Reading, Empathy, and the Operation of a Small Business
“Egghead likes his booky-wook!”
-Homer Simpson
I’m not delusional enough not to realize the vibes my physical appearance gives off to those first entering the shop. A shaved head (usually tucked under a hat or beanie), a beard, blue jeans (carpenter-cut), black top (T-shirt or hoodie, depending on the temperature), sneakers, and perhaps a smear of ink or some other typewriter-related residue situated upon my face (below the brow but above the perimeter of reddish follicles)—I probably look like I’ve walked out of the crowd of a ’90s Vans Warped Tour concert. So, it’s not surprising, after opening my mouth, any tense visitor immediately relaxes. There’s no “skater slang,” no piebald latticework of clean/vulgar language, no incessantness of “likes” and “ums” and “ya knows,” filtered through vacant stares and gaping maw. A kind, older woman once remarked, “You speak like a scholar,” to which I responded, “You haven’t met many scholars, have you?” She thought that funny; it was intended to be.
The natural question might be, “Don’t you think customers would appreciate if you dressed more professionally?”
My answer to that: “I do.”
I dress in the garb of a blue-collar worker, maintaining machines of predominantly white-collar notoriety, who’s invested enough time and money into his business that he prefers to feel comfortable, walking the floor of the storefront he leases. After all, if I’m comfortable, I’m better able to greet, interact, and repair. Few things in my day do I take more seriously than the work I perform, but there’s also Creature from the Black Lagoon imagery strewn across nearly every surface of the shop.
Levity is a must, pomposity isn’t.
Still, the way, and degree to which, certain people are taken aback can be, at times, a bit unexpected. Although word-of-mouth demonstrates itself with more frequency every passing day, most individuals find their way to the shop through online means, although apparently by way of a path foregoing the “bio” page of the website. And, that’s absolutely fine! In fact, I’d argue the less they know about me ahead of time, the more upfront and undiluted conversations tend to be.
People stopping by want to talk about their typewriters—what they mean to them, how they came upon them, loved ones who used them, what they plan to use them for, what their loved ones used them for—and I’m always engrossed by the stories they tell. Many conversations zigzag into the emotional, aspirational, and autobiographical, to the effect several patrons have joked I should install a psychiatrist’s couch in a corner of the shop. If not for the matter of space…
What I find most people appreciate is reciprocation. The scientists and engineers who come in receive a committed interlocuter on the subject of their discipline. What I don’t know, I inquire about, and with genuine curiosity. The same goes with poets and novelists and sports enthusiasts and gamers and cinephiles and audiophiles and chefs and gourmands and teachers and students and travelers and stay-at-homers. Everyone’s interest receives an open ear and rebounded dialogue from someone who knows a lot, a little, or absolutely nothing about the subject matter, because the person they’re speaking with actually wants to learn.
Those desiring a typewriter do so, because they want to write. In order to be a good writer, you have to find your voice, something authentic and penetrating and wholly your own. Finding a voice means reading others’ writing; it means learning what you do and don’t like about what you read. Arguably, while the mechanical intricacies of typewriter maintenance retained my interest in the craft, I originally got involved in the discipline, because I was an aspiring writer and wanted to learn how to fix my own machines, should Cambridge Typewriter shutter. To boot, because I typewrote, and wanted to be the best writer I could, I was also a voracious reader.
I’d argue the hardest part of typewriter repair is the limited number of hours it leaves me for reading. Before my apprenticeship, I easily scarfed 50 – 60 books a year, on every subject imaginable. Sometimes, I purposely read books by authors I hated, about subjects I knew I wouldn’t enjoy, just to comprehend alternate perspectives, however polarizing, to personal philosophies I’d already formed—an empathetic, though masochistic endeavor I feel more people should aspire to undertake. After all, how formidable are the tenets by which someone lives—how firm is their integrity to underlying ideals—if they can’t be tested through objective (and, let’s be honest, subjective) counterarguments?
I didn’t grow up wealthy. When my friends went on long vacations and their parents bought them the newest toys, video games, and whatever doodads were in vogue at the time, I ventured to the public library, finding my own private conduit to distant worlds, imaginative and real. Later in life, my wife and I would build a personal library of several thousand titles—ever-growing and already too large to be consumed in a single lifetime—confounding friends and neighbors in this digital era. Ironically, this literary refuge consumes the former TV and computer rooms of our home’s previous owners.
At any given time, I’ve got at least two dozen books in various states of consumption. (I’ve been reading the same biography of Jackson Pollock for over a decade now, mostly because every time I pick it up again, I’m inspired to rewatch the equally amazing Ed Harris film, Pollock, thereby momentarily satisfying my interest in the subject matter once more.) Granted, certain books require a constant sticktoitiveness, persevering from the title page to the back cover in as succinct a timeframe as possible, due to complexity, experimentalism, or timeliness to world events…or just because it’s that damn good! Regardless, the advent of daily operations, customer service, correspondence, service/labor, and troubleshooting involved in owning a small business severely truncates the free time necessary for undertaking one book, let alone a score.
Still, I trudge on…
But, therein lies the rub. In order to fix typewriters, I have to care about them. In order to care about them, I have to use them. In order to use them, I have to know how to write. In order to know how to write, I have to read. In order to read, I have to absorb.
