Chicago-Indiana-Michigan, episode 6. In which I page through a favorite collection.

When I think about it, I'm not really sure why I was an accounting major for three years.  I did always enjoy math and numbers and did well in my high school accounting class, so it seemed like a natural way to go.  What I forgot to inform the left side of my brain was that my passions lived elsewhere.
I should have heard the wake-up call when I snoozed my way through introductory finance and statistics classes, but I was already settled (stubborn) in my ways, or so I thought.

That's me during a recent visit to my old dorm,

home of The Wicker Lounge 1985-1986.

Frankly, it wasn't numbers and slide rules I had always been crazy about but words and books.  Books seemed to be the first thing I collected as a child--mostly overdue library books from the Warner Public Library (a most beloved, inspirational, and treasured place) until I had accumulated enough piggy bank change to buy my first brand new book at The Book Inn on Broadway and Main in Tarrytown.  I will always remember my first purchased book.  It was actually a slipcased paperback box set of the four original Winnie-the-Pooh paperbacks.  At the time I think it was a grand total of about five dollars and well worth purging my porcine account.  I must have read those books over and over every night for a year.

I'm going to take advantage of a section break here

before my silly sentimentality overwhelms me.

Even before my youthful sleep became Pooh distracted, I had always been a reader.  From that primal Pooh moment when I owned my very own book, however, I was hooked on books.  When I eventually left home for college I packed a trunk full of laundry-number-labeled-clothes and the cardboard box the trunk had arrived in full of books.  What else was there?

I also remember the point when I crossed the literary line from being a book buyer to a book collector and it was just about the same timely time (and at the same propitious place) when I became an unwitting purveyor of vintage men's fashion accessories.  That's one of the things I love about fleamarketing in general and especially about fleamarketing at antique malls--you can and will find almost anything out of context and out of era.

It was during one of my first visits to the Michiana Antique Mall that I came upon what would eventually become a favorite vendor and one which inspired me to collect books rather than just continue to buy them.  Andrews & Rose, a local bookseller of vintage books at the time always had a wonderfully browsable, neatly arranged (I'm all about the neatly arranged) and categorized book display and I always looked forward to perusing the precisely ordered shelves of accumulated volumes that had been gathered from years and miles apart to meet my bibliophilic browse.  Since my first discovery, this vendor's attention to display detail, to the quality and condition and selection of books, and reasonable prices have remained stellar.

This is the first book I purchased at MAM from the Andrews & Rose booth (which has since been widely expanded to cover a major portion of the mall's East end).  It seemed appropriate that an old edition of Browning's poems found its way into the hands, heart, and apartment of this Portuguese-American Domer and newly-declared English major.  That little erasable stamp in the upper right corner seems to be in quite a few of my books now, but I've never had the heart to erase any of these sentimental-to-me reminders of past hunted-and-gathered purchases.

View Andrews & Rose vintage book offerings online.

abebooks.com/home/anrbooks

Here are a few more of the volumes vanquished from Andrews & Rose during my early collecting.

I don't necessarily look for anything technically collectible when I hunt for books.  I'm not looking to resell or make a profit.  I collect because I enjoy my collections.  I don't dissect the title page minutiae although I do feel privileged to find an early edition of a favorite (or soon to be favorite) novel especially with original cover art like the groovy awesomeness of Tom Wolfe's trippy Sixties chronicles.  The simplicity and beautiful font work on The Good Earth reprint are what really drew me back to the similarly spare and beautiful prose, too. I confess, despite the fact that I am a librarian and was an English teacher for over 20 years, that I do judge books by their covers.  At least that's what initially gets them through the (looking glass) door.

I promise to finish Ulysses some day, I really do!  

More from Michiana before heading off to Chicago next time.