's in those days. Library books are all very fine, but you have to give them back. Blauer's books, once bought, were all yours: powerful, secret servants – “slaves of the lamp” like the biddable genies of the Arabian Nights.

It was an indescribable thrill, just to open the door of the Old Book Store. The game was afoot! Only the first room was heated. The farther back one delved into the books, the colder it got. I remember looking at a late 19th Century Dante's Inferno illustrated by Gustave Dore, and shivering as I turned the pages. It was gorgeous. It was $8. I couldn't afford it! The agony!

The Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, imagines an eerie, infinite “Library of Babel,” in which books reached out forever through deserted, geometric spaces, embracing all possible knowledge, true and false.

Blauer's shop was the vestibule of Borges' endless library. In it, a large part of the world had already shipwrecked inside books: Truth and error were cheek by jowl, with no catalog or clue which was which. Thousands of books begged to be read, chaotically, in the weak lamplight. You were on your own.

Here was a huge set of the “Le Moniteur,” the newspaper published during the French Revolution, gigantically bound. And a Lippincott's Universal Gazetteer, done in the 1850s, when Archbishop Ussher had most people convinced the world was created on a certain morning in 4004 B.C.

Gradually it sank in, how long-lived old books can be. When one is handling an 1832 Cicero, with its creamy, cloth-soft rag paper pages still fresh after 164 years, one begins to look with new respect at this tough, simple medium for storing and transmitting knowledge. How many 3.5-inch computer discs, or CD-ROMS, or videotapes, are going to be accessible in 160 years?

“Buying books,” wrote the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, ``would be all very fine, if one could also buy the time in which to read them.'' When it comes to old books, possession is ten-tenths of the law. Possession possesses you.

Blauer's wife, Laura, knows. “He got into this business because books were spilling out of the house.”

“When you start double- and triple-stacking your bookshelves, putting books behind books and on top of books, then you know you're in trouble,” Blauer said. ``Now I limit myself to two or three hundred books at home. Anything over that, I put up for sale. In this business, you've got to sell to buy.

“Over the years I've had some thrills, some real finds. I sold a page from a Gutenberg Bible. I've sold letters from Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. I sold Aristophanes' Lysistrata, illustrated and signed by Picasso. Now that was a beautiful book.

“It's like fishing. You stand for hours waiting outside for an estate sale to begin, and you rush in and grab whatever you can in the scramble. And sometimes you hook some real treasures.”

Frequent-Flier Prices

The hooking process doesn't stop there. On a lower shelf behind the counter was a large, beautifully bound 1927 book done with Vatican approval: The Face of Christian Rome, filled with hundreds of exquisite photographs of the Eternal City. I lunged for it like a greedy largemouth bass snapping at a silvery lure. Opening it, I could almost feel the barb sink into my cheek.

“How much?” I asked.

Blauer gave me a discount, for old times' sake. ``It's not every day I get a customer of 33 years' standing,'' he said.

The book was somewhat cheaper than an airplane ticket to Rome. At least that is how I rationalized buying it. Section: Tropic
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Copyright (c) 1997 The Miami Herald