Canadian Writers Abroad

London, Madrid, San Miguel de Allende – diverse cities for three writers who have in common a love of books, bookstores, and words. As the author of Pandexicon (Greystone Books, 2023), among many, Wayne Grady is the perfect fit to review Marius Kociejowski’s bookstore memoir, A Factotem in the Book Trade (Biblioasis, 2022) and Nick Thran’s collection of poems, essays and stories, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (Nightwood Editions, 2023). More information on the authors is at the end.
-DM

Wayne Grady reviews:
Marius Kociejowski, A Factotem in the Book Trade: A Memoir (Biblioasis, 2022, trade paper), and
Nick Thran, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (Nightwood Editions, 2023, trade paper).

In Matt Cohen’s 1993 novel The Bookseller, the owner of Fenwick’s Used and Antiquarian Books has “one of those big doggy middle-aged faces that can droop with the misery of the world.” Booksellers, especially antiquarian booksellers, deal with the world’s miseries every day; they gather them the way old books gather dust. They invite accounts of disasters and mayhem, lost loves and dashed hopes into their shops, and let the stories seep into them by a process of osmosis known only to those who handle books. They aren’t really book sellers at all; they are book collectors forced by circumstances to sell the books they have so lovingly collected: sociologist Laura Miller calls them “reluctant capitalists.” Selling their treasures makes them grumpy and uncommunicative; they glare at customers and hide their best books at home. But we like them: after all, they got that way because they share our love of books.

In A Factotum in the Book Trade, his mesmerizing memoir of fifty years as an antiquarian bookseller in London, England, Canadian poet and antiquarian bookseller Marius Kociejowski acknowledges that being in the book trade isn’t so much an occupation as an obsession. And “sadness,” he says, “is the square root of obsession.” Multiply sadness by sadness and you end up like Alan Clodd, whom Kociejowski calls “the greatest collector I have ever known,” who owned more than a hundred first editions of Waiting for Godot, and whose collection was so valuable the University of Texas offered him a blank cheque for it, he could write in any amount he wanted and, furthermore, keep the collection until he died: Clodd turned down the offer. He was “shy, sensitive, a man who spoke only when it was necessary.” Because no collection is ever complete, Clodd suffered from “the loneliness of the collector, solipsistic, self-isolating, narcissistic.”

Kociejowski’s memoir is full of such characters, all booksellers and/or collectors, all obsessed with endless acquisition: Bernard Stone, George Lawson, John Byrne, Peter Jolliffe. In the last week of his life, Clodd “managed to purchase Harry Crosby’s extremely rare second book of poems, Red Skeletons (1927),” and died unhappy that he had failed to purchase a first edition of Count Stembock’s Love, Sleep, & Dreams (1881). Kociejowski worked in most of the great bookshops, starting with Bertram Rota and ending at Peter Ellis Books, which closed its doors in London’s Cecil Court and now sells only over the Internet. A Factotem in the Book Trade thus pays homage to an era of bookselling that is fast fading from memory. The Globe and Mail described his book as being very much like the characters it commemorates: “Cranky, obscure, charming.”

Good bookshops are more than retail outlets, more even than community centres where writers and readers come together both physically and metaphorically. Bookstores keep alive the intellectual and emotional geist that drives people to write and read books in the first place. Walter Benjamin wrote about the “auratic” quality of books, their luminous essence that distinguishes them from almost all other objects. Books unite people. When I lived in Montreal in the 1970s, I and other writers hung out at The Word, a used bookstore on Milton Street owned by Adrian King-Edwards. Adrian started selling books from his living room (no sign, people heard about it by word of mouth), then bought the Chinese laundry next door and moved the books into there: he waited for the day my first daughter was born to open in his new location. He had a Gestetner machine and published my first short story. I used to pick books for him, going to church rummage sales, garage sales, and Sally Ann stores, buying books for a quarter and selling them to Adrian for whatever he thought they were worth. We both profited.

Before that I lived in Ottawa, at about the same time Kociejowski did. He and I share memories of taking books to Patrick McGahern, whose shop was in an office building on Metcalfe Street. When Kociejowski found a box of books “dumped by the side of the road for rubbish collectors,” he took it to McGahern. Pat gave him ten dollars for the box, but declined one of the books, a biography of Madam Curie, because he said he couldn’t afford to pay Kociejowski what the book was worth. In my case, I discovered an early edition of Finnegan’s Wake in a junkshop in the Byward Market, and Pat took it on consignment, saying he would pay me for it when he sold it. He later gave me much more for it than he would have been able to had he bought it outright. Booksellers can be moody and withdrawn, but they are also fiercely honest and loyal.

