Walking down McCall towards Queen from the Ontario College of Art in the 1970’s, I would pass Malabar’s, a theatrical emporium of props and costumes built like a fortress. Next was the little place where they killed chickens, a truck of clucking crates was usually parked in the back alley just North of Queen. All the chickens were white, making them look like they’d been raised in the dark. They gave me a twinge of original sin.
There was also a little bar on Queen adjacent to the chicken place called The Rex. For personal-finance reasons I rarely drank, but I was there with a friend because he wanted to watch an afternoon talk show called Luncheon Date with Elwood Glover on the CBC. He was a guest on the show, and was probably curious to see whether the camera liked him.
He told me that someone I don’t remember once said you should never turn down an opportunity to either be on television, or have sex. That may have been Truman Capote or perhaps William F. Buckley, but it was probably Capote. Mr. Buckley always seemed much too concerned with his serious persona as a conservative public intellectual. I always found Buckley profoundly irritating: For instance, his obtuseness interviewing Noam Chomsky looked aggressively deliberate - he needed a good poke in the eye, or perhaps up his nose, something he made highly available with his head permanently tilted back so he could look down at his guests.
But back to the journey: There was a business on the South side of Queen near McCall that was more or less a hardware store. In pine bins darkened by years of cigarettes and city air, you could find things like glass eyeballs for taxidermy, random pieces of plexiglass, assorted fasteners, hinges, and springs, specialty light bulbs for unimaginable tools or appliances, and other things that looked perfectly functional but for unknown tasks.
And then there was Marty, the proprietor of The Village Bookshop, also on the South side of Queen looking straight up McCall. I spent a lot of time prowling the used book shops of Toronto, and many shops had a dog or cat, but Marty didn’t have any pets that I know of. The other exception was Hugh Anson-Cartwright up on College, he seemed too high-end for animals, and too well dressed for a typical purveyor of used books. He was more towards the antiquarian end of things, and had a display case with a number of CS Lewis first editions. I don't remember ever buying anything there, it was beyond a student’s budget.
Anyway, College Street was getting too close to uptown, there were plenty of good stores right on Queen West, and the Village Bookshop was my favourite. Marty would put the word out on his network of used and antiquarian book dealers to find books I was looking for. There were many successes, but we never scored Goethe’s Theory of Colour in English translation. I did eventually find a copy in the subterranean library of Saint Michael's College at the University of Toronto and it felt like the only copy of the book in town.
Goethe’s pique with Newton was mildly interesting in an academic kind of way, but the only useful thing I found in it was his claim that black could be transparent, but white is always opaque. It seems obvious when you hear it, it's just that I never thought of it. It's a handy thing to keep in mind if you're a painter.
We did have success with Count Hermann Keyserling, a spiritual seeker and Kantian idealist who had come to my attention through a footnote somewhere or other. Amazingly, my 1929 first edition of Creative Understanding even has the original dust jacket, all for a very reasonable price. Emerson, Whitman, Schopenhauer, and Plato also came from Marty, and the prices were always better than buying new. He called me The Count, and if asked, he was always willing to share his hostility about ball caps. They had a different read in the 70s.
The thrill of the hunt was certainly a factor. Through Toronto’s used book stores I obtained all seven volumes of Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy. The volumes didn’t match but I think that pleased me more than if I had found a whole matched set in one location. I also managed to almost fill out a complete run of Artforum magazines from it's fold-and-staple era. I was also constantly looking for FILE magazine, but I never found a second hand copy. I guess that was asking too much. People were hanging onto those.
I always have the excuse that I planned on reading what I bought, but there’s still a bitter pleasure in collecting things: They become a responsibility, a dragged anchor in your life. The implications of accumulated treasure lead to uncomfortable thoughts about mortality. I think it was Emerson who said that farmers don’t own their farms, it’s the farms that own the farmers.
I may have misremembered things please let me know in the comments.
