Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“What is it?” Jess asked him.

“Get back to work, please.”

She smiled at him. He’d never asked her to do anything “please” before. She didn’t hear that he used the word only for emphasis. “Could I show Noah the Muir?”

“Is he interested?” George spoke in the third person even as Noah materialized behind Jess.

“Of course.” Then Jess saw that George meant “interested to buy,” and she looked a little disgusted. She liked to think of Yorick’s as some sort of rare-book room, a miniature Houghton or Beinecke.

He unlocked the glass case, and Jess took out The Mountains of California .

“Cool,” said Noah.

“ When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day,” Jess read aloud, “from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light .”

Golden compositae, George thought. How easy it was to forget the mountains, just a drive away.

“And look at this.” Jess opened the book and showed Muir’s inscription on the flyleaf.

Noah traced Muir’s signature with his fingertip. “That’s incredible.”

“That’s fifteen hundred dollars.” George took John Muir away from Jess and locked him up again.

Later, after Noah had to run off to work, Jess approached George at his desk. “Could I ask you something?”

“You could.”

“If you love books, why don’t you like sharing them with other people?”

“I do like sharing them,” said George. “I like to exchange them for money, in a transaction economists call making a sale.”

“You can hardly stand it when other people look at them.”

“Looking is fine. I don’t enjoy watching people paw through a signed—”

“You touch your books all the time,” Jess protested.

“I wash my hands.” He had her there, and he saw her smile, despite herself.

“You’re very supercilious,” she told him.

You’re very pretty, he thought, but he said, “Anything else?”

“Do you like owning books more than reading them?”

He began to answer and then stopped. “You want me to admit that I like owning better, don’t you? Then you can tell me that books are about reading, and that words are free.”

“No, I’m really asking,” she said. “Which do you like better—having or reading?”

“I like reading books I own,” he said.

“Does owning improve them?”

“You mean why not go to the library? Look at this Gulliver’s Travels.” He unlocked the glass case again. “This is a 1735 printing. Do you see the ridges here?” He held up the page for her. “This is laid paper. See how beautiful it is?”

“What happened there?” She was looking at the white scar on the back of his right hand.

“Cooking accident,” he said.

She couldn’t help staring at where the scar disappeared into his shirt cuff. “That must have been some knife.”

“Look at this. Do you see the chapter headings?” He showed her the thick black type. “When I read Swift here, I’m reading him in this ink, on this paper, with this book in my hands—and I’m reading him as his contemporaries read him. You think there’s something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We’re the only ones who still love books as objects.”

“That’s the question,” said Jess. “How do you love them if you’re always selling them?”

“I don’t sell everything,” he said. “You haven’t seen my own collection.”

“What do you have?”

“First editions. Yeats, Dickinson—all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay …” He had noticed the books she read in the store. “Plath. I have Ariel —the English edition,” he added temptingly. “I also have Elizabeth Bishop.”

“I wish I could see them,” Jess said.

“You would have to come to my house.”

“Are you inviting me?” She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information.

Yes, he thought, I’m inviting you, but he did not say yes. He was her employer. She could act with a certain plucky independence, but he would always be the big bad wolf.

“I have a theory about rare books,” Jess said. “Here’s what I think. Rare books—any books—start to die without readers. The words grow paler and paler.”

“Not true,” George said. “Unread words don’t fade at all.”

“I meant metaphorically,” said Jess.

“You’d rather see them all in public libraries?”

“Ideally, yes,” said Jess.

“I’ve got a signed Harp-Weaver.”

“Really!”

He had to laugh. She was so eager.

She saw that he was in a good mood, and took the opportunity to ask, “Could I put up a poster outside the door?”

“No.”

“Wait. You haven’t seen it.” She hurried to the storeroom where she kept her backpack and brought out a poster, which she unrolled over his desk. Comically, with hands and elbows, she tried to hold down all the corners at once. Failing in the attempt, she weighted them with George’s books: Gulliver’s Travels, The Good Earth , an old thesaurus.

George saw a woodblock print redwood against a cloudless sky. One word in green:

BREATHE

“Sorry.” George pushed his books away. The poster rolled up instantly.

“It’s a limited edition,” Jess said.

“I don’t collect propaganda,” he told her.

“How is the word breathe propaganda? You can’t object to breathing.”

“I don’t object to breathing. I object to being told to breathe.”

“There is no agenda here,” she said.

“This is Save the Trees warning me that without redwoods I won’t breathe much longer. Therefore I should support the cause. I hope this is recycled paper, by the way.”

“Of course it is.”

“No posters anywhere near my store,” said George. “This is a poster- and leaflet-free zone.”

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“I’ll have to add that to my questionnaire: Are you now or have you ever been involved in an evangelical, Messianic, or environmental cult?”

“Save the Trees is a registered nonprofit,” said Jess.

“Oh, that’s all right then,” said George. “Yorick’s is a nonprofit too.”

“And ‘Breathe’ is actually the title of a poem.”

Breathe now .

Breathe soon.

Early and often.

Between times

Before it’s

Too late .

“Sorry.” George handed her the rolled-up poster. “No.”

“You don’t like new poetry?” said Jess.

“I don’t like bad poetry,” said George, and then with some horror, “You didn’t write that, did you?”

She shook her head.

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“I used to write poetry when I was younger,” Jess said. She had kept a notebook by her bed, in case some line or image came to her in her dreams, but she had always been a sound sleeper, and no Xanadus or nightingales woke her. She read Coleridge or Keats and felt that they had covered the great subjects so well that she had nothing to add about beauty, or immortality of the soul. “Now I just read.”

She spoke cheerfully, without a hint of wistfulness. She was indignant sometimes, but never wistful. Opinionated, but still hopeful in her opinions. Oh, Jess, George thought, no one has hurt you yet.