Ghostwritten No. 3: Young Bibliophiles

One day a very shy girl came in to my shop - so shy that she checked my facial expression to see if it were all right for her to touch the books on the shelves. She was in the Young Adult section, and she seemed to know just what she wanted. Very specific books. It took a little coaxing to get her to tell me why she'd chosen those particular ones. I practically cried when she explained: Her teacher had instructed her class to make kits in case of house fires. Flashlight, toothbrush, change of underclothes, stuff like that. This dear girl was buying extra copies of her favorite books to put in the pillowcase she'd grab if she had to evacuate quickly.

When I talk about the young readers I love, I'm not talking about the ones reading the Hottest New Series. I appreciate that kids are reading - it's no secret that YA is the fastest-growing part of the book market, and I'm glad to hear it - and I really like a few of the hot new books, such as Collins' The Hunger Games. But I also think that some of what passes for YA fiction now is tasteless. Poorly written. I won't carry that, no matter how much the kids want it. I'm here to show them the good stuff.

And the thing is, they like the good stuff if I can get them to try. Moreover, once they get into the good stuff, they want well-made editions of the good stuff. They want old editions, hardcovers, or copies with renowned illustrators. These aren't kids just consuming products designed for their market. They are genuine bibliophiles, the kind that some of my cranky colleagues think don't exist anymore.

You hear it at least as often as I do, probably. Kids don't love books as books. They want to see the movie adaptation. They won't read it unless it's popular. They don't want to read classics, not even Newbery winners. Blah blah blah. Of course there are some kids like that, just as there have been for generations - why do you think L. M. Montgomery's publisher forced her to write more Avonlea books than she wanted to write? And if you know anything about your Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys, you know that they were great for a while and then settled into bland routines. Brand-name books for kids have been around since the invention of books for kids, so no curmudgeon now living can claim that kids these days are different from kids back when.

Anyway, every book collector was once a child, and the species is not endangered, despite dark forecasts from those who think the e-book will replace the print book (it won't; maybe I'll write about that another time). Maybe the book collectors aren't as interested in ephemera concerning Grover Cleveland as they might have been a century ago, but the new collectors love their selection at least as passionately.

What are the kids collecting? Funny thing: not series. They'll get all the books in a shortish series (Daniel Handler's Series of Unfortunate Events, at thirteen and a half volumes, is as far as they'll go without parental financing) and read them all, but that's not the kind of collecting we're talking about. No, what they want for their personal libraries are things like:

- Attractive, centenarian editions of Mark Twain's novels. Especially Connecticut Yankee.
- Illustrated editions of Arthurian legends, Jules Verne's novels, Sherlock Holmes, and epic poetry, as well as mythology texts, especially if they have cover art mimicking illuminated manuscripts.
- Old schoolbooks. When I say old here, I mean more than 100 years. Also old, illustrated books on physics or anatomy. Gray's Anatomy is one of my biggest movers in the young collector market, though they have to settle for later reprints since the centenarian editions are pricier than most allowances can cover.

Think that's shocking? I would like to announce a startling and profoundly meaningful fact to the grumps: I have patrons under the age of fourteen who save up for particular books. Particular old books. Clothbound, gilt titled duodecimo type books. So there.

And I'm not talking about kids in their late teens, either. I'm talking about the 10-14 age group. One of my most serious collectors of 19th century math primers couldn't have been twelve yet when he started buying the things. I set aside Modern Library editions of certain authors for a thirteen-year-old. A fourteen-year-old asked me very seriously which translation of The Inferno of Dante was better - and understood perfectly when I asked whether he wanted a close translation or a poetic interpretation - and chose the dual text edition that wasn't the best translation in the end, because it was 86 years old, gilt titled, and had the original Italian and modern English in facing text, so that he could try to learn some of Dante's Italian.

One patron, according to her parents, actually made aisles of bookshelves in her bedroom, divided into sections and organized within the sections. I'm not commenting on how many books she has - it's the fact that she organized them by how good they were. And then rearranged them as her tastes evolved. And sometimes rearranged them thematically, in ways that made me stop and think about some books in ways I hadn't before, when she told me her latest spatial system.

Okay, so you know a kid who has only read the latest three- or four-volume pop series and, when asked about the book, comments only that the actor who plays the male lead in the films is really hot. So do I. But just because they haven't discovered books as books yet doesn't mean they won't. Here are a few tricks to try:

1. Of course there are new vampire series, but none of them are as good as the original vampire books. Bram Stoker's, for example. (This only works on kids who don't have hangups about 19th century vocabulary, so be careful.)

2. You know what's really scary? No, of course your teacher wants you to try Edgar Allan Poe. No, there's this book I read about.... (Try "a girl who gets a job as a governess, so basically a nanny, and she starts hearing crazy laughter at night, and then this random fire breaks out" = Jane Eyre. Sound too old for them? Ask if they've read Pride and Prejudice. A remarkably large number have.)

3. Oh, that? It's totally copycat. The author basically used the same plot as... (Be creative. I've actually gotten kids to read The Picture of Dorian Gray by arguing that its characters have the same relationships to each other as in Interview with a Vampire.)

4. Find something older that is like what the kid just finished. Cooper's The Dark is Rising is great for Harry Potter fans out of material; Brian Jacques' fans love Le Guin's Earthsea books while waiting for the latest Redwall book. And if they're still hung up on the latest teen romance/paranormal series, try to find a non-dorky-looking edition (tragically, many look dorky) of Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card, adding a note that the main character gets pretty messed up before he reunites with the girl he first met when she was four, who has gotten really bitter herself, but then, dot dot dot, you know? (Bonus: Alvin, the main male character, is not a manipulative stalker, and neither he nor Peggy are solipsistic or fashionably depressed.)

5. If you're not actually living with the kid, you can play the Aloof Game. This is a total blast, just not recommended for parents or guardians. It goes like this: if the kid asks you for a pulp tripe book, look preoccupied and say it's with the "kiddie books." Then look at the kid and correct yourself: "I'm sorry, young adult." The kid should look offended. If not, add something like "You should be able to find it easily - it's thinner than the other ones." Or say, "Do you know how to look for a book by the author's name?" Then walk with the kid over to the books like you're afraid the kid will smudge peanut butter on something, and tell the kid which letter to look under, but then act like you've forgotten the kid is there while you touch the spine of a really good book with a provocative title, like The Witch of Blackbird Pond or Hatchet, or an obscure one like Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and then turn away. When they ask, it is very important to say exactly this: "You'll enjoy it more when you understand it better." - They never fall for the old "You're too young" line, but the implication that they are too inexperienced nabs them almost without fail.

None of these work? I've got more ideas. Ask, or bring the kid to our place. We have ways of making these beepless, not-network-enabled, non-oversexed, unadapted-to-film glued stacks of paper somehow still irresistible. It's nothing really special, just that we have practice getting young people to tell us what kind of story they would read, plus we have a huge collection of books we've already read. Sometimes it just takes a stranger listening and sympathetically picking one special book. Or maybe it's the mystique. Booksellers, for some crazy reason, still have mystique.

Also we sparkle in daylight.

No, seriously. It's the gilt that flakes off the spines of really old books.

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Next week: Is the printed book dying? Will e-books kill it? Why am I actually totally thrilled about Sony e-readers when it's my job to sell physical books?