Book Sale · 27 August 2001
The volumes that lined these walls, gathered in the six years since the last great purge. Hours spent, many times over, crawling inside someone else’s head. Tens of thousands of dollars invested. Long waits for special orders. Books snapped shut and hurled across the room. Books that quietly glowed there on, the shelf. Great books, crap books – some of both were even designed by me.
Today they were on sale in Vancouver’s West End for nothing: dollar here, dollar there; small stack for this much, large stack for that. They were a ridiculous bargain, these books.
(It was a fun day: we made funny Jeff Wall pictures.)
And it felt good putting them out. Here, make them yours. But as people stopped by to flip through, to chat, to inquire how much, I went from being pleased at the transactions (the earlybirds were fierce and sharp-eyed consumers) to being disappointed by, to being irked at, to being disgusted with customers who were unable to appreciated this massive chunk of, well, me, sitting there, available for like nothing. How much? they’d ask, holding a vast stacked fortune in hand, and I’d name a ridiculous low figure, and they’d pause, halve the stack, and say, How much now?
While I paced and snorted, misanthropy rising, my friend Gwen – a knowledgeable and experienced life-dismantler and road-hitter – said that I was plainly unclear on the scalar economies of garage sales, and that I needed to chill: “Would you rather nobody had them?”
I was starting to calm, to abide Gwen’s advice, when an aging Truman Capote manqué in unfortunate Tommy gear – and what looked to be a perpetual, wide-eyed hissyfit – shoved a very dear reference book in my face:
TCM: Is this more than a dollar...?
Me: Well, it’s a...
TCM: ...coz if it is I’m not buying it.
Me (taking it gently from his hand): Fuck off.
TCM: What...?
Me: You can’t have it.
TCM: What!?
Me: At any price. Fuck off.
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