The Gift

The title of this post ("The Gift") is ripped off from a book of the same name by Lewis Hyde. That's one of those Big Brain books where the author takes one idea and tries to make all sorts of different phenomena fit that idea. (I should know what that's like– I'm writing a dissertation. Other culprits: Malcom Gladwell, Henry Petroski, Chris Anderson.) Hyde's idea is based on looking at different "economies," especially artistic economies, in the sort of anthropological way of thinking that lets you count anything as evidence. The end result is a very detailed, prose version of "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

That's fine. It might even make sense sometimes. But there is something more interesting about freebies that catches my eye: they're unexpected. It's really hard to find unexpected things. I would almost say that you can't buy them. More precisely, you can't buy them new. The book with the big secret– you know, something like the actual recipe for the philosopher's stone as printed in the Boy Scouts of America Fieldbook between 1937 and 1939– will not be found at Border's or Barnes and Noble. Those shelves are filled with remaindered "Eating Lite the Sufi Way" cookbooks. You have to go to a used bookstore, preferably one like "Rare, Medium, and Well Done" in Chicago, a store so recondite it doesn't even have a website. My wife won't go there with me because the stacks, loosely piled to eye level, could actually fall over and kill you at any time. But because the store is so disorganized, and because books are automatically discounted just for being on the shelves too long, there is always the promise of a $0.50 book with the actual answer to life, the universe, and everything. I'm still looking.

I also search used record stores and junk shops. But now we can look for the same things– surprises and freebies– on the internet. This is probably not a bad thing. The junk shops and used bookstores will exist long after Amazon has eaten the chain stores alive. Independent places– including holes in the wall on the Internet– don't suffer from competition because they were never in the running in the first place. The only difference is that now anybody can float into the ether a little gift that just might surprise any other person. Nobody needs the prior approval of a publishing house, manufacturing company, or record label. This is old news by now, but just in case you didn't believe it, here's my own submission to the big sea of small surprises: