There’s this dream I used to have, when I was a teenager. It’s not an uncommon dream, maybe even you yourself have had something like it. In it, I walk into a vast bookstore; shelves extend beyond the horizon line—a Jorge Luis Borges or artist François Schuiten kind of shop, decorated with rococo woodwork, tons of curling brass, ladders that slide along an eternal track near the ceiling (in my dream, the ceiling is the sky). And, of course, on the shelves, all the books I’d ever wanted to read, all waiting to be taken to a Borgesian cash register (perhaps one pays in shells or sand), and then home to become part of my own library. At that time in my life, the dream shop would have contained the complete works of Moorcock and Ellison, Simak and Burroughs, all in paperback size (even in my dreams, hardcovers were well beyond my means).
In today’s world of instant-gratification internet auction-houses and book dealers, this dream must seem quaint and unnecessary. But, for a young kid growing up in the eighties and early nineties, it was an intoxicating fantasy, since most of the works by the authors named above were completely out of print and unavailable to me or anybody else. Certainly, a copy of Dune or Foundation and Empire or The Demolished Man could be found at any shopping mall bookstore, but what were you to do when these few classic titles were exhausted and you wanted more? When the local library discounted science fiction as juvenile and thus only carried a few age-appropriate Heinlein and Bradbury titles?
The answer was simple: used-book stores. Becoming a reasonably well-read SF reader was no hard task, as the best known books had always remained in print. It was the more developed reader who ran into problems: how to discover Sturgeon? Or Lafferty? There was only one way, and that was to root around, a little teenaged pig hunting for paper truffles, in the mold-ering stacks of used-book stores. It was in those stacks that I discovered my favorite of the largely forgotten (for my generation, at least) writers of classic SF: Jack Vance.
A quick glance at JackVance.com reveals that his masterwork, The Dying Earth, was completely lost as an in-print US paperback between the years 1986 and 2000. Unavailable for fourteen years! If you had the great luck to find it used during those years (and when I found it, as Robert Silverberg writes about it in this month’s Reflections column, I knew that I had to have it), and recognize it as a classic, you could look forward to future dreams of Borgesian bookshops featuring all the Greatest Works of Jack Vance, most of which were unavailable in anything other than costly small-press editions. Those who enjoyed The Dying Earth for the great poetic and mysterious masterpiece that it is would most certainly want to explore the many other worlds of Vance—perhaps Big Planet or the Gaean Reach? It was so for me. I leaped to the world of The Last Castle via interlibrary loan, and crashed upon the steppes of the Planet of Adventure with Adam Reith—a setting I have always equated subconsciously with Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical adventures upon the plains of Poland, which I read the same year. But it was always a vigorous hunt to find the next Vance book, in those days before Abebooks.com and eBay, when old books were gloriously fallen upon, found by pure chance and, perhaps, fate.
Imagine my delight, after years of collecting Vance in drips and drabs, when I discovered the Vance Integral Library <www.vanceintegral. com> in 1999—a volunteer-run project devoted to producing “a complete and correct edition, in forty-four volumes” of Vance’s entire oeuvre. Forty-four volumes! Everything. That year, I knew I could not afford to purchase the whole collection, which was printed privately at considerable expense, but I had to be involved in whatever minor capacity I could muster. I signed up to proofread Vance texts in my spare time, a job I enjoyed, though I did not always have the opportunity to proof Vance’s best.
The VIE’s purpose was elegant: “the proper presentation and preservation of Vance’s work” so that it “may . . . be conveniently assessed.” That future assessment may feature wildly divergent opinions as to whether Vance is or is not literature, or, even whether his work is or is not science fiction—even the editors and volunteers of the VIE itself could not always agree on these points in their own newsletter. (I love when SF is not considered “literature”—the used-book-store owners price their stock accordingly.) At the project’s core, and beyond all critical appraisal, Vance’s work is now available to be accessed in its purest and least tampered-with form, in a truly beautiful edition meant to last several lifetimes. Though scheduling conflicts forced me to leave the project when I accepted the job at Asimov’s, I was proud to have helped with this effort.
My set of the VIE—purchased on-line in 2006, some time after its original publication—represents to me a secretive nod to that Borgesian dream-bookshop of my youth. The next best thing, used-book shops were places where chance and randomness and instinct unwittingly collided to create my tastes and sensibilities in the fiction I love. Without these places, stores separate from the consumer economics of larger chain bookshops and the ephemeral trends of the day’s literati, I would never have had the opportunity to discover Poul Anderson’s classic novels, Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia, or scores of other books and stories that are as integral a part of my intellectual tapestry as most of the Vance Integral Library remains. It seems to me that this constant recycling of artifacts is crucial to the development of new science fiction aficionados, and I hope that my library, painstakingly cobbled together over many years, will one day disseminate to the next generations of SF readers, becoming the currency paid that will keep the genre alive forever. m
Brian Bieniowski is the associate editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.
