Used books often give clues to stories of their own. Settling into bed just now, I reached over to my bookshelf for an anthology I bought last month for a mere three dollars at the used-book store Second Story: The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. So far I’ve read a couple of the stories. Not bad. But only tonight as I quickly thumbed through the entire book did I find evidence of its former life. Tucked between pages 472-473, in the middle of David Leavitt’s “When You Grow to Adultery,” is the original receipt for the book at twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents, dated December 7, 1991, from A Different Light Bookstore in New York. Part of a small, but important chain of gay bookstores for nearly twenty years, the New York location of A Different Light closed in early 2001.
And so as a piece of history, this receipt, this small, yellow piece of paper, stirs in my mind a brief flurry of whimsical speculation. Who first bought the book? Has it sat on a shelf for the past ten-plus years, or has it accompanied its owner on distant travels? Who or what brought it from Chelsea to Dupont Circle, and when?
Oh, the stories books could tell. So to speak.