Running with the Bulls Books

by

Dan Crawford

I am the Manager of the Newberry Library Book Fair, which annually offers 100,000 to 120,000 books over a four-day period at the end of July.  (This year it’s July 29 through August 1, August 1 being officially named July 32 for our purposes.) People ask me what I do the rest of the year. Um, I do this. Since 1995, it has been my full-time job, dealing as the middleman between people who are desperate to get rid of books and people who are desperate to buy them. And for ten years before that, I was the part-time Assistant Manager.

Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I see something new. One gentleman’s books are in this year’s Book Fair, making it his fifteenth consecutive year of donating books. What makes it particularly interesting is that he has been dead now for six of those years. But everywhere he went, he left stacks of books: they’ve come to me from his mother’s house, his first wife’s house, his second wife’s house, and his brother’s house. His soul goes marching on. I get obsolete schoolbooks fished from dumpsters behind school buildings by people who want the tax deduction. I get calls from schools asking whether I will come pick up books so they don’t have to be thrown in the dumpster in the first place. One gentleman used to bring me a pickup truck filled with phonograph records: not stacked in boxes or even in jackets and sleeves. He bought up old jukebox warehouses and just brought me everything he didn’t want, tossed in the back of the truck.

This year, we have been dumped on . . . donated to by people from all points on the spectrum of readers, and the weird variety of our offerings this year is right up there with our usual. If you can drop by this year you will find, among our other donations:

A convent/women’s college cleaning out its choir loft after seventy years sent scads of sheet music, priced very reasonably per scad. There are dozens of those old song plugger sheets and a great version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” rewritten as a hymn to the Virgin Mary for Mother’s Day. An art gallery disposed of its reference library, as well as the books which used to have signed limited prints in them. What do you do with the books once you’ve framed and sold the prints? They thought of something: us. One magazine which had had the Calder lithograph removed still included the note saying you could have the magazine free if you bought the framed lithograph. A collector of books on knife fighting who has moved on to other interests dropped off his assortment. (I didn’t ask.) The lady who collected autographed romances and fantasy novels, particularly fantasy romance novels sent over three SUV-loads. I find that if you are not a naked immortal Highlander or cannot morph into a wolf, bat, cat, or leopard, you don’t have a chance with the ladies these days. It’s all gone into the mix.

It is not a boast but a rueful admission that I am uniquely suited to the work I do. I am suited to nothing else, so it’s just as well the Newberry Library and I found each other. I have read books, colored in books, reviewed books, written books, eaten lunch sitting on books, and, over a three-day rearrangement of my living quarters, slept on books. The first night I slept on a pile of books that had been heaped there willy-nilly; by the second night, I had piled up the books so I would at least be sleeping on a flat surface. I can report that neither arrangement has anything in particular to recommend it, and I probably slept as badly the second night as the first. I sometimes just write “bookman” on my tax form.

People who view my work area have one of two responses, either a) “I bet you get sick of books” or b) “I bet you just want to stop and read them all.” The answer to both of these is the same, and is two letters long. I get sick of some books (I don’t get Professor Samuelson’s magnum opus on Economics as much as I used to, but enough already with The DaVinci Code. I ran out of customers for that last year.) And I may get sick of books in bulk: my face when that U-Haul backed up to the loading dock just this morning made for a real YouTube Moment. But even there I found books which made up for that plummet of my stomach.

Still, there are plenty of books this year which tempt me not a bit. Just pricing books for the Nature section I passed up Harnessing the Earthworm, Raising Butterflies for Profit in New Guinea, Get To Know Your Ferret, and that great book on the damage done to American culture by overzealous fishing regulation. Not one of those is going on my bedside table. (Um, that’s just an expression. I don’t have a bedside table. That’s a pile of books.)

The Book Fair opens at noon July 29, a time and date for both booklovers and people watchers. (People who have seen our doors open at noon and the running of the bulls in Pamplona cannot decide which is more breathtaking.) If you want to be part of the rush at noon on Thursday, or want to stroll in a less competitive fashion at, say, one o’clock Friday or three o’clock Saturday, be sure to drop by 60 W. Walton Street in Chicago. Remember, Harnessing the Earthworm is not to be found at every book fair in America.

Dan Crawford wrote his first joke when he was three, and nobody got it. His first job playing with books came when he was eleven. He has been writing and playing with books ever since and is a member of both the American Library Association and the Mystery Writers of America. He would rather not be too specific about where his fiction and nonfiction have appeared, as he is rather fond of Googling his name and finding people who want to know whatever became of him. He blogs three times a week (except during the last two weeks in July).