Think of an Elephant.

I write this in a peculiar state of grief. On Nov. 9th, Martin Stone — almost ubiquitously described as "the legendary book scout" — died at his home in Versailles. And on that same day, Donald J. Trump was declared the 45th President of the United States. The first left a hole in the trade I love; the second exposed one in the country I do. Martin was not an American, and I did known him well, yet somehow these two events are linked in my mind more closely than simple temporal proximity ought to suggest. As a scout, Martin was known for his almost preternatural ability to be in the right place at the right time, and once again his timing seemed perfect: departing (undoubtedly with a tip of one of his many natty hats) just as a man utterly antithetical to the values of our trade passed through the electoral gates to stand at the doors of the White House.

But this begs the question: what are the values of the rare book trade? What is its worldview? I confess that even I sometimes lose track, indulging in flights of rhetorical revery after the acquisition of some cool new thing. Or fearing that I am a mere hawker of fetishistic tokens, just one small step away from wampum or indulgences. While it may be easier for the purveyor of an independent bookstore, or used bookshop, or local library to trace a clearer link between their occupation and their influence in the larger community (support of literacy, of free speech), for the rare book dealer such connections are more tenuous. We are sellers of objects after all, not texts. And so our businesses can often feel divorced from these more immediate concerns. The values of our trade are essentially abstract, esoteric: preservation, appreciation, connoisseurship. Indeed, for most people — even many so-called book lovers — bibliography (which seems to me what links the worlds of collector, dealer, and curator) must appear an almost pure abstraction, deserving of some brutal Swiftian satire: so-called intellectuals talking animatedly about books, all the while ignoring the words they contain.

So, what is the connection between the worlds of rare books and politics (and here I am using the word in the broader Aristotelian sense, rather than the narrow American one)? What influence should each have on the other? Or to ask the question still another way: What is the proper response of our trade to the election of a man so clearly unfit for the highest position our country can bestow? And can such a question be anything other than ridiculous? More akin to a mechanic or accountant wondering how the election should influence their work?  

I don't think so. Because the books and manuscripts we buy, the archives we tout, the photographs we sell, the ephemera we save, these diverse primary objects of material culture are nothing less than the gold standard underwriting the fact-based economy. That this economy is under siege only makes what we do all the more necessary and indispensable. I would be tempted to call these activities — preservation, bibliography, curation, the buying and selling of our printed historical repositories — radical, if they weren't, ironically, such fundamentally conservative impulses.

But inherent in this tension between the subversive and the cautious, or perhaps even because of it, is a fundamental hope. In describing the work of scouts like Martin Stone, Peter Howard captured this: 

"[B]ut the motivation is hardly just the financial return. The motivation is to please, and to complete that aesthetic curve, that, for a book, is the arc of its destiny [...] But the will and ego of scouts like Martin Stone are subsumed under an overriding conviction that they affect the future. They know they enrich the future by what they do. A particular branch of optimism!" (MARTIN STONE, BOOKSCOUT. Serendipity Books, 2000)

Admitedly, I am finding it hard to be optimistic. The Oxford English Dictionary chose "post-truth" as its 2016 word of the year. Fake news seems to have played at least a part in the election. As John Oliver succinctly put it recently, "There is no longer a consensus on what a fact is." And in decoupling facts from evidence, we have utterly devalued the common currency of political and communal discourse. This loss has made it harder for everyone — liberal, moderate, conservative — to listen to each other, or be heard.

If once the musical metaphor for America was jazz — a collection of individuals each improvising on their own but simultaneously attuned to each other to create a harmonious whole — I now fear we have become little more than a clanging cacophony, each of us childishly banging our pot as loudly as we can, ignoring the other players, insulated by an increasingly narrowly-targeted press and the echo chambers of our own self-selected social media.

But like Martin Stone, I have to believe we can affect the future. And that our past speaks to our present in ways that can change and influence it.  As I've walked around my office these last two weeks, certain items began to speak to me, almost whispering from the shelves, quietly but unmistakably nudging me to reckon with this moment in American history, and to begin to imagine a way forward, both professionally and personally. Some have encouraged to me to remember that we are all Americans. Others have reminded me of how far we've come as a country. Others how far yet to go. Many speak to the need for continued vigilance and resistance. All feel uncomfortably relevant.

So what is the proper response to America's swerve toward authoritarianism? Toward an almost pre-Gutenbergian idea of truth? I am a bookseller. That fact feels dearer to me now than perhaps at any other time in my career. It is not sufficient. But I refuse to act as if it cannot be a response.