The Title Wave Used Bookstore

The Title Wave Used Bookstore.-- Photo by Nancy W. Woods

There’s something so comforting, so unassuming, about discarded and used books. With their tattered covers, torn pages and affectionate inscriptions written to unknown readers, they seem to offer all that is good about books while, at the same time, remaining unpretentious.

Every once in a while, to give myself a break from life’s trendy newness, I stop by the The Title Wave Used Bookstore, here in Portland, Oregon. Housed in a 1912 Spanish Renaissance Revival building, the store is filled with thousands of books, CDs, videos, tapes, maps, music and magazines that have been pulled from the shelves of the Multnomah County Library. Run mostly by volunteers, the store features an imposing front door; high, arched windows; and shelves and shelves of affordable books. Since the inventory is constantly changing, there’s no way of knowing quite what to expect.

When I stopped by the other day, the first thing I noticed was a signed copy of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It by Martha Burk ($5). The book was inscribed “To Judy – Women will change the world! Martha Burk.”

Nearby, sat a paperback copy of Just Desserts: A Bed-And-Breakfast Mystery by Mary Daheim, with a price tag of 75 cents.

Amused and encouraged by the juxtaposition of political outrage and pure escapism, I headed to the Talking Books for Adults section, where I spotted a four-cassette set of Accent English for Russian Speakers ($1) and an eight-cassette set of Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie, described on the cover as a “delicious tale of scandal, gossip, and murder in a small town called Temptation.”

In keeping with the store’s free-thinking, open-minded mix of the silly and serious, classic and pop, practical and esoteric, its shelves included everything from outdated, $.25-copies of The New Yorker to a long-playing record of Vikki Carr’s called Don’t Break My Pretty Balloon ($.10); G. Schirmer’s Collection of Opera Librettos: Don Giovanni, Opera in Two Acts, Music by W.A. Mozart (in Italian and English) ($.01); and a hardcover copy of Danielle Steel’s The Kiss ($2).

Pittman’s map of Harney County ($.25) was shelved not far from Sensational Sex in 7 Easy Steps: The Proven Plan for Enhancing Your Sexual Function and Achieving Optimum Health by Ridwan Shabsigh, MD ($2).

Torn between buying an 1884 copy of Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R.S., Vol. V, April 1, 1665-April 8, 1666 ($15) or Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley, edited by Susan Sherman ($3), I settled, instead, on something even better, a spiral-bound blank book made from the covers of a 46-year-old copy of Theory and Practice of Presswork: United States Government Printing Office Training Series.

Then, feeling once again renewed and ready to face the brand-new world, I headed back out the door, armed with a sense of history and the comforting feeling that, for me at least, can only come from handling old books.

The Title Wave Used Bookstore
216 N.E. Knott St.
Portland, Oregon 97212
(503) 988-5021
www.multcolib.org/titlewave/

Trying too hard to lighten up

Several months ago, I took a writing-for-the-radio class. During one session, I practiced recording “Lighten Up Already,” an essay about how I think people should lighten up.

The recording didn’t go well. I was finding it difficult to lighten up and come across as my naturally funny self, because, the whole time I was speaking into the microphone, the instructor’s Labradoodle (a dark-haired Labrador/poodle mix) was running around the small room, chewing on a squeaky dog toy and, every so often, humping me and the other students, who included a Jewish woman who’d written a piece about what it felt like to have a Christmas tree during the holiday season and a woman who’d written about her trip to Southeast Asia.

“What’s the matter? You sound angry,” the instructor kept asking me, as I tried a second recording and then a third. “Try to come across as flabbergasted and vulnerable,” the teacher insisted, as her large, untrained mutt continued to run and hump and squeak.

Looking back

You don't have to look very far to find a magazine article promising to tell you how to become a writer. In my case, however, the route was anything but straight.

Fall in love with reading

I started reading at the age of four or five. I spent much of those years sitting on the kitchen floor, slowly sounding out the words in my pink-covered reading book. Nearby, my mother would be washing the dishes. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand, I would do my best to pronounce it and my mother would tell me what it meant. Even at that age, I knew reading was a key to worlds I might otherwise never visit. If I could just figure out the secret, I would get in.

Be a bookworm

As a child growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I spent most of my time reading. I was particularly drawn toward pathetic stories about poor, fatherless families who enjoyed making each other Christmas gifts out of nothing more than bits of used string. I read Little Women in the overhead cab of my father’s camper, read Daddy Longlegs in the bow of my father’s boat, read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in our cabin at Harding Lake.

I gulped books whole, choked them down fast, gobbled down one only to swallow another. I checked books out of the George C. Thomas Memorial Library, bringing them home a bicycle basketful at a time. The library was housed in a log building down by the Chena River, a matronly, broad-hipped building that wore its front porch like a skirt. Inside, way in back, on the other side of the adult section, was a small set of stairs that led to a tiny landing where the children’s books were kept. It was up there while all alone, kneeling before the bookshelves that I made my choices, my coarse hair almost brushing the tin ceiling.

Be curious.

When I left home to go to college at the age of seventeen, I had only two goals, to become a medical technologist and get an apartment. My worst fear was I would die with other cities being nothing more than dots on a map. I wanted to expose myself to new ideas and cultures and people.

Eventually, I got a job as a med tech, but after several years of drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, I woke up one day scared shitless that I was going to spend the rest of my life drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, when I wasn’t barely paying my rent or bleaching other people’s blood out of my five white uniforms. So I quit.

Have an inexplicable, life-changing moment

Over the years, I delivered mail, took wedding photos and sold (legal) drugs, but nothing seemed to stick, so it isn’t all that surprising that one day while sitting on the floor of my barely furnished, no-bedroom apartment ― a ground-floor studio with a broken toilet and non-functioning TV ― I pulled out the portable Olivetti my parents gave me for leaving home. I’ve been writing between naps ever since.