From Word To Word

I bought a copy of Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc at Macondo books yesterday, and it was inscribed,

Mani Haghighi
21 October 97
Montreal

I googled the name, as I always do when I find a reasonably informative inscription, because I love the story of a book as much as I love the story in a book.  Usually I discover nothing very interesting from these searches: a facebook page perhaps, or a business profile, but most often nothing that would even positively identify the former owner of my book.  My search for Mani Haghighi, however, was rather more informative. Apparently Haghighi is a well-known Iranian filmmaker, the director Abadan, Men at Work, Hamoon Bazha, and Canaan, and the writer of Fireworks Wednesday.  His Men at Work in particular is considered to be a modern classic of Iranian cinema.

Now, I expect that you are probably as skeptical as I first was about whether Mani Haghighi the Iranian filmmaker is the same Mani Haghighi who used to own the book I just bought, but the facts do seem to fit.  It turns out that Haghighi took an undergraduate in philosophy from McGill University, which explains why the book was inscribed in Montreal, and then he took a masters in philosophy from the University of Guelph, which explains why I found it in my local bookstore.  I think these two facts alone are more than enough evidence to suggest that the book in my hand was once owned by Mani Haghighi the filmmaker.

What remains unexplained, however, is why I only found the book now, thirteen years later.  I doubt that Haghighi retains a residence in Guelph, especially considering that he went on to further post-graduate work at Trent University and has since been making films in Iran.  Perhaps he gave it to a friend before he left who just recently sold it to Macondo.  Perhaps he sold it to a used bookstore those many years ago, and then it was purchased by someone else, and then it was resold to Macondo, and then I finally discovered it yesterday morning.  Whatever the case, I now find myself distantly and mysteriously linked to this man who was living in the same city and studying at the same university as I was more than a decade ago.  We never chanced to meet then, but I am now reading something that he also once read.

I think I will try to find one of his films.

A friend of mine invited me over to look through some books this afternoon.  Her father, who recently passed away, was an avid collector of many things, including stamps and coins and plates and fossils and shells and rocks, but most of all books, rooms of books and rooms of books and a garage of books and a basement of books, certainly in the thousands of books.   My friend is trying to clean out the house, and she will be taking many of these books to a charity sale at some point, but she asked me and some of her other friends over to have a glass of bourbon, which was poured from one of her father’s many collectible bourbon bottles, and to take what we wanted from his book collection.

As I expected from what I knew of my friend’s father, much of the collection was not really to my taste.  There were boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of trash war novels, cheap thrillers, biographies, science textbooks, old field guides, histories of the English royal family, and so on.  I did make a few worthwhile discoveries however.  There was a whole section of illustrators in which I found a book dedicated to the work of Howard Pyle, the artist and author that I recently discovered and enjoyed so much.  I also took from this section a number of books illustrated by Gustave Dore, who is one of my favourite artists: Perrault’s Fairy Tales; London: A Pilgrimage; Illustrations for Don Quixote; Illustrations for Rabelais; Illustrations for the Bible; Fables of La Fontaine; and The Divine Comedy.

I also found a section of books for children, all in hardcover and beautifully illustrated, from which I took Howard Pyle’s Pepper and Salt, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle and Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters.

The rest of my finds included books by Desmond Morris, Robert A. Heinlein, Rudyard Kipling, Farley Mowat, Simone de Beauvoir, Goethe, Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, and E.J. Pratt, among others, an incongruous group of authors that the other book-hunters were usually more than willing to let me claim.

Of course, in any sizable collection of used books there will be at least a few of those impromptu bookmarks that so inexplicably amuse me, and this one was no exception.  I discovered two sets of drying wildflowers, left to press who knows how long ago and then forgotten, a flattened bit of cigarette foil, some torn tissue paper, a slip of notepaper with math sums on one side and a doodle on the other, a newspaper clipping about Richard Adams, “Watership Makes a Memorable Saga” by Sandra Hunter, and three newspaper clippings about Farley Mowat:  “The Perfect Writer to Plead for Great Whales” by Kildare Dobbs; “Peace on Earth, Good Will” by Gale Garnett; and “The Tragic Parable of Mowat’s Whale” by William French.

The bourbon was also good.

The pastor at a local church is retiring, so on Monday, a gloriously sunny day, he left a table of his books along the sidewalk, free for the taking.  His collection, at least what he was discarding from it, was quite eclectic.  Here is what I took from it, in no particular order:

Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective
Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church
Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
Erich Fromm, Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought
Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
Tacitus, On Britain and Germany
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time
Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory, The Spiritual Dialogue
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Paul Tilloch, Dynamics of Faith
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

Actually, these last three books are exceptions to the rule of no particular order, since they all came with those little impromptu bookmarks that so intrigue me.  The Ignatieff book contained a promotional bookmark by a publisher called Chelsea Green, which is not remotely the publisher of the book.  The Lewis book contained a sixties era advertising postcard for The Prudential Assurance Company in London, England, with a very amusing black and white photograph of two elderly people framed by mountains and their brand new Buick.  The de Chardin book contained a little recipe card.  At the top, in very neat bloc capitals, it reads, “DIE VORWAHL FUR DIE SCHWEIZ, BITTE.”  When turned upside down, beginning from the bottom, there is a list: “Bus, L’Abri (this is boxed), Swiss Tourist office (this is linked with the previous item with a bracket), post office – see if Dianne or Trudy listed”.  On the back, it reads, simply, “Zurich – 01660845.”

None of these books will rank very highly in the order of books that I will be reading next, though Calvino and de Beauvoir  and Flaubert and Catherine of Genoa will probably get read sooner rather than later.  Most of them are merely books of the sort that I might read, at some point, if the occasion and the inclination arises.  Even so, they are welcome on my shelves.

I buy most of my books used, and I buy most of my used books from less than professional booksellers.  I find better deals in thrift stores and consignment shops, so this is where I most often prefer to shop.  What this means, not infrequently, is that the books I buy come with odd bits of paper that served their previous owners as bookmarks.  Of course, because I list obsessive behaviour among my personality disorders, I have collected these bits of paper, though with no real idea as to what use they might have.

Today, in a copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, I found another makeshift bookmark, and I decided that, rather than just collect these things, I will blog them and then dispose of them.  This solution seems somehow to meet my need to collect the silly things while dispensing with the problem of where to keep them.

The bookmark that I found in Don Quiote is a form of some sort.  It is printed on heavy gray paper, about seven inches tall and four inches wide.  At the very top, it reads, “Insert This End In Stock”.  This is underlined.  Then there is about three inches of empty space before a second underlined phrase: “Insert To This Line”.  The bottom three inches contain a series of form questions, all separated by lines:  “Date Mixed”, “Mixer”, “Batch No.”, “Cmpd No.”, “Oils”, and “Add Before Using”.  The final phrase, also underlined, reads, “Hold For Lab.  O.K.”.

I have no idea what this is, but there you have it.  Do with it what you will.