Back in the day, when your friendly Bookseller was a wide-eyed ingenue, visiting the Big City for the first time, she met a man in a cafe. And that man was a monster.
This man was older, pushing thirty at least, and very handsome. A little bit of scruff on his jawline; worn jeans, worn T-shirt, worn leather jacket over the back of the chair. His name is forgotten, but the title of the book he was reading remains.
It was Wuthering Heights. So we will call him Heathcliff
.
Heathcliff was sipping a tiny black coffee, there in the window of this cafe, and when the Bookseller sat down, he looked up from his book. His…well. It was sort of a book. It was about half of a book.
The Bookseller blushed and took out her journal, her pen, and her own paperback novel. This was long ago, when people did not carry headphones and cameras everywhere they went. It was so long ago that the Bookseller still retained the tendency to blush. She did not wish to seem forward. So she just admired her very fancy cupcake and her very fancy coffee drink, and her reflection in the plate-glass window.
She took one sweet sip and one sweet bite, before uncapping her pen.
“Three p.m., Monday,” she wrote. “Spring. The ginkgo trees are budding. Gymnosperms, a relic of the Jurassic Era, grow in sidewalk cages here in the modern metropolis—” RIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPP.
She looked up. Heathcliff was staring at her. He was also ripping a page out of his book. She went pale. He ripped another page, and smiled.
RIIIIIIIIPPPPPPP.
The Bookseller looked down at her notebook. “Like the alligator, a predator unchanged since the Middle Triassic—“
RRRIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPP.
“What are you doing?” she blurted out. You must remember that the Bookseller was at that time a young Midwestern girl, and nosy busybodying is her birthright.
“I finished the chapter,” he said. RIIIIIIPPPPPP.
“So you’re destroying the book??????” The Bookseller was horrified. Imagine meeting a monster, right there in the middle of a Monday.
“I’m going to hit the road,” he said. “I’ve got another couple hundred miles to go today, and I don’t need the extra weight. That’s me.” He jerked his thumb at the motorcycle parked diagonally across the cafe’s loading zone.
“No one else can read it now!”
“Relax,” he said. “It’s not the only copy. I promise.” He winked, and tidily ripped off another sheet. The Bookseller was speechless (again it was really very long ago).
He squared off the torn-out pages; tapped them on the table; stood up. Slipping the remains of Wuthering Heights into the back pocket of his jeans, he shrugged on his leather jacket. He picked up his empty demitasse, and wiped up the ring it had left behind.
The Bookseller stared, mesmerized, as he stuck that tiny cup into the dish bucket, and dropped his sheaf of papers into the recycling bin. The door’s bell jangled behind him, quiet in comparison to the dull roar of his bike starting up. He backed out, and looked into her eyes, through the shop window, before pulling away. As he hit the gas, he smiled.
This story, of course, is open to the Reader’s interpretation.
Was he in fact a monster? Did he go on to rampage across the country, destroying books by the dozen? Is he the descendant of those barbarians who burned the great library of Alexandria and ran over country music CDs with their tractors?
Or was he just a savvy traveler, keeping his burdens light by sensibly disposing of doomed paperbacks, giving them one last read before they go to the Great Noncirculating Stacks? Was he only reading tattered classics, or would bargain books and rock-bottom remainders, covers returned to the publisher as unsold stock, also fall prey to his depredations?
You be the judge.
And. If you happen to be the same kind of monster, then have we got a bargain for you. Books without front covers, ready to be read to pieces. They’re a dollar apiece in the shop, or we can ship you a bundle via Media Mail, anywhere in the continental U.S.
Books for wanderers. Books for those who travel light. Books for monsters.
And for those who love them.
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