A Worm Hole Grows In Oaklyn

Approached from the prickly perspective of hard science, there is no observational evidence for worm holes—those alleged shortcuts through the time/space continuum that can suck you up in one corner of the cosmos and spit you out in an altogether different galaxy, light years from where you started. Worm holes, like cosmic string or compassionate conservatism, are hypothetical. There is no proof they exist.
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Thus, what I am about to tell you qualifies me for the Nobel Prize in Physics for I have discovered one such corridor in Old Oakland. The only math I know is how to use a calculator and some of the function buttons on Excel. Still, I offer as irrefutable proof this one fact: One day in the early spring, when I was exploring my new neighborhood, a shop so small I’d overlooked it many times beckoned to me and I opened the door. Wondrously, a universe fell out. I was quickly enveloped and now, tunneled deeply into an expanding, parallel reality, there is no turning back.
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I am not the only occupant of five-dimensional space. While others find their entrée elsewhere, for me it began on July 11, 1960 with the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird--a book many would argue is THE iconic “great American novel.” With an initial run of only 5,000 copies, the book that would win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction started modestly. Now, 50 years later, few copies of the first edition, first printing--what collectors would call a "first, first" or "true first"--remain. What makes this story unique to me and illustrates so happily the existence of worm holes, is that I now own one of the 5,000. The story further illustrates the quiet beauty of my raucous, littered, and fragile inner city neighborhood.
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Fairy tales and myths have demonstrated for millennia that children are often born to families that are not their people but these children are, at a decisive moment, all called home if they recognize and heed the summons. One day, seeing a rack of paperbacks on a sidewalk near my building, I stopped to look and found myself in front of a little, used-book shop I’d not noticed previously. Stepping through the tall, thin doors, I fell all Alice-in-Wonderland through the rabbit hole. Like Oakland, the shop was worn down and gritty. It smelled of candles and old tea. As I examined the shelves, I could almost hear the murmurings of the many prisoners, vagabonds, desperados, lying cheats, private dicks and their jezebel dames, sailors, cops, robbers, explorers, and drunken fuck ups pressed between the boards of ravaged and discarded books.
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Amid this debris, sat Harper Lee’s paean to small town life in the American south on the brink of the modern era. It had come all this way. Through the long corridor of half a century we had been traveling toward each other; making our way blindly but always meant to be. Holding the first edition of a classic American novel is exhilarating. Published at the dawn of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the book expressed our longing for justice and eulogized our hope that we could arrive on the other side of hatred without violence. In later years, as each of the men and women who led us through that terrible reckoning died, I would imagine Atticus Finch, alone and defeated, walking out of the Maycomb courtroom and hear the black maid telling Scout, "Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing."
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Connecting to that day of publication, viscerally connecting not to the recollection but to the physical experience of a defining moment in our collective consciousness makes time fluid and easily navigable. It was exciting in the same way that a direct experience of the numinous is and, having tasted it once, I wanted it again.
I began returning to the book store regularly. I learned of other stores—crazy little hole-in-the-wall shops. Berkeley, California is the Ogallala Aquifer of used book stores—one needn’t scratch very deeply before they come bubbling to the surface; dark, filthy caverns of treasure staffed usually by one shabby and flea-bitten old, bald hippie who nevertheless pulls the clown fringe that is left on the sides of his head tightly back into a two-foot long pony tail. Do not make me talk about the finger nails. The blue jeans are appallingly grimy. Of course, they wear a vest and flower-patterned shirt.
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I wear my most disposable clothes to shop these stores—not one good item, even the shoes. I should but do not wear a mask. One shop in particular is a health hazard and probably a fire code violation. The aisles are made impossibly narrow by overflow spilling from the double row stacks onto the floor. There can be no sure principle of arrangement amid such chaos and so I must scan each shelf twice—the books on the front edge of the shelf and the second row behind them—in about twenty book stacks that reach from the floor to well above my head. I drop to my knees to work the lower shelves and then crawl along the hideous kinky carpet on my hands and knees to examine the over flow while a couple of Berkeley’s many leftover hippies who may actually have read To Kill A Mockingbird in its first edition, haggle over the selling price of a large collection of psychedelic literature from the town’s heyday.
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These men are of the surreal brotherhood of collectors—living in a parallel universe on the far side of the worm hole. They remind me of what my mother used to call Carney Folk, meaning marginally respectable people perpetually on the hustle. This entire community—buyers, sellers, the pickers who drive around the west in dust-covered rattletrap cars going from estate sale to estate sale, the lunatic fringe who one day show up with a carload of books some of which are worth serious money—live in a world of their own making. They occupy time differently—opening their stores whenever they feel like it, endlessly making phone calls, faxing, or stopping by because they do not know how to use a computer. But they are all idiot savants of rare books.
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They know the market intimately. They can identify a first edition going back decades, before ISBN numbers and publisher statements made validation as simple as logging on to the Internet. Best of all, they are generous. Any one of them will talk to you about their work and the tricks of the trade. They are happy to share what they know and have taught me to identify publishers marks on the verso of a title page; what enhances value (a signed title page, a dedication copy) and what diminishes it (no dust jacket, foxing); and how to read catalog abbreviations in auction listings. My appetite for what they know is endless and, because time stands still in this world, they are willing to talk forever.