Durham calling to the Gothic Wonderland:
Summer session has begun, reading lists and pre-labs already in hand.
Durham calling to Duke’s academic halls:
Come from your partitioned caves on Central, Belmont and wherever your feet fall.
Durham calling: Duke cowers and recedes.
Hold! Abandon your tomes, frat music and bad beer.
For Durham is coming, brilliant in the summer sun.
Your fake friend mosaic shattered, Durham’s breeze blows through—yes, it has won.
A social or situational miscalculation? No, I have no fear.
For Durham’s thriving, expanding to our domain, and I, thankfully, lie in its grasp.
Of Durham’s secondhand bookstores—all of which I insist you visit before ordering on Amazon—Books Do Furnish A Room remains unapologetically unique. Located off of East Campus on West Markham, the store and its owners—Gordon Matthews and Richard Lee—are seemingly modeled after Anthony Powell’s 1971 novel of the same name, the 10th in his wondrous and prolific series, A Dance to the Music of Time.
In this novel, a generation returns from world war amid the type of austerity measures the world has only begun to suffer in Tory Britain and Tea Party America. These “representative” (albeit oligarchical, usually plutocratic) governments scream that to save the economy we must pummel the poor in the name of rescuing the rich. In their futile attempt to ignore the constant pile of metaphorical corpses following these wars—social programs, morality and intellectualism—the wounded embrace nostalgia for the time before violation.
Like the characters in the novel, this Durham bookstore, beyond Luddite fears, teems with a rejection of the technological rat race of a never questioned worth despite the always apparent sacrifices. Within this blue building at the end of a long gravel driveway, a time warp lies behind a shabby white door near a sign advertising that the store is “Open 364 Days a Year.”
The three men who you will immediately encounter within the building—the two owners and staff member Yancee Perrish—are, admittedly, niche nostalgists. When Richard Lee first approached Gordon Matthews with a business proposal, he had already discovered his knack for identifying valuable comic books at a Chapel Hill secondhand bookstore. Matthews, a quirky, unabashed audiophile, loves classical music and vinyl records. Despite these two specific interests, the men share a passion for the aged and the old pages of secondhand books. Combining vinyl records, collectable comic books and secondhand books of all genres, Lee and Matthews have created a seamless and beautiful “menage a trios” of nostalgia.
Our generation, like that which fought in the mechanized schizophrenia that was the Great War can never really know of the time before our never-ending War on Terror and the resultant programmed paranoia. In more subtle violence enabled by the emergence of the Internet, texting and e-readers, we have abandoned that which humanity once held so dear. We are the ADD generation, “multitasking” but never doing anything extremely well. When speaking with Matthews one afternoon, he turned to me with a deep sadness and, like an extended sigh, told me that which he has come to accept:
“I’ve had moments of great anxiety running this place. We are living in a shifting world. It used to be that people listened to music for quality—now they just want it for free. People are growing up not knowing what a physical copy of music is—that’s already happened, and I think it’s too late to save them. I always thought the most boring part of an album was the hit songs. It’s everything else that makes it an album. Now people only have the hit songs. I don’t even know if they know about the rest of the songs. The same is true for books. I think we have a less literate population than we did 30, 40, even 50 years ago. What I mean is that people read less. When people do read books, they read them on some electronic device. They don’t read a real book and appreciate what it is. People like me, places like this—we’re a dying breed. Like you saw at the Book Exchange, the next generation doesn’t want a place like this. I hope I’m wrong, but that’s just what I think.”
Students and faculty, I pray we can prove Matthews wrong. Go to Books Do Furnish A Room and browse. Yes, look for the books on your school list—the store’s “hits”—but also walk around and find the title that attracts you personally. Bring life back into an aged book or vinyl and take a moment to learn from those now long gone voices chronicled within. A paradox and its solution are written within Books Do Furnish A Room: The roots of “to furnish” suggest advancement and progress, but even in this forward march, we can never forget our history lest we live with nostalgia the word derived from the Greek “nostos” and “algos,” which literally describes a painful yearning for homecoming.
Josh Brewer is a Trinity senior.
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