Turning the Page

Copperfields, a place where books filled with pages filled with ink and filled with words saturated with vast denotations and connotations and used by diverse authors and poets over and over again- was a small and crowded store. It is a store where books are crammed next to one another on wall length shelves; where books are then taken down and held gingerly in aging hands and then bought, then read, then placed on smaller shelves as they wait motionlessly gathering dust until the next set of hands picks them up.

It is a place where fathers sneak away for ten minutes to look through magazines like ESPN, a magazine for the men who once where little league champions; Bon Appetit, a magazine for the men who once were aspiring chefs but are now confined to the instructions of Craft Mac n Cheese; and Rolling Stone, a magazine for the once up and coming garage band that could have been on the rise but never made it past the driveway.

Some mothers wander towards the teen section: where they find the most popular romance novels on vampires and lovestruck and desperate young women and an unrequited love. They fawn over the perfectly constructed male characters that are exciting and misunderstood to fill gaps their boring husbands are unable to conceal. The will buy the newest Nicolas Sparks novel and drive home smiling in anticipation and as their slumbering husbands lie beside them, they will race through the novel under the dim light of the mini lamp that stands on their bedside tables along with their overnight wrinkle removing masks and a family portraits of their smiling children and husbands in matching Christmas sweaters. These women devour these tales of romance and come back for the next installment of the same story with same characters and plot, but disguised with different names and a new and more exotic setting.

Children can be found holding their mothers hands, running around the store, losing their patience as they look up and say “lets go mommy”. These children disregard the lettering of the books surrounding them, but are entirely attracted to the bright images on the cover and the silly cartoons made specifically to capture the attention of children with a one hundred to two hundred word vocabulary. The boys drag their parents toward the adventure stories of silly children doing silly thing like they wish they could be doing. The girls skip over to the books with images of girls in long dresses and glistening hair and imagine their faces in the place of the empty minded models.

On occasion an elderly man may walk in and move past these young families and new books marketed toward a fresher audience. He will descend the stairs underneath a sign that reads, “Rare and Used Books”, and as he does so, he will remember when these books had been upstairs and his parents would take him to the book store to buy his first chapter book. He will remember how mature he felt when he chose to read Earnest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and how hesitant he felt as he held onto the last line pursed on his lips, and with a final sigh he released it, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

The books in the basement are more delicate. Each page slightly bent, but preserved in a neat cover. Each word gradually fading, but still legible and rich in meaning. Musty, bleached, and slightly abused- these “rare” and “used” books are the prototypes of the stories written by modern authors. These books hold the values and memories of our history; they are our legacies.

Creek, creek, creak under the feet of a young father running after his impatient children. Woosh, woosh, woosh flip from the stiff pages of a book held by short lady who is “Just looking”. Click, click, click from the keyboard under the fingers of a heavy handed woman typing on a small computer behind a white desk covered in pencils, erasers, and book markers ready to help the next costumer who is ready to purchase their next book.

-Laura G.