The annual Flower Mart was taking place at the National Cathedral the other weekend. A wonderful used book sale was also taking place on the Cathedral grounds underneath a long tent.

I found some lovely books and LPs, though I missed out on an anthology of stories by John Campbell, better known as the editor of Astounding Stories, where he ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction,  publishing early stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton. I would even go so far as to say that Campbell was the Maxwell Perkins of sci fi – driving his writers in the direction of more and better characterization and hard science. Of course, after the Golden Age era of the late thirties and the forties, both he and the magazine he edited became better known for crackpot conservatism, new age-y hocus pocus, and a racism that was both weirdly expressed and unforgivable.

What I did pick up included Virgil, Jorie Graham, Otto Rank, and Goethe; along with vinyl records including a Glenn Gould performance of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier and Leonard Bernstein conducted performances of Mahler and Beethoven (which, much like reading Heidegger on Nietzsche, one listens to more for Bernstein’s vision than the composer’s).

Will I live to see the day come when printed books, like vinyl, are only available used? Or else in limited release, deliberately anachronistic editions that merely supplement the work in some other form (like REM’s orange tinted vinyl pressed single of Orange Crush, released to help generate buzz for the album on which it appeared, Green)?

After all, I am still old enough to faintly remember the days before cassette tapes fully replaced vinyl LPs.

In such an event, it becomes to easy to envision one’s self as a cantankerous old recluse, surrounded by the detritus of a dead age: manual typewriters with each ribbon wrung dry of the last particle of ink before being replaced, fountain pens, mouldering books with brittle pages, and vinyl records etched by time with deep scratches, skips, and crackles.