Daedalus Bookshop

3 floors of out-of-print books, specializing in fiction. 90,000 books. The Washington Post described the Daedalus Bookshop as "a three-story temple of secondhand lit, a bibliophile’s church tucked away on a curling side street. The steps creak, the nooks are shadowed. Books are piled from dusty floor to shelves that scrape the ceiling." Mon. – Sat., 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.; Sun., 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Off of the Downtown Mall.  Address 123 Fourth Street, N. E.  Charlottesville, VA 22902  Phone (434) 293-7595

Photo by NB/David Mason Books.

Among the many useful tailings scooped up while mining Terry Belanger’s mind on Tuesday afternoon, this: In Studs Terkel’s book Working ( a series of interviews in which the author talks to people about their occupations to find out what they do and how they feel about it), there is a conversation with a book-binder. She is among the happiest of the lot.

In one of a growing number of pleasant karma clogged, book-related coincidences, I came across and bought Terkel’s book yesterday…Here’s some of what book-binder Donna Murray has to say:

“You must be very clever with a binding and give it the dignity it deserves. Because the pages are so full of stunning, fantastic things that say, This is life. So what do you do with a binding like that? I don’t know. You just give it a strength. If it’s leather or it’s cloth or it’s paper, you give it strength, an indication of what is inside.

I only enjoy working on books that say something. I know this is an anathema to people who insist on preserving books that are only going to be on the shelves forever – or on coffee tables. Books are for people to read, and that’s that. I think books are for the birds unless people read them…

Books are things that keep us going. Books – I haven’t got much feeling about many other things. I adore the work…Keeping a four-hundred-year-old book together keeps that spirit alive. It’s an alluring kind of thing, lovely, because you know that belongs to us. Because a book is a life, like one man is a life. Yes, yes, this work is good for me, therapeutic for old age…just keep going with the hands…”

"About publicity…it should not be difficult  – you may suppose – to achieve the simple feat of telling a few thousand intelligent people that Mr. A’s book has been published, is worth reading, and costs seven and six. But it is difficult…and becomes more difficult every year…According to the English Catalogue of books…in the year 1923 there were 7,992 new books published in England – something over 150 a week. That was bad enough. Ten years later, in 1933…the number had risen to 9,905 – or 190 a week…Of this total, by the way, fiction accounts for 1,950. Every week, therefore, on the average throughout last year, there were something like 40 new novels and 100 new books of more or less general interest competing for the attention of the public…

The most valuable publicity that a book can have is  – talk; one reader’s enthusiastic recommendations are worth weveral inches of newspaper advertisement….Next to talk, in the publicity scale, probably ranks reviews. Here again, the publisher’s influence is small. he can sometimes draw the attention of a literary editor or a reviewer to a particular book; but that is about all that it is prudent for him to attempt…Theoretically, the publisher’s influence should be nil. Actually, it is not quite that. His reputation goes for something. If it is good, books bearing his imprint will stand a better chance of serious attention…

There remains, however, one form of publicity which the publisher can influence and which is of very real value – the distribution of his books in the bookshops…The wise publisher will take every opportunity of making friends with those who sell his books; not only because, if he as well as his travellers is known and liked and trusted by the trade, the trade will do its best to give his books a good showing; but alos because he can learn a great deal from the intelligent bookseller, who stands in a far closer relationship than himself to his ultimate customers…

All is, in fact, very far from being well with publishing…What is wrong with publishing is that there are too many publishers, and far too many books. 

If every intelligent man and woman in this country could be made to realize that the responsibility for the future of English letters is ultimately his or hers, the whole outlook would be completely changed. It is the scantiness of intelligent, sympathetic, discriminating response on the part of the public which compels publishers to cheapen their ideals. If, instead of borrowing books you would buy them; if you would, especially, buy the books of unknown authors; if you would buy books speculatively – not for a possible first-edition value but on the chance of their containing something of value; if you would use your own judgment and discrimination, instead of going with the herd – why, then the face of publishing would be changed…the future of English literature depends on the private buyer of books. All that publishers can do in the long run is to give the private buyer the opportunity of exercising his judgment…Perhaps some energetic member of the Oxford University English Club will be moved to start an Anti-Best-Seller League. If so, I, for one, should be delighted to become a subscribing member."

          Excerpts from "Are Publishers Any Use?" A paper read by Geoffrey Faber to the Oxford University English Club, February 15, 1934. Published in A Publisher Speaking (Faber & Faber, 1934).

Wikipedia reports that there were 206,000 new books published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Very nicely justified summer read over at The Guardian by Alain de Botton, recommending The Death of Ivan Illich by Leo Tolstoy:

‘A powerful if slightly morbid summer read (but only 120 pages long), this tells of the decline and death of a Russian civil servant. It is a terrifying book, the literary equivalent of receiving the news that the dark shading across your liver is, unfortunately, the worst possible of the 12 scenarios you’d Googled. Why is this good on holiday? Because reminders of mortality tend to accentuate pleasure.’

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAOJ_azIvus

Patrick Shanks steps up to the plate with a beautiful ‘books’ shot.The flip-flop does it for me.

Newsweek’s Book section seems to be taking out all the stops on the glib-two-sentence-justification-of-must-read book lists. First with these 50 because "what we…need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we’d like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.’

This is of course fine. But what we really need is a considered justification for why these, rather than another, 50 voices are the ones you’ve exhorted us to listen to.

Next, we get nine authors giving us the ‘essential’ books in their fields of expertise. Patricia Cornwall’s for example are:

Great. I love this kind of shit. The Guardian has been doing it very well for years, if not decades. But, why not do something a little more thought provoking Newsweek, get Patricia and the gang to give us something really interesting to chew on: why they chose the books they chose.

There is in fact a book that does a pretty good job on this front. It’s called The Top Ten by J. Peder Zane.

In Washington for July 4th celebrations. Visited

Bartleby’s Books in Georgetown near the hotel

and was impressed with all the poetry and literature titles, many of them in attractively jacketted hardcover editions. Came across a first of George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, published by Faber for $15. By coincidence, I saw the same book in paperback, new, for close to $30 right around the corner.

Not that this is a knock against Bridge Street. Really well stocked poetry and lit crit sections, and a good selection of interesting books out front at discount prices.