This morning, with first light barely bathing Room 119, evil spirits descended on my world. For half an hour, the alarm on my machine that regulates my feeding tube has been beeping out into the void. I cannot imagine anything so inane or nerve-racking as this piercing beep-beep-beep that keeps pecking at my brain. As a bonus, my sweat has unglued the tape that keeps my right eyelid closed, and the stuck-together lashes are tickling my pupil unbearably. And to crown it all, the end of my urinary catheter has become detached and I am drenched. Awaiting rescue, I hum an old song by Henri Salvador: “Don’t you fret baby it’s be all right.” And here comes the nurse. Automatically, she turns on the TV. A commercial, with a personal computer spelling out the question: “Were you born lucky?”

Ever feel as though you can’t accomplish as much as you wish?

For writers (there are many scribblers among us), anxiety and frustration are staples to an otherwise semi-sane diet of normality, emotions that are iron in their ability to incapacitate. In Jorge Luis Borges short story, “The Secret Miracle“, the protagonist is a writer sentenced to death by firing squad:

Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friends and many routines, the problematic pursuit of literature constituted the whole of his life; like every writer, he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.

Unlike Hladik, the fictional protagonist soon to be shot, Jean-Dominque Bauby was not content to allow other men to measure what he might have done. Bauby’s memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was written in a special type of short hand. Virtually paralytic, he tapped out his memoir with one eye, blinking through a special alphabet denoting one letter at a time until all one hundred and thirty two pages were complete. That’s approximately 840 blinks per page, or 26,880 meticulously fluttered alphabetic letters. For the former general editor of one of the most affluent and popular fashion magazines, this had to be particularly grueling.

Bauby’s memoir is not just another memoir about the infirm. It’s a rich exploration of life, seen from a rare perspective – one that none of us would ever wish to know. Far from morbid, it’s a memoir that is truthful without being darkly sardonic, honest yet affirming. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly just became one of those books I read annually (or at least biennially) for the simple reason that Bauby’s life, at a time when one would surely be full of excuses, did not prohibit him from doing what he loved. Whatever excuses, however many interruptions, obligations, or hindrances, they all pale in comparison to a life like Bauby’s. His written testament exemplifies the trite but true euphemism, “whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.”

Special note: You might have seen previews for the movie The Diving Bell and Butterfly. Bauby’s family objected to the veracity of the film. I recommend the book. Besides it being closer to Bauby’s intent, I think it is somewhat honoring, a gesture of respect, to read the book he so painstakingly wrote.

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Summer has arrived but despite the heat, there are plenty of estate sales, auctions and garage sales which means we’ve been busy buying up books! Book scouting is great fun but a tremendous amount of hard work. The physical aspect of hauling heavy boxes plus the meticulous process of determining the value of each individual book is enough to remove any remnant of romanticism I once had for the book trade. What is left of these notions is the appreciation and admiration of an individual’s library. In the past three weeks we’ve picked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 books: European travel books, children’s books, religious books, books on the holocaust, heraldry, Oklahoma history and more.

What I am most surprised at is the amount of time this hobby has taken up. Larry McMurtry, in his memoir as a lifelong bookman, wrote “Many bookmen, and some of the best among them, rarely, if ever, read. … It could be that one of the reasons Marcia and I remained lesser bookmen was that neither of us ever stopped reading. I was, after all, a reader first and a book dealer last.” Though it has been fun and exhausting, reading remains my first love. (Perhaps it is this love of reading that might sustain me through the lean years of a lifetime of collecting and selling books as it has Larry McMurtry).

Beyond book scouting, I started reading three great books:

• In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

I’ve returned to Cather once again as I’d like to complete her “prairie trilogy”, hopefully sometime this year. I really hadn’t planned on reading Proust’s seven volume epic but I was completely mesmerized by the audio version, read by John Rowe. Don Quixote, I am embarrassed to say, I have not read and am looking forward to reading it more than any other book I’ve considered reading. What’s next on your list?

For further reading:

• Young Collectors: An Emerging Market? (FineBooks & Collections)
• Larry McMurtry’s Dream Job (The New York Times)

(By the way: I started a flickr page of some of our most recent, unique finds, you can access it here).