Free Literature

There’s no other way to say this. On our way to read a menu at an Italian restaurant, we passed the gated trash area behind a large apartment building. Valuable trash was strewn everywhere. Books. Piles of them. I reached in through the grate to take a “Best American Short Stories of 1996.” All of the 90s were represented in that series, O’Henrys, Fence, and the Denver Review. A pretty blonde woman with a pink scarf asked if I wanted to be let in to shop for books. It was cold and I said OK. Misha watched, and by total coincidence happened to have a camera, as I picked through books. I found much better books than I anticipated.

The woman said they had 1000s of books and the used bookstore wouldn’t pick them up. Discarded postcards, pay stubs, notebooks, and manuscripts revealed the names of the onward tenants and Google further revealed their occupations (fiction or poetry) and confirmed suspicions that at least one of them attended Columbia’s MFA program, which I mention to validate the quality of the trash, some of which was obviously assigned (Fagles, Garcia Marquez, anthologies) and some interests expired (Henning Mankel, lesser D.H. Lawrence, and Pound).

I knew that lugging 60 pounds of books over the 1-hour commute was a fool’s errand, knowing that, no matter how much or how little of them I read (Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, unabridged Leaves of Grass), they will end up in our trash heap when we run out of time and foresight to gift, sell, and pack.