A week ago or so, I entered a used bookstore in some town I was stuck in for an hour.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting to find much as, from the outside, that store looked more like some militant headquarter than your usual bookshop, but it was real cold outside and it was a bookshop. I pushed the door open.
I said hi and looked around with a hungry smile. Shelves were filled to the brim with books. Unsurprisingly, most of the books were indeed political and militant ones. Still, there was the occasional novel, a poetry volume and even a Bible and some books by Mircea Eliade. And then, there was this beaten down cardboard box nearby the entrance, with a thick marker sign saying ‘3 livres pour 2€’ (3 books for 2€) in which I found this Christmas Stories, by Charles Dickens.
It is not that exceptional but it’s always an nice surprise to find books published in English, in most French bookstores. And then, it was a book by Dickens, which was also nice. It was an anthology of short texts, another niceties as I’m always happy to carry with me shorter texts for quick (un)interrupted reads. Also, as we’re nearing Christmas and it seemed to me an indisputable reason to start reading a few Christmas Stories. So, with a couple other books I grabbed from that beaten down cardboard box, I gave the militant-owners my 2€ coin and moved to a nearby bistro where I got myself a coffee that cost more than the books I just purchased—this says a lot about our real priorities and values—and I started reading the first pages.
At first, I noticed the odd glances the young lady at the bar was sending me as, her included, I was the only person in that bar not scrolling on my phone or watching the giant TV screen that was broadcasting a news channel. I quickly forgot about her and the TV, and focused on the book I was reading.
As you can see from the picture, the poor book very much deserves its used label as its fabric cover has started to wear out and its spine is starting to detach too. But that should not come as a surprise: flipping through the pages, I managed to find a date, 1909. Not sure if it is the exact publishing date or the date of its first publication only, but that would make the book around a hundred and sixteen years old.
It certainly is not that old for a book but it’s starting to get seriously venerable and it is not in that bad of a shape for a book that age that was lying forgotten in a beaten down ‘3 books for 2€’ cardboard box.
There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than lany real men—and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plum; there were (…) (‘A Christmas Tree’, page3)
While I was reading that text, I started wondering…
How many of us had been reading it, more or less gently had been flipping through its pages? And how many of not that delicate and not careful us had it taken to wear that sturdy fabric out? How many other book lover like myself had this book been dating with before becoming mine. If a book can ever really be owned by its reader?
And does it matter at all to know how many of us did read it and handled it before it was our turn to do the same with it?
Or, as I see younger people of today say, does body count matter? Maybe it does. But then, maybe it doesn’t matter in the way those younger may think it does.
I‘m happy to have met that hundred years old book and I enjoyed the little time time we’ve managed to spend together, so far.
Published: 2025/11/27