A Requiem for Reading ?

A Requiem for Reading ?
East County Magazine: August 26, 2009
by Craig S. Maxwell

The memorial service for my grandfather, Vernon Wahrenbrock, was sparsely attended; the inevitable consequence, I suppose, of his having lived nearly a century. All his friends and much of his family were gone. We, his survivors, were there of course. And so were a few of the folks he'd come to know at the rest home. But the only other person to pay his respects that day was Chuck Valverde. It was February 18th, 2008 and already he was pale and thin. Still, I had no way of knowing that within six months I and hundreds of others would be attending a memorial service for Chuck himself.

The link between these very dissimilar but remarkable men was, of course, Wahrenbrock's Book House – the shop my grandfather founded in 1935 and that Chuck had operated (and later owned) since 1967.

Wahrenbrock's had always been the flagship of San Diego's used bookstore fleet and one of the best used bookstores on the West Coast. Recently, many San Diegans were shocked and saddened to hear that the store itself was gone – its doors closed forever.

The store's sudden demise, falling as it did hard on the heels of its owners' deaths, has provoked thought and memory. Is this simply a reflection of the timing? Smack on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune was the story of a small business – Wahrenbrock's – gone south. Why? Other failed ventures don't get that kind of attention. Sure, at 74 the shop was old – at least by San Diego standards. But no one had paid any attention to my father's business when it closed back in the nineties, and it had been around since 1896. No, there was something about Wahrenbrock's, and perhaps about used bookshops in general (which have been steadily disappearing for twenty years or more) that led to all the attention and caused our city's collective lament. I think I know the answer, but my explanation will require a brief detour through the past.

I, too, was destined to become a used bookman. On one occasion during my informal yet invaluable apprenticeship with Brian Lucas at Adams Avenue Bookstore a co-worker, while casually thumbing through a volume said, “You know, this is a pretty durable piece of technology.” He was right. The technology to which he referred was the codex book – the book as we commonly know it. I was amazed at the profundity of that simple observation.

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In a recent lecture at Rice University, another skeptic, America's best known bookseller and Pulitzer Prize winning author Larry McMurtry, mourned what he sees as the end of an era. “My theme is a sad one. It's the end of reading. I had always thought that books may end, but reading would not. I'm not so sure anymore.” He continued, “It's just sad that what is being left behind is a very beautiful culture, the culture of the book. I think it's gone, I don't think it will come back,” he said. “My bookshop has become a temple. It's not…commercial real estate anymore. They come in and hold a book as if they're holding a talismanic object from a past culture. And, in a way, they are.”

Sure, many people will continue to buy books on line. But utterly absent from such impersonal, sterile transactions is the irreplaceable experience – the romance of browsing – with all of the attendant smells and textures among out-of-print books on old wooden shelves and the ever present possibility of stumbling across that unexpected work of genius.

And public libraries will probably continue to exist in some form or other. But they too are increasingly yielding to popular demands for contemporary media, and ultimately this means fewer books. Just a few weeks ago, a customer asked me if I had a specific volume from Will and Ariel Durant's magnificent The Story of Civilization. He said he tried to find it out at the library but was told that they no longer carry the set. The reason: it wasn't popular enough.

Wahrenbrock's Book House was San Diego's oldest and most distinguished inventory of "talismanic object[s] from a past culture.” The question that faces us in the wake of its demise is not can we survive without stores like it, but what must we be if the answer is yes. What are we without the past? Until recently America, along with the rest of the West, had been guided by the seminal ideas, emotions and desires in the stories, poems and chronicles that silently and unobtrusively reside between two covers, until they are opened. So far we have only had a foretaste of what will happen if they remain closed, and it is bitter. READ MORE !

Craig Maxwell is the proprietor of Maxwell’s House of Books