Absorption originates knowledge, from which blossoms understanding, from which fosters empathy, from which elicits genuine interest, from which encourages dialogue, from which an honest rapport with patrons can be had. This is why the grungy-looking fellow, seated behind a workbench—the bent neck of a lamp adjusted at the right angle for illumination to the posterior of an upended writing machine—is more than the sum of his wardrobe selection or the fishman artifacts on his walls and shelves.
Below is a list of my favorite books, divided into “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction”—fifty of each. These are not “the best books ever written,” although more than a few have ended up on lists of that ilk. Honestly, a couple aren’t even that well-written, but they meant a lot to me in very specific points in my life, and the inspirations they engendered, or reflections they continually nurture of a life forever out-of-reach to me now, by time or circumstance, are enough to warrant their placements on this list, specific only to myself. In more than a few cases, I don’t even agree with everything the author has written, but the prose may be so unbelievably captivating, I can’t help but be in awe of what they were able to achieve. There are too many “honorable mentions” to count; and, depending on the day, more than a few of the listed quite easily could be bumped for an equal number from a batter’s box as amorphous as it is heterogeneous. Several, however, are staples; otherwise, how could they have made it so high?
Just keep in mind: never judge a book by its cover.
—————
Fiction
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Stoner (John Williams)
Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon)
2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Blood Meridian; or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy)
A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood)
The Jeeves Omnibus (P. G. Wodehouse)
Coriolanus (William Shakespeare)
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov)
Battle Royale (Koushun Takami)
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
Enduring Love (Ian McEwan)
Autumn of the Patriarch (Gabriel García Márquez)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Inherit the Wind (Jerome Lawrence)
Exquisite Corpse (Poppy Z. Brite)
Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
Candide (Voltaire)
Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
MacBeth (William Shakespeare)
No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
Child of God (Cormac McCarthy)
Complete Poems, 1904 - 1962 (e e cummings)
The Children Act (Ian McEwan)
Perfume (Patrick Süskind)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
White Fang (Jack London)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)
Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmund Rostand)
The Long Walk (Stephen King [as Richard Bachman])
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein)
Contact (Carl Sagan)
The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño)
Butcher's Crossing (John Williams)
Thank You for Smoking (Christopher Buckley)
Glamorama (Bret Easton Ellis)
Under the Skin (Michel Faber)
The Mezzanine (Nicholson Baker)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
Porno (Irvine Welsh)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)
Main Street (Sinclair Lewis)
The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolaño)
Non-Fiction
Prejudices: The Complete Series (H. L. Mencken)
Discourses on Livy (Niccolò Machiavelli)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X)
Library of America: Collected Essays (James Baldwin)
Hitch-22: A Memoir (Christopher Hitchens)
Washington: A Life (Ron Chernow)
The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
The Quantum Story (Jim Baggott)
One Man's Meat (E. B. White)
Mortality (Christopher Hitchens)
The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene)
Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Marion Elizabeth Rodgers)
Absolutely Small: How Quantum Theory Explains Our Everyday World (Michael D. Fayer)
Flaws and Fallacies in Statistical Thinking (Stephen K. Campbell)
Arguably: Selected Essays (Christopher Hitchens)
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Gordon Wood)
An Introduction to Information Theory: Signals, Symbols, and Noise (John R. Pierce)
Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (Candice Millard)
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (Nick Offerman)
The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey (ed. Martin Scorsese)
The Social Conquest of Earth (Edward O. Wilson)
The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy (Scott A. Boorman)
John Adams (David McCullough)
Grant (Ron Chernow)
Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (Lori Gottlieb)
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (Vincent LoBrutto)
The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge (William Poundstone)
Chaos: Making a New Science (James Gleick)
The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey (Linda Greenlaw)
American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot (Craig Ferguson)
The Universe in a Nutshell (Stephen Hawking)
Born Standing Up (Steve Martin)
Evolution: The First Four Billion Years (Michael Ruse; Joseph Travis)
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (H. L. Mencken)
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays (Christopher Hitchens)
On Ugliness (Umberto Eco)
Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989 - 2021 (Andrew Sullivan)
A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America (Jeff Ryan)
Educated (Tara Westover)
Chasing Venus (Andrea Wulf)
Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov (Stacy Schiff)
The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli)
Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (Paul J. Steinhardt; Neil Turok)
A Year in Provence (Peter Mayle)
The Universe from Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
Organic Chemistry (John McMurray)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn)
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (Ralph Alger Bagnold)
—————
Five honorable mentions, dismissed because of length, or, technically, lack thereof:
“The Colonel’s Son” – a short story by Roberto Bolaño, included in his collection, The Secret of Evil
“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” – a short story by Harlan Ellison, included in any number of compendiums of his work
“The Art of Loading Brush” – a short story by Wendell Berry, included in the essay/story collection, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings
“Ozymandias” – a sonnet by Percy Shelley
Yo, Millard Fillmore! – a children’s non-fiction book about the presidents, which includes a mnemonic device for memorizing them all, in order, out-of-order, frontward, backward, every-ward.
