The Bookseller: Stories received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Peter Briscoe.
What’s the name of the book and when was it published?
The Bookseller: Stories; January 25, 2021
What’s the book’s first line?
“When I knew him he was starting to get a beer belly.”
What’s the book about?
Four stories about professors, students, librarians, booksellers, and early scientific explorers—all living literately, on journeys of the mind. The first line quoted above comes from the story, “One of Our Stars,” about a professor so engrossed in difficult studies that even a blatant sexual invitation (accepted) merely distracts him. He concentrates with the mental force of a chess grandmaster, a zen roshi, or a musical virtuoso. The next story about a female college student is set in a Colombian jungle. The third story portrays a once formidable professor coming to terms with retirement, old age, and approaching death. The last (title) story, novella length, takes place in an Ecuadorian library that is experiencing rampant theft. A place where some men steal books while others wonder why they bother. A literary, intellectual mystery that explores the library as a profound idea while the world rushes into a digital, post-literate future.
What inspired you to write the book?
When I studied to become an academic librarian I read hundreds of books on librarianship, the transmission of recorded knowledge, bibliography, bookselling, and many other facets of the book world. These were non-fiction works crucial to developing my expertise. However, I also treasure fiction, which allows one to experience things from the inside, vicariously. Fiction provides insights and imaginative leaps you will never find in non-fiction. Fiction gets at truth without needing footnotes. It has its own ways. So, naturally, as a student of librarianship I looked for novels and short stories on the subject. And what did I find? Almost nothing worthwhile, with notable exceptions. The library as an institution is 2,700 years old (by contrast the university as an institution is 1,000 years old.) You would think it would have received decent treatment in the literary world, but only three excellent books come quickly to mind: Borges’ Library of Babel, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Eco’s Name of the Rose. To be honest there are a few other books that treat the library well, but only incidentally. The rest are mostly feel-good books, silly or saccharine, promoting stereotypes of librarians as Goody Two-Shoes or fuddy-duddy amateur sleuths; still others are fantasies and fairy tales. These genres and character types all have their place in a library’s collection, but are they accurate portraits of the library itself, an institution invented by the great king Ashurbanipal of Nineveh three millennia ago? My own experience as a librarian has been quite different. In general I worked with intelligent, highly educated, often multi-lingual, worldly librarians. In physical appearance they were everyman. They had personal lives, they had sexual lives, they had interesting past histories. I felt they deserved a book.
In addition, as a collection development and book acquisitions specialist, I came to know hundreds of booksellers from all over the world. What fascinating individuals they are! Some had amazing stories to tell, but almost none ever wrote them down. I used to beg them to do so, to really describe the life and lore of bookselling (especially the rare book dealers). There are famous memoirs of booksellers, but not many good works of fiction. Too often the novelist’s bookseller is a mere prop, and the reader learns almost nothing about his or her art. (Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman is a stunning exception.)
To address these deficiencies, I wrote The Best-Read Man in France (Wildside, 2012) and The Bookseller (Palo Verde Press, 2021). Both are novellas: the first about a Los Angeles rare book dealer who searches in Mexico and in France for his stock and who is inspired by Gabriel Naudé, a 17th-century French librarian who founded research librarianship; and the second, described above, about the essence of a library wrapped in a mystery. I guarantee that my characters are not Goody Two-Shoes, but rather superb professionals who love what they’re doing and who have lives of their own.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
One of my readers, an anthropologist, put it this way: “Besides being a wonderful read, this book raises many important questions about where civilization is going.”
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who—real or fictional— would you say the character reminds you of?
Andrés Vidal is a complex man of knowledge keeping an eye on a looming dark age. I had no model in mind when I thought him up. Upon reflection, perhaps Icarus.