There's something deeply pleasurable and romantic about slipping out of the common light of day into a second-hand bookstore.
Fathoms of stacked books, each one their own little universe, wait patiently to be re-discovered. Some people look for lost treasure - that unknown, un-namable book - with a longing that recalls Dante's quest for Beatrice.
Others are simply in search of that certain book their best friend never returned.
Louis Collins, bookseller and a book seeker, knows the feeling and has seen it all.
Collins is owner and operator of Louis Collins Books, situated in a renovated old house at 1211 E. Denny Way, a suitably quiet part of Capitol Hill.
Collins, 64, in proper bookselling manner, lives upstairs. He inhabits a world that is more variable, nuanced and yes, more romantic, than popular monoculture makes room for. The good news is: There are still people who read, who think, who take pleasure in opening and holding a book, who slow down to consider life's taste and meaning.
If bookselling isn't a straight road to riches, that's OK, too.
"I haven't had a boss in 35 years," Collins says. "It's your own little world. Your own little time."
Collins built a reputation in the second-hand book world for his search and find expertise, based on what he describes as a near-photographic memory. If someone walked into his store looking for a title and Collins saw it in a New York or London bookshop the previous year, or decade, for that matter, Collins would know where to reach.
That talent, however, has been considerably neutralized by the Internet, where the book-seeker can ask bookshops around the world about that out-of-print botany classic or rare edition of Steinbeck from the comfort of home.
The internationalization of the second-hand book world is a fact of life. Once, book searches constituted 50 percent of Collins' business.
"My business is now a regular second-hand shop," Collins says.
Still, the business is viable. And of course there's a flip side to the Internet search: Collins figures about 80 percent of his business now comes from Internet sales.
Still, there's no substitute for browsing in-person, especially if you don't know what, exactly, you're looking for. Collins' Capitol Hill space, with some 25,000 books, is replete with off-hand treasures. Collins is living out his dream.
"I plan to do this until I die," he says. "That was the idea."
From New York to North Beach
As a child Collins, who grew up in Baltimore, Md., read everything he could get his hands on. He recalls walking into a second-hand bookstore when he was 9 where the proprietor, an older gent in an elbow-patched sweater, was smoking a pipe and playing chess.
"I really wanted to do that," Collins says.
After high school Collins made his way to Greenwich Village in New York City, as a young, aspiring Beatnik should. He even owned a coffee shop there called the Zen Den. In 1964, Collins migrated to Beat headquarters, San Francisco's North Beach, where he worked in a book store, Discovery Books, next door to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's legendary City Lights bookstore. He still counts Ferlinghetti as a friend.
In 1964 San Francisco, one world was giving way for another. JFK was dead, the Beats, like Elvis, were fading and Vietnam, heating up, nurtured the seeds of hippiedom.
In his two decades in the Bay area Collins, very much part of the North Beach scene, mastered the bookseller's trade.
He arrived in Seattle to set up his own shop in 1984. "Divorce and property values," Collins says, sent him north.
Collins speaks in short sentences and comes across as someone inwardly focused who is comfortable with conversational silences. His love of books runs deep.
If Collins is living out his romantic dream, that dream includes his customers.
When he finds that special book for someone, hugs and kisses and sincere handshakes come his way.
In the Bay Area, in the days when his prodigious memory was a tool of the trade, Collins recalls writing down a book order for an old Chinese gentlemen in the early 1970s. The book was an English translation of Chinese poetry. Collins happened upon the book nearly 20 years later in an Illinois bookshop. He called the man in San Francisco, who was still alive. The man had found the book in the meantime, but they had a nice conversation, Collins says.
Collins' love of the trade extends to the annual Antiquarian Book Fair (see sidebar), which he helps promote.
And though most of his business derives from the Internet, Collins keeps a browser's paradise for walk ins.
Sylvia Plath to Kenneth Clarke
The old house Collins' bookshop occupies once served as a grocery store and art gallery. It's a well-lit place, with two levels and ample windows, where books are neatly arranged on shelves and some wait to be shelved in neat stacks on the floor.
Even before getting past the front counter, a quick perusal of the boxes of old poetry pamphlets and plays stationed there reveals precious artifacts like "American Poetry Now," edited by Sylvia Plath during her British years (original price: one shilling), and "The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen" from the Pocket Poets Series published by City Lights Books.
The bookshelves reinforce the reason why there's no substitute for old-fashioned browsing: "A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis," by David Friedman coexists with a 1927 illustrated, edition of "The Grail and the Passing of Arthur," by Howard Pyle, published by Scribners.
Just around the corner: a soft-cover, mint-condition edition of Kenneth Clarke's "Civilization."
Collins says he doesn't travel to estate sales to find books: He's too much of an un-hurried buyer. His book expertise was rewarded when he was tapped to supply more than half of the books for George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch library in Marin County. Many of the books that supplied the background for the Bill Moyer interviews with Joseph Campbell got there by way of Collins.
"One of my better search customers," Collins says with typical understatement.
In his travels, and he travels much, Collins will duck into bookstores when maybe he should be at the beach.
Whether he steps through the doorway of a second-hand shop in Seattle, Bali, Corfu or Anacortes, Collins says he always wonders what lost treasure might be waiting around the corner.
"I'm mostly interested in something I've never seen before," he says.
Louis Collins Books, 1211 E. Denny Way. www. collinsbooks. com
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