When Dean Wallace of Editorial Humor first suggested this column, I think he expected it to be more about individual wonderful books, and less about the used book business. At the time I told him that I would find that difficult, that almost never in my 27 years as a dealer had I recommended a specific title to someone unless I personally had no copy to sell, but could recommend a possible source, interlibrary loan if nothing else.

That, on the contrary, I’d told about 4,000 customers over the years not to buy a specific book or copy, and that I sometimes felt that the best thing about the general used book business was that it permitted this anti-selling attitude. "If it needs to sold it shouldn’t be bought" was rightly the title of my first column: i.e. the browser should fall in love with the book, not have it pimped to him. This has an odd sort of logic:1) If the book is any good, the right person will find and desire it. 2) If it isn’t any good, I don’t want anyone to buy it. Life is too short, and people shouldn’t be johns or pimps. Citizens shouldn’t be lemmings or aspire to lead lemmings, no matter how comfy the fur, how awesome the sea and the squeaks of the multitude.

But now, in my 10th column, I’ll do a little book-chat. And I guarantee that I don’t think I have a copy to sell of any of the three titles I’ll reminisce about at this or any given moment, though they’re all titles I sometimes have, just not when you’re looking for them.. I often feel that books on the shelves of a general store hide from the customer that’s looking only for the one specific title, preferring to go home with the person that discovers the book and their desire for it simultaneously.

These three titles are here as examples of what sorts of things might find you if you go browsing in any general used bookstore, even a relatively bad one. (All used bookstores can have books that speak to you, but the better inventories have fewer titles that yell, lie mute, or make annoying gestures.)

All three titles are currently gettable new, and , on the internet, the used ones can’t hide: they’re findable, just read the dealer descriptions judgmentally before ordering.

First is Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, the memoir of an Alsation with a French father and German mother who was swept into Hitler’s army at 16 and into the Wehrmacht a year later. He did two tours on the Eastern Front, volunteering for the second trip to hell so as to get a week’s leave in Berlin, and because his best friend volunteered.

He describes hordes of screaming Siberians, most without guns, charging their foxholes, as Stalin threw bodies at the Germans while he built industrial production. On the winter retreat from the second tour, the soldiers were so cold that if anyone was about to urinate, he’d announce it so his group could briefly warm their infected hands in the stream. The officers had vehicles and horses and wagons of food: he describes an overturned wagon and the summary hangings (to save bullets) of starving enlisted men that took bread.

And at the end of the retreat, after desperately avoiding the Russians, he gave himself up to the British. They, on learning his background, turned him over to the French and he did a year in the French army, essentially to clean up his resume, obscure his past. That’s why it’s called The Forgotten Soldier: he wants people to remember that there were a lot of non-Germans in Hitler’s armies, as their were many non-French in Napoleon’s troops. Both wanted empires, so both fought European wars.

The second title is about an older Europe and a different world system: De Santillana and von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. The Mill in question is the mythological one in the tale of "Why is the sea salt?", and it’s symbolic of the Milky Way as it turns over eons. The authors, both eminent historians of science, argue that distant cultures have structurally similar myths because a very prehistoric trans-continental elite thus shared knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, knowledge gained from centuries of observation and data transmission. Numbers preceded the words, but many generations later only the words were remembered.

Number three is Road Mangler Deluxe by Phil Kaufman, self-described "executive nanny" to the Rolling Stones, Emmylou Harris, Joe Cocker, Frank Zappa and many others. He’s the Road Manager who, while on parole after doing years in prison for smuggling marijuana, stole and burned Gram Parsons body to fulfill his pledge to the deceased. He knew Manson in prison (one of Ma Barker’s aging boys taught Charlie guitar there), and owns the rights to Manson’s recorded music. But Manson got mad at him: Kaufman liked the sex but not the Family values. In it’s own grim way it’s a hilarious book: in prison, Kaufman started an interview column called "guard of the month" to enable himself to wander about, simultaneously farting and picking his nose as sexual deterrents to other prisoners. He survived, and tells many tales of rock and roll excess.

Feedback is more than welcome at mike@mcintyreandmoore.com.