06.12.08 kulturnatib

Book ukay

In boxing, heavy and weight mean simply that. The heavier, the weightier and, to the delight of boxing fans, the more brutal – not brutish, as this is supposed to be a gentleman's sport – if, occasionally, burlesque the fight. Remember Tyson biting off a chunk of Holyfield's ear like it was some particularly delectable morsel of piping hot lechon?

With books, however, heavy and weight are often sparring partners. The heavier are often not the weighter. They are, as often, pejoratively called 'door stoppers' whose heft lend nothing but a hand at preventing doors from closing shut.

Conversely, the slim volumes are often those who pack the most punch.

This leads to the problem of monetizing books. Or, putting a money value to them. Like the rest of the trade of goods and services – the economy in general – the price we pay for books are supposed to be the sum of complex equations involving anything and everything that goes into book production, not the least of which are factors that make books more confounding than boxing.

But why not forget or at least temporarily put aside those confounding factors and reduce books to their most elementary, equalizing characteristic? Which, of course, is weight since books are nothing but paper, ink, glue, binding materials and, for talking books or books with accompanying cds or dvds, some plastic and chemical coatings.

Why not, indeed?

This appears to be the tack taken by the annual “Grande Vente de Livres D'occasion.” This yearly used or second hand book sale is organized by the Gatineau Municipal Library. It pools books, journals, magazines, vhs tapes and dvds from the ten libraries of the city's five sectors that comprise the municipal library network and sells them to the public by weight. At the price of Can$ 2.50 per kilo of books.

Even for Filipinos who can and do try to afford books – realizing full well that this means roughly 4 kilos of food crisis rice per kilo of books – this is reasonably affordable. Enviably cheap.

No less here where by the time we arrived at the gym where the sale was held an hour and a half after the doors were to open, as announced, it was packed. In fact, not knowing exactly where the gym was located, we were led to it by the cars that had lined the road from the highway, the tail-end – our lead-start -- of which was about half a kilometer away.

Inside it was organized chaos, ukay-ukay style. In snaking, criss-crossing lines, people were pushing, pulling or hefting bags, back packs, sacks, boxes and all sorts of containers being filled up with books. Along the walls some were sprawled on the floor by themselves or together with their children poring over volumes that would eventually go towards their pile.

This pile or piles were the only claim, if only for that day, to book connoisseurship entitling them to become spontaneous or extemporaneous book critics; Have you read his latest?; This one is better; This seems to be a new edition; etc. And in a mix of English, French and other languages for the immigrant communities were well represented there.

As to my pile, it included, among others, “Letters to Father,” letters of Suor Maria Celeste the eldest daughter of Galileo from a convent in Florence where Galileo had placed her and, “The Professor and the Madman,” a tale of the strange contributor of nearly 10,000 definitions to the great Oxford English Dictionary who, aside from being a master wordsmith, turns out to be a murderer and clinically insane.

For sure there were as many reasons as there were people for what could only be the success of that event. Chief among them, I am inclined to think, is that people there, perhaps unknowingly, are simply heeding the advice of Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Mlle de Chantepie: “Read in order to live.”

That quote is taken from, “The History of Reading,” of course, another one among my pile.