The Secret Sharers
Book Boxes of Paris Won't Give Up The Fight
A phenomenon so humble you walk by without noticing, book boxes are scattered around Paris, sometimes ugly storks on a tilting stick of plywood between the kiddie zone and the stairs into the mairie (Kremlin Bicêtre), painted like a dollhouse outside the entrance to the métro (Porte de Clichy) or jammed into the ground where a green pathway leads to a withered garden, two benches facing each other silently, not a reader in sight. Or like the photo above, on a traffic island on Boule’ Jourdan, across from Stade Charlety, not far from the prestigious university up the hill, which must be packed with all sorts of treasures neatly arranged in Dewey decimals, if that old crank hasn’t been cancelled yet. No worries ! The college library, arranged from Assyrians to Ziggurats, knows its business. Au contraire the book boxes: you’re thrusting your hand right into the vagaries of local consciousness. What do they read in this quartier ? Are these the books they couldn’t stand or the ones they got rid of before they moved ? Cheap white shelving about to collapse in a heap, it has a stack of some twenty books on the lower shelf. Intrigued, I drew closer, antennae vibrating. What could they be ? Messengers from another age.
All giving is mysterious, and a little box like this, even if it’s rejected items, has a story to tell, like the famous pair of baby shoes left on the sidewalk. Whoever owned these books didn’t walk five minutes further down the boulevard to the local Gibert Jaune to see what they could get for them. They gave them away. Maybe you remember Neruda’s story when, as a child, he discovered the hole in the fence big enough to wriggle his hand through ? He left a colored stone from the beach and came back the next morning to find a pine cone. Maybe books, like cats, own us – for a while – and not the other way around.
It was the long summer twilight then, and I was on my way home after a swim in Butte aux Cailles to Parc Montsouris, which was open all night in the summer. I planned to lay down in the meadow and count the stars while the trains rumbled under the park. I was ravenously hungry. I’d been swimming for almost an hour. I detoured to the boulevard to seek out the places where students eat and crossing the intersection, found the teetering stand of books.
So what were they ?
Balzac, Collected Works. Complete in twenty-two volumes.
I could hardly believe my good fortune. A fated meeting ! A challenge ! A duel ! Here was insurance for the coming winter (little did I know how long it was going to be,