Something On Sunday...

These books have a story. I'm not sure I remember the origin. Part 1.

Something On Sunday is a new recurring feature of essays and/or recollections about…something…hopefully interesting each time.

I am a minor collector. Assemblages of various things, sometimes duplicates of the same item, a handful of treasure in a particular genus. It’s never been excessive. And I’m not a hoarder. But early in my life, it looked like things would go the other way. Perhaps my mom envisioned this grab-bag existence where stuff came in but never left and she was, secretly, worried about it. I don’t know. Everything was all on the table. Probably literally.

When I was kid, my friends and I would ride our bikes feverishly for several miles in search of stickers. Automotive parts stickers, to be precise. We called this “sticker hunting,” which seems on point for that age. We’d pedal down Mission Boulevard in Southern California’s toxically boring and awful Rubidoux, stopping by each auto parts store and asking the same thing: “Got any stickers?” This turned to “Stickers?” pretty quickly, as we exhausted ourselves pedaling shop to shop, store to store. Carburetors, manifolds, exhaust pipes, oil, brakes, gears, you name it, we hunted for it. Like this one, which was an old favorite:

Iconic.

What does this have to do with books? Well, music and books became, years later, the next collectibles. (Nothing like the stickers, however. I nearly cried when I couldn’t bring my bedroom door — which had hundreds of these stuck to the back — with me when I moved to Northern California).

Music seems obvious to me — a collectible obsession driven by the music, not the collecting of albums or CDs. Everyone does it. I had hundreds of vinyl records and 45s, every single one of them donated or tossed because technology makes fools of us all. Cassettes — oh so many cassettes. Then CDs.

But I know now that I collected books for a different reason. At least I know it better now than I did when I was doing it. It was aspirational. It was “dress for the job you want” only more like “collect the books of authors you want to be like or be inspired by.” The hard, honest assessment looking back is that, well, the books were more like the stickers than they were the music.

I read a lot back then. I was going to very obviously be an English major — duh — after I got my degree in journalism. Dual degrees. Except that journalism felt like a career opportunity while English felt like a dream. I didn’t sell out the liberal arts completely, though, because I was a philosophy minor (until I switched it to political science out of laziness). Clearly I was more dreamer than doer, but I had not fully accepted that yet, which is why I read constantly and bought books constantly.

Working in a bookstore helped. A lot. Working with a friend who wanted to be a novelist and knew absolutely everything about every writer helped. “You don’t know Paul Bowles? Oh, wow, OK.” Or: “Did you see the Katherine Mansfield short story collection that we got?” Suddenly collecting also became a visual representation of being learned. Like fake it till you make it except more like buy it now and read it later and it will change your life — your life as the writer you will no doubt become.