HOW TO BECOME A BIBLIOMANIAC

Kay Olson Freeman writes:

Sam Hough is a bookseller and his living room is a wonderland of books and relic-like gewgaws that people of that profession are inclined to accrue. True, there are owls about the place, in prints, as figurines and by other representation but that is not why he calls his business The Owl at the Bridge.

“Obviously, we like owls but the name came from being near the Pawtuxet Bridge and the image of an owl at the bridge appealed to me,” said Hough (pronounced “huff”).

Although he once did have a small space on Broad Street when he started selling books in the 1980s, the brave new world of inflated real estate costs and diminished foot traffic made maintaining the space impractical.

“I do keep some of my stock here in the house but I also have 2,500 square feet of storage on Wellington Avenue,” he said. “Our book shop was always much too small for the space we needed.”

Like most booksellers in the digital age, Hough has adapted to the world of online bookselling. In fact, very few used bookstores could sustain themselves by walk-in sales alone. Catalogs and mail order have been a major part of the rare book business for centuries but Goodspeed's, The Brattle Book Shop and other small stores in Boston made good money catering to leisurely walk-ins or the lunching masses that haunted the 25 and 50 cent tables everyday. Now, if Sam Hough wants to get his hands on a good book, he has to go to a public or private library. He won't find the bookstores of his youth in Philadelphia, or his salad days of acquiring books for college libraries. There are no easy fixes for a bibliomaniac these days. Everyone is waiting for the mail, or, as some would have it, the “snail mail.” We must wait, anxiously and tensely, for our junk to come from the Post Office or UPS.

These are bad times for book addicts.

In his 1944 article, “Book Row,” in the Saturday Evening Post, Don Samson gives a brief history of a bibliomaniac that haunted the area.

“A shoe clerk from Brooklyn wandered into one of the secondhand bookshops on Book Row. He had never bought a book in his life, but picking up a musty volume, he liked the feel of it and bought it. The more he handled it, the more he liked it. He began buying books…Finally, his wife couldn't take a bath because the tub was full of books…and threatened to go home to mother unless he got rid of them. He did. But within two weeks he was buying books again…She went home to mother.”

To read the complete article, see: How to become a bibliomaniac (warwickonline.com/stories/How-to-become-a-bibliomaniac,65291)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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