In the story, C stumbles into her life, and I suspect Thran got his first bookstore job, at Book City in Toronto, in a similarly serendipitous fashion. However it happened, the association with books grew on him, until the thought of doing some kind of work unrelated to books ceased to occur. In the title story, Thran is working at Westminster Books, in Fredericton. “As a writer, as a bookseller, as a person,” he writes, “I inhabit myself most fully when I am around many different kinds of books, or different kinds of art…. Taking my first job at the bookstore in Toronto, I think, was the beginning of that understanding. There was a gravitational force to the little store that I could not do without.”

“Every passion borders on the chaotic,” Walter Benjamin wrote in “Unpacking My Library,” (in Illuminations) “but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” Kociejowski’s and Thran’s memories are chaotic. Upon reading them I thought of Anthony Burgess’s book about Joyce, which he called Here Comes Everybody. In Kociejowski, one anecdote fuses with another then doubles back to finish a previous anecdote; with Thran, poems dwell side by side with essays and short works of fiction, like books in an eccentric bookstore. But if this is chaos, it is Milton’s chaos, from which emerge light and sense and, eventually, the world. Against all the recent talk of the end of the bricks-and-mortar bookstore (a recent New Yorker article was called “Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?”), these books remind us why we need them.

At the end of Matt Cohen’s The Bookseller, Paul, the narrator, has (to his surprise) become a co-owner of Fenwick’s Used and Antiquarian Books. He has learned to accept the notion that there is no such thing as chance, that what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny. Without that notion, literature itself would be impossible, let alone bookstores. Paul believes that “the night which is coming is only an ordinary night…a night to be followed by days like other days. A day during which the entire universe could hinge on a cough, a sigh, a book opened at a random page, the first person who walks through the door.”

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Born in Prince George, BC, Nick Thran grew up in various Canadian towns and cities, as well as abroad in southern Spain and southern California. He completed an MFA at New York University, and spent his adult life living in Toronto, Madrid, Victoria, Calgary, and Montreal before settling in Fredericton, New Brunswick (on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik). Writer, editor, bookseller, he has published three collections of poetry. Earworm (Nightwood Editions, 2011) won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and his first collection, Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press, 2006) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

Marius Kociejowski is a poet, essayist and travel writer. Among the books he has written are The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool – A Syrian Journey, now reissued by Eland, and a sequel, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus published by Biblioasis in 2010. His first collection of poetry, Coast (Greville Press, 1990) was awarded the Cheltenham Prize. His most recent books are God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet, 2014), The Pebble Chance: prose & feuilletons (Biblioasis, 2014), Zoroaster’s Children and other travels (Biblioasis, 2015) and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). He has recently completed another travel book, The Serpent Coiled in Naples, which he mentioned in the interview “Casting Himself on a Breeze” in 2016. He lives in London, England where, until recently, he worked as an antiquarian bookseller.

Wayne Grady is the author of 15 books of nonfiction, including Pandexicon, The Quiet Limit of the World, The Bone Museum, and Bringing Back the Dodo. He has also published three novels; his debut novel, Emancipation Day, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and The Good Father was named by the CBC one of the ten best books of 2021. He is an award-winning translator, winner of the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Antonine Maillet’s On the Eighth Day. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and he has twice been included in Best Canadian Essays. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with his wife, novelist and essayist Merilyn Simonds.

• Matt Cohen, The Bookseller, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
• Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” essay in Illuminations, HMH, 1968 (pages 59-68).
• George Orwell, “The Moon Under Water,” review of The Pub and the People by Mass Observation, first in The Listener, 21 January 1943, now online at The Orwell Foundation.
• Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote about Marius Kociejowski in Naples, “A Search for the Soul of Naples,” The New Yorker (Sept. 19, 2022).
• Review of Zoroaster’s Children, Maclean’s (Nov. 2015).
• Poem “Three Trees” by Nick Thran on Concrete&River.
• Rob Taylor interviews Nick Thran for Event.
• More on Wayne Grady.