Story: 10. ) The Secondhand Book Sale . . . from A BOOK IS LIKE A SACRED ISLE: A Rain of Booklight

The Secondhand Book Sale

    ‘A bird in the hand,’ a book can travel from here to there bringing with its flutter of wings the delight of a song. For sometimes a book will leave its shelf to fly to a new owner there to bring new life that its writer, or first owner could hardly have foreseen. So it happened to me near the beginning of the year, 2014.
  I chanced to notice a hand painted sign on the side of the road advertising a large secondhand book sale and amazingly I remembered the date and went. It was inside a large gym – a huge roller hockey skating rink. I was overawed. The place was filled with at least fifty long trestle tables laden with banana boxes full to overflowing with books…books of all kinds …books of all shapes and sizes…and the price, one and the same for all of them: two NZ dollars. Which you paid for at the door you came in by.
   I wandered about as if in a dream: from the inside of me I was looking out on a scene I had never seen before and so my imagination went wild.
  It was the outer court of a temple. But there was only buying going on and not selling; so, though the people were completely absorbed and totally blind to one another, they were not blind to their own inner court, for they saw here treasures and bought them to take them further in.
   It was a bustling fresh produce market. But one without any hawkers, only buyers consuming the produce at a phenomenal rate. They had each been given plastic bags at the door and were busy stuffing them full with the bright fruit and vegetables of the market: the ephemeral eatables and colourful consumerables from the farms of thousands of publishing houses. And their authors’ books sold once, now being sold again, a second time. The books twice as good as before having double value now; though the second time the gain from them was love; the two dollar purchase price for each book went in its entirety to a local charity.   I continued to weave my way through the mêlée, going round and round the long tables getting dizzier and fainter as I went; trying to take in too much instead of ‘blotting out’ as the people all around me did. I saw hands and arms from all directions reaching in toward the treasures with something akin to absolute avarice. I had no idea that paper made books still held such a total fascination for so many people; and they were of all ages and sizes; no group or type of people was unrepresented.
  Eventually, slowly, I lost my fascinated for the scene as a whole and applied my bemused brain to the task of joining in and choosing books. I had my plastic bag. But it was weightless. I carried on.  I found myself amongst acres of fiction. The content and ages of the books discernible by their cover type; instinctively one ignored certain cover designs the brain systematically tracking what the unconscious was looking for. I wondered why I was here. The books in the banana-boxes all around me looked so similar. And I was beginning to make up my mind to leave this particular acreage. There were no ‘more’ books here. Or so I thought.  It wasn't that I recognized anything, specific; but my hand, of its own volition suddenly stretched out and snatched up a book; and in no less a greedy way than anyone else in that overcrowded marketplace. I had hardly glanced at its cover; from whatever I saw I knew that it was indeed, a treasure. Now there was weight in my shopping bag, and in more ways than one.
  I had begun. And once beginning, I let my hand shoot out three more times. My bag was heavier, but it weighed no more than it had done before. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get out of the crowd. I felt I didn’t belong here, nor did my treasure. I paid my eight dollars at the door and drove home.
  That it had resisted every other hand and had been waiting for me, I was sure. It was a children’s book. It said it was a winner of the Smarties prize bronze medal, and that it had been shortlisted for the Whitbread children’s book of the year. Yet I had found it amongst the grazing paddocks for adults. I was thrilled, because I have always loved books for child persons, far more than those for adult persons. And it was more wonderful than any of the other books I had consciously picked from nearby it; (which I still haven’t read.) I looked at the front cover. I saw on its lower edge a narrow scene of knights in shining armour jousting on horseback. The book was called Arthur – The Seeing Stone; the first in a trilogy by Kevin Crossley-Holland.
  I read it avidly; but slowly, to make it last. The writer was obviously a poet; so I was entranced at once. My own poet’s heart thrilled to the short chapters. Some as short as half a page. The very format of the book stimulated the waiting spaces in me; the unknown halves of buried couplets awaiting their matching parts from the outside.
 King Arthur! My heart melted! But overall something leapt in me at every mention of Merlin; the good wizard of the mystical courts of Avalon, and Arthur: the boy who could pull a sword from a stone. The book sparked a passion in me for a near-distant Merlin; which led me on a trail of research, for weeks. This culminated in the writing of a story – a fantasy – a forty page epic poem on the sixth century, Welsh, Myrddin Wyllt; forerunner of the famous Merlin of the Middle Ages.
  I received a great deal of pleasure in the writing of this landmark poem; and I knew once again to live always by instinct. Convinced that ‘any bird that hath a wing’ – any book that could leave the extension of itself inside me, and ‘marry’ something there – was a ‘more’ book, and so it would find me. Certain, also, and in delight, that these kinds of books could often be found in their second ‘flight,’ in any secondhand book sale!
  Just as they throw out books from the local library, so people do, from time to time from their own shelves at home. I used to think this was sad, but I have now changed my mind! We never know what treasures we may find from other people’s cast-offs, which, if we have eyes to see, can take us further in to see further out to fulfill our destiny in the world.  

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