This week our college library is having a used book sale. It’s one of the best events of the year on campus. I always run into lots of friends, colleagues, students. We’re all in the same mode, looking for those physical copies of great texts worth owning. Someone picks up a copy of a Shakespeare play. Someone else notices a commentary and says out loud, “Oh, I know who would LOVE this!” It’s fifty cents for paperbacks, a dollar for hardcovers, so it’s easy to buy gifts for everyone.

Black Hills history, and some USGS reports on local hydrology. An English professor shows me some large scale block prints, signed by the artist. Free. She’s thrilled, and I’m thrilled for her.

Students peruse the LPs discarded by an older generation, scoring classic sounds on vinyl.

An elementary school teacher browses the children’s books, shopping for her classroom. Others shop alongside her, and people point out books to each other.

I run into a favorite student (can I say “favorite student”? I like them all, really) and we compare the books we are struggling to hold as we peruse the tables. We have some of the same authors in hand, and we congratulate each other as a new bond forms between teacher and student; now we are both fellow readers, and we share a secret: this author is worth our time.

A colleague who first introduces me to Graham Greene greets me and I tell him where I saw a bunch of Greene. I bought only the one I thought he already had. He grins and shows me the rest of the volumes already under his arm. He found them not long after I found them, and snatched them up. We take a moment to chat about our favorite Greene titles. Both of us really like “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American.” I think I’ve quoted both of them in some of my published essays, and I have Will to thank for that.

But we don’t chat long, because there are more books to find. It’s not a competition, but it is also a little competitive. It’s convivial, and we all know it: we are in this together, the race to find and preserve and enjoy and share texts that have made us who we are, and that are continuing to make us something new.

I always look for texts in classical and ancestral languages, but this time I only find one, an edition of Catullus. I snag it, of course, but I wish I had found some good texts in Sanskrit. I’d love to find some Classical Chinese texts, too, and some more Greek texts to complement the shelves in my office. Old Norse, Old Icelandic, Old English? Yes, please. But none come to light. Maybe at the next table.

Slowly, texts like those seem to be vanishing. When I first started teaching in Greece I brough a small bag full of Greek texts to share with my students while we were abroad. When the Kindle appeared I thought I’d save some weight, but no, the texts I wanted were not available in digital form. They just don’t sell enough copies. Now of course I can find those texts online, and my cell plan covers me in Europe now. But I wonder how long the digital archives will last. The Cloud, after all, is just hard drives that belong to other people. Which means other people are deciding whether to keep maintaining them. Libraries might someday vanish not in an Alexandrian fire or in a Fahrenheit 451 raid, but simply because the books aren’t being read enough to pay for the digital storage. Libraries are often forced to cull their collections, and I sometimes go into the library and remove books from the shelves and place them in the reshelving area so that they are logged as books that people still care about.

The ladies at the door have a metal box with cash in it, and that feels quaint and old fashioned. I hand them a twenty for my eleven dollars' worth of books, a stack so large I can hardly hold it. In addition to the Greene and Catullus, a few volumes of Hannah Arendt, an edited volume of early Christian literature, a volume of poems by Ted Kooser, a few books about philosophy, religion, and science. Some field guides, and yeah, I bought those USGS hydrology books because mni wiconi, water is life.

One of the ladies hands me my change and tells me I haven’t bought as many books as last year. It’s true. My shelves are running over both at home and in my office. I remember that this sale benefits the library, and helps to maintain the collection, so I hand over a few more dollars and buy a reusable book bag with the library logo branded on the side. I slip the books in the bag and head for my car. I might come back tomorrow. There’s still a little room on the shelves, I think.

Auto-generated description: A wooden bookshelf filled with neatly organized Loeb Classics books in various colors. Image: a small section of the bookstore at my alma mater, St John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. It’s one of the only college bookstores I know that sells such a fine selection of texts in Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek.