The Book Barn

The Book Barn is bigger than it looks and harder to find. It’s out there in what were once pastures and cornfields but today are the wild wooly wags. What lies beyond that can only be imagined. The Book Barn has an annex. It is not heated and every volume in there is “a buck or less.”

On a winter’s day, I stand before the door of the annex and consider my options. The older I get, the fewer they seem. I enter the annex and peruse the crowded, disorganized shelves. I see and touch many a moldering title but am not tempted to make a purchase. I do not know if this shivering I experience is from the cold or from a preternatural sense of all the effort that went into making these now forsaken efforts—the mostly forgotten labors of authors, editors, publishers, distributors, and booksellers. Or maybe the shivering is induced by the mouse that runs over my foot while I am flipping through a slim edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Oh well, the words of Lew Welch sum it up nicely: “So it’s all come to this.”