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| Patrica Nelson | |
Patricia Nelson, a sales representative with University Press Sales Associates who is based in Santa Fe, N.Mex., sent the following note to her booksellers Monday under the subject line "Reading out the Window":
As we take in the impossible news of bookstores cancelling their calendars and closing their doors for a prudent interim, I feel the hum of book hives quieting. Extraordinarily dear places. As a sales rep, my GPS is bookstores--I triangulate any travel by proximity to bookstores, those in my circuit and those I know elsewhere. All are virtually present in a memory palace, how they are laid out, an odd corner, an intriguingly curated category, what I found there.
Hardly a week ago, in San Diego, I recognized a book was waiting for me on a lovely table at the Book Catapult. Fenton Johnson's At the Center of All Beauty, on "solitude and the creative life." I found Fenton Johnson a while back, intertwined with Thomas Merton and Kentucky. He asks, apropos of the solitaries he studies here, "But does ascetic practice require bricks and mortar?"
Even at the very precipice of this sudden abyss, I did not realize we would face immediate social distancing. At the CALIBA Spring Meeting in San Diego, I enjoyed being with booksellers together, appreciating authors, sharing the struggles and rewards of small business concerns, not recognizing so incipient a threat. Now, finding ourselves at home, separated from our ordinary lives out and about, I am thinking about our reading practice beyond brick and mortar.
Finding books is a kind of wayfaring. With our experience of favorite book terrains, we comfortably and trustingly can "virtually" visit our bookstores. We can share the enthusiasms of our favorite booksellers, their staff picks and book news, we can imaginatively search their shelves, even write or call for distance bibliotherapy. At home, hunkering down, we more deeply recognize the gift of gathering so generously bestowed. As we recognize the myriad ways bookstores animate our community, and offer the astonishing presence of writers, let us recognize the actual object of these unique encounters. That we can actually bring home the book, possess the object. I am reading through postponed events calendars which literally picture a season of delights unfolding. As a rep, the reply to "what are you reading now?" is always something out ahead. I'm looking at my notes. Order the book!
Let us find ways to sing our reading out the window together. All of us, as publishers and book travelers, as booksellers, as readers, can share in the generosity of bookstores as places in mind. May you all stay safe and well.