The bookstore sat in a low strip of shops twenty years ago, give or take, in a town I will not name. The withholding is a condition of the account. I can give you everything else: the doorway, the display, the counter, the coins landing in a man’s palm. The name of the town is the one thing the story cannot carry.
It was a Mormon bookstore, an independent, and it lived on the trade of the wards within driving distance. Its shelves carried the scriptures and the lesson manuals, the church histories, the fiction written to the market’s standards, the children’s books, the music, the small hardware of a devotional home. The margins were an independent bookseller’s margins. A family that left the church left the store’s market entirely, and a family in good standing was worth years of steady purchases across every shelf. The owner knew what his register ran on, and he answered honestly when a regular asked.
The regular that day was a friend of mine. He worked in technology from Monday through Friday, and on Sundays he presided over a congregation, because he was, as I understood it then, the bishop of his ward. The office is unpaid by design. A bishop keeps his career and his family while he serves, oversees the ward’s records and its finances and its meetinghouse, and answers for the worthiness of his people. Above his office sits another office, the stake president’s, and between the two offices runs one of the church’s consequential pieces of paper. None of that structure moved that day. No order came down, and I want that stated as plainly here as the record states it anywhere: the church had no errand in that store. What moved was one man with a borrowed name.
Just inside the door stood a new display. Goosebumps, the series of horror paperbacks for children, the books with the dripping green logo. This was the middle of the nineties, and the series was selling four million copies a month at its peak with no advertising at all, carried reader to reader by what the trade called the secret kids network. The Haunted Mask was there, and Night of the Living Dummy, and The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, rows of copies at a child’s price. My friend asked the owner how the books were moving, the way a regular asks. The owner said they were selling well, and then he said the sentence the afternoon turns on. Those sales were keeping the store alive.
My friend had read the books. The whole series, by his own account, the way a bishop reads what a ward is reading, and he had survived them unharmed. He had concluded that the series was blasphemous, an invitation to the occult at a child’s price, and he told the owner so. Then he let the owner understand that if the titles stayed on the shelf, a report would go to the stake president.
Weigh what that sentence cost each man. For the one who said it, a breath. For the one who heard it, arithmetic. A merchant in that trade does the math quickly: the cost of testing the hint against the cost of obeying it. No committee met. No vote was taken. The structure behind the store’s best customers had been invoked by name, and the name did the work while the structure stayed silent. On his own account, years of shopping there, my friend was a man with an opinion about paperbacks. With the stake’s name riding along as ballast, the opinion weighed like a ruling. That is the whole mechanics of the afternoon, and it fits inside one sentence spoken at a counter.
He gave it a week. When he came back, the display was gone, the shelf where the green spines had stood was bare, and the owner was distant and cold. The coldness was all the protest the afternoon allowed; a merchant cannot refuse the coin of the man who just cost him a shelf. My friend answered the silence the way his conscience asked. He bought a couple of books, ordinary stock, something for the shelf at home. To make up the difference was his phrase for the purchase, and he offered it in the telling. Two paperbacks against a line of monthly sales the owner had called survival. The register drawer opened. The coins landed with the small clean sound of a settled account, and he carried them home beside the feeling: the ward protected, the difference made up.
He told me the story within the week, and he told it proudly, the way another man tells you his side won. I did not share the pride, and the friendship ended over the afternoon, by degrees and then for good. For years I could not have told you why it stayed with me. I have the words now. What he described was a reward collected at the register. He had investigated the books, prosecuted them at the counter, and won the case in one errand, and the verdict was delivered by the man who celebrated it.
The twenty years after were spent learning what that reward is made of. In a laboratory at the University of Zurich, volunteers inside a brain scanner paid their own money to punish a stranger who had cheated them, and the reward circuitry lit up when they did. People pay to punish, and they enjoy the paying. The pleasure is real, it is cheap, and it is borrowed, and the bill goes out to strangers: the owner with his income line cut, the families who lost an option without losing a vote, the children who would now find the green spines somewhere else. Somewhere in that ward there was a child who had read three of the paperbacks and was saving for the fourth, and who came in the next week and found bare board. I invented that child, and I mark the invention plainly, because the rule of the larger record is that its figures are marked as figures. You know the child anyway. The child found the book. A cleared shelf carries no sign, and the lesson arrives regardless: the thing worth taking is the thing worth having, and fear, attended closely, is a map. Every emptied shelf advertises its contents.
One finding sits under all of it, and it is the one the afternoon taught first. To rule on a book, you must read the book. So every regime of taking builds a library of what it forbids and licenses one class of reader to use it. Comstock kept what he seized and showed it to congressmen. In Paris the national library locked its forbidden books into a section called Hell and catalogued it, and sells the catalogue to visitors today. A school-board form now asks the challenger whether he examined the material in its entirety, and leaves a blank line beneath the question for the sections examined. The censor keeps a copy. The exemption cannot be designed out, because the reading is the enforcement.
If you have watched a shelf go empty at a store, a school, or a library, and wanted the whole pattern named, my new book is out. It is called The Censor Keeps a Copy: A History of the Pleasure of Taking Things Away, and it follows this one afternoon through four hundred years of the record, from Plato’s nursery to the statute that fires itself, with a hundred and ninety-two sources pinned to documents you can open yourself. It is on Amazon as a Kindle eBook and in paperback, and the door to everything I publish is BolesBooks.com.
Twenty years ago a man walked home with two paperbacks in a bag, pleased, and the shelf stayed bare, and the child came in the next week, or the week after, and found the gap the size of a hand. The book is my answer to the afternoon. The afternoon is still there to answer.