Yesterday’s post on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project mentioned a surprise that came with the book. It’s not that unusual to find odd things in used books – old bookmarks, inscriptions of past owner’s names, slips of paper – but this was truly odd.

The surprise is that this book was once given by a man to a woman as a Valentine’s Day present.

Well, I’m not sure of the wisdom of giving a woman a heavy, scholarly tome for Valentine’s Day. Might not even an intellectual feminist prefer chocolates, flowers, or jewelry? I don’t know.

The guy who sent this was risky but thoughtful in some respects. It’s hard to say without knowing the girl but there’s this chance that she might have tossed him and this book onto the used pile.

There are various reasons why a book ends up on the used market…usually the owner sells the book, but sometimes other things just happen, leaving a mystery as to why and how this book and its forgotten contents ended up being discarded.

Anyway, the letter that comprised the Valentine which I found between the pages of the book was quite touching. And it does provide a great description of the book. I’m including it below, but am omitting the names of the recipient and the sender.

Dear **** – I thought you would like this book as much as I do. It’s fun to just flip through and read things at random, but the individual sections also point to pieces of a coherent vision regarding the growth of a dominant bourgeois sensibility and the development of Paris in the nineteenth century. It tends to assume an elaborate working knowledge of the history of Paris. Not having such background knowledge, I end up reading it as simultaneously history and critical history. I think you’ll be most interested in the sections on Hugo and Baron Haussman – but all the sections are interconnected. The other fun game to play with the individual notes is to try and determine whether Benjamin was on hashish when he wrote them. All in all, this is my favorite book in a long time, and I thought you would enjoy it as well. Let me know what you think.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Love,

***

For weeks I’ve been waiting for a shipment of books from the U.S. Finally, today, a notice arrived and that meant a trip down to Retiro and the international post office.

The most anticipated volume in this shipment, what I look forward to soaking in day after day, is the one thousand plus pages of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.

The entire book is simply snippets of Benjamin’s readings and his thoughts, an almost blog-like composition that Benjamin crafted while sitting in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

The work is a curious intersection of philosophy, urban planning, architecture, sociology, and literature.

Benjamin was fascinated by the arcades, passageways, of Paris and the ways those structures transformed Parisian society in the mid-1800s.

The Arcades Project – just like any blog – is an unfinished work. Begun in 1927, Benjamin still hadn’t completed the work by his death in 1940, a suicide at the French-Spanish border as he attempted to flee Nazi-occupied France. It’s not clear what Benjamin’s intended behind the many pages of notes that editors later comprised together to form The Arcades Project, possibly notes for another work or simply his own occupation with a variety of thoughts. Originally written in German and French, the English translation was not published until 1999.

Walter Benjamin was a great observer of urban culture. And in my own walks around Buenos Aires, I’m going to be lugging this volume (my edition is a 5 lb hardcover!) along some of my jaunts. It should make for fascinating reading and reflection while sipping coffee. I’m sure that it will not be the last book I will ever read. But, I probably could spend the remainder of my days perusing this volume.

Besides, my book shipment also included W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

An additional surprise

I bought this book used at a good price, the hardcover was no more expensive than a new paperback. But what I particularly like about buying used books is that they often come with an added surprise. And this one certainly did. I’ll blog tomorrow about that.

…this post continues yesterday’s odd encounters in the bookstores along Florida street…

Argentine writer César Aira never seems to struggle with the writer’s block, facing the blank page. After all, he has written more than 50 books. Despite his prolific output, I’m having a difficult time finding a wide range of his works in Spanish here in Buenos Aires. (I’m reminded of my long, desperate search last year for a particular set of books by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano).

When I go to search for Aira I’m finding only 2 or 3 titles on the bookstore shelves. In one of the four hundred El Ateneo stores on Florida street, I pulled down a copy of Aira’s novel Embalse. I almost purchased it but as I was flipping through the pages I noticed that several pages were blank…page 62 had no ink on the page. Further examination revealed even more pages in the book that were blank…The book was published by Emecé, a fairly large publisher in Argentina. I would think that their quality control would be a lot better.

Then again, I partly wondered, considering Aira’s often eccentric style, if the blank pages were intentional. But I decided it was just a printing error. Yet, I couldn’t help to think of Italo Calvino’s wonderful story that plays with the concept of a reader buying a book with a printing error, